A woman taken at twelve describes ten years in Petit-Goave

Juana Tomasa, a mestiza from Maracaibo in Venezuela, was kidnapped when she was barely twelve and spent a decade at Petit-Goave. Questioned at Veracruz in December 1688 by the judge Fernando Lopez Ursino, she described a port that took enslaved people, linen goods, liquor and wine and paid in tobacco. That matches what the French slave trader La Courbe recorded in 1687, when he received three thousand pounds of tobacco for each person he sold. Sugarcane was still fifteen years away from dominating the colony. Tomasa said the ships entering Petit-Goave were all French, which conveniently gave the judge nothing on Dutch contraband. She said an undisclosed number of women paid six pesos each to board a French sloop that carried them to Baracoa, and that she begged the ship owner there to take them on to Havana so the pirates could not seize them again. She called herself a foreigner in Veracruz.

Between 1688 and 1695 at least sixteen women taken from Veracruz were married in the parishes of Leogane, L'Ester, Petite Riviere and Croix-des-Bouquets. Every one of them appears in the register as free, and over half named their parents, which set them apart from newly landed African captives whose families the visiting friars did not record. Therese Quadrat, described as a free mulatresse and a native of Veracruz, married Guillaume Boursicot in late November 1688 and bore ten Boursicot children. Jeanne Fort married Mathurin Boulet in June 1690. Article nine of the Code Noir freed an enslaved woman whose owner married her, and made her children free and legitimate, which is the door these women went through. Their twenty nine children were baptised as mulatre or quarteron. In 1695 Marie Converque stood godmother to Therese Quadrat's daughter Marie, tying the two women together twelve years after they were carried out of Mexico.

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.