A slave ship lands captives in March and raiders take them in May

The Dutch slave ship San Joseph y Nuestra Senora de la Paz left Curacao on 2 February 1683 with six hundred captives aboard and put hundreds of them ashore at Veracruz on 1 March. Three months later the buccaneers took the port and carried the same people away again. For them the raid was one more stage in a sequence of removals rather than a single catastrophe. Many of the women and men seized at Veracruz had crossed the Atlantic weeks or months earlier and had already had their social world broken and rebuilt several times, in different households, work gangs and markets. Historians of the raid have often written that those taken were bound for the darkest slavery under the French and English, which flatters the bondage they were leaving. Slavery in urban New Spain reached into child rearing, food, debt and the pursuit of honour, and the people carried off had lived inside it.

By the middle of the seventeenth century there were sizeable black Catholic communities in Brazil, Portugal, Angola and the Kongo, some of them organised into their own lay brotherhoods for prayer and mutual aid. A leader of one in Lisbon, Lourenco da Silva, used the title procurator general for a congregation of blacks and mulattos named after Our Lady of the Rosary, and claimed descent from the royal houses of Kongo and Angola. He was probably born in Brazil. In 1684 he got himself to Rome and protested to the Pope against the perpetual enslavement of black Christians and the cruelties inflicted on them. His case joined the Capuchin protests, convinced Propaganda Fide, and produced a broad condemnation of the slave trade from the Holy Office in 1686. It was blocked by the governments of Portugal and Spain and had no effect. The papacy was in a weak position to press it, since popes were still using purchased slaves in their galleys.

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 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.