A prophetess tells the king to come down or watch the mountain burn

By 1703 the Kongo had been in pieces for nearly forty years. Sao Salvador had stood empty since 1678, at times four men claimed the throne at once, and the churches, the Jesuits and the canons were gone. Pedro IV, the closest thing to a recognised king, was living in a fortified camp on Mount Kimbangu while popular pressure mounted for him to return to the capital. Around the camp people began saying the Ave Maria three times after evening devotions, followed by a triple cry of mercy, and word spread that Christ was angry the king had not gone back and that only Mary held his anger off. An old woman known as Apollonia or Mattuta declared the mountain would go up in fire if the king did not come down. She started burning charms and performing cures. The country was waiting for something, and the political demand and the religious language were by then the same demand.

Between 1679 and 1704 enslaved people in French Saint-Domingue organised four separate armed conspiracies. Their object was the destruction of the master class in its entirety. The dates matter more than the plots achieved on their own. The colony was barely established, its enslaved population was still small, and resistance of this order was already being planned and had to be hunted down. The usual telling of Haitian history begins the story of revolt in August 1791, as though a hundred and thirty years of obedience came first. The record says something else. Conspiracy, poisoning, flight to the mountains and open revolt run continuously through the colonial period, and marronage was permanent. What changed in 1791 was scale, timing and the collapse of French authority in Europe, which gave a rising the room to grow into a war. The intention was present in the first decades, and the colonists knew it.

This is my favorite thing on the whole timeline and it exists only because the data was read whole. Saint-Domingue took 2,336 recorded voyages landing 695,398 people, ranking fifth among all destinations in the Atlantic trade. But the composition of who arrived changed completely across the century. In 1700 the Bight of Benin supplied 59.9 percent of arrivals and West Central Africa supplied zero. By 1760 West Central Africa is at 57.1 percent and Benin has fallen to 16.2. By 1790, the year before the rising, it is 42.1 against 9.6. So the generation that took the colony by force in 1791 was demographically a different population from the one that built it. Anybody making an argument about continuity of African military tradition into 1791 has to survive this table first, and most of those arguments have never been shown it.

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.