Agaja sends George I forty slaves and offers forty times as many more

The letter asks for expanded English trade, for a factory in Dahomey with Lambe as its governor, and for the return of the interpreter called Captain Tom, who is to be made chief of white men on his return. It sends forty slaves as a present and offers forty times forty more, assures the king there will be no want of slaves once the inland conquests resume, and promises to buy anything of quality even at a thousand slaves for a single article. It also offers exemption from customs for six years for ships arriving through Lambe. Law argues this wording makes it impossible to believe that the separate scheme of trade quoted by John Atkins proposed abolishing the slave trade, and that any European plantations envisaged in Dahomey would have supplemented rather than replaced the export of captives. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against Atkins and Akinjogbin, who read the material transmitted by Lambe as evidence that Agaja opposed the slave trade, Law argues the full text of the letter rules that interpretation out.

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.

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.

James Papaw was set free in Virginia in 1729 by order of the governor and his council, the reward for disclosing what he knew about curing yaws. The condition attached to that freedom is the striking part. He was required to go on working for the government until he disclosed some other secrets he was said to hold, for expelling poison and for curing other diseases. Rewards of this kind were not unusual in the British colonies of North America. An enslaved man named Caesar in South Carolina was freed in 1749 for sharing what he knew about curing snakebite, and almanacs and recipe books reprinted his remedy for the rest of the century. The same secrecy that made such knowledge valuable made it frightening. A runaway advertisement of 1745 described a middle aged African man with the marks of his country on his face as a cunning, subtle fellow who pretended to be a doctor and had a great acquaintance.