Colonial officials forbid stone and brick after a second earthquake

After the earthquake of 1770 levelled Port-au-Prince for the second time in twenty years, the colonial officials who survived it passed laws forbidding stone and brick in the rebuilding of the city. Houses were to be raised in timber or in adobe instead. This was a seismic building code written long before seismology existed, and it rested on a crude but correct observation. Light flexible structures kill fewer people when the ground moves. The regulation created a different hazard. Wooden towns burn. Port-au-Prince burned down several times during the Haitian Revolution and during the civil wars that followed independence in 1804, and fire stayed the ordinary risk of urban life there long after the memory of the earthquakes had faded. Every material available to the city carried a catastrophe with it, and the choice was always which catastrophe to accept.

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.

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.

Prince Hall was born in Barbados about 1738 and was enslaved in Boston. He was manumitted in 1770 and sought acceptance within white American Freemasonry, which refused him. Within ten years he had established African Freemasonry as a social structure of its own, and it still bears his name. The refusal and the reply together are the shape of the thing. A free Black man in revolutionary Massachusetts could not enter the institution that organised the civic life of free men, so he constructed it a second time alongside the first, with its own lodges, its own charters and its own line of succession. The order became one of the oldest continuously working Black institutions in the United States and a network by which Black men in distant cities knew and vouched for one another. Hall died in 1807. He was the most notable of the Caribbean born figures in early Black America.