Two Dutch ships buy 836 people east of the Volta and 38 on the Gold Coast

The Dutch West India Company had taken Pernambuco in north eastern Brazil in 1630 and needed labour for the sugar estates there. In 1635 it commissioned two vessels, the Eendragt and the Halve Maen, to buy captives in West Africa. Their accounts run from September 1636 to April 1637 and survive. The two ships took 836 people from the region the Dutch called the Bight and Arder, against only 38 from the Gold Coast. The currencies used give a clue about where inside that region the purchases happened, because 288 people were bought with cowrie shells, which circulated in Allada, and only 47 with copper rods, which were the money of the Calabar area further east. Six years later the Dutch authorities in Brazil were planning on 1,500 to 1,600 people a year from Allada alone. Those hopes ran well ahead of what the coast delivered.

Barbados began as a tobacco colony worked largely by indentured Europeans, and it did badly, undersold by Virginia. In the 1640s the planters changed crop. Sugarcane needs a mill, a boiling house, fuel and a large permanent workforce, so changing the crop changed everything else: land consolidated into estates, smallholders were bought out, and the workforce became African and enslaved. Dutch and Sephardic merchants trading out of Brazil and Amsterdam supplied the technical knowledge, the credit and the shipping. Within a generation Barbados was the most valuable ground in the English empire, and every other island copied it. Saint-Domingue copied it later than most and then outgrew all of them, producing more sugar by the 1780s than Barbados and Jamaica together. What the Barbadian model fixed was a ratio, a small planter class governing a large enslaved majority that it could neither replace nor reproduce. That ratio is the precondition for everything that happens in Saint-Domingue in 1791.

When the Compagnie Francaise des Iles d'Amerique was set up in 1635 to carry on the traffic in enslaved Africans, Louis XIII laid down that everyone the company took had to be baptised and instructed in the Catholic faith. Conversion was the stated purpose of the commerce, and one of the earliest missionaries in the French islands, Father Jean-Baptiste Dutertre, wrote plainly that saving the souls of black people was the reason the business existed. In practice the rule produced an effect nobody in Paris had planned. Enslaved people treated baptism as a source of power rather than a change of allegiance, and presented themselves for it three, four, five and six times over. Planters grew suspicious of the priests, whom they thought capable of preaching that black and white were equal before God, and did what they could to keep religious instruction away from the work gangs.

Dorothe Angola took in an orphaned boy called Anthony, the child of half free parents in New Netherland, and became his adoptive parent. Maria Portogys apprenticed her daughter as a household servant to a Dutch family. Both arrangements went through the colonial authorities, which is the only reason the two women have names that survive. Almost everything else about them is missing, including their presence in the freedom petition their husbands signed, where the wives are referred to and never listed. Placing a child in a Dutch household tied the adult to the colony and kept the family within the colony's reach, which suited the Dutch. In the paperwork the children exist as use value. What the two women were doing was working the only instrument within reach, the colony's own record keeping, to hold on to children whom the law had already assigned to somebody else.