Antigua landed more than 5,000 people a year at its peak

Antigua's slave trade peaked in the middle 1750s and again in the late 1760s, with annual arrivals sometimes above 5,000. London merchants dominated in one phase and Liverpool merchants in another, and the island itself sent out a notable number of its own slaving vessels, which was unusual for a colony of that size. The African regions supplying it shifted across the century, away from the Gold Coast and toward the Windward Coast and the Bight of Biafra. After Britain banned the traffic in 1808 arrivals continued at a trickle. They came from shipwrecks and from vessels seized by the Royal Navy, whose captives were landed in the islands and put to work under terms officially called apprenticeship. Abolishing the trade left slavery itself standing for another generation. Britain freed the people it held in 1834, thirty years after Haiti had taken its freedom by force of arms.

Francois Makandal, a Muslim from Guinea, became the best known of the maroon leaders in 1757. He prophesied that the white masters would be wiped out. He spread terror among them by preparing poisons that killed slowly, and he supplied rebellious slaves with talismans called garde-corps, which were held to make the wearer invulnerable to weapons and to remove all fear of white people. Several groups of maroons were said to be under his command. His name outlived him in the language of the colony. Makandal became the general word in Saint-Domingue for a talisman or a poison, and later for the ceremonies in which such charms were made. That linguistic afterlife is the measure of what he achieved. A man who has been executed can still be a working category in the vocabulary of the people who executed him, and every planter who used the word was repeating his name without meaning to.

In the region around the Gulf of Benin, each ethnic group, village, family and lineage kept its own vodun, guardian deities tied to ancestors. Relations between these groups were marked by rivalry and frequent war, and religion moved with the fighting. At the opening of the eighteenth century the royal family of Abomey, extending its power, set out to centralise worship. It appropriated deities belonging to its enemies, among them Yoruba ones, suppressed some spirits and imposed others across the whole kingdom, so that these became public vodun. Priests who had until then worked independently of rulers were turned into dignitaries of the court. One imposed figure was Agassou, founding ancestor of the royal line at Abomey, held by tradition to be the child of a woman and a panther. Families went on honouring their own vodun regardless. Both habits, the state cult and the household one, crossed the Atlantic in the slave ships.

In 1741 the Conde das Galveas, viceroy of Brazil, sent the king a broadly positive report that ended with a warning about great illnesses sweeping Salvador, fluxes and people bleeding from the mouth. By the autumn of 1743 his tone had changed completely. More than five thousand people had sickened and died in recent years and the colony was in a terrible state. Jesuits at the Engenho de Santa Anna had already reported in the early 1730s that they could not cope with the number of sick around them. Galveas never wrote that these deaths were poisonings. In the same year as the alarming report he set in motion an ordinance on poison, which made administering it worth investigating even where nobody died, and required anyone selling poison to register with the state. Over the following decades denunciations to the Inquisition of causing or of treating such illnesses climbed rapidly.