The French governor dies at Limonade and the northern plain is sacked

Pierre-Paul Tarin de Cussy became governor in 1683 with two standing problems: colonists who would not submit to authority, and a Spanish neighbour that regarded the entire French presence as illegal. In June 1689 he chose to strike first and led a raid on Santiago in the Spanish east. The retaliation came in early 1691 and was overwhelming. On 21 January the French were broken at Limonade, near Cap Francais, where Spanish lancers killed de Cussy and his deputy. The victorious force then went through the Plaine du Nord, the richest agricultural district in the French sector, and left it wrecked with nearly 500 dead. This was one theatre of the European war of the Grand Alliance, fought out by men who would never see Europe. It also shows how provisional French control still was after twenty seven years. The plain they burned in 1691 is the plain that rose in 1791 and burned again.

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.

Willem Bosman lived on the Gold Coast as a merchant of the Dutch West India Company from 1688 to 1702 and published his description of the coast in 1705. He wrote about priests conducting divination and sacrifice before decisions on war or travel, consecrated objects placed in the rooms of the sick, and payment for healing collected from a patient's relatives in proportion to their means. He disapproved of most of it. He also conceded, grudgingly, that he had watched several of his own countrymen cured by remedies that looked wrong to him, at moments when the European physicians had no idea what to do, and wondered whether African medicines worked better on Europeans because the climate had altered European bodies. What shocked him was that Europeans on the coast had taken up the practice of putting consecrated objects beside sickbeds. The exchange ran both ways long before it reached the Americas.