Indigo carries the colony before sugar and coffee do

The earliest census records and the accounts left by French chroniclers show indigo as the leading crop of the western end of Hispaniola long before sugar and coffee took over. From 1688 to about 1770 the planters there sold their dye into a market where they had to undercut growers in Guatemala and in South Carolina, both producing the same commodity for the same European buyers. The competition was hard and the margins were thin. The relief that arrived with the sugar and coffee markets later in the seventeen hundreds can be measured against those eighty years of struggle. Sugar and coffee also happened to be complementary at the point of consumption, since Europeans who took one usually wanted the other. That combination turned a hard pressed dye colony into the most profitable European possession on earth. Indigo stayed in production all the same, and in 1789 more than three thousand small growers were still living on it.

Some time after Easter in 1704 a young woman named Kimpa Vita, baptised Beatrice, joined the old prophetess in burning charms and crosses in the villages around Mount Kimbangu. She was said to die every Friday and return to life every Sunday. The Capuchin Bernardo da Gallo questioned her and she told him she was St Anthony, come from heaven. He asked, crudely, if there were Kongolese blacks up there and whether they still had their colour. She answered that there were Kongolese adults and children who had kept God's law, and that nobody there was black or white, because heaven has no colour. Pressed on why she burned crosses as well as charms, she said the crosses had superstition mixed into them too. She had given away everything she owned, as the friars did, and she was preaching that the people must go back to Sao Salvador. About that she was right.

Over the summer of 1742, after torture, an enslaved man named Baron confessed to causing his mistress's death. He said he had bought herbs from Abraham on another plantation, meaning to cool her temper and avoid future punishment rather than to kill. He also named Coffij, who belonged to the Society of Suriname itself. Coffij denied it and gave the court Askaan and Emanuiel for poisoning other enslaved people, which produced their trials, and Emanuiel's trial produced Ajuba's. Baron additionally accused Louis, a driver on his own plantation, of going about with poison, and Louis's case produced Sambo's. Suriname had sixteen poison cases in the whole of the 1730s and forty two between 1740 and the end of 1745, and eighteen of the forty two were tied to another case. Baron, Sambo, Abraham and Emanuiel were branded, pinched with hot tongs until they died, and their heads set on spikes in the Suriname river.

On 23 January 1745 a court in Orange County, Virginia convicted a woman named Eve of mixing poison into the milk of her owner, Peter Montague, who had languished four months before dying. The record calls the act feloniously and traitorously done, and she was burned at the stake. Virginia treated the killing of a master by a slave as a species of treason, on the model of the English rule under which a wife who killed her husband committed petit treason. Trial records from Virginia counties usually run to a few lines listing the accused, the charge and the outcome, so cases with this much detail are rare. Where a method is named it is almost always something put into food or drink, which is what European ideas about poisoning expected. In four trials between 1763 and 1798 the accused were said to have poisoned their owners while pretending to give them medicine.