The Code Noir writes slavery into law

Louis XIV issued the Code Noir in March 1685 to regulate labor in the French island possessions. On paper it granted things: the right to marry, the right to a formal trial, mandatory Catholic baptism and religious instruction, limits on punishment. Read the omission instead of the grants. There is no provision for education anywhere in it, and that was deliberate, because planters held that a literate enslaved population was an ungovernable one. The Code also defined enslaved people as movable property, meubles, which is the legal category you use for furniture. So the same document that requires a soul be baptized classifies the body carrying it as a chair. In Saint-Domingue the protective articles were ignored as a matter of routine and the property articles were enforced with absolute rigor, which tells you which half the state actually meant.

The raiders drove every person of African descent and every Spanish man out to Isla de Sacrificios, an islet off Veracruz where more than four thousand people were crowded with almost no drinking water. On the afternoon of 26 May the buccaneers formed two lines, drew their cutlasses and ordered the captives to strip. The Franciscan Juan de Avila, who watched, wrote that the black and mixed race women were left almost naked and weeping. The raiders then divided the black and mixed race men and women from the Spanish men. Interracial families were broken at that moment, which the friar did not mention. On 29 May a final choice was made and only the young and healthy were put aboard. About five hundred people described as old and sick were abandoned on the islet. On 30 May those left behind watched 1,463 relatives and friends sail away.

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.