Lisbon lost the Spanish market in 1641 and turned to Brazil

Lisbon had built its slave trade on selling into Spanish America, which was lawful while one crown ruled both kingdoms. When Portugal separated from Spain in 1640 that market closed, and the Lisbon traffic went into decline. The response was to concentrate on the colony Portugal still held, and for a century Lisbon merchants kept up a steady supply of captives to the various regions of Brazil. After 1750 they opened something new, a triangular route linking the port with Senegambia on the upper West African coast and with Amazonia in the far north of South America, a region that had been marginal to the trade until then. The Portuguese crown was at that point trying to develop the Amazon basin through chartered companies, and the labour arrived under that policy. A port loses a market, falls back on a colony, and invents a route to join them. That is how the geography of the Atlantic trade kept rearranging itself for two hundred years.

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 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.

In February 1644 a group of enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam petitioned the Dutch authorities for their freedom. They had served the Dutch West India Company for eighteen years, they said, and they were burdened with so many children that they could no longer support their families while they stayed in the company's service. The Council of New Netherland granted what historians call half freedom to the named petitioners and their wives. In exchange each man owed the company a yearly payment of wheat and a hog valued at twenty guilders. The council also ruled that their children, those already born and those yet to be born, would serve the company as slaves. The petitioners carried names recording where they had passed through, Paulo Angola, Simon Congo, Anthony Portugis, Jan Fort Orange. They spoke some Dutch and some Portuguese and had stood on two other continents. Their wives appear in the ruling without names.