A colonial postmaster empties the till and crosses the border

In 1753 a man named Constant held the post of postal director in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. His salary was twelve hundred livres a year, and he considered it too little. He emptied the operating funds of his agency and fled across the island to the Spanish side, in what is now the Dominican Republic. Gros uses the episode as an early case of a habit that outlived the colony that produced it. Public office in this territory carried access to money belonging to the office rather than to the man, the sanction for taking it was weak, and a border lay a few days' ride away. The same structure reappears later under presidents and ministers who treated the treasury as a private account and the neighbouring republic as somewhere to land. The colony was the richest in the Caribbean, and it was already leaking at the seams two generations before the revolution.

Cases heard by the Conseil Superieur of Martinique in 1755 and again in 1767 describe the same procedure. Enslaved people were lined up and touched with a branch of the medecinier, the tree also called the Barbados nut or purging nut, in one instance by a small child, and the guilty were expected to collapse in fits of convulsions and shouting. Slaveholders reporting these events told the court that everyone on the plantations held that contact with the branch would torment a poisoner. Pierre Clement de Laussat recorded the same use of medecinier branches in a diary entry in 1807. Eating the seeds causes vomiting and stomach pain, which Orfila noted in 1814, while touching the leaves and branches does nothing at all. The ritual worked through participation. It needed the whole community present, and the verdict it produced was one they had reached together.

In October 1749 several residents of a Salvador neighbourhood complained to the Inquisition about deaths they blamed on Paulo Gomes and Ignacia, a well known free couple of African descent who could both inflict and lift illnesses caused by charms. Witnesses called Ignacia the greater of the two, a master of the calundu dance and a queen, and stressed her African origin. A neighbour who had worked beside Gomes as a stonecutter for decades described him attending the calundus of other people before he ran his own, travelling every Sunday and holy day to Rio Vermelho and Itapagipe, and going as far as Pernambuco to visit the houses of other practitioners. He saved money, bought Ignacia's freedom, then bought a farm where they could work. Reputation was built by learning from rivals, and the network of clients and teachers that made a practitioner successful was the same thing that made him easy to accuse.

Oyo was a Yoruba kingdom in the interior to the north east, and it had invaded Dahomey repeatedly. Tegbesu spent his first years fighting it and made peace in 1748 on the condition of an annual tribute. The military reason was obvious enough, since the invasions were ruinous. There was a commercial one too. Oyo had been the main supplier of captives to the coast, and peace opened the possibility that its caravans would come down through Whydah again. During 1746 to 1748 Tegbesu had criers announce at Whydah that the paths were open and free. The second and third announcements named the places by name, Epe, Weme, Ajara and Popo, and invited their traders in. Dahomey had spent twenty years accused by European buyers of strangling the routes from the interior. It now set out to become the middleman on those same routes.