The South Atlantic currents made Brazil the short crossing

A ship leaving West Africa for Brazil spent far less time at sea than one bound for the Caribbean islands. The reason is the shape of the ocean. Winds and currents in the South Atlantic turn in a tight circuit between the African bulge and the Brazilian coast, so a captain could make the passage in weeks where a Caribbean voyage took months. Time at sea governs everything else aboard a slave ship: the water and food that must be carried, the length of confinement in the hold, the spread of dysentery and smallpox through people packed together in the dark. Shorter passages produced lower death rates for captives bound for Brazilian plantations through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two parts of the Americas therefore received African populations shaped by different odds, and the odds were set before anyone came aboard. Saint-Domingue lay at the far end of the long route. Every cargo that reached it had been at sea long enough for the arithmetic to work against the people below.

Leaving the king's camp, Beatrice led a group of ordinary people back to Sao Salvador and made her home beside the cathedral, on the ground where the bishop had once lived. She sent out messengers, called little Anthonies, across the country to summon people to the capital. Soyo and Nsundi threw them out. Elsewhere the movement caught, and another Capuchin met it near the sea in mid 1705. The city filled up. Beatrice was hailed as the true nganga, the one restoring the kingdom, and Bernardo da Gallo was mocked as little Bernardo, the cowardly nganga who had lacked the nerve to lead the people home. Her teaching grew: Christ had been born at Sao Salvador, the true Bethlehem, and baptised at Nsundi in the river Zaire. Marriage, baptism, confession and prayer counted for nothing in themselves, she said, because God looks at the intention.

In 1757 an enslaved man named Medor went before the court at Cap Francais in Saint Domingue and confessed without being compelled. He said that he and many others used magical powders to persuade owners to grant them their freedom. His statement opened the enormous investigation that became the Makandal affair. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus have since tracked the timing and geography of the deaths blamed on poison that year and argue that mycotoxins in spoiled flour, during a wartime blockade, are the likelier cause. On that reading Medor and the others who confessed to using poison and spells to tame their owners may genuinely have believed their taming had killed by accident. The same pattern turns up far away. In Suriname, Clarinda and Nero insisted that the mixture Nero made from bush herbs was meant to calm Clarinda's mistress, and Clarinda was alarmed when the woman fell ill and died.

Over the summer of 1742, after torture, an enslaved man named Baron confessed to causing his mistress's death. He said he had bought herbs from Abraham on another plantation, meaning to cool her temper and avoid future punishment rather than to kill. He also named Coffij, who belonged to the Society of Suriname itself. Coffij denied it and gave the court Askaan and Emanuiel for poisoning other enslaved people, which produced their trials, and Emanuiel's trial produced Ajuba's. Baron additionally accused Louis, a driver on his own plantation, of going about with poison, and Louis's case produced Sambo's. Suriname had sixteen poison cases in the whole of the 1730s and forty two between 1740 and the end of 1745, and eighteen of the forty two were tied to another case. Baron, Sambo, Abraham and Emanuiel were branded, pinched with hot tongs until they died, and their heads set on spikes in the Suriname river.