A report counts six thousand Africans on St Vincent

In 1722 the second Duke of Montagu tried to plant British colonists on St Vincent. John Brathwaite, the captain who handled the talks with the Caribs, reported seeing at least five hundred Africans on the island. A report of 1735 put the population at six thousand Africans and four thousand Amerindians. A third figure, from the elder William Young in 1767, counted only two thousand Caribs. Every one of these numbers should be handled carefully. The Caribs kept Europeans off the windward half of the island, so nobody surveying could walk where they wanted, and the population itself moved with the fighting. What the figures establish between them is direction rather than quantity. Over roughly seventy years an island that European powers had agreed to leave alone filled up with people escaping the plantations of the islands around it, and by the time British settlers arrived after 1763 they faced several thousand inhabitants organised against exactly what they had come to build.

In 1735 Antonio de Salas, the Spanish governor of New Granada, wrote to his crown to complain that English merchants of the South Sea Company were bringing black Christians of the Congo into Cartagena. The complaint identifies who those people were. Two states in central Africa were Christian: the kingdom of Kongo and the Portuguese colony of Angola. Angola shipped its captives on Portuguese and Brazilian vessels to Brazil, and its Christian captives came from districts under the tightest Portuguese control, so a Christian in English hands almost certainly came from Kongo. The English trade on that coast worked out of Kabinda, just north of the mouth of the Zaire river; company records show every central African voyage of the 1720s heading there. The same merchants supplied South Carolina. Kongo had been Catholic since the 1490s and treated its Christianity as the thing that made it a distinct people, which is why offers of religious freedom from Spanish agents carried weight with Kongolese captives in the Americas.

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.

The Code Noir gave enslaved people in the French Caribbean almost no standing in law. One article allowed them to denounce a master who abused them. Another barred their testimony outright, and colonial courts had been ignoring the ban when no better witness existed. On 15 July 1738 the Conseil d'Etat in France settled the question by ruling that enslaved people could give evidence, with one exception written into the ruling: they could say nothing against the person who owned them. The exception protected the only relationship that mattered. A planter could be accused by his neighbour's slaves and never by his own. Magistrates in the colonies routinely destroyed the case files that involved enslaved litigants and witnesses, so the number of surviving records is small. Historians reading colonial criminal papers for the voices of enslaved people are working with what a system designed to silence them happened to leave behind.