Ouidah keeps a snake house and the king walks to it every year

The best known public healing cult of the Bight of Benin before Dahomey took the region surrounded Dengbe the snake at Ouidah. Dengbe was one of many vodun, which European observers called gods or devils and which are better described as forces able to act on the lives of the living. The king of Ouidah made an annual pilgrimage to the snake house. Young women who fell into what Willem Bosman called madness at harvest time were confined there for a season. When fevers came, people made offerings to particular vodun trees to restore health. The specialists who ran these rites at Ouidah in the late seventeenth century included women as well as men, unlike the Bight of Biafra further east, where Igbo speakers gave such work to men. William Snelgrave later described the destruction of the snake house when Dahomey conquered the port. People sold out of these harbours carried the ideas with them.

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.

Around the end of the seventeenth century the money in the Americas moved. For most of the two hundred years since Columbus, the wealth Europe drew from the hemisphere came out of the ground in Mexico and Peru, in silver dug by conscripted indigenous labour. By the 1690s the largest returns were coming from sugar grown on the Caribbean islands and along the coast of Brazil. Sugar demands land, mills, capital and an enormous supply of workers who can be compelled, and the plantation complex that supplied all four expanded through the Atlantic basin at once. This relocation is the reason the slave trade reached the size it did. Silver mining drew on indigenous labour drafts organised in place. Sugar drew on Africans bought across an ocean and shipped in, and it consumed them fast enough to require permanent replacement. Every feature of the eighteenth century Caribbean, including the colony that became Haiti, follows from the centre of gravity moving off the mainland mines and into the island cane fields.