Fontana runs six thousand experiments and tastes the venom himself

Felice Fontana published his treatise on viper venom at Florence in 1781. Its structure was a collection of more than six thousand experiments he had performed himself. He tested the remedies people swore by against snakebite and found theriac, electricity and sucking the wound with the mouth all useless. Earlier writers had disagreed about what venom tasted like, so he tasted it, calling this a philosophical necessity. He also worked on poison ivy from North America, giving up when the rashes became unbearable, and on ticunas, the arrow poison of Yameo speakers in the Peruvian Amazon, using arrows a friend at the Royal Society supplied. He trusted neither the traveller who first reported ticunas nor any account from a person native to that country. The citations show the shift. Ancient writers supplied about a third of Mead's references and five per cent of Fontana's. Knowledge made in a European laboratory now outranked knowledge made anywhere else.

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.

The Portuguese missionary Rafael de Castello de Vide served in Kongo through the 1780s, witnessed and denounced the export of captives, and sought to persuade the king of Kongo to ban the sale of enslaved people outside the country. Thornton uses his eyewitness reports to connect two things usually kept apart. A long round of Kongo civil war began in 1779, first setting partisans of King Pedro V against those of José I, then breaking out again on the death of José's brother and successor Afonso V. French and English shippers were buying along what they called the coast of Angola, with the region around Loango as the main base, and Vili merchants brought captives from inland to Cabinda, Malemba and Loango. Thornton estimates some sixty-two thousand Kongolese exported in the decade after 1780, more than half the combined French and English Angola trade.

Perry notes that the insurgent army in Saint-Domingue was for a short time called the Army of the Inca. Geggus attributes the name to a mistaken belief that the Taino descended from the Inca. Sinclair Thomson offers an alternative that Perry prefers to leave open: the Tupac Amaru rebellion against the Spanish received extensive coverage in the Saint-Domingue press, so the name may register a sense of solidarity with aboriginal peoples that reaches beyond the Taino as local predecessors. She uses the ambiguity to develop her central distinction. The relationship the revolutionaries built with the Taino was not filiation, which would require biological descent, but affiliation, secured by an analogy between two historical situations involving two entirely different sets of actors, Taino against Spanish and African-descended against French.