Eight candles burn before the Virgin in the new cathedral at Cap

The cathedral at Cap Francais was completed in 1718. A nun of the Company of the Daughters of Mary wrote that eight candles burned before the statue of the Virgin at all hours, and gave the devotion of the enslaved as the reason. The first French parish church in the town had been consecrated to Our Lady of the Assumption in 1681, and the same dedication later went to the cathedrals of Port-au-Prince and Les Cayes. Missionaries arriving in the young colony were struck by how attached African and creole slaves were to Mary. Much of that attachment crossed the ocean with them, since devotion to the Virgin was generations old in Kongo, where a large share of the later arrivals came from. The mid-August feast of the Assumption grew into one of the largest gatherings in the country, and it is still kept in all three cities.

Francisco Buytrago was a knight of the Order of Christ and a cavalry officer stationed in Angola for twenty years across the 1710s and 1720s. He spent that time watching medical practitioners in Angola and the kingdom of Kongo and asking them questions, and from them and from enslaved informants he learned about a small yellow tree with thick bark that he was told was the finest counter poison anywhere in the world. He saw healers use it on a man badly swollen from evil spells, and reported that people also carried the bark to keep harm from reaching them at all. The tree was almost certainly Erythrophleum suaveolens, called nkasa by Kikongo speakers, whose bark made the ordeal drink given to test the innocence of the accused and also served as a fishing poison. Buytrago drew none of that. He understood the bark as a new instrument for casting out demons and wrote a manuscript recommending it for exorcisms.

In May 1712 Governor Arnoul de Vaucresson opened his report to the ministry in Paris with a long run of losses among enslaved people and livestock in Martinique, from illnesses so unusual that the owners could not explain them. Several owners had arrested their slaves, held them in irons on the plantations, extracted confessions and then sent them on to the king's prison. One case in that report concerns an enslaved man named Francois, who claimed particular skill in detecting poisons, spells and the people who used them. His owner, a Mr David, hired him out during the crisis and collected money from the neighbours for it. The court dropped the case against the accused for want of proof, rebuked the owners who had abused them, and made David return the money for tricking the public. Slaveholders were learning who to suspect, and how to look, from the enslaved themselves.

No general census of seventeenth century Bahia survives, although the crown ordered them. The first solid figure is ecclesiastical and comes from 1724, when 45,482 enslaved people made up 57 per cent of the population. The count did not separate free whites from free people of African descent, and travellers early in the century suggest the latter were a large share of Salvador, a city of roughly twenty five thousand. Sugar drove the demand. From 1600 to 1680 over thirteen thousand Africans were landed in Bahia, 69 per cent of them shipped from West Central African ports, and the numbers then climbed steeply, from 1,193 in the 1660s to 5,121 in the 1670s, 11,540 in the 1680s and 42,562 in the 1690s. Plantation ledgers from the 1730s suggest Africans were about three quarters of the enslaved population. Poison accusations climbed on the same curve as these figures.