Mead explains poison as salts that cut the stomach like knives

Richard Mead published A Mechanical Account of Poisons in 1702 and revised it in 1729 and 1747. Looking at dried viper venom through a microscope he saw jagged crystals, and concluded that all poisons were salts working by cutting the stomach like sharp knives. He gave an essay to the Italian tarantula, whose bite was said to bring on a delirium curable only by vigorous dancing, and explained the cure through sweat and through vibrations in the air breaking up coagulated blood. Mead never left Europe. He was physician to George II and a fellow of the Royal Society, and each new edition leaned harder on people who had been elsewhere: a treatise on the Mexican tarantula, a Portuguese merchant's report that Kongolese people ate vipers to cure disease, an account of poisoned arrows near Cape Town, and letters from surgeons living in Guinea and Virginia. European knowledge of poison was assembled from African and American material.

Jean-Baptiste du Casse took charge of the French settlements on the western side of Hispaniola in 1691 and spent twelve years turning a buccaneer coast into a colony. He shifted the capital to Leogane in 1695. In June 1694 he led a raid on English Jamaica that stripped the sugar works of their machinery and carried three thousand enslaved people back across the water to be put on Saint-Domingue estates. That is how the colony was capitalised: by seizing equipment and people from a neighbour. In 1697 the Peace of Ryswick gave France formal title to the territory he had been assembling. Du Casse treated the place as a base as much as a plantation, a place d'armes from which France could reach at Spanish Mexico and Peru. His final act was the charter of the Compagnie de St. Louis in 1698, which settled the southern peninsula with fifteen hundred French emigrants and twenty five hundred Africans. The ratio in that last sentence is the colonial project stated in figures.

Some time after Easter in 1704 a young woman named Kimpa Vita, baptised Beatrice, joined the old prophetess in burning charms and crosses in the villages around Mount Kimbangu. She was said to die every Friday and return to life every Sunday. The Capuchin Bernardo da Gallo questioned her and she told him she was St Anthony, come from heaven. He asked, crudely, if there were Kongolese blacks up there and whether they still had their colour. She answered that there were Kongolese adults and children who had kept God's law, and that nobody there was black or white, because heaven has no colour. Pressed on why she burned crosses as well as charms, she said the crosses had superstition mixed into them too. She had given away everything she owned, as the friars did, and she was preaching that the people must go back to Sao Salvador. About that she was right.

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.