The count of 1681 puts 6,648 people in Saint-Domingue

A count taken in 1681 put the population of Saint-Domingue at 6,648. Around 65 percent were white and around 31 percent were enslaved, with a small remainder made up of free people of colour and others the enumerators could not fit into the first two categories. That distribution lasted one more generation. By the middle of the eighteenth century the enslaved outnumbered the free by roughly ten to one, and by 1789 the gap was wider still. The 1681 figures describe a colony of smallholders growing tobacco and indigo, where a man with four or five enslaved workers counted as a substantial planter and where whites and blacks often worked the same fields side by side. Sugar destroyed that arrangement. It rewarded scale, it demanded gangs, and it turned a settler society into a labour camp with a European garrison. The count of 1681 is the last picture of Saint-Domingue before the change.

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.

Two Capuchins of the Flanders province, Celestin de Bruxelles and Benedict de Hulst, embarked for Whydah late in 1681. Celestin wrote home in November 1682 that the king had given him a house beside the palace, received him often in private, and handed over his elder sons to be taught. Accounts gathered in Whydah a generation later go further. A number of local people were instructed, and some could still recite parts of the scriptures decades afterwards. The king himself and several of his chiefs agreed to be baptised and, as a condition, to give up all but one wife. The night before the ceremony the mission chapel burned down. One version has the king reading the fire as punishment from the gods he was about to abandon. Another has him seeing human hands behind it and fearing a rising that would cost him his throne. He dropped the plan and his people followed him. Benedict died inland in November 1683 and Celestin died in Europe in 1684.

The census of Martinique taken in April 1683 recorded 8,967 enslaved people, already 66 per cent of the island's population, most of them probably working its 122 sugar plantations. By the general census of 1726 the number of sugar plantations had nearly quadrupled and the enslaved population stood at 40,403, or 77 per cent, with a further 1,304 free people of African descent. Together they outnumbered white residents four to one. The arrivals behind those figures rose steeply. Landings climbed from 1,750 Africans across the 1680s to 2,084 in the decade after, then to 5,556, then to 12,350, and reached 20,393 during the 1720s, the second highest decade in the colony's history. Sixty per cent of the people landed between 1680 and 1730 had embarked in the Bight of Benin and twenty per cent in West Central Africa. Martinique's first poison law and its first wave of accusations belong to exactly these decades.