The Dutch West India Company is rebuilt as a slaving business

The Dutch West India Company was reorganised in 1674 after its first form failed, and the version that emerged was built around the trade in people. It carried captives from the Gold Coast and West Central Africa and delivered them to Dutch possessions and to foreign buyers alike, working through two entrepot islands. Curacao lies off the Venezuelan coast and served the Spanish mainland. St Eustatius sits in the Leeward Islands among the French and British colonies. Neither island had much of a plantation economy of its own. Their business was transit, and their warehouses held goods and people together. The Dutch were losing ground to growing British and French sea power, so they positioned themselves as the middlemen of everybody else's empire. St Eustatius later became the busiest smuggling port in the Caribbean, and Saint-Domingue planters bought there whenever the French supply fell short of what their fields required.

Bertrand d'Ogeron reached Tortuga in February 1665 and set about converting hunters and pirates into settled colonists. He pushed cocoa as a crop that paid, and lent money at low interest out of his own pocket to men starting plantations. He also arranged the shipment of about one hundred women from French jails, recorded as orphans, to be married to the settlers. The count of planters rose from 400 to 1,500 by 1669. In June 1670 the colonists revolted briefly over the prices charged by the chartered company, and it passed. When d'Ogeron died on 31 January 1676 the economy of the French west had shifted from raiding to farming, and the civil and religious institutions of a permanent colony were in place. Read the measures together and the shape is plain. Credit for the planters, a crop that sells, and women delivered like stock. The workforce for these fields was already being bought on the African coast.

The first great expansion of Atlantic slaving produced the longest voyages and the highest death rates in the whole history of the traffic, for the crews as much as for the people in the hold. Ships were slower, provisioning was worse, and nobody had yet worked out how to keep several hundred confined human beings alive for three months at sea. Within the period the regional differences were enormous. People embarked in the Bight of Biafra died at two to three times the rate of people embarked in Upper Guinea, a gap that reflects the length of the route, the disease environments at either end, and how long a captive had already been held on the coast before boarding. Faster ships and later regulation brought the overall figures down. The seventeenth century numbers stayed in the record as the baseline, and every improvement the eighteenth century claimed for itself was measured from here.

After Ambuila the Portuguese moved to crush Soyo, the coastal province that had grown rich on direct trade through the port of Pinda and had been drifting away from the Kongo crown for a generation. A Portuguese army beat the Soyo forces in 1670 and killed their prince. Soyo regrouped and destroyed that army in a surprise attack on 18 October, the feast of St Luke. Nobody threatened Soyo like that again. St Luke's Day became a national festival of deliverance with processions and war dances, and the church took a full part in it. Soyo was also the one place in the whole country with an almost unbroken Capuchin presence from 1645 into the eighteenth century, and it developed something like a settled Christianity, with eight churches in its capital, lay brotherhoods whose membership was near compulsory for high office, and princes who could read and write Portuguese.