Le Havre sold most of its captives into Saint-Domingue

Le Havre was the first French port to send slave ships in significant numbers, and it was still sending them close to the end of the legal trade. The chronology is lopsided. Almost 40 percent of everything the port ever carried was carried between 1784 and 1792, a window of eight years. Le Havre merchants had built an unusually tight relationship with Malembo on the northern coast of West Central Africa, and more than half of the people their ships carried were sold in Saint-Domingue. Those dates repay attention. The heaviest concentration of arrivals came immediately before the insurrection of August 1791. Many of the men and women who rose in the northern plain had been in the colony only a few years, and many had come from the same stretch of the Kongo coast, which is one reason a rising of that size could be organised at all. A trade running at full speed built the conditions that ended it.

Beatrice had a male companion who called himself St John, and she became pregnant by him, which fitted badly with the chastity she had claimed on the Capuchin model. She left the capital to give birth and was arrested soon after the child was born, then taken for trial to the king's camp at Evululu. The Mani Vunda, Dom Manuel, appears to have led the proceedings as Kongolese custom required, while Bernardo da Gallo and Lorenzo da Lucca interrogated her and the old woman Apollonia. Da Lucca noted that she spoke with gravity and seemed to weigh her words. At the friars' request Apollonia was spared on grounds of age and the baby was spared too. On 2 July 1706 Beatrice, aged about twenty two, and the man called John were thrown alive onto a fire. She was probably the first African woman burned for heresy by Europeans in Africa.

In October 1741 the Conseil Superieur of Martinique told Paris that the deaths of enslaved people and livestock came from particular slaves misusing medical knowledge, making powders and drugs from plants and handing them round as remedies. It warned that such practitioners might turn their skills on owners, argued that medicine could not be told apart from poisoning because the composition was kept secret, and said other slaves would never denounce them for fear of becoming victims. It concluded that slaves should be barred from giving any remedies, powders or drugs for any illness. Before the royal answer came, the court had to deal with Jean Francois, who admitted in January 1742 to distributing remedies across many quarters of the island. No accusation of harm could be found, and with no law the court could not execute him, so it argued about irons and deportation. The royal declaration arrived on 1 February 1743 on precisely the terms requested.

Sailing home from Angola, Francisco Buytrago stopped at Salvador in Bahia and stayed with a relative. He found many people there, free and enslaved, described as sick of charms, with drawn out illnesses of three or four years and no prospect of recovery. His relative owned an enslaved woman who was dying, her body swollen and her pulse sluggish, and those around her believed she had been afflicted deliberately. Buytrago had nkasa bark with him from Angola. He used it, in 1729, in what he called his first exorcism, and it was judged successful enough that others came to him. He sold some of the bark and performed at least ten more treatments before he left. In the decade before that day more than 82,000 Africans had landed in Bahia, about 30 per cent of them from West Central Africa. Some of the people in that room may well have known the bark by its Kikongo name.