Abomey takes the gods of its enemies and puts the priests in court dress

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 employee of the Dutch West India Company named Bosman wrote in 1705 that the captives he handled believed they were being bought and carried across the sea so that they could be fattened and eaten. He put the belief down to innocence. It was a reasonable inference from the evidence available to them. People who had been seized, sold and loaded onto a ship by strangers concluded that the slavers and planters were cannibals or sorcerers commanding spirit powers stronger than those at home, since they had managed to tear them away from home in the first place. Many also held that they could return to the country of the dead, leaving only their body to the white man, which is one reason planters feared suicide among new arrivals. In Saint-Domingue a working life lasted seven to ten years on average, and owners saw no reason to lengthen it while the ships kept coming.

Leaving the king's camp, Beatrice led a group of ordinary people back to Sao Salvador and made her home beside the cathedral, on the ground where the bishop had once lived. She sent out messengers, called little Anthonies, across the country to summon people to the capital. Soyo and Nsundi threw them out. Elsewhere the movement caught, and another Capuchin met it near the sea in mid 1705. The city filled up. Beatrice was hailed as the true nganga, the one restoring the kingdom, and Bernardo da Gallo was mocked as little Bernardo, the cowardly nganga who had lacked the nerve to lead the people home. Her teaching grew: Christ had been born at Sao Salvador, the true Bethlehem, and baptised at Nsundi in the river Zaire. Marriage, baptism, confession and prayer counted for nothing in themselves, she said, because God looks at the intention.

The Treaty of Ryswick of 20 September 1697 moved the western third of Hispaniola from Spain to France and created the colony of Saint-Domingue. The figures it eventually produced are worth stating plainly. By the 1780s something near forty percent of the sugar and sixty percent of the coffee consumed in Europe came out of this one territory, an area smaller than Belgium. More than half a million enslaved Africans were living and dying there to produce it, and the mortality was such that the colony needed tens of thousands of fresh arrivals a year simply to hold its workforce level. The elegance of eighteenth century France, including the coffee houses where its philosophers argued about liberty, ran on this. Ryswick also drew a line. The boundary the treaty left vague became, after a century of adjustment and dispute, the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A European peace conference created the legal object the revolution would destroy and fixed the shape of the country that replaced it.