Bosman records that captives expect to be eaten at the end of the voyage

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.

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.