The sugar lead passes from Barbados to Jamaica to Saint-Domingue to Cuba

From roughly the 1690s to the 1860s the lead in Caribbean sugar production travelled along a chain of islands, from Barbados to Jamaica, then to Saint-Domingue, then to Cuba. Labour in the cane looked entirely interchangeable, and that was the design. One job broke the pattern. The striker was the enslaved worker who judged the moment when boiling cane juice was ready to move from one vessel to the next. That moment turned on the fire, the temperature, the thickness of the juice, the quality of the cane and how long ago it had been cut. Some planters bought elaborate thermometers to find it. Others concluded that a good striker was worth more than the best instrument, and a person with the skill would be advertised and sold as a striker. On the smaller estates growing coffee, work was often set by task, which let an individual who passed the quota earn something extra.

In the region around the Gulf of Benin, each ethnic group, village, family and lineage kept its own vodun, guardian deities tied to ancestors. Relations between these groups were marked by rivalry and frequent war, and religion moved with the fighting. At the opening of the eighteenth century the royal family of Abomey, extending its power, set out to centralise worship. It appropriated deities belonging to its enemies, among them Yoruba ones, suppressed some spirits and imposed others across the whole kingdom, so that these became public vodun. Priests who had until then worked independently of rulers were turned into dignitaries of the court. One imposed figure was Agassou, founding ancestor of the royal line at Abomey, held by tradition to be the child of a woman and a panther. Families went on honouring their own vodun regardless. Both habits, the state cult and the household one, crossed the Atlantic in the slave ships.

An earthquake destroyed Port-au-Prince in 1751, two years after French colonists laid the town out. The stone buildings raised since 1749 came down. Masonry behaves badly in a seismic event because it has no give. Walls crack, then shear, then fall in heavy pieces on whatever is underneath them. The colony had built in the material that signalled permanence and discovered that permanence was the wrong property to want on that stretch of coast. The lesson did not hold. Rebuilding went ahead, and the city was levelled a second time by another earthquake in 1770. Port-au-Prince has been shaken repeatedly across its history, and the gaps between events run long enough that each generation has had to learn the fact again from its own rubble. The interval between 1770 and the next catastrophic quake in the capital ran to two hundred and forty years.

On Saturday 7 May 1842 the Septentrional fault in northern Hispaniola moved. Witnesses said the ground worked for several minutes and came in two distinct shocks, the second doing most of the harm. In Port-au-Prince people ran out of the downtown buildings into the streets, and the coat of arms above the Senate entrance fell and shattered, which onlookers read as a sign that the government would come down too. Tremors went on through the weekend, and a heavy one broke up mass on Sunday 8 May. Reports reached the capital from Puerto Plata, Gonaives and Saint-Marc, and from Falmouth in western Jamaica. A mountain near Saint-Marc was said to have split in two. James Hartwell, a British missionary in Port-au-Prince, wrote to England wondering why the capital had been spared. At Gonaives the government house, the arsenal, the treasury and the prison collapsed, sixty prisoners escaped, and a fire the next evening burned much of the rest.