John James Audubon is born at Les Cayes

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.

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.

Nine slave ships sailed from Le Havre in 1783 for the Loango coast, all of them bound for Saint-Domingue. Their names were L'Homme Instruit, L'Apollon, Le Neree, Le Roi Maure, La Marthe, L'Agamemnon, Le Prince Noir, Le Jason and Le Jeune Frederic. The armament records give three figures for each vessel: how many people it bought in Africa, how many died at sea, how many were put ashore in the colony. Together the nine bought 3,722 people. 458 died on the crossing. 3,264 were landed in Saint-Domingue. Le Jeune Frederic, which left on 25 September, bought 328 and lost 115 of them, more than a third. Le Neree lost 17 out of 432. Le Havre was one port among several, since Nantes and Dunkirk were fitting out for the same African coast in the same years. Loango lies north of the Congo river, and its people were the largest single group in the colony that became Haiti.