Ouidah became West Africa's chief slaving port before 1700

By the end of the seventeenth century Ouidah, on the coast of what is now Benin, was the leading slave trading port in West Africa. Merchants from several European nations and from Brazil kept establishments there at the same time, and they went on trading alongside one another while their home countries were at open war, because the local authorities required it and because each of them needed the beach more than they needed the quarrel. The captives embarked at Ouidah in this early phase were mainly Ewe speakers from the country behind the port, and the origins shifted considerably in later decades as Dahomey pushed its wars further inland. The British and Dutch Caribbean took most of the people leaving the port during this expansion. The religion of this coast crossed the ocean with them, and the Rada rite in Haiti is named for Allada, a kingdom a short distance inland from Ouidah.

The Code Noir of 1685 ordered that every enslaved person in the French islands be baptised and instructed in the Catholic religion, and required a planter buying newly arrived Africans to notify the governor within eight days so that instruction and baptism could be arranged. The same text forbade the public exercise of any other religion and directed that offenders be punished as rebels. Marriage of the enslaved was prescribed as well, and the Church pressed it through the following century. The purpose of this apparatus was the quiet reproduction of slavery over a long stretch of time. Masters and administrators watched for anything that might interrupt it: abortion, infanticide, and above all flight from the plantation. Alongside the whip, which had never been sufficient on its own, the colony now had a machine for supervising the few hours of rest a slave was allowed.

Louis XIV of France and William III of England closed their war in 1697 by exchanging territory neither of them had ever seen. The Treaty of Ryswick was a general settlement covering Europe, North America and the Caribbean, and among its terms Spain gave up the western third of Hispaniola to France. Spain had held nominal title to the whole island for two centuries and had governed the western end of it hardly at all, its own settlers having withdrawn eastward long before. France received the piece that turned out to matter. Over the following century Saint-Domingue produced revenue on a scale that is hard to state without sounding careless. By the 1780s the colony was worth more to France, in trade and customs receipts, than the thirteen British colonies of North America were worth to Britain. One third of one Caribbean island out-earned the eastern seaboard of a continent. That is the wealth the enslaved population created, and it is the wealth they carried out of the empire with them.

In 1679 a French vessel under a captain recorded as La Moisse reached Saint-Domingue and put ashore 241 captives. The voyage carries the number 33733 in the database that has assembled the surviving records of the Atlantic traffic. That is close to everything known about it. No names of the 241 survive in this record, no ages, no stated origins, no account of what became of any of them after they were sold. The colony was young in 1679 and its enslaved population was still counted in thousands rather than hundreds of thousands, so a single shipload was a noticeable addition to it. I put entries like this one on the timeline deliberately. The trade is usually met as a total, and totals are easy to read past. A figure of that size is made of arrivals like this, one ship at a time, each one a day on which 241 particular people were walked off a deck and sold.