The church has the Jews expelled from Saint Domingue

The Jesuits were operating as an order in Saint Domingue well before their mission was formally established in 1704, and in 1669 they asked the crown's representative in the colony to take action against tavern keepers, undesirable women and Jews. In 1683 the church induced Louis XIV to expel every Jew from the colony and to impose a religious test on new arrivals. Jews had been in the Caribbean from the first crossing. At least one recently converted converso sailed with Columbus in 1492 and historians suspect five more. Most colonial Jews were Sephardim of Spanish or Portuguese origin, often travelling under false identities, some from France and others by way of Dutch or Iberian settlements. Zvi Loker located Jewish settlements in four zones of what became Haiti, including eighty families from Curacao who set up as traders at Cap Francois and brought a prayer leader with them. Christian planters got on with them well enough that the campaign against them failed.

After Ambuila the Portuguese moved to crush Soyo, the coastal province that had grown rich on direct trade through the port of Pinda and had been drifting away from the Kongo crown for a generation. A Portuguese army beat the Soyo forces in 1670 and killed their prince. Soyo regrouped and destroyed that army in a surprise attack on 18 October, the feast of St Luke. Nobody threatened Soyo like that again. St Luke's Day became a national festival of deliverance with processions and war dances, and the church took a full part in it. Soyo was also the one place in the whole country with an almost unbroken Capuchin presence from 1645 into the eighteenth century, and it developed something like a settled Christianity, with eight churches in its capital, lay brotherhoods whose membership was near compulsory for high office, and princes who could read and write Portuguese.

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.

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.