Agaja asks England for traders who do not want slaves

In 1725 Agaja of Dahomey sent a spokesman to England to say that he wanted Europeans other than the ones who came with slave ships. The overture drew no positive response. What followed was the opposite. Agaja moved south in March 1724 under cover of backing a candidate for the Allada throne and took the kingdom, and in February 1727 he attacked Whydah. Oyo answered with punitive expeditions in 1726, 1729 and 1730. When Oyo forces were advancing in January 1730 he pushed large numbers of his own followers into Igelefe, the port at Whydah, blocking the exiled king Huffon from returning while Abomey was under pressure. Dahomey came to terms with Oyo in 1730 and paid tribute collected by annual military expeditions. After that its overseas trade was concentrated at Igelefe, where the European forts stood.

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.

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.