Efik houses at Old Calabar control who is sold and to whom

Old Calabar stands on the estuaries near the modern border of Nigeria and Cameroon, and by the middle of the seventeenth century it was one of the leading ports of the Bight of Biafra. The business there was organised by Efik trading houses, resident family firms that controlled credit, the inland routes and the supply of captives coming down them. European captains did not go upriver and did not buy in the interior. They anchored, dealt with the houses, waited on the houses, and took what the houses delivered on the terms the houses set. British ships from London, Bristol and Liverpool carried the largest share of that traffic until the abolition act of 1807, which is why most people shipped out of Old Calabar ended up in the British colonies of the Caribbean and North America. The Atlantic trade needed partners on both shores. At Old Calabar the African partners held the local advantage, and they used it.

Francois Makandal, a Muslim from Guinea, became the best known of the maroon leaders in 1757. He prophesied that the white masters would be wiped out. He spread terror among them by preparing poisons that killed slowly, and he supplied rebellious slaves with talismans called garde-corps, which were held to make the wearer invulnerable to weapons and to remove all fear of white people. Several groups of maroons were said to be under his command. His name outlived him in the language of the colony. Makandal became the general word in Saint-Domingue for a talisman or a poison, and later for the ceremonies in which such charms were made. That linguistic afterlife is the measure of what he achieved. A man who has been executed can still be a working category in the vocabulary of the people who executed him, and every planter who used the word was repeating his name without meaning to.

France established a colony on Tortuga, the island off the northwestern coast of Hispaniola, in 1625. It was a modest thing. A rocky island a few kilometres offshore, occupied by buccaneers, adventurers and men with reasons to be a long way from Europe. What made it consequential is that the French crown claimed it. A crew of raiders becomes a settlement, a settlement becomes a possession, a possession acquires a governor, and the governor's remit reaches across the channel to the mainland coast Spain had abandoned twenty years earlier. From that beachhead France worked its way into the western third of Hispaniola, which Spain conceded formally in 1697 and which became the colony of Saint-Domingue. Within a century Saint-Domingue was producing more sugar and coffee than any other territory on earth and returning more profit than any colony in the history of European empire. All of it traces to a claim staked on an island most maps do not bother to name.

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.