Michel holds the Bahoruco while Canga works the northern plain

The runaways took leaders. A man called Michel held the mountains of the Bahoruco in 1719. Polydor operated in the plain of Trou. Noel, Canga and others were active around Fort Liberte about 1775, according to a ruling of the council of Le Cap dated 2 October 1777. All of them aimed at revolt, and they held their followers by religious authority as much as by force, so that political and priestly power sat in the same hands. The masters answered with castration, quartering, the stake and the wheel, and none of it slowed the movement. Two colonial officials wrote down what they saw. They suffer without a word, reported the administrator de Machault. They endure the cruellest torments with an unequalled constancy and go to the scaffold and the pyre with a ferocious tranquillity, wrote de Sezellan from Le Cap on 7 June 1763. What the officials called ferocity was the composure of people certain their cause would win.

A report from Elmina in 1720 recorded that the gold coming in was about half what it had been ten or twelve years earlier, and warned that if the price of captives kept climbing the Gold Coast would become the Slave Coast. Dutch employees said the prediction had come true by 1726. The arithmetic behind it had been visible for years. In 1704 the English were offering goods worth nearly three ounces of gold for one man, and a Dutch officer noted that Africans, seeing this, were now paying more attention to the slave trade than to gold. Between September 1701 and April 1704 English ships carried some 2,300 people away from this stretch of Guinea. In 1706 it was said that Cape Coast Castle had handled 10,198 captives over two and a half years. The Dutch West India Company began recruiting captives in Akan country in 1711.

On a Sunday in September 1739 some twenty enslaved men, called Angolans by the colonists and led by a man named Jemmy, broke open a store of firearms near the Stono river in South Carolina. They killed as they went and marched south toward the Spanish settlements around St Augustine, carrying two drums and flying banners. Their numbers reached sixty, and at a large field they stopped, beat the drums and danced in order to draw more people to them. Ninety strong, they met the colonial militia and were scattered after a fight in which they left some of the militia dead. A body of about ten kept going until mounted troops caught them the next day. Seven days after that, a further party stood and fought an open battle against the militia some thirty miles below the site of the first clash. English officials in Carolina blamed Spanish agents and priests, who had been offering freedom to any runaway who could reach Florida.

Over the summer of 1742, after torture, an enslaved man named Baron confessed to causing his mistress's death. He said he had bought herbs from Abraham on another plantation, meaning to cool her temper and avoid future punishment rather than to kill. He also named Coffij, who belonged to the Society of Suriname itself. Coffij denied it and gave the court Askaan and Emanuiel for poisoning other enslaved people, which produced their trials, and Emanuiel's trial produced Ajuba's. Baron additionally accused Louis, a driver on his own plantation, of going about with poison, and Louis's case produced Sambo's. Suriname had sixteen poison cases in the whole of the 1730s and forty two between 1740 and the end of 1745, and eighteen of the forty two were tied to another case. Baron, Sambo, Abraham and Emanuiel were branded, pinched with hot tongs until they died, and their heads set on spikes in the Suriname river.