A chapel burns the night before a king of Whydah is to be baptised

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.

Drawn up in France at Colbert's instance and issued by Louis XIV in 1685, the Black Code set out how the official justification for slavery was to be handled. Article two required that every slave in the islands be baptised and instructed in the Catholic, apostolic and Roman religion. Article three forbade the public practice of any other. Gatherings of enslaved people, by day or by night, were outlawed, which was aimed squarely at African rites. The code regulated work, rest and family, and classed human beings as movable property with no rights at all. Of its sixty articles not one calls for any easing of the treatment slaves received. Its clauses on food, rest and religion are all designed to discourage flight and to leave the owner in complete command. An owner could in theory be punished for cruelty, but slaves could not be called as witnesses in any court, civil or criminal, which made the theory useless.

The raiders drove every person of African descent and every Spanish man out to Isla de Sacrificios, an islet off Veracruz where more than four thousand people were crowded with almost no drinking water. On the afternoon of 26 May the buccaneers formed two lines, drew their cutlasses and ordered the captives to strip. The Franciscan Juan de Avila, who watched, wrote that the black and mixed race women were left almost naked and weeping. The raiders then divided the black and mixed race men and women from the Spanish men. Interracial families were broken at that moment, which the friar did not mention. On 29 May a final choice was made and only the young and healthy were put aboard. About five hundred people described as old and sick were abandoned on the islet. On 30 May those left behind watched 1,463 relatives and friends sail away.

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.