A colonial newspaper starts printing notices for missing people

Les Affiches Americaines was the newspaper of Saint-Domingue, the French colony that became Haiti. It began in 1766 and stopped in 1791, and across those twenty five years it printed notices placed by owners whose enslaved workers had left them. Each notice tried to make one person findable again, so it recorded height, scars, teeth and clothing, the languages the person spoke and the way they talked, supposed habits of character, and the people they were thought to visit. Nowhere else in the paperwork of the colony do so many enslaved people appear as separate individuals. The same press carried a second kind of document, the lists drawn up by jails naming those who had been recaptured. One fairly complete run of the paper survives in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. From it, 10,772 advertisements and 6,535 jail lists have since been transcribed, which makes the newspaper the largest single record of flight from slavery in Saint-Domingue.

A French mission worked in the kingdoms of Loango and Kakongo north of the river Zaire from 1766 to 1775. The Capuchins had never reached those societies and they had stayed non-Christian, yet the French kept running into individual Christians, enslaved people and traders originally from Soyo, who were delighted to meet a priest. In 1773 a man named Pedro came to tell them that a whole group of Soyo Christians had migrated across the river years before and were living in Kakongo under their own head, Dom Iouan. The prefect went with him to their settlement at Manguenzo, was met by the community, saw the great cross standing in the middle of the village, and went into the chapel to pray while the people sang. In a week the visitors baptised several hundred children. When they came back later to live there they were disappointed and left.

In August 1766 the Suriname court sentenced a woman named Bettie, along with Sara and Januarij, to burn for allegedly poisoning other enslaved people. Bettie then obtained at least a delay by agreeing to work with a Dr Moedner on experiments with the various poisons and counter poisons she knew. The resolutions of the governor and council record the arrangement without saying how long the delay lasted or whether the sentence was ever lifted. The court's attitude to such knowledge was inconsistent. In 1749 it had examined a substance another woman called Bettie gave her owner, concluded that it had no physical effect and was one of the things slaves used to put owners in a good humour, then ruled that such practices were evil and dangerous in themselves and deserved punishment. The same expertise counted as superstition when it soothed a master and as science worth a laboratory when it might kill one.

In 1768 William Young and the other British settlement commissioners informed the Caribs of St Vincent that they were now subjects of the British Crown. Joseph Chatoyer refused. He asked which king this was, of Great Britain, and said the Caribs would listen to the governor of Martinique and to nobody else. That is the first appearance of Chatoyer in the surviving documents. His answer was a piece of practical politics rather than confusion. The Caribs had dealt with French administrators in Martinique for generations, had allowed French cultivators onto the leeward side of St Vincent to grow coffee, cotton and cacao on small plots, and had used the rivalry between the two empires to keep either from taking the island outright. In 1778, when France and Britain went to war over the American colonies, the Caribs asked France for troops. They arrived in 1779, and St Vincent was out of British hands until 1783.