A Dutch merchant admits the Gold Coast cures work

Willem Bosman lived on the Gold Coast as a merchant of the Dutch West India Company from 1688 to 1702 and published his description of the coast in 1705. He wrote about priests conducting divination and sacrifice before decisions on war or travel, consecrated objects placed in the rooms of the sick, and payment for healing collected from a patient's relatives in proportion to their means. He disapproved of most of it. He also conceded, grudgingly, that he had watched several of his own countrymen cured by remedies that looked wrong to him, at moments when the European physicians had no idea what to do, and wondered whether African medicines worked better on Europeans because the climate had altered European bodies. What shocked him was that Europeans on the coast had taken up the practice of putting consecrated objects beside sickbeds. The exchange ran both ways long before it reached the Americas.

The Treaty of Ryswick of 20 September 1697 moved the western third of Hispaniola from Spain to France and created the colony of Saint-Domingue. The figures it eventually produced are worth stating plainly. By the 1780s something near forty percent of the sugar and sixty percent of the coffee consumed in Europe came out of this one territory, an area smaller than Belgium. More than half a million enslaved Africans were living and dying there to produce it, and the mortality was such that the colony needed tens of thousands of fresh arrivals a year simply to hold its workforce level. The elegance of eighteenth century France, including the coffee houses where its philosophers argued about liberty, ran on this. Ryswick also drew a line. The boundary the treaty left vague became, after a century of adjustment and dispute, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A European peace conference created the legal object the revolution would destroy and fixed the shape of the country that replaced it.

The Treaty of Ryswick ended the Nine Years' War in 1697 and, among many other provisions, handed France the western portion of Hispaniola. The territory was named Saint-Domingue. Within fifty years it led the world in sugar, coffee and indigo, and by the 1780s it earned France more than any other colony earned any other European power. All of it rested on one input. The enslaved African population of that third of an island passed five hundred thousand, against roughly forty thousand whites and a similar number of free people of colour. The link between those two facts is what makes the colony worth understanding. Extreme output was bought with extreme mortality, and the deaths had to be covered by continuous imports, which is why the ships never stopped arriving. Saint-Domingue held its place as the most valuable European possession in the Americas until the people producing the wealth destroyed the machinery that produced it.

The Italian Capuchin Luca da Caltanisetta, travelling in Kongo, set down what happened on 10 February 1701. An officer holding the title Mani Lumbo came back with fifty eight people taken as slaves on the king's orders, having destroyed the village of a vassal accused of treason. Among those fifty eight, the priest noticed, were a number of free people: some who lived in the village, and others who had simply been there on business. This is how a large share of the Atlantic trade was actually supplied. Armies moved on a settlement and everyone inside it became merchandise, whatever their standing that morning. Caltanisetta recorded a second case in the same years. A woman already enslaved learned that her master had decided to sell her on to a trader with connections to the coast. She killed her baby and then herself rather than be deported. Kongo before 1665 had been orderly enough that few of its own people were enslaved. After the civil wars began, that protection was gone.