Forsdick and Høgsbjerg open their account of the man later called Toussaint Louverture with a caution about evidence. He was born enslaved sometime in the early 1740s; the precise date will probably never be established, and the surviving stories of his childhood contradict one another or cannot be checked, which points to legend as their source.

Rather than adjudicate those claims immediately, the chapter turns first to the setting that shaped him, Saint-Domingue as it was when he was born, and reaches back to Columbus's landing on Hispaniola in 1492 to begin that account. The passage available here breaks off at that point.