A free black man is credited with founding the Petro rite in 1768

Moreau de Saint-Mery, a creole lawyer who wrote down what he could learn about the religion of the enslaved during the 1780s, reported that the Petro rite had been founded in 1768 by a free black man of Spanish origin known as Don Pedro. Petro is the violent and magically inclined side of Haitian Vodou, set against the Rada rite that came from the Bight of Benin. The date is worth holding onto, because 1768 falls in exactly the years when captives from West Central Africa came to dominate arrivals in the colony. Pedro was the name of seven kings of Kongo and probably the commonest name carried by Congo captives in Saint Domingue. The chalky white stones sold by Jerome Poteau at Marmelade reappear in modern Petro ceremonies, as does the mixture of rum and gunpowder recorded in the 1780s. What one colonist heard as an individual invention looks like a rite arriving with a population.

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.

Enslaved people rose against the Dutch in Berbice on the Guyana coast in 1749 and again in 1752, and both risings were put down harshly. From 1762 to 1767 a far larger revolt aimed at something else. It set out to turn the whole colony into a free black state, which would have carried consequences for Surinam, Demerara and Essequibo alongside it. In ambition and in what it achieved, it was second only to the revolution that later took Saint-Domingue. That distinction matters. Most slave risings in the Americas involved the people of one plantation or one district and often prepared the way for flight into the bush. A revolt aimed at an entire colony required planning across estates and a plan for what came after victory. Cartagena in 1599 and 1600, Jamaica in 1760, and Berbice belong to that smaller and more dangerous category.

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.