Montserrat's slaveholders were descended from Irish servants

Montserrat built a sugar sector that depended entirely on continuing slave arrivals, heaviest between 1689 and 1730 and handled mainly by merchants from London and Bristol. Many of the principal slaveholders on the island in that period were descendants of Irish indentured servants shipped out in the seventeenth century, some of them transported against their will after the wars in Ireland. A generation or two later their families were buying human beings. Smaller territories nearby, St Lucia, Tortola and the Bahamas, took arrivals in an irregular pattern, often clustered around wartime, and relied heavily on Liverpool ships bringing people from the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa. The Irish detail is the one to keep. Being the victim of an empire has never stopped anyone from running one. Slavery in the Caribbean was sustained by whoever arrived and found the arrangement profitable, and in Montserrat that meant the children of men who had crossed in chains themselves.

Arrested in 1758 and sentenced to burn, Makandal was taken to the square in front of the church at Cap-Francais. Accounts agree that he got clear of the flames, in front of a crowd that had come to watch him die. He was retaken and executed shortly afterwards. What the colony remembered was the leap. Haitian painters have returned to the scene since, showing the rebellious slave with magical powers astonishing the spectators, and the episode went on troubling masters and administrators for years after the man himself was ash. For the enslaved population the reading was straightforward: fire did not hold him, so the power he claimed was real, and the authorities that had promised a public death had failed to deliver one in front of witnesses. Executions are performed in order to be seen. This one was seen, and it taught the opposite of what it was staged to teach.

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 March and April 1848 Faustin Soulouque, then president of Haiti, broke the political families of the south. The trigger was the killing of Celigny Ardouin, a former deputy accused of conspiring against the government. The fighting reached Port-au-Prince and ended in the massacre of members of several southern households. More than seven hundred surviving relatives took shelter in the British legation. In one incident men hunting refugees came to the consul's steps and found a Union Jack laid across them, and none of them would cross it. Minutes before the killing started, Soulouque had sent a note to the British consul Ussher at the palace promising that all foreigners were under his protection. Ussher saw the events and wrote that the object was to strike terror into the respectable mulattoes whom Soulouque had always taken for his enemies. Afterwards Haitians left for Jamaica in numbers larger than any earlier wave of the decade.