Allada seizes a Royal African Company factor over an unpaid debt

Lambe worked for the Royal African Company at its factory in Jakin, the port of the kingdom of Allada. The king of Allada held him against a debt the Company had not settled, which was a normal instrument of commercial pressure on that coast. He was still a prisoner two years later when Agaja of Dahomey conquered Allada and carried him inland to Abomey, so a debt hostage became a war captive. The article treats this accident as the origin of every subsequent document, because Agaja soon conceived, perhaps at Lambe's own suggestion, the idea of negotiating a commercial arrangement with the Company, and Lambe offered himself as the intermediary as a route out of captivity. Agaja later told the trader William Snelgrave that Lambe had sworn on his faith to come back within a reasonable time with a ship.

Until 1724 Martinique had no legislation on poison at all. The Code Noir of 1685, which governed slavery in the French colonies and stood on the island until 1831, said nothing about poison, sorcery or medical practice. In February 1724 a royal ordinance extended to the Windward Islands the edict of 1682 that had come out of the poison affair at the court of Louis XIV. Most of the wording was kept. The preamble was replaced. The French original had warned about pretended diviners, magicians and enchanters who added spells and poisons to their sacrilege and seduced the credulous. The Martinique version spoke instead of the enormous crimes of malicious slaves administering poisons to the detriment of the king's subjects. Through one act of copying, a law about aristocratic love magic in Paris became a law about enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, and the legal tie between poison and slavery was made.

The Atlantic trade in Africans was already old before anyone published a description of how it worked. The first such information appeared in 1675, in the manual of commerce written by Savary and known as the Perfect Merchant, and compilers of dictionaries drew on that account for generations afterwards. In 1723 Savary's universal dictionary of commerce set out the justification repeated for the rest of the century. It is difficult, the entry conceded, to justify the trade in Negroes altogether, and then argued that these wretched slaves found their salvation in the loss of their liberty and in the Christian instruction given them. The order of operations is what matters. The practice came first, in the search for hands cheap enough to dig gold and grow sugar, tobacco and cotton, and the theory explaining why the people bought deserved their condition was assembled afterwards, once buyers in Europe began asking.

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.