Long voyages killed people, and what came before the ship killed more

Crossings to mainland North America ran longer than crossings to the islands, and more people died aboard them. Two things made them long. Vessels often stopped at ports in the eastern Caribbean to take on water and provisions, and the passage between the southern and northern Atlantic current systems was awkward to sail. Length alone fails to account for the deaths. The condition of the captives when they were first brought aboard predicts survival better than the number of days at sea. Some long voyages out of the Gold Coast recorded lower mortality than much shorter ones from elsewhere. What that measures is what happened before the ship, in the marches to the coast and the weeks or months of confinement in barracoons waiting for a buyer. The Atlantic crossing has become the whole image of the trade because it can be counted from ships' papers. The dying began earlier, inland, where nobody kept a ledger.

At the end of the eighteenth century Saint-Domingue held between 400,000 and 500,000 enslaved people, about 40,000 whites, and some 25,000 free black people and people of mixed descent. In 1789 the colony had 793 sugar plantations. It accounted for more than a third of all French trade outside France, which made it the richest possession the country had, and every year five hundred ships unloaded its sugar, coffee, indigo, copper and timber in French ports. The whites who lived there, whether petty clerks or great planters, were occupied with dinners, balls, taverns and theatres, and with quarrels over the mistresses of estate managers. They resented the rule that colonial produce could be sold only to France and only at prices France set. Visitors were already describing the place as a volcano under the feet of the dancers, and the arithmetic at the head of this entry explains why.

Between 1663 and 1664 a Spanish Capuchin missionary named Antonio de Teruel wrote an account of the kingdom of Kongo. He described the people as black in varying degrees, some the colour of chestnut, some closer to olive, and recorded that the deepest black was held among them to be the most beautiful. Mothers, he wrote, rubbed their infants with an ointment and laid them out in the sun for long stretches, repeating this until the children darkened. He then set down what followed from that standard. Because a black skin was so highly regarded, Europeans appeared ugly in their eyes, and children in places where no white person had ever been seen ran from the missionaries in terror. He added that they refused the word negros and insisted on prietos, because among them only slaves were called negros, so that the two words had come to mean the same thing.

In March and April 1848 Faustin Soulouque, then president of Haiti, broke the political families of the south. The trigger was the killing of Celigny Ardouin, a former deputy accused of conspiring against the government. The fighting reached Port-au-Prince and ended in the massacre of members of several southern households. More than seven hundred surviving relatives took shelter in the British legation. In one incident men hunting refugees came to the consul's steps and found a Union Jack laid across them, and none of them would cross it. Minutes before the killing started, Soulouque had sent a note to the British consul Ussher at the palace promising that all foreigners were under his protection. Ussher saw the events and wrote that the object was to strike terror into the respectable mulattoes whom Soulouque had always taken for his enemies. Afterwards Haitians left for Jamaica in numbers larger than any earlier wave of the decade.