Only about 10,000 Africans reached New England straight from the coast

Direct arrivals from Africa into New England were small, roughly 10,000 people across the whole colonial era. Most came from the stretch of coast west of what is now Nigeria, aboard ships owned in Boston and Newport. A larger number reached the region indirectly, carried up from the West Indies in the trade between colonies. Those people were often what the merchants called residuals, the individuals left unsold once a cargo had been broken up in a Caribbean market, taken north on the return leg and disposed of there. The word repays sitting with. A shipload was sorted by what a sugar buyer would pay for, and whoever remained went on to a place with weaker demand. Slavery in the northern colonies was smaller in scale and identical in kind, and the people held there had usually passed through a Caribbean auction first. The islands were the sorting house of the entire system.

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.

On 20 September 1697, in the treaty signed at Ryswick, Spain recognised French sovereignty over the western third of Hispaniola. Spain had claimed the whole island since 1492 and had lost working control of its western end decades before, as French buccaneers occupied the coast and the offshore island of Tortuga and proved impossible to dislodge. The treaty confirmed the fact on the ground and drew no precise line, leaving a question open for two hundred years. From this point the two halves carry separate names in the record. The French portion is Saint-Domingue and the Spanish portion is Santo Domingo, and Rayford Logan is careful with the distinction because his sources often are not. The frontier between them was disputed, redrawn, invaded across, and fixed by treaty only in 1929. France meanwhile developed its share into the most profitable overseas territory any European state possessed. Two countries share the island today, and the line between them was first sketched by diplomats settling a European war.

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.