Ninety two people are landed at Port-de-Paix in February

In February 1679 a French vessel commanded by Jean Lescuyer arrived at Port-de-Paix carrying 92 captives. Most had been taken from Senegambia and the Atlantic islands offshore, and they were landed to clear and work ground on the northwestern coast. The town was fourteen years old. Ninety two is a small number by the standards of this traffic, and it is the right size to picture. That is a crowd you could count, standing on a beach in a place none of them had chosen, at the start of a colony that would eventually hold half a million people in the same condition. Senegambia supplied a modest share of Saint-Domingue's population overall, since the French bought most heavily much further south, and the early arrivals came disproportionately from these northern coasts. The people put ashore that February were among the first Africans to work the soil of what is now Haiti.

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.

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.

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.