In Brazil a rich woman went to church on the backs of two men

Brazil used enslaved Africans twice over. They cut the cane, worked the mills and packed the sugar that paid for everything, and in the port towns they were put to a second use. A wealthy Portuguese family kept men chosen for their strength and sent them out under a covered hammock or a sedan chair, carrying the wife and the children on social calls and to Mass. The cloth stretched over the frame was velvet or damask. It kept the sun off the passenger and told every household on the street what this one was worth. Mercenaries writing in the sixteen hundreds describe the practice, and travellers arriving after 1800 describe it still, which puts nearly two centuries between the first account and the last. Saint-Domingue had its own version of the same arrangement. Reading a person's rank off the bodies that carry them is a habit that required no invention in either colony, only a supply of people who could be owned.

The most famous poison case in the French Caribbean ended in 1758 with the execution of Makandal in Saint Domingue. The charge that carried it was sacrilege, and the object at its centre was a tied up bundle of power containing a crucifix. Bundles like it were made across the Atlantic world and their contents can be listed from trial records: grave dirt, animal horns used both for cupping and for binding other objects together, feathers, herbs, and in the Portuguese colonies pieces of consecrated host, papers bearing the names of saints, and small crosses. Christian material inside such a bundle was what colonial courts found intolerable, and cases described as sacrilegious were the ones the Lisbon Inquisition proved most willing to bring to trial. The papers on Makandal, letters and interrogations running from 1757 to 1759, were gathered together by Moreau de Saint-Mery and sit in a single box in the French colonial archive.

Dom Jeronimo Chingulia was educated by Augustinians in Goa, married a Portuguese woman and was installed as king of Malindi and Mombasa. In 1631 he renounced Christianity and massacred every Christian who would not renounce it with him. Among those who refused and died was his cousin Dom Antonio of Malindi, also educated abroad, who had served in the Portuguese navy and whose leadership during the crisis several witnesses attested. Evidence was gathered afterwards for a possible canonisation of the martyrs. The list of names sent to Rome contained four priests, forty seven men, thirty nine women and fifty nine children, and every one of them was Portuguese. About a hundred and fifty Africans died in the same massacre. None was included, not even Dom Antonio. The stated conclusion was that God had chosen to honour the Portuguese nation by showing the firmness of its faith.

For sixty years a single king ruled both Spain and Portugal, and the arrangement solved a practical problem. Portugal held the trading posts on the African coast, Spain held the American colonies that wanted labour, and Portuguese ships could deliver captives into Spanish ports without breaking any law. In 1640 the union ended. Portugal recovered its own crown and its vessels lost the legal right to sell in Spanish territory. Madrid then had to license foreigners, which it did through the asiento, a contract granting one company the exclusive right to supply the Spanish colonies with enslaved Africans for a term of years. The asiento passed in turn to Dutch, French and British holders and became one of the most fought over prizes in European diplomacy. Santo Domingo, the Spanish half of Hispaniola, sat inside that system and was starved by it, receiving few captives and little investment while the French west filled up. The line that eventually split the island into two countries was drawn partly by who was licensed to sell people where.