The one surviving eyewitness account of the 1739 rising in South Carolina describes some twenty Angolan slaves who were Catholic, spoke a language close to Spanish, marched behind banners and drums, and stopped in a field to dance. Thornton takes each of those details as evidence about where the rebels came from and what they knew. English shipping drew its central African captives through Kabinda, supplied chiefly from the Christian kingdom of Kongo, where literacy in Portuguese and a proud Catholic identity were established well before 1739. Kongo's recurring civil wars sold off men who had been trained as soldiers, and the spread of firearms in those wars meant musketeers among them. Dancing before combat was a standard part of Kongolese military preparation, not a celebration. The rebels' loose formation and their persistence after the first engagement, Thornton argues, follow a central African pattern of skirmishing rather than a European one.