An earthquake drowns Port Royal and closes the buccaneer era

An earthquake threw most of Port Royal into the sea in 1692. The town stood on a sand spit at the mouth of the Kingston harbour and had been the busiest port in the English Caribbean, a place where privateers refitted, prize goods were sold, and sailors with no master and no country could find work and disappear. Two thirds of it liquefied and sank. Julius Scott treats the disaster as the closing of an era. The Caribbean of the buccaneers had been a frontier where the borders between empires leaked and a man's status could be renegotiated at every landing. What came after was the plantation: surveyed estates, registered human property, garrisons, courts. Within fifty years the islands Scott calls enchanted had been taken almost wholly into that system. The masterless world survived at the waterline, in the crews, canoes and dockside taverns that moved news and rumour between colonies faster than any governor could, and that traffic is the common wind of Scott's title.

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.

Thornton uses the movement led by Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita to show how far Kongolese ideologues could rework Christian material. Claiming to be permanently possessed by Saint Anthony, she set out to end the civil wars and restore the kingdom, and in defining her position she retold Christian history so that the nativity happened at Nsundi, the province traditionally tied to Afonso, which she named as Bethlehem, while the capital São Salvador became Jerusalem and the place of the baptism. Thornton's point is that Macaya's later description of the kings of Kongo, France and Spain as descendants of the Magi was not eccentric improvisation but an established Kongolese habit of mind. Kongolese, he argues, viewed kings much as northern European thinkers did, as necessary but potentially limited.

By the 1690s the enslaved black population of Virginia outnumbered white indentured servants there by four to one. For most of the century the tobacco colony had run on indenture, which meant English and Irish people bound to labour for a term of years and then released with a claim to land. That arrangement carried an end date inside it. Slavery carried none, and the Atlantic traffic had grown large enough to supply planters at a price they preferred. The ratio is the visible result of decisions the Virginia assembly had already taken in law: making slave status inherit through the mother, closing the escape route through baptism, and fixing condition by race. The colony that later produced the sentence about all men being created equal had, by this decade, settled the prior question of who counted as a man. The same substitution of African slavery for European indenture was under way across the plantation Americas at the same moment, on English, French, Dutch and Portuguese ground alike.