Two enslaved people are bought for their reputation as healers

A denunciation made to the inquisitorial commissioner in Salvador in March 1686 described slaveholders buying an enslaved couple precisely because they were known for curing afflictions caused by poison and charms, and hoping to profit from their practice. It sits inside a cluster. Across the two full trials and twenty one investigations from 1686 to 1707, ten cases involved fifteen medical practitioners, and all but one of the fifteen were of African descent. Some stood accused of causing afflictions and some of curing them, and the same people often did both. The knowledge that an illness came from sorcery, and frequently the accusation itself, came from the enslaved, and owners gradually adopted it. Church law had nothing yet to say about any of this, and the Inquisition did not much want the cases. The link between poison, sorcery and African healers was made on plantations and in city streets long before a statute described it.

The Code Noir settled the legal question of what an enslaved person was. The answer was movable property, meuble in French law, which placed a human being in the same column as furniture and cattle: bought, sold, mortgaged, seized for debt, divided among heirs. Baptism was compulsory and certain punishments were formally prohibited, and in Saint-Domingue neither provision was enforced. What the colony did enforce was output. Someone landed there from a slave ship could expect roughly seven years of life, and the whip, the branding iron and the mutilation of runaways were ordinary instruments of labour discipline. This is the law the rising of 1791 set out to destroy, and it explains why the destruction went further than a change of government. A people defined in statute as property does not finish the job by capturing a treasury. The Haitian declaration of independence answers a legal claim about what human beings are, which is why the document still reads as philosophy.

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.

Offra sat on the coast of what is now Benin and served as the sea outlet of the kingdom of Allada, whose rulers lived inland. English and Dutch chartered companies did their buying there for thirty years. Thousands of captives were marched down to it and loaded for the British and Dutch islands of the Caribbean. In 1690 a local war destroyed the town and the traffic there ended in one stroke. The business itself did not disappear. It moved a short way along the same coast to Ouidah, which grew into one of the largest embarkation points in the whole history of the trade and sent very large numbers of people to Saint-Domingue. This is worth holding onto, because the coast is usually described as though European demand alone decided where ships called. African political events decided it too. A war between African states closed one port and made another, and the consequences reached across the ocean.