A French ship lands 241 people in Saint-Domingue

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.

Between 1677 and 1682 an investigation at the court of Louis XIV drew in close to four hundred suspects. At its centre was a circle of noblewomen who commissioned love magic from a sorceress in Paris. Investigators then turned up something else. The same sorceress was said to have sold deadly poisons made from toads to heirs impatient for their inheritances, and to have had charms consecrated by rogue priests. The French script of the moment held that women used potions to make men love them, an inversion of order that frightened the powerful. The affair produced a royal edict in 1682 that criminalised pretended magic, punished superstitious use of sacred objects and prayers, and tightened the sale of arsenic and mercury sublimate. Its effect in France was to cut accusations of sorcery by renaming the accused as false sorcerers or poisoners. Forty two years later that edict was extended to the French islands of the Caribbean.

The Jesuits were operating as an order in Saint Domingue well before their mission was formally established in 1704, and in 1669 they asked the crown's representative in the colony to take action against tavern keepers, undesirable women and Jews. In 1683 the church induced Louis XIV to expel every Jew from the colony and to impose a religious test on new arrivals. Jews had been in the Caribbean from the first crossing. At least one recently converted converso sailed with Columbus in 1492 and historians suspect five more. Most colonial Jews were Sephardim of Spanish or Portuguese origin, often travelling under false identities, some from France and others by way of Dutch or Iberian settlements. Zvi Loker located Jewish settlements in four zones of what became Haiti, including eighty families from Curacao who set up as traders at Cap Francois and brought a prayer leader with them. Christian planters got on with them well enough that the campaign against them failed.

Offra sat on the coast of what is now Benin and served as the sea outlet of the kingdom of Allada, whose rulers lived inland. English and Dutch chartered companies did their buying there for thirty years. Thousands of captives were marched down to it and loaded for the British and Dutch islands of the Caribbean. In 1690 a local war destroyed the town and the traffic there ended in one stroke. The business itself did not disappear. It moved a short way along the same coast to Ouidah, which grew into one of the largest embarkation points in the whole history of the trade and sent very large numbers of people to Saint-Domingue. This is worth holding onto, because the coast is usually described as though European demand alone decided where ships called. African political events decided it too. A war between African states closed one port and made another, and the consequences reached across the ocean.