Offra ships for Allada until a war burns it down

Offra sat on the coast of what is now Benin and served as the sea outlet of the kingdom of Allada, whose rulers lived inland. English and Dutch chartered companies did their buying there for thirty years. Thousands of captives were marched down to it and loaded for the British and Dutch islands of the Caribbean. In 1690 a local war destroyed the town and the traffic there ended in one stroke. The business itself did not disappear. It moved a short way along the same coast to Ouidah, which grew into one of the largest embarkation points in the whole history of the trade and sent very large numbers of people to Saint-Domingue. This is worth holding onto, because the coast is usually described as though European demand alone decided where ships called. African political events decided it too. A war between African states closed one port and made another, and the consequences reached across the ocean.

Drawn up in France at Colbert's instance and issued by Louis XIV in 1685, the Black Code set out how the official justification for slavery was to be handled. Article two required that every slave in the islands be baptised and instructed in the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion. Article three forbade the public practice of any other. Gatherings of enslaved people, by day or by night, were outlawed, which was aimed squarely at African rites. The code regulated work, rest and family, and classed human beings as movable property with no rights at all. Of its sixty articles not one calls for any easing of the treatment slaves received. Its clauses on food, rest and religion are all designed to discourage flight and to leave the owner in complete command. An owner could in theory be punished for cruelty, but slaves could not be called as witnesses in any court, civil or criminal, which made the theory useless.

Thirteen vessels under Dutch, French and English raiders led by Laurens de Graaf, called Lorencillo, occupied Veracruz for two weeks in May 1683. The port held six to seven thousand people, about as many as the whole of French Saint-Domingue at the time. The raiders worked through the town methodically and seized close to 1,500 people of African descent. Whether a person was free or enslaved made no difference to who was taken. Skin did. Nearly every able-bodied Afro-Veracruzan in the city was carried aboard. When the ships sailed on 30 May the incoming Spanish fleet, well placed to intercept them, let them pass, because the merchandise and passengers it carried were judged too valuable to risk in a battle. The captives were landed in Saint-Domingue, Carolina and Jamaica. Spanish scribes appear to have registered only the dead.

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.