Trinidad's sugar arrives late and Liverpool supplies the labour

Trinidad and Tobago received roughly 44,000 captive Africans directly from the African coast, a small figure by Caribbean standards, and most of it arrived in the closing decades of the traffic. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the islands were a Spanish backwater with little plantation agriculture on them. That changed when Britain took Trinidad in the 1790s and began planting sugar in earnest. British ships carried almost the whole trade, and Liverpool alone accounted for more than two thirds of the recorded voyages. The captives came chiefly from the Bight of Biafra and the Gold Coast. The timing gave Trinidad an unusual population. Its African arrivals came late enough that a large share of the enslaved were African born when emancipation came, and the languages, drumming and religious forms they carried survived with less erosion than on islands whose importing had finished a century earlier. A late start in the sugar business produced a different kind of Caribbean society.

Arrested in 1758 and sentenced to burn, Makandal was taken to the square in front of the church at Cap-Francais. Accounts agree that he got clear of the flames, in front of a crowd that had come to watch him die. He was retaken and executed shortly afterwards. What the colony remembered was the leap. Haitian painters have returned to the scene since, showing the rebellious slave with magical powers astonishing the spectators, and the episode went on troubling masters and administrators for years after the man himself was ash. For the enslaved population the reading was straightforward: fire did not hold him, so the power he claimed was real, and the authorities that had promised a public death had failed to deliver one in front of witnesses. Executions are performed in order to be seen. This one was seen, and it taught the opposite of what it was staged to teach.

Alvaro II ruled Kongo from 1587 to 1614 with vigour and intelligence, and in 1596 obtained a separate bishopric for the kingdom. His successor Alvaro III drew Jesuits into the country in 1619, and one of them put his own candidate on the throne in the succession dispute of 1622. In that same year the tensions between Kongo and the Portuguese colony of Angola broke into war. Black mercenaries known as Jagas fought in it and left a mark on Kongo folk memory that outlasted the war itself. There may have been as many as a thousand Portuguese trading agents living in Kongo at the time, with their own villages, farms and extended African families, and the war damaged them too. Alvaro III died the same year. The uneasy peace that had held through two reigns was finished, and the hostilities that opened destroyed the monarchy at Ambuila in 1665.

On the last day of 1640 a public sale in Dutch Brazil was written up line by line. The captives had arrived on the Wapen van Delf and had been taken at Guinea, at Ardra on the Slave Coast and at Calabar in the Niger delta. The clerk recorded who bought what. Gaspar Dias Ferreira took several lots of ten people, paying between 161 and 205 patacas a head. Moses Netto, Simon van der Neese and Jacob Aboaff appear as purchasers alongside him. Some lots ran past five thousand guilders. The document survives because the Dutch West India Company kept proper accounts, and it is worth more than a hundred pages of description: it names the buyers, fixes the prices, and shows a market in northeastern Brazil where Dutch and Sephardic merchants dealt in human beings by the batch of ten. Not one of the people sold that day is named. The ledger preserves the side of the transaction that somebody expected to need later.