The Code Noir makes Catholic instruction a condition of holding slaves

The Code Noir of 1685 ordered that every enslaved person in the French islands be baptised and instructed in the Catholic religion, and required a planter buying newly arrived Africans to notify the governor within eight days so that instruction and baptism could be arranged. The same text forbade the public exercise of any other religion and directed that offenders be punished as rebels. Marriage of the enslaved was prescribed as well, and the Church pressed it through the following century. The purpose of this apparatus was the quiet reproduction of slavery over a long stretch of time. Masters and administrators watched for anything that might interrupt it: abortion, infanticide, and above all flight from the plantation. Alongside the whip, which had never been sufficient on its own, the colony now had a machine for supervising the few hours of rest a slave was allowed.

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.

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.

A census of Suriname in 1684 counted 4,137 enslaved Africans and creoles of African descent, 81 per cent of the population, along with 144 enslaved Indians. At the height of the English colony in 1663 the comparable proportion had been 55 per cent. The census of 1701 recorded 8,500 enslaved people and roughly a thousand maroons against 700 Europeans. Large sugar estates began pushing out the smaller ones in the middle of the 1680s, the enslaved population doubled again across the 1690s, and coffee added its own demand in the 1720s. By 1752 there were 37,835 enslaved people and they made up 95 per cent of everyone in the colony. The earliest surviving poison trial in the Suriname court records dates from 1731, and from 1735 to 1739 poison accounted for a tenth of all trials. The arithmetic of the plantation and the arithmetic of the poison docket moved together.