Cholera lands at Port Royal and kills a tenth of Jamaica

Asiatic cholera reached Jamaica through Port Royal in September 1850. The first reports blamed a steamer from the isthmus of Panama, where the disease had been killing miners on their way to the California gold fields. It crossed the harbour into Kingston within days and moved fast through the crowded streets of the city. By November travellers had carried it into the other parishes. Kingston counted between four and six thousand deaths in the first year alone. A medical officer sent out from England reported that mortality in Jamaica ran at thirty three times the European rate, and that no part of the world had recorded a higher ratio of deaths to population. The epidemic faded late in 1850 and returned briefly in 1854. It was reckoned to have killed forty to fifty thousand people, a tenth to an eighth of the island. Haiti escaped it, because Soulouque kept watch on the ports.

Gaffield lists the sequence in which the powers eventually granted official diplomatic recognition: France in 1825, the British empire, the Netherlands and Denmark in 1826, Spain in 1855, and the United States in 1862. Her argument is that these dates have been made to carry far too much weight. Because historians have measured Haiti's standing by them, the intervening decades get described as isolation, and Haitian history becomes a straight line from a failed experiment in independence to the poorest country in the hemisphere. What the archives in Haiti, France, Jamaica, England, the United States, the Netherlands and Denmark show instead is a long period in which policies shifted constantly, local officials improvised without instruction, merchants traded legally and illegally, and courts made law. Recognition, she argues, had already happened in pieces long before it was announced. Where this account departs from the standard one: Gaffield rejects the isolation thesis, arguing that the conventional recognition dates conceal decades of diplomatic, economic and legal connection between Haiti and the Atlantic world.

Dahomey had no writing system in ordinary use and kept its history in the mouths of paid professionals called ahanjito. At the annual customs of 1850 the British official Frederick Forbes counted fifty six of them, performing in pairs and competing with each other for the approval of the crowd. Some were travelling men. The most important held office at court, the post was hereditary, and specialists were attached to particular dead kings so that every reign kept its own troupe. Archibald Dalzel had written in the previous century that on solemn occasions the bards sat at the king's gate and recited the whole history of the country, a recital taking several days and attended by young men with good memories who were training to replace them. One chanter was said to recite the names and praise names of every previous king each morning before the king woke. Forbes called these performances the only form of public education the country had.

Pierrot follows the story into the middle of the century, when the Reverend John Relly Beard published his life of Toussaint in 1853 and a second book in 1863. Beard emphasised his subject's racial purity, wanting it marked that he was wholly without white blood, while also asserting that the negro race was inferior to the highest style of man and that the race at large had as yet no history. He praised Toussaint for proclaiming the doctrine of free trade, and disparaged Dessalines, the man who actually liberated Haiti, as a monster cruel by nature. The mechanism Pierrot draws out is the introduction's admission that no detailed life was accessible to English readers because the only existing memoir had long been out of print. Rainsford's account was out of print in 1853 and still is.