The colony's own court registers the Code Noir two years late

On 6 May 1687 the Sovereign Council of Saint-Domingue registered the Code Noir. Registration was the step that counted. A royal edict signed in France carried no force in a colony until the local sovereign council, which served as high court and administrative authority at once, entered it in the register and undertook to apply it. Until that day the code was a document from across an ocean. After it, a magistrate at Cap-Francais could cite the articles by number, and a planter who wanted a runaway punished had a text to point at. Two years had passed since Louis XIV signed it. The delay says something about how the empire worked. Versailles wrote the law, the colonists decided when to receive it, and the colonists had reasons to read the articles about their own obligations slowly. From 1687 the slavery of Saint-Domingue operated under a registered code, enforceable in the colony's own courts, and those courts were staffed by the men who owned the plantations.

The San Antonio made port at Veracruz on 24 May 1687 with 580 enslaved Africans in its hold. Margarita de Robles, Paula Matias and Maria de Pares came ashore quietly from the captain's cabin. They had been taken in the raid of 1683, held at Petit-Goave, and had worked their way back through Baracoa in eastern Cuba and Havana. On the last leg they travelled as free women and Spanish subjects, seasick and dependent on other passengers for food, but with their status unquestioned. The people below them were about to be branded, quarantined and measured. Matias later gave her age as twenty two and called herself a free mulata. She said the pirate Lorenco had taken her prisoner with other women and carried her to Petit-Goave, where she remained. She named no owner, no husband and no companion, and said nothing of how she had survived four years among the French.

Eleven people on Andre Gomes de Medina's plantation in Bahia, and more in the neighbourhood around it, had died over the course of a year from illnesses nobody could name. In 1688 the enslaved people there searched the cabin of a man called Simao and found a pot of animal teeth and powders. Simao later told the Lisbon inquisitors it was made from the heads of snakes and served as a cure for venomous bites. Before that he was put through a boiling water ordeal, a judicial procedure closely resembling ones then in use in West Africa. Afterwards he was said to have confessed to killing other slaves. Three enslaved people, Domingos, Joanna and Ursula, heard the confession, and the slaveholder heard of it only at second hand. Domingos, about twenty five years old, gave evidence to the commissioner himself, and he and Joanna testified to finding the pot. The enslaved ran this investigation from beginning to end.

Eric Williams, the Trinidadian historian and politician, put the point in a sentence. The English settlement of 1688 gave a decisive push to the doctrine of open commerce, and the traffic in captive Africans was then opened on exactly the terms every other line of business was opened on, with a single difference, which lay in the nature of the goods. The goods were people. That settlement is normally taught as the moment parliamentary liberty was secured in England. In the same decades the Royal African Company lost its monopoly and English shipping was opened to any merchant who wanted to fit out a slaver, and the volume carried across the Atlantic rose sharply in consequence. The expansion of liberty at home and the expansion of the traffic in human beings abroad were produced by the same act. Saint-Domingue was reaching its first sugar boom while this was happening on the other side of the Channel.