Women lead the rising at Cap against the Compagnie des Indes

Resentment at the Compagnie des Indes, which held the trading monopoly over Saint-Domingue, reached the point of open revolt on 16 October 1722. Women were at its head. According to the priest Jean-Baptiste Lepers, they laid siege to the house of the director who lived at Cap, one of the three the company had sent out. The rising spread quickly. Men dressed themselves as women and joined the besiegers, then carried the revolt up to Haut du Cap, where they camped until their demands were met and the company's charter was withdrawn. The episode sits at the opening of the period that made Saint-Domingue the richest colony in the Caribbean, and it shows women acting as a political crowd sixty nine years before the general insurrection of the enslaved. The disguise of the men is the detail worth keeping: a crowd of women was expected to get away with more.

Brazilian interest in the Whydah trade produced a fortified Portuguese post there in 1721. Brazil's viceroy required that the fort be given a chaplain, and in 1724 an Italian Capuchin was recruited from Bahia for the position. The plan attached to the post went further than a chapel for the garrison. More priests were to be found and a mission established, and among the duties of that mission would be brief religious instruction and baptism for enslaved people before they were put aboard ship. For this the clergy were to receive a commission of one thousand reis on each person baptised. The personnel were never found and the project lapsed, so the Portuguese chaplains at Whydah served only their own expatriates. The scheme is worth recording anyway. It shows the sacrament being budgeted as a charge per head inside a slaving operation, at the port that supplied a large share of the people carried to Saint-Domingue.

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.

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.