A king of Whydah calls the mass very fine and keeps his own god

In 1699 two Portuguese priests of the Augustinian order crossed from the island of Sao Tome to the kingdom of Whydah. King Agbangla gave them liberty to work and permission to build a church and a hospice. He agreed to attend the celebration of the mass and agreed to very little beyond that. A Dutch trader who was visiting asked him what he made of it. The king answered that it was very fine, and that for his part he chose to keep to his own object of worship. The Augustinians returned to Sao Tome before the year was out. That was the last mission of the seventeenth century on this coast. The pattern by then was set. Kings welcomed priests, granted them land, sent them their sons and declined to convert, while missionaries who could not accept a new cult placed alongside the old ones went home or died where they stood.

The Treaty of Ryswick, signed on 20 September 1697, ended nine years of war between France and the Grand Alliance of England, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic. The negotiators met at a country house near The Hague and traded fortresses, ports and colonies. One clause among many awarded France the western third of Hispaniola. Nothing changed on the island that day. French buccaneers had been established on Tortuga and along the northern coast since the 1620s, and by 1697 they had cleared land, planted tobacco and indigo, imported Africans, and installed a governor and a council. The treaty attached a legal name to a settlement already in place. That is generally how colonies come into being. Someone occupies ground, and a document drafted afterwards in Europe converts the occupation into title. The territory took the name Saint-Domingue and went on to earn more from sugar and coffee, worked by enslaved people, than any comparable piece of ground on earth.

The Treaty of Ryswick ended the Nine Years' War in 1697 and, among many other provisions, handed France the western portion of Hispaniola. The territory was named Saint-Domingue. Within fifty years it led the world in sugar, coffee and indigo, and by the 1780s it earned France more than any other colony earned any other European power. All of it rested on one input. The enslaved African population of that third of an island passed five hundred thousand, against roughly forty thousand whites and a similar number of free people of colour. The link between those two facts is what makes the colony worth understanding. Extreme output was bought with extreme mortality, and the deaths had to be covered by continuous imports, which is why the ships never stopped arriving. Saint-Domingue held its place as the most valuable European possession in the Americas until the people producing the wealth destroyed the machinery that produced it.

In 1700 the Jesuit missionary Jean Baptiste Labat described St Vincent as the centre of the Carib republic, the island where the Amerindian population was largest, with Dominica nowhere close. Living among them he found a great number of runaway Africans, most of them from Barbados, which sits upwind and gave escapees a straightforward passage by boat or on rafts of light wood. A second French observer that same year wrote that the crossing required nothing beyond letting the currents carry you. Labat noted that the Caribs had once handed such arrivals back to their owners, or sold them on to the French and Spanish, and said he did not know what had made them change. Also in 1700 the Caribs asked the governor of Martinique to settle a boundary dispute among themselves. They were conducting their own diplomacy with a European colony, on terms they set, a century and a half after the Spanish first labelled them hostile.