Revolt on one voyage in ten changes where the ships buy

Rebellion aboard slave ships is documented on about one voyage in ten across the three centuries of the traffic. Most of it happened while the vessel was still within sight of the African coast, or during the first days at sea, when land was close enough to make escape imaginable. That rate had consequences the traders recorded in their own books. A ship expecting revolt carries more crew than sailing her requires, and it carries guns, nets, chains and irons that serve no other purpose. All of that is cost, and it was folded into the price of every person sold. The fear also moved the map. Owners and captains came to believe that captives shipped from some stretches of coast were likelier to rise than others, and they shifted their buying southward on that belief. People held below deck, without weapons and often without a common language, altered the geography of the trade that was carrying them. Resistance is in the accounts because it changed the accounts.

In 1605 the Spanish authorities on Hispaniola ordered the settlers of the western part of the island to abandon their towns and move east, and burned what they left behind. The reason was contraband. The western settlements had been trading with French and English smugglers for a generation, and Madrid concluded that the cure was to remove the population doing it. The order worked as policy and failed as strategy. Trade with foreigners stopped in those places because the places had ceased to exist. What remained was several hundred kilometres of empty coastline, with harbours, fresh water, and cattle running wild across the abandoned country. French and English crews who had been raiding Spanish shipping now had a shore they could use without opposition, and within twenty years they were living on it. The line Spain drew in 1605 by pulling its own people eastward runs close to the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic today. It began as an anti smuggling measure.

France declared sovereignty over western Hispaniola in 1664. The declaration covered a place French settlers and buccaneers had already been living in for decades, so the novelty lay in the claim rather than in the occupation. Spain rejected it. Madrid had held the island since Columbus and regarded every French farm on it as a trespass, and thirty three years passed before Spanish recognition came in a European peace treaty. Through those years the French planted, imported captives, and fought. The ground in question is the western third of the island, and it became Saint-Domingue. By the 1780s that strip of land was producing more wealth than any comparable territory on earth, more sugar and coffee than all the British West Indies together, and every unit of it was produced by people carried across the Atlantic in chains. A claim made on paper in 1664 is the legal ancestor of that arrangement.

Faustin Soulouque, head of the Haitian state and a committed servant of the spirits, made himself emperor in 1850 and ruled without mercy. The European newspapers had been waiting for a figure like him. They called him the sum of every recollection of aboriginal savagery and announced that he had set Haiti on a course of complete regression to African barbarism. Honore Daumier produced a caricature the same year showing the emperor in his regalia about to drop a journalist who had criticised Haitian politics into a pot of boiling water. Racist theory was gaining ground across Europe in these decades and it found in Haitian religion an inexhaustible supply of material. Soulouque fell in 1860. What is worth noticing is how little the coverage had to do with him. The caricature was about the existence of a black state, and the emperor merely gave it a face.