Campbell builds an essay around one odd episode — crabs swarming ashore — in Leonora Sansay's Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo of 1808. The reading follows the crustacean backward into eighteenth-century natural history, where writers on the natural world had already loaded the animal with meaning about slavery, and specifically about the threat that enslaved people were thought to pose to European colonization.

Taken as an emblem rather than a stray detail, the swarm lets Sansay do two things at once: register American alarm at the Haitian Revolution and take the edge off that alarm by rendering it in the cool, classifying idiom of science.

Campbell treats the episode as evidence for a wider claim about the period's fiction — that political commentary often sits inside borrowed scientific description, and that early American literary study has something to gain from reading natural history alongside the novels.

Sweet's research note opens not with Kongo but with a French colonist. Louis Narcisse Baudry des Lozières landed at Norfolk, Virginia, on February 26, 1794, after a four-month crossing from Le Havre that began in a storm and never improved.

Worse had come earlier. Two years before, with the revolution just under way, Baudry found his wife and daughter wandering in the woods of Saint-Domingue, driven from their home by rebels. He was an officer, wounded near Léogane, and most of the men under his command were killed. He fled the colony in March 1792, met briefly in Paris with his brother-in-law, the writer Moreau de Saint-Méry, and was soon exiled again, settling in Philadelphia.

There he worked as clerk, bookseller, and editor. He traveled North America, spent time with relatives in New Orleans, and recast himself as an authority on the natural history of the French colonies, lecturing to the American Philosophical Society and publishing on scientific subjects.