Bahia sent out more slaving voyages than any port in the Atlantic

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Salvador da Bahia organised more slaving voyages than any other port in the Atlantic world, ahead of Liverpool, Lisbon and Nantes. Its advantage was a particular commercial link with the Bight of Benin, held together by African demand for Brazilian tobacco coated in molasses, a grade Europe did not produce. Ships worked the route directly, carried by the prevailing Atlantic currents, exchanging tobacco for people without touching Europe on either leg. After gold was found in the Brazilian interior in 1695 the destination of many of those captives changed. They were landed at Bahia and sold inland to the mining districts, hundreds of miles from the coast, into work that killed faster than cane did. The busiest slaving port in the Atlantic therefore stood in the Americas, and the commodity that bought the captives was grown a few days' ride from the quay where they were landed.

The Treaty of Ryswick, concluded in 1697, obliged Spain to cede a third of Hispaniola to France. The ceded territory took the name Saint-Domingue. Sugar was already being made there, and the arrival of enslaved labour in quantity was about to change how it was produced. Through the eighteenth century the traffic in captives climbed to its peak before falling away, in the language of the day, for want of supply. Ships were built larger to carry more people. Captives lay chained in pairs in holds that the trade itself called floating tombs, and the crossing to Saint-Domingue took between forty and ninety days on short rations. Most African regions were represented in the colony, and among the three largest groupings the Fon of Dahomey, combined with the Yoruba of what is now Nigeria, supplied the framework on which the transplanted religious practice of the island was built.

In 1640 the Dutch took Angola from Portugal, and Rome used the opening to create an Apostolic Prefecture for the Kongo answering directly to it rather than to Lisbon. The men chosen were Italian Capuchins. Twelve Italian and Spanish friars came ashore at Soyo in May 1645 under their prefect Bonaventura d'Alessano and were welcomed by the count and his people as priests of the great God. Soyo and the Kongo were at war, so the count tried to keep them there; the prefect threatened excommunication and got his porters. King Garcia II received them warmly at Sao Salvador precisely because they were not Portuguese, did not come from Loanda, and represented the direct link to Rome his predecessors had spent fifty years trying to open. Three years later the Portuguese retook Loanda, and a mission with no Portuguese in it became a liability.

In May 1745 Governor Mauricius wrote that poison was one of the greatest troubles in the country and that the executions were not answering, because this population did not fear death or even the most wretched torments. Beheading, burning at the stake and breaking on the wheel had all been tried. The Society believed the condemned expected to return to their homelands after death. So in December 1745 it issued a short ordinance that changed the punishment rather than the definition of the crime. Anyone convicted of poisoning another slave or livestock would have the tongue cut out and the forehead branded, and would work in chains at Fort Amsterdam, secluded, without communication or meeting, so that they should never form a community. The target was the network. At least three men suffered it. The practice was dropped after that decade, and cases involving practitioners and their networks ran on for another thirty years.