A duke in southern Kongo fields archers, lancers and musketeers together

When the Capuchin Anton Felice Tomassi da Cortona visited the duke of Mbamba in the southern interior of Kongo in 1734, he found the duke's military retinue made up of archers and lancers alongside numerous musketeers, many more of them than another Italian priest had counted in the same duchy fifty years earlier. In 1668 Dionigio Carli da Piacenza had met about twenty musketeers there, all of them mixed race men from a small elite whose social connections made their sale across the Atlantic unlikely. The flintlock replaced the matchlock in the 1680s and African armies rearmed as European ones did. Standing forces spread from the capital out to small provinces once the civil wars started, so more men were trained and fewer of them were protected by rank. By 1781 Rafael de Castello de Vide watched the royal army assemble and put it at more than thirty thousand men armed with powder and ball. Soldiers who could handle a musket were among those sold to the Americas.

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.

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.

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.