Hens are fed to a shrine at Sestro in the days before the rice harvest

In the early 1680s the French slave trader Jean Barbot watched a public ritual at Sestro on the West African coast in the days before the rice was cut. Hens were sacrificed and fed to a small shrine holding a thick human shaped statue. Barbot also met the local priest, a man who knew the medicinal plants and served as doctor to everyone around him, greatly respected and consulted when people believed themselves in peril. What Barbot recorded, filtered through his own vocabulary, was a system in which public health ran through seasonal ritual and through specialists who were also healers. The editors who later worked through his manuscript found he had copied freely from earlier writers and separated what he had seen from what he had borrowed; these passages are his own. Practitioners of this kind were among the people sold across the Atlantic, and their expertise travelled with them into the plantations.

Thirteen vessels under Dutch, French and English raiders led by Laurens de Graaf, called Lorencillo, occupied Veracruz for two weeks in May 1683. The port held six to seven thousand people, about as many as the whole of French Saint-Domingue at the time. The raiders worked through the town methodically and seized close to 1,500 people of African descent. Whether a person was free or enslaved made no difference to who was taken. Skin did. Nearly every able-bodied Afro-Veracruzan in the city was carried aboard. When the ships sailed on 30 May the incoming Spanish fleet, well placed to intercept them, let them pass, because the merchandise and passengers it carried were judged too valuable to risk in a battle. The captives were landed in Saint-Domingue, Carolina and Jamaica. Spanish scribes appear to have registered only the dead.

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.

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.