A merchant's manual supplies the argument that slavery is salvation

The Atlantic trade in Africans was already old before anyone published a description of how it worked. The first such information appeared in 1675, in the manual of commerce written by Savary and known as the Perfect Merchant, and compilers of dictionaries drew on that account for generations afterwards. In 1723 Savary's universal dictionary of commerce set out the justification repeated for the rest of the century. It is difficult, the entry conceded, to justify the trade in Negroes altogether, and then argued that these wretched slaves found their salvation in the loss of their liberty and in the Christian instruction given them. The order of operations is what matters. The practice came first, in the search for hands cheap enough to dig gold and grow sugar, tobacco and cotton, and the theory explaining why the people bought deserved their condition was assembled afterwards, once buyers in Europe began asking.

The Treaty of Ryswick of 20 September 1697 moved the western third of Hispaniola from Spain to France and created the colony of Saint-Domingue. The figures it eventually produced are worth stating plainly. By the 1780s something near forty percent of the sugar and sixty percent of the coffee consumed in Europe came out of this one territory, an area smaller than Belgium. More than half a million enslaved Africans were living and dying there to produce it, and the mortality was such that the colony needed tens of thousands of fresh arrivals a year simply to hold its workforce level. The elegance of eighteenth century France, including the coffee houses where its philosophers argued about liberty, ran on this. Ryswick also drew a line. The boundary the treaty left vague became, after a century of adjustment and dispute, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A European peace conference created the legal object the revolution would destroy and fixed the shape of the country that replaced it.

Some time after Easter in 1704 a young woman named Kimpa Vita, baptised Beatrice, joined the old prophetess in burning charms and crosses in the villages around Mount Kimbangu. She was said to die every Friday and return to life every Sunday. The Capuchin Bernardo da Gallo questioned her and she told him she was St Anthony, come from heaven. He asked, crudely, if there were Kongolese blacks up there and whether they still had their colour. She answered that there were Kongolese adults and children who had kept God's law, and that nobody there was black or white, because heaven has no colour. Pressed on why she burned crosses as well as charms, she said the crosses had superstition mixed into them too. She had given away everything she owned, as the friars did, and she was preaching that the people must go back to Sao Salvador. About that she was right.

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.