The French build the fort that will fire the first shot against them

Le Glaunec introduces Fort Picolet as a piece of colonial engineering that changed sides. Designed in 1736 and built in 1739 on a rocky point at the northwest tip of the city, it commanded the entrance to the bay, and ships had to come close under its guns to avoid the reefs. It was strengthened repeatedly, including during the war of independence under orders from Leclerc and Rochambeau, which means the French rebuilt it shortly before losing it. The author uses the fort to state the problem driving his book. The ancestors of the war of independence are vividly alive in Haitian memory while the physical traces of their story are extremely fragile, and Picolet is left uncared for. It still appears on tourist maps, yet the site is effectively abandoned by the state that traces its founding to the battle fought within sight of it.

On a Sunday in September 1739 some twenty enslaved men, called Angolans by the colonists and led by a man named Jemmy, broke open a store of firearms near the Stono river in South Carolina. They killed as they went and marched south toward the Spanish settlements around St Augustine, carrying two drums and flying banners. Their numbers reached sixty, and at a large field they stopped, beat the drums and danced in order to draw more people to them. Ninety strong, they met the colonial militia and were scattered after a fight in which they left some of the militia dead. A body of about ten kept going until mounted troops caught them the next day. Seven days after that, a further party stood and fought an open battle against the militia some thirty miles below the site of the first clash. English officials in Carolina blamed Spanish agents and priests, who had been offering freedom to any runaway who could reach Florida.

An inventory taken in 1738 of a coffle walking from Caconda to the coast at Benguela recorded, for close to one person in ten, an injury to the leg. Umbundu speakers in this region built two new nouns from the same root they used for the diviner and healer, ochimbanda. One was ochimbandanga, an affliction of the legs, a paralysis, which can be read as an affliction caused by sorcery. The other was okambanda, a young slave, formed by adding a diminutive prefix. A young adult was what the Atlantic market wanted most, and such a person had been cut off from their people and was very likely bound. Neighbouring language speakers made similar moves, layering onto an old verb for being strong the sense of being swollen and captured by illness, and building words for disease and health out of a root meaning to tie up. People described the trade in the vocabulary of sickness.

Over the summer of 1742, after torture, an enslaved man named Baron confessed to causing his mistress's death. He said he had bought herbs from Abraham on another plantation, meaning to cool her temper and avoid future punishment rather than to kill. He also named Coffij, who belonged to the Society of Suriname itself. Coffij denied it and gave the court Askaan and Emanuiel for poisoning other enslaved people, which produced their trials, and Emanuiel's trial produced Ajuba's. Baron additionally accused Louis, a driver on his own plantation, of going about with poison, and Louis's case produced Sambo's. Suriname had sixteen poison cases in the whole of the 1730s and forty two between 1740 and the end of 1745, and eighteen of the forty two were tied to another case. Baron, Sambo, Abraham and Emanuiel were branded, pinched with hot tongs until they died, and their heads set on spikes in the Suriname river.