Agaja destroys Jakin and puts all the selling in one place

Having taken the coastal kingdoms, Agaja at first let his people trade at two ports, Jakin, which had served Allada, and Whydah. In 1732 he destroyed Jakin, and everything moved to Whydah. His stated aim through these years was to cut out the middlemen who had stood between him and the European ships. When an English captain traded at Jakin in 1727 he had to travel inland to negotiate in person, and the talks covered not only the fee for permission to trade and the price per person but the make up of the cargo itself, three men to every woman, and none the captain did not want. That is a seller specifying his own goods. In 1733 a French agent reported that captives at Whydah were scarce and only the king was selling any. In the same year the king's chief gaoler was executed for selling captives on his own account.

Ambrose Madison finished building the plantation Montpelier in Spotsylvania County, Virginia in 1732, and shortly afterwards three enslaved Africans were accused of poisoning him. He suffered a long wasting illness and died. Their conviction was the first in Virginia of enslaved people for murdering an owner and the first conviction for poisoning. The documentation is thin, but one detail carries weight. The three had help from a man on another property who was said to know about poisons, which points to a relationship between a client and a practitioner. The case set the shape of Virginian poison talk for the rest of the century, in which an enslaved poisoner kills the owner slowly. Elsewhere in the Atlantic the accusations more often concerned other enslaved people. Virginia stood apart in this respect, and of the cases from Brunswick and Cumberland counties between 1740 and 1799, 44 per cent had white targets.

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.

The earliest surviving poison case in the records of the Suriname court dates from 1731 and turns on a calabash. Inside it were pieces of a red stone and a bird's beak. Several enslaved people reported having seen the practitioner who owned it near the graves of the dead and using the calabash to pray to leaves behind his house. Isaac did not deny owning it or using its contents. He said it served medical purposes and that he had never used it to cause harm. Objects of this kind worked as compositions rather than as single ingredients, and their power lay in the assembly and in the words and gestures that activated them. Another Suriname case turned on a small stick packed with herbs and tied up with what may have been cowrie shells. Court volumes survive from 1722 onward with gaps, so earlier trials may have existed and been lost.