Four thousand imported a year in the 1720s becomes forty thousand by 1787

After the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 the French held the western third of Hispaniola outright, having used the island of Tortuga as a base since 1630. Over the following century Saint-Domingue became the most profitable colony not only of France but of any European power, on a plantation economy of sugar, coffee, cotton and indigo worked by enslaved Africans. The French followed the labour pattern the Spanish had set, and drew captives from nearly forty different African regions. The rate rose steadily. About four thousand people a year were landed in the 1720s, five thousand in 1753, ten thousand in 1771, twenty seven thousand in 1786, and forty thousand every year from 1787 to 1789. On the eve of the French Revolution the colony held around four hundred and fifty thousand enslaved people. The affranchis, freed people mostly of mixed descent, owned as much as a third of the land and a quarter of the slaves.

A report from Elmina in 1720 recorded that the gold coming in was about half what it had been ten or twelve years earlier, and warned that if the price of captives kept climbing the Gold Coast would become the Slave Coast. Dutch employees said the prediction had come true by 1726. The arithmetic behind it had been visible for years. In 1704 the English were offering goods worth nearly three ounces of gold for one man, and a Dutch officer noted that Africans, seeing this, were now paying more attention to the slave trade than to gold. Between September 1701 and April 1704 English ships carried some 2,300 people away from this stretch of Guinea. In 1706 it was said that Cape Coast Castle had handled 10,198 captives over two and a half years. The Dutch West India Company began recruiting captives in Akan country in 1711.

Over the summer of 1742, after torture, an enslaved man named Baron confessed to causing his mistress's death. He said he had bought herbs from Abraham on another plantation, meaning to cool her temper and avoid future punishment rather than to kill. He also named Coffij, who belonged to the Society of Suriname itself. Coffij denied it and gave the court Askaan and Emanuiel for poisoning other enslaved people, which produced their trials, and Emanuiel's trial produced Ajuba's. Baron additionally accused Louis, a driver on his own plantation, of going about with poison, and Louis's case produced Sambo's. Suriname had sixteen poison cases in the whole of the 1730s and forty two between 1740 and the end of 1745, and eighteen of the forty two were tied to another case. Baron, Sambo, Abraham and Emanuiel were branded, pinched with hot tongs until they died, and their heads set on spikes in the Suriname river.

Sailing home from Angola, Francisco Buytrago stopped at Salvador in Bahia and stayed with a relative. He found many people there, free and enslaved, described as sick of charms, with drawn out illnesses of three or four years and no prospect of recovery. His relative owned an enslaved woman who was dying, her body swollen and her pulse sluggish, and those around her believed she had been afflicted deliberately. Buytrago had nkasa bark with him from Angola. He used it, in 1729, in what he called his first exorcism, and it was judged successful enough that others came to him. He sold some of the bark and performed at least ten more treatments before he left. In the decade before that day more than 82,000 Africans had landed in Bahia, about 30 per cent of them from West Central Africa. Some of the people in that room may well have known the bark by its Kikongo name.