Three Veracruzanas come home in the captain's cabin of a slave ship

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.

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.

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.