Virginia frees James Papaw for a cure and keeps him working

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.

In 1729 the king of Whydah retook his kingdom while Agaja was busy fighting off an invasion from Oyo, the large Yoruba empire to the east. Agaja had lost many men. William Snelgrave, an English slave trader who knew the coast, recorded what he did about it. Agaja had a great number of women armed like soldiers, gave them officers, flags, drums and umbrellas, and put them in the rear of his line of march where they would be seen. The Whydah forces had heard that Dahomey was short of men and were surprised by the size of the army facing them. Part of the Whydah army broke and ran, along with allies from Popo, and Dahomey won. Snelgrave gives no hint that the women fought. They were not disbanded afterwards, and many later writers, reading the episode from a century or two away, credited Agaja with founding a women's army corps.

Colonists in Saint-Domingue rose against the French Indies Company between 1722 and 1724, objecting to the monopoly the company held over their trade. The last of the great chartered companies to dominate the colony gave way, and the settlement was written down as the Cul de Sac Treaty of 1722. What that paper did was introduce the principle of representation into colonial administration, giving white planters a formal voice in how they were governed. Sixty years later Moreau de Saint-Mery assembled the first French colonial legal archive, six volumes of laws and constitutions for the French windward colonies published between 1784 and 1790. He approved of the fight against the monopoly. He also found the treaty alarming, because planter democracy sitting on top of a slave society pointed somewhere he did not want to go, and he cut the document from the official record. Almost everything now knowable about maroons, enslaved people and free people of colour in the colony survives inside the archive he shaped.

In 1735 an enslaved man named Kees told the Suriname criminal court what had happened before he reached it. His overseer had smelled something bad in the water and suspected him of poisoning it. His owner, Jon Kramer, tied him to a plank, beat him, and withheld food and water until he confessed and named accomplices. In court Kees withdrew the confession. The court found the account troubling enough that the case closed without a clear outcome or a recorded punishment. Seven years later the same court handled the same complaint very differently. Sambo, interrogated on his plantation by his owner and a group of neighbouring owners until he confessed, tried to withdraw the statement in court and was ordered to be tortured at Fort Zelandia until he affirmed it, then branded, pinched with hot tongs and beheaded. What had changed in between was the volume of accusations.