Half the profit of an average Nantes slaving voyage came from the treasury

After 1784 the French government paid its slave traders a bounty averaging 14,000 livres for every ship sent to Africa. An average expedition out of Nantes between 1783 and 1792 came home with a profit of 25,000 to 30,000 livres, a net gain of about ten per cent. Half of what the trade earned therefore came from Versailles rather than from the sale of human beings. A typical ship cost 275,000 livres to fit out and sold 310 captives at around 1,300 livres each, so the gross figures looked handsome, averaging near fifty per cent and often passing a hundred. The net figures did not. Buyers in the islands paid late and paid short, and holding back about a tenth of what they owed halved the trader's return, from twenty per cent to ten. The merchants of Nantes complained continually while sending out record numbers of ships, because nothing else open to them paid better.

The Dominicans who drafted a slave code in 1784 attached to it an account of what the colony actually produced. Apart from tobacco grown around Santiago in the north, they judged sugar to be the only export worth naming, and they counted 760 black and brown workers on nineteen sugar mills. That was the whole plantation sector of Spanish Santo Domingo. Across the mountains, the French colony of Saint Domingue was working several hundred thousand people on cane and coffee and was the richest European possession in the Americas. The Spanish side lived instead on cattle. Ranching estates called hatos sold meat and hides, much of it across the border, where French planters needed meat to feed their labour force and leather to make the whips used on it. Most of the manufactured goods reaching Dominican households came in through smuggling, which was cheaper and better than anything the official Spanish channels supplied.

Renda separates the two events that other accounts fuse. She states that secret services in the woods of the north nurtured the will to rebel through the summer of 1791, that one such service is said to have taken place on 14 August led by a priest named Boukman and a priestess whose name is not known, and that those present swore an oath of solidarity to revolt. A week later, on the night of 22 August, the enslaved people of the northern plains burned the cane and turned on their owners. She uses the conch shell as her thread. It calls people across distance, summons work gangs, ends the working day and opens a religious service, and marines on patrol more than a century later were badly unnerved by the sound of conches and drums coming out of the hills around them without knowing why. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda dates the Bois Caiman oath to 14 August 1791 and the rising to 22 August, splitting into two events what many accounts place on a single night.

Audubon was born on 26 April 1785 at Les Cayes, the illegitimate son of a French sugar planter and a French servant woman. He was taken to France as a child as the colony destabilized and later sent to the United States to avoid Napoleon's conscription. He became the defining ornithological artist in American history, and almost nobody who owns a print knows the man was born in Haiti. I keep him here for one reason. The diaspora is usually narrated as something that starts in 1915, or 1957, or 1991, and it starts before the country does. Saint-Domingue exported people to Louisiana, to Cuba, to Philadelphia, to Charleston and to France for decades before independence, and the cultural residue of that scattering is sitting in American museums under captions that mention no island at all.