Winds and currents give Amazonia a slave route of its own

The northern coast of Brazil ran a slave trade of its own, and the reason is weather. Winds and currents in the equatorial Atlantic carried ships from the Senegambian coast toward the mouth of the Amazon instead of toward Bahia or Rio, so the captaincies of Para and Maranhao, which grew cotton, cacao and rice, were supplied along a lane no other Brazilian province used. The vessels were fitted out in Lisbon rather than locally, and they bought their captives in the rivers south of the Gambia. The pattern held for over a century. Only after 1815 did significant numbers reach Amazonia from West Central Africa. Other parts of Brazil sent their own ships from their own ports and drew on Angola and the Bight of Benin. What survives the detail is this: the Atlantic worked as a set of separate lanes fixed by sailing conditions, and where in Africa a person was taken from largely settled where in the Americas that person came ashore.

The most famous poison case in the French Caribbean ended in 1758 with the execution of Makandal in Saint Domingue. The charge that carried it was sacrilege, and the object at its centre was a tied up bundle of power containing a crucifix. Bundles like it were made across the Atlantic world and their contents can be listed from trial records: grave dirt, animal horns used both for cupping and for binding other objects together, feathers, herbs, and in the Portuguese colonies pieces of consecrated host, papers bearing the names of saints, and small crosses. Christian material inside such a bundle was what colonial courts found intolerable, and cases described as sacrilegious were the ones the Lisbon Inquisition proved most willing to bring to trial. The papers on Makandal, letters and interrogations running from 1757 to 1759, were gathered together by Moreau de Saint-Mery and sit in a single box in the French colonial archive.

Jean-Pierre Boyer governed Haiti from 1818 to 1843. He is remembered for two pieces of legislation. The rural code of 1826 tied the Haitian peasant to a marginal existence and went on doing so long after his fall. The penal code of 1835 placed Vodou under the heading of superstitions and made its practice illegal, punishable by fine and imprisonment. One article specifically exacted fines and prison from anyone who made zombies or cast spells, which meant the state had written a belief about the dead into its criminal law and then undertaken to prosecute people under it. Practitioners responded the way people respond to that: they went further into secrecy, and priests surrounded their worship with mystery and with a reputation for power. Both effects outlasted Boyer by more than a century, and the sensational literature about Haiti drew much of its raw material from the court cases the article produced.

By the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 France formally acquired the western territory its settlers had been occupying for decades. Yingling then sketches the economy that grew out of that transfer and the dependence it created in both directions. Saint-Domingue became the most profitable acreage in the Americas, but the French devoted almost no good land to livestock or food crops, so through the eighteenth century they spent commodity profits buying cattle, hides and staples from Santo Domingo, running a trade deficit with the Spanish side. Dominican elites owned enormous herds worked by thousands of free and enslaved people. Yingling insists on the consequence: Dominican cattle, as draught animals and as food, physically underwrote each expansion of French slavery. The two colonies were not neighbours who happened to trade but a single working system.