Nevis fills with captives around 1680 and then slowly empties

Arrivals of enslaved people in Nevis jumped around 1680, driven by the island's sugar revolution, and then settled into a long and uneven decline. London vessels carried most of that labour until 1730, drawing on the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra and the Gold Coast. Nevis is 36 square miles, a single volcanic cone with a rim of coast, and for a few decades it was worth more to England than large stretches of North America. That is what sugar did to the value of land. The estates could not sustain their own numbers, so production depended on a continuing supply of new arrivals rather than on families raising children. The same pattern ran on every sugar island and reached its extreme in Saint-Domingue, where the scale was many times greater. Nevis shows the mechanism early and in miniature: a small island, one crop, and a population held up only by importing more people.

The Code Noir settled the legal question of what an enslaved person was. The answer was movable property, meuble in French law, which placed a human being in the same column as furniture and cattle: bought, sold, mortgaged, seized for debt, divided among heirs. Baptism was compulsory and certain punishments were formally prohibited, and in Saint-Domingue neither provision was enforced. What the colony did enforce was output. Someone landed there from a slave ship could expect roughly seven years of life, and the whip, the branding iron and the mutilation of runaways were ordinary instruments of labour discipline. This is the law the rising of 1791 set out to destroy, and it explains why the destruction went further than a change of government. A people defined in statute as property does not finish the job by capturing a treasury. The Haitian declaration of independence answers a legal claim about what human beings are, which is why the document still reads as philosophy.

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.

Before she was called Defilee she had fought beside her two brothers, as Sanite fought beside Charles Belair and Marie-Jeanne beside Lamartiniere. Both brothers were killed in one battle and her mind gave way. She stopped recognising people, including her three children, and spent her evenings kneeling at their grave in the cemetery at Cap. By the end of 1806 she was wandering in Port-au-Prince, a scrap of green ribbon pinned to her headscarf. On 17 October 1806 at five in the afternoon she came on a crowd of soldiers, generals, onlookers and children throwing stones at a body in the road. It was Dessalines. She knelt, then collected the broken bones and the flesh, put everything into a sack, and carried it to the inner cemetery with the help of a beggar called Dauphin. The two of them were seen at nightfall kneeling over what was left of the man who had declared the country independent.