An edict written about court sorcerers is turned on the enslaved

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.

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.

A town built of palm and thatch burns. Cap Francois burned in 1688, again in 1694, and again in 1734. The colonial authorities answered with building law. In 1721 they outlawed thatched roofs. In 1736, two years after the third fire, they passed an ordinance requiring that houses be built of masonry, or of brick set between wooden posts, or of stone rendered with plaster. The rule changed how the place looked. Walls of rubble or masonry were coated with white or ochre lime wash so that the town glared in the sun, and roof tiles from Normandy and slates from Anjou began arriving as shipping from France increased. The older methods survived in the houses of poorer residents, who could not meet the standard. Every house kept a rear yard with a detached kitchen and usually a well, an arrangement that had nothing to do with fire and everything to do with heat.

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.