Half the Caribs deported to Balliceaux never left it

Starvation ended the Second Carib War. The British had worked out that destroying the hidden provision grounds would do what pursuit could not, and the survivors who came down from the mountains were described by the botanist Alexander Anderson as a spectacle of misery. Britain then decided to remove them from St Vincent altogether. They were shipped first to Balliceaux, a small island nearby, where roughly half of them died under British military supervision, probably of continued famine together with yellow fever or some similar epidemic. Nancie Gonzalez counts 4,338 deported to Balliceaux and 2,248 alive to make the onward voyage to Roatan, an island off the coast of Honduras. Years later a Guatemalan envoy, Jose Rossi y Rubi, came to Roatan to negotiate resettlement on the Central American mainland and asked one of their leaders where his loyalties lay. The man answered that he commanded in nobody's name and was a Carib subordinate to no one.

The French traveller Moreau de Saint-Mery published the first volume of his description of the French part of Hispaniola in 1797. He had presided over the electors of Paris in July 1789. His account of the rites and beliefs of enslaved people is the earliest to come near what was actually happening, and he still condemned what he had watched as a kind of bacchanal that ended in disgusting prostitution. He noted that the participants were Arada people, from the town of Allada in Dahomey, and that they lived by the rules of their religion. Worship centred on dances around a snake kept in a wired box on an altar, from which the faithful were said to gain knowledge of past and future. A goat was killed and its blood poured over those present, who swore to stay faithful. He described the trance that followed without a word for what it was.

The wars that began with the rising of August 1791 broke the plantation economy of Saint-Domingue by destroying the two things it ran on, forced labour and fixed capital. The export figures show the scale. Measured against their levels of 1789, in 1795 sugar exports stood at 1.2 percent, coffee at 2.8 percent, cotton at 0.7 percent and indigo at 0.5 percent. All four except indigo recovered strongly up to 1802, and then the French invasion of that year pushed them down again, leaving 1804 with sugar at 34 percent, coffee at 40, cotton at 43 and indigo at 4 percent of pre revolutionary levels. Reports from 1803 describe burned cities, demolished sugar mills, carbonised beams and plantations reduced to ash, with only the small plots of coffee and food crops showing any life. The population fell from 520,000 in 1790 to 380,000 in 1805.

Yellow fever killed three thousand five hundred or more people in Philadelphia in 1797. Most physicians who could leave the city did leave. One who stayed was Felix Pascalis, who had arrived in the United States in 1793 as a refugee from the Caribbean and had treated fever patients at Benjamin Rush's house on Walnut Street during the epidemic of that year. His book on the 1797 outbreak argued against the common opinion that the disease had been carried in on human bodies aboard ships from Saint-Domingue. He allowed that ships brought it, and held that it moved through wood and air rather than from person to person, rising as putrid exhalations from the timber wharves along the city's two rivers as they dried out. His recommendation was to replace the wharves with stone and coat the stone with tar once a year. The theory was wrong. The habit of plotting cases against places became part of epidemiology.