For most of fifteen years the Kongo had exactly one priest in it

From the 1740s there was no priest living even in Soyo and rarely more than one anywhere in the Kongo. In 1763 the Marquis de Pombal, Portugal's anticlerical chief minister, barred Italian Capuchins from sailing out of Lisbon. Through most of the period of his power the country's only missionary was Cherubino da Savona, who spent fourteen unbroken years there, travelled almost every province, and reported baptising more than seven hundred thousand people, plausible in a place where a whole population expected infant baptism as a matter of identity. His report of 1774 rates the provinces. Soyo was still almost entirely Christian and its prince, Dom Miguel Castro da Sylva, could read and write Portuguese, though the churches were ruins whose sites were kept swept. In Mbamba the duke paid three teachers and gathered his vassals every Saturday for the catechism. In Nsundi, the oldest Christian province, the people were now almost all pagan.

The most famous poison case in the French Caribbean ended in 1758 with the execution of Makandal in Saint Domingue. The charge that carried it was sacrilege, and the object at its centre was a tied up bundle of power containing a crucifix. Bundles like it were made across the Atlantic world and their contents can be listed from trial records: grave dirt, animal horns used both for cupping and for binding other objects together, feathers, herbs, and in the Portuguese colonies pieces of consecrated host, papers bearing the names of saints, and small crosses. Christian material inside such a bundle was what colonial courts found intolerable, and cases described as sacrilegious were the ones the Lisbon Inquisition proved most willing to bring to trial. The papers on Makandal, letters and interrogations running from 1757 to 1759, were gathered together by Moreau de Saint-Mery and sit in a single box in the French colonial archive.

Poison prosecutions in Virginia were rare before the law of 1748: five cases in the whole stretch from 1730 to 1748. Then they climbed to thirty in the 1750s, fifty six in the 1760s and sixty five in the 1770s, before dropping to twenty three in the 1780s. Across the eighteenth century more enslaved people were tried in Virginia for poisoning than for any crime except theft. After 1748 the phrase poisonous medicines, which had appeared in neither law nor cases before that year, turns up in a majority of them until the end of the century, and the number of cases naming no victim at all rose in step with it. Of the twenty seven cases in Brunswick and Cumberland counties in these decades, just over half involved medical practitioners. The statute that created the offence created the wave of prosecutions that followed it.

An enslaved woman named Quamina died in 1775 on a Suriname plantation after weeks of pain in her belly. Everyone on the estate went together to the overseer, H. C. Dorfeld, accused Quacoe of poisoning her and asked that he be put in irons. Quacoe was the head carpenter and, judging from the letter Dorfeld sent the court, a healer too; the others believed he could have cured Quamina and had refused. At the funeral in the slave quarters the crowd ran behind the coffin and flung it against Quacoe's door. They searched his house for evidence and found none. They washed the body and gave him the water to drink, on the understanding that a guilty man would die of it, and he drank it willingly. Later four men beat him, joined by several young women with sticks, and he reached the main house covered in blood. The court punished the four and let Quacoe go.