A slave ship finishes the whole triangle and sinks in sight of home

In 1785 the ship Rose, belonging to the Chaurand house of Nantes, sank just outside the port after covering about six thousand miles. She had taken trade goods to the African coast, carried captives across to the French Caribbean, and was coming back up the Loire with the return cargo when she was lost. The letters the Chaurands wrote that January and February record what they thought of it. A slaving voyage put the whole investment into the hands of one man for a year or more. The captain had to bargain on the African coast, keep the people he had bought alive as far as the islands, and then help sell them there, and a failure at any stage emptied the accounts. Arthur Young, travelling through France in 1788, wrote that Nantes had the look of prosperity that new building always gives. By 1789 the merchants of the town were putting close to ten million livres a year into the trade in people.

In 1785, acting on a denunciation, police raided a house near Cachoeira in Bahia where six people had gathered, all of whom said they were Jeje, a Brazilian term for people born in the Gbe speaking region of the Bight of Benin. Their leader, Sebastiao de Guerra, had been accused of sorcery once before and was publicly known for curing charms, dancing calundus and leading worship in the Jeje language. What the police carried away differed from what earlier raids had produced. Alongside small calabashes holding ingredients for spells there were buried objects and an arrangement of leaves, and leaves were central to the worship of the vodun, to initiation and to medicinal baths in the Bight of Benin. The gathering looked less like a healing consultation and more like a shrine with offerings and a congregation. Historians read the case as an early moment in the formation of Candomble as an institution.

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.

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.