Frontiers of servitude: Slavery in narratives of the early French Atlantic 9781526122254

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Arguing that the social and cultural context of the Caribbean colonies from c. 1620–1750 was marked by considerable instability, this book explores the transformations in the theorisation and practice of slavery. Authoritative discourses were confronted with new cultures and environments, and the servitude thought to bring Africans to salvation was accompanied by continuing moral uncertainties. Slavery gave the most fundamental forms of ownership from labour up to time itself, but slaves were a troubling presence. Colonists were wary of what slaves knew and what they hid from them, and were aware that the strategies used to control slaves were imperfect, and could even determine the behaviour of their masters. Commentators were conscious of the fragility of colonial society, with its social and ecological frontiers, its renegade slaves, and its population born to free fathers and slave mothers.

Frontiers of servitude

Based on original research into little-examined printed and archival sources, this book explores the fundamental ideas behind early French thinking about Atlantic slavery by asking three central questions. What, in theoretical and social terms, did the condition of a slave mean? How were the uses of the human body in Caribbean labour conceptualised, and what were their limits? What can the strategic approaches described in interactions with slaves tell us about early slave society?

Slavery, this book argues, was fundamentally anti-social. With wide use of eye-witness accounts of slavery, this book will be of interest to specialists and general readers interested in the history and literature of the early Atlantic and Caribbean.

Cover image: Sébastien Le Clerc, Indigoterie, in Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, 1667. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

ISBN 978-1-5261-2226-1

Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

9 781526 122261 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Harrigan

Michael Harrigan is a specialist in the history and literature of early modern European initiatives in the Americas, Africa and Asia. His publications include Veiled Encounters: Representing the Orient in 17th-Century French Travel Literature (2008)

Frontiers of servitude Slavery in narratives of the early French Atlantic

Michael Harrigan

Frontiers of servitude

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies General Editor Anne Dunan-Page Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies is a collection of the Société d’Études Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles promoting interdisciplinary work on the period c.1603–1815, covering all aspects of the literature, culture and history of the British Isles, colonial and post-colonial America, and other British colonies. The series welcomes academic monographs, as well as collective volumes of essays, that combine theoretical and methodological approaches from more than one discipline to further our understanding of the period and geographical areas. Previously published Radical voices, radical ways: Articulating and disseminating radicalism in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain Edited by Laurent Curelly and Nigel Smith The challenge of the sublime: From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic art Hélène Ibata English Benedictine nuns in exile in the seventeenth century: Living spirituality Laurence Lux-Sterritt

Frontiers of servitude Slavery in narratives of the early French Atlantic Michael Harrigan

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Michael Harrigan 2018 The right of Michael Harrigan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2226 1 hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10/12 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Dedicated to the memory of Leo T. Harrigan





Contents

viii x xi

List of figures Acknowledgements Note on sources

Introduction 1 1 Narrative and servitude 46 2 Slave economies 97 3 The labouring body 161 4 Spheres of knowledge 201 5 Tensions, order, and the body 237 6 Society and slaves 270 Conclusion 316 Index 324

vii



List of figures

1.1 Paysage d’une partie de l’Ile de Saint-Christofle, avec un crayon du chasteau de Mr le Général in Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l’Amérique (Rotterdam: Arnout Leers, 1665), pp. 52–53. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 81 1.2 La figure des moulins à sucre in Rochefort, Histoire, pp. 332–33. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 82 1.3 Sucrerie in Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, 3 vols (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1667–71), vol. 2, pp. 122–23. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 83 1.4 Indigoterie in Du Tertre, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 106–07. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 84 2.1 Title page in François Froger, Relation d’un Voyage fait en 1695, 1696 & 1697 aux Côtes d’Afrique, Détroit de Magellan, Brezil, Cayenne & Isles Antilles (Paris: Nicolas de Fer and Michel Brunet, 1698). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 123 2.2 Commerce des esclaves in Froger, Relation, pp. 16–17. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 124 viii

List of figures

5.1 Ménagerie in Du Tertre, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 418–19. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University 238

ix



Acknowledgements

This book has benefited from the support of a number of colleagues and institutions. Funding and a period of research leave from the University of Warwick were invaluable for carrying out research at several archives in France. I would like to thank Karine BénacGiroux and Coline-Lee Toumson for their welcome at seminar and conference presentations at Université des Antilles, and at Domaine de Fonds Saint-Jacques, Martinique in 2014 and 2015. Thanks also to the Société d’études Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. The manuscript of this book was read by a number of anonymous reviewers, for whose helpful suggestions I would like to express my gratitude. Thanks also to the staff at Manchester University Press, particularly Emma Brennan, Paul Clarke and Alun Richards. Particular thanks are due to L. A., to my mother Edie, and to Constanza and Francis. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father Leo, who loved life, and from whom I learned its most important lessons.

x

Note on sources

Note on sources

Translations into English are my own, unless otherwise indicated. Quotation of original texts in French has been limited when an original is available in a modern, online or facsimile source. Original quotations in French from restricted archival material have generally been included in notes. The spelling of quotations in French has been modernised but, to facilitate referencing, the titles of sources have been transcribed using the original spelling. The following abbreviations have been used for archival or unpublished material: AdC AJPF ANOM ARSI ASPF BM BnF MdC

Archives départementales du Cher, Bourges Archives jésuites de la Province de France, Vanves Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide, Rome Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris Médiathèque de Carcassonne Agglo, Carcassonne

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xii

Introduction

Introduction

It was February 1694, in the north of the island of Martinique. Père Labat had arrived in Macouba to an enthusiastic welcome. In the recently constructed church, aided by two altar-boys, he had said Mass before the small community of French colonists. After his sermon, he asked his parishioners for a list of the names of those to be prepared for the sacraments. These were children of communion age, and those ‘adult slaves’ (or as Labat wrote, ‘nègres adultes’) who had not yet been baptised who required instruction.1 He implored his parishioners to let him know whenever anyone became ill in the future. ‘Day or night, in good or bad weather’, he said, he would be ‘always ready to assist them as soon as he was called’; if he was obliged to be away from the parish on other business, his sacristan would know where to find him. These words, the priest noted, were ‘appreciated by everybody’. At the end of the Mass, after a baptism, all of his parishioners were at the door of the church, and gave him ‘great thanks’ for his promises of help. In turn, they assured him, they would make sure to carry out the other instructions the priest had made during the Mass. The rest of the day continued in a similarly welcoming vein. Accompanied by most of the attendees to his presbytery, he received assurances that they would contribute to financing the enlargement of the building. Invited to dine at the house of a Captain Michel, Labat was offered the use of Michel’s own horse. During lunch, the neighbouring cleric, Father Breton, arrived, greeted Labat warmly, and joined the company. After a long, pleasant meal, the Captain 1

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and others began to play cards (Labat, somewhat coyly, refused to participate, but consented to Michel’s offer to put half of what he might win aside for him or for furnishings for the presbytery). Labat stayed for supper (another generous meal) and was lodged, he says, in an excellent room. The Michel family were to prove of further assistance. Having noticed that Labat was suffering from a skin irritation caused by ticks, the lady of the house sent a female servant to pick a selection of herbs and leaves and to boil them. Before going to bed, Labat writes, a bowl containing the mixture was brought, and his feet and legs were washed. This treatment was repeated over the following days, much of which Labat passed in social visits, interspersed with religious offices and, following a visit to Michel’s sugar plant, designing a garden for the captain. The account of Labat’s arrival in his new parish which has been summarised here figures in his copious description of the Caribbean, the Nouveau Voyage, which would be published in the early 1720s.2 Within, we can glimpse the importance of the priest in assuring the spiritual needs of his parishioners, the privileged place he occupied within the community, and the serenity of the newly arrived curé. Yet, at over three centuries since his arrival in Macouba, one is also struck by what remains unsaid in his account. Labat’s Nouveau Voyage is characterised by the minutiae of commercial detail and his often merciless observations about the colonial population. Yet, on numerous levels, spoken and unspoken, Labat’s Voyage is marked by the labour of slaves. In Macouba, they were sent to spread the news amongst the planters that their new parish priest had arrived. It was a slave who informed the diners (who ‘had not yet finished the soup’) of the arrival of Father Breton, and it was a slave who treated Labat’s tormented legs.3 These passing mentions of unnamed slaves illustrate the fundamental absences within first-hand accounts from the era of early modern slavery. Much of the specificity of human interaction, from the gestures and expressions of slaves and colonists, or the uses of language, to the subjectivities of the participants, is lost to the textual record. Slaves, in Labat’s account, seem to be undifferentiated as they carried out their labour, delivering messages, washing feet and announcing arrivals. The concentrated labour which enabled the planters’ comfortable existence on the islands seems to be hinted at, obliquely. Michel’s sugar plant deserves the briefest of mentions, while the most striking feature of another of 2

Introduction

Labat’s parishioners, Boissière, was his insobriety, rather than the ‘reasonable number of nègres’ with which he and his brother-in-law cultivated cacao, annatto and livestock.4 Labat’s account is, nonetheless, based on the lived experience of slavery. How such depictions reflect the interactions between the slave-holding stratum and those they held in perpetual servitude have in large part motivated this book. Its principal focus is the body of textual and, to a lesser extent, graphic depictions of colonial life produced in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries. Although often discreet about practices of slavery, accounts of the early French Caribbean colonies reflect thinking about human interactions, from those that took place between ­individual colonists and slaves up to the coexistence of entire populations within society. What such narratives can tell us about the culture of the early modern slave society is the subject of this book. There are three principal domains of investigation. First, this study analyses how, and in what ways, certain human beings could come to be understood as marginalised, commodifiable entities. Secondly, it explores how the practice of colonial power was conceptualised, most particularly on the bodies of chattel slaves, and in turn, how limits to this corporeal power were also acknowledged. Thirdly, it explores how colonial-era narratives reflect power. It examines their reflections of the use of strategies within Caribbean slavery, for such aims as conversion, profit or social control; one such strategy, the use of the script in which we now apprehend testimony about early slavery, will be a consistent focus. Before embarking on this search for the traces of the past, the context of the interactions between slaves and masters will be sketched out in three parts. The first discusses the context of human mobility within the Atlantic and the Caribbean during this era. The second gives an overview of the socio-economic, religious and intellectual climate of the era of French Caribbean slavery. The third elaborates on the questions of the social status of the slave and the importance of the corporeal to understanding slavery, and introduces the distinct ways narrative reflects early colonial power. Atlantic and Caribbean narratives The colonial society described by Labat was both recognisable and fragile. Its religious rites and leisure activities testify to how 3

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European practices were transferred to new spaces. With his request to his parishioners to send their slaves for baptism, he also testifies to how these practices were adapted within new societies. Behind the apparent stability of planters and priests whiling away the time on a Sunday were the constant demographic and cultural transformations of colonial settlements. The earliest accounts of the colonisation of the Caribbean testify to these transformations. Hazardous Atlantic voyages, and violence, disease and famine laid the foundations of plantation life in the Antilles. Through the circulation of human beings, flora and fauna, enormous transformations were wrought on its ecologies, demography and social systems. Over the decades, language, conceptions of what are now called ‘ethnic’ groupings and even religious practices were reconfigured within the Caribbean. There could also, as Caroline A. Williams has observed, be considerable ‘fluidity of national, religious, and cultural loyalties and identities’ according to the needs of the mobile populations of the early Atlantic world.5 There were important transformations in economic structures and consumption patterns around the Atlantic, and new sites of production of commodities and culture developed in the colonies and in Europe itself.6 The focus of this book is rather on the narratives and ideas that developed within this great movement of peoples. This was a context in which new contacts and cohabitations around the peripheries of the Atlantic gave rise to novel transfers of such narratives and ideas. The changing demographics of the Caribbean and the contacts between diverse settled and transplanted populations could be a rich source of such transfers. The contexts of contact between European, African and Amerindian populations were very diverse. The early encounters with peoples in Africa and the Americas took place in often-charged conditions of communication, mediated through interpreters or speakers of linguae francae, or on an unfamiliar linguistic terrain. Exchanges of information were of considerable value to the crews or collectivities around the Atlantic peripheries. This (inter-)cultural capital was the fruit of varying degrees of contact between human societies and economies. Certain colonial actors attached great importance to understanding specific domains of Amerindian and African cultures; missionaries, for example, displayed a recurring interest in understanding alternative spiritualities. 4

Introduction

There were also substantial concerns about communication and knowledge, in contexts of sustained coexistence of human populations. In the French possessions, colonial settlement continued the progressive distancing (or elimination) of indigenous Amerindian peoples that had begun with the arrival of Europeans. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also saw the importation of great numbers of African slaves into the French plantations, as with those of the other European colonial powers. The cultural productions of the colonial era also reflect how uneasy the coexistence of these populations might be. They demonstrate the importance of rumour, of now-unfamiliar forms of exchange of information, and of often violent forms of signifying authority and power. They testify to the importance of restricting specific types of knowledge so as to ensure military and economic domination. There were also preoccupations with the limits to the knowledge of planters and of missionaries, who might be confronted with alternative forms of knowledge. This book is a study of the textual and graphic productions of the first century of accelerated French Atlantic mobility. These reflect an era of significant transformation, from the first organised settlements in the Antilles up to the early stages of the flourishing plantation society that would make Saint-Domingue so renowned. They also demonstrate the diverse preoccupations of early colonial actors. There are letters from missionaries who tell of attempts to convert slaves in the plantations, or accounts of voyagers to coastal Africa who relate peripheral contacts with slave-trading societies. There are also extensive, multi-volume, printed accounts (like Labat’s), which describe the economies, and what would now be considered the ecology, of the Caribbean. The corpus reflects the diverse concerns of indentured labourers or mariners, of missionaries or of military officers. Their responses are also remarkably informative about the distinct ways Europeans saw themselves in this era. This book focuses on accounts of the Atlantic and its peripheries, most particularly the French Antilles and the west coast of Africa. This allows the exploration of contexts beyond the immediate ‘colonial’ space of the plantation environment, but some restrictions in this approach must be acknowledged. It is geographically restrictive; a focus on Atlantic slavery is, after all, itself a delimitation of trade and demographic circuits which extended far beyond the peripheral European contacts with sub-Saharan Africa.7 There were 5

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also sites of early modern French slavery beyond the Caribbean, with which there were differences and commonalities in theory and practice. Brett Rushforth has extensively explored the differences between Caribbean slavery and the ‘alliance’-based slaveries of the Pays d’en Haut in his 2012 Bonds of Alliance.8 Frédéric Régent’s study of over two centuries of French slavery examines such further sites as Louisiana and La Réunion; even in such a wide ‘synthesis’, Régent identifies approaches to such significant areas of understanding as ‘colour’ and métissage that were specific to different French colonies.9 Caribbean slavery was the most important of the French forms in sheer numerical terms, but other practices existed, and with specificities that went beyond the use of mass labour. There were significant, regional, disparities in forms of slavery, while the practices of slavery were themselves ever-changing, over time, within each of the colonies. This was a context marked by its diversity, but the narratives of the early modern French Atlantic do reflect a number of shared preoccupations. They were produced within the socio-economic conditions of so-called ‘New World’ slavery, with its ‘aggregations of male slaves’ destined for plantation labour.10 Those Europeans who themselves laboured in the Caribbean settlements were subject to labour regimes distinct from those of African peoples. In the coexistence of Europeans (labouring or not) and populations originating in Africa, a number of questions recur. Interrogations inspired throughout Europe by conquest and colonisation were reflected in the French Atlantic environment. These included such questions as the nature of human difference, the legitimacy of power, and the implications of miscegenation or conversion. There were concerns about the extent to which one could know the peoples and cultures of these new environments, and how they might be controlled. There were also concerns about the nature of the community and of society within the early colonies. Among the many interrogations reflected in the cultural productions of the French Atlantic, those relating to the practice of slavery and the experience of the enslaved are among the most charged. France, the colonies and slavery The texts and images that are the focus of this book were produced during the earlier stages of French colonial installation in the 6

Introduction

Antilles and later, Saint-Domingue. The durable French settlement of the Antilles from the second quarter of the seventeenth century followed a series of unsuccessful initiatives in South America. That which most recently preceded the settlement of Saint Kitts was the failed initiative to settle Maranhão (northern Brazil) in the second decade of the seventeenth century. The mission was allocated to the Capuchin order and generated considerable publicity within France itself.11 The dynamism of early French presence in the Petites Antilles, and their ‘regular contacts’ with ‘multiracial’ Amerindian societies who held ‘European and African captives’ has been stressed by Jean-Pierre Moreau.12 After an initial reconnaissance mission in 1625 encountered some scattered inhabitation on Saint Kitts, a French settlement was implanted on the island in 1627, dividing it with the English colony.13 These were difficult beginnings; there were serious food shortages and consequent mortality in Saint Kitts among the French, and conflicts with indigenous populations and with English and Spanish forces.14 The establishment of colonies on Guadeloupe and Martinique from 1635 on led to further conflicts with their Amerindian populations, and in the case of Guadeloupe, to famine.15 The focus of settlement would evolve significantly in the following decades. Most notably, France would lose Saint Kitts to the English in the early 1700s, and Saint-Domingue would evolve from a frontier colony in 1665 to become the most important focus of French settlement in the eighteenth century.16 This was an era in which early settlers were confronted with significant ecological and cultural frontiers. The ‘frontier era’ is a term used by Philip P. Boucher to qualify the early decades of French settlement, which he characterises as a period of dealing with hostile Amerindians and a hostile environment, while importing European and then slave labour. For Boucher, this ended in the 1660s with the transition to ‘colonial’ settlement proper.17 James Pritchard, in a study of the French ‘empire’ between 1670 and 1730, stresses that French immigration to its colonies was consistently low in comparison with its European neighbours. Pritchard’s model of the ‘frontier’ settlement pattern is wider in extent and duration than Boucher’s; he depicts colonies in large part independent from the metropolis, characterised by diverse social practices, and with often transient populations living in often perilous climatic conditions.18 These various frontier contexts were the site 7

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of new forms of production, and which demanded new forms of human labour. The growth in cash-crop agriculture over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was instrumental in the socio-economic transformation of the Caribbean. Philip D. Curtin’s study of the ‘plantation complex’ describes how a combination of climatic and geological advantages with mid-seventeenth-century market and technological conditions favoured the ‘forward movement’ of the ‘sugar revolution’ to the Caribbean.19 Among those critics who have stressed the unique social consequences of the transformations in production, Robert Chaudenson distinguishes the ‘homestead’ society (‘characterized by constant contact between’ colonising community and slaves) from the ‘plantation’ society (with mass immigration of slaves, less ‘direct contact with the white community’ and a class of relatively privileged Creole slaves in between).20 The transformations of production on Saint-Domingue in the eighteenth century were particularly radical, with booms in the p ­ roduction of sugar, and then, from mid-century, coffee.21 The cash-crop economy necessitated substantial sources of manual labour. European indentured labourers were an important source of labour from the beginnings of French colonisation, but France would quickly find itself immersed within the Atlantic slave economy.22 The trade in slaves led to great demographic change in the Caribbean. In a letter sent from Saint-Domingue in 1725, the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Margat de Tilly estimated that 18 missionaries looked after the spiritual needs of approximately 50,000 slaves; by 1743, he wrote that this population had swelled to over 150,000.23 This had substantial consequences on the proportions of slaves to colonists and ‘free coloureds’. One survey has shown that slaves already significantly outnumbered the two latter groups on Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue at the turn of the eighteenth century, and suggested that the disproportion grew to a point where there were approximately fifteen slaves for every white settler on Saint-Domingue by the beginning of the French Revolution.24 Other factors determined the interactions of slaves and masters. Frenchwomen were consistently outnumbered by men, and the sexual exploitation of female slaves has been well documented.25 This change in the labour regime permeated all aspects of colonial existence. Boucher, for example, distinguishes the ‘frequent face-to-face contacts’ between slaves and masters that he sees as 8

Introduction

characteristic of the early decades of the island colonies from the more distant (or nonexistent) relationships of the later, plantation model.26 This was a novel environment in social, as well as labour, terms. Concepts of identity and culture were being constantly negotiated in the changing political, socio-economic and ethnic environments of the colonies. The transformations in their political status over the seventeenth century are indicative. An early regime of governorship gave way to the prosperous period of the ‘autonomous governorproprietors’.27 Political consolidation took place from 1664 with the creation of the Compagnie des Indes Occidentales, and ten years later the French Caribbean colonies became part of the royal domains.28 Legislation developed to deal with the social and political challenges of the colonies. The 1685 royal edict which came to be known as the Code Noir is perhaps the best known enactment. It was in large part concerned with ensuring religious orthodoxy in the colonies; it ordered the expulsion of Jews, limited public religious practice to Catholicism and declared non-Catholics ‘unable to contract a legitimate marriage’. It also established legislation to deal with the slave population. The second article ordered their baptism, and the edict also set out such conditions as their nourishment, their sale, their punishment and the conditions of an eventual manumission.29 This was, as Yvan Debbasch points out, legislation which both drew heavily on precedent in Roman law and on consultation with colonists and administrators.30 From early on in the colonial initiatives, Catholic religious orders settled on the islands. Capuchins were sent to look after the spiritual needs of the population of Saint Kitts in 1635 (they would be expelled in 1646). The Dominicans accompanied the new settlement of Guadeloupe in 1635.31 The Jesuits arrived in Martinique in the 1630s, and they would have an important influence in SaintDomingue.32 The role of the ecclesiastical orders in colonial slavery was particularly complex. That Dominicans and Jesuits possessed considerable tracts of land and numbers of slaves is well known.33 However, the relationship of ecclesiastical orders (or even individual clerics) with colonial authorities and even planters was not unproblematic. In Cap Français (Saint-Domingue) in 1730, one Jesuit (apparently with the permission of his superior) preached a vigorous sermon against both the violence of French colonists towards their slaves, and the laxity of judges in dealing with this.34 9

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There were also significant differences in the practices of the various religious orders in the colonies. For Gabriel Debien, the Jesuits ‘saw themselves as the defenders’ of slaves, while Pierre Pluchon characterises the Jesuits as essentially opposed to the interests of masters and administrators, even tending towards ‘autonomous’ organisation of the slave population.35 In turn, how ecclesiastical orders were viewed would evolve along with the great changes in the colonies, as Sue Peabody has demonstrated; she observes that the ‘missionaries’’ interventions on behalf of slaves and free people of colour [were] increasingly treated as threats by colonial officials’, in the context of increasing social control in the plantation economy.36 Slavery was implemented in the early modern French Caribbean in a context of interrogations about the practice. The question of slavery had been discussed in Jean Bodin’s well-known analysis in 1576. This was long before the French settlement of the Antilles, but a time in which other forms of slavery were practised in the Americas, and in the polities of the Barbary coast, for example. Indeed, Bodin considered that ‘the whole world is full of slaves, excepting certain countries in Europe (which since also by little and little receive them)’.37 He was preoccupied by two main questions: the degree to which slavery was ‘natural and profitable’, and the extent of the ‘power the lord of right ought to have over his slave’.38 With recourse to the classical heritage and French and Church jurisprudence, he refuted Aristotle’s justification of slavery in ‘natural law’, according to which ‘some [were] naturally made to serve and obey, and others to command and govern’.39 Bodin acknowledged that the ‘long continuance’ and the ubiquity of slavery might make it seem a natural phenomenon, while the principle of reducing a prisoner to servitude so as to guarantee his life appeared morally justifiable. He countered the first, ‘natural’ justification by noting that many morally upright and wise men had been themselves enslaved to their inferiors, and that the widespread cruelty of human practices meant that one could not ‘measure the law of nature by men’s actions’. He refuted the second justification by questioning, for example, the motives for sparing a prisoner’s life, or the extent of the service demanded from a captive slave.40 Bodin also considered slavery to be problematic for the social order. Drawing from a wealth of precedent in Antiquity, he considered the practice to be based on a relationship that encouraged disloyalty between master and slave, sedition on the level of the res publica, which was 10

Introduction

manifested in the ‘fear that cities and commonwealths had of their slaves’.41 Although he considered slavery to have almost died out in Christendom and in Muslim lands by 1200, it continued to exist as adherents of these two faiths refused to liberate those who had converted to their religion.42 Bodin’s analysis is telling about three central strands in early modern French thinking about slavery. The first is that slavery reflected, by necessity, on the conception of the kingdom. Bodin thought of France as a kingdom which fundamentally refused slavery on its soil, and it was a question that, as Peabody has shown, would become extremely contentious during later French Atlantic slavery.43 The metropolitan refusal of slavery has further implications for such wide concepts as the nature of society, or of the individual. It calls attention to what it was that defined early modern French concepts of society; France was certainly a distinct national culture, but there were commonalities of thought within Europe (Winthrop D. Jordan, for example, suggests that the concept of a distinct rejection of slavery on home soil was shared in Tudor England).44 David Eltis considers the ‘slave-free dialectic’ (which allowed Europeans to use non-Europeans – but never other Europeans – as slaves in the Americas) as an ‘exceptional’ phenomenon stemming from the unique way Europeans situated rights in the ‘individual’. This has considerable implications for how the person – or as Eltis writes, the ‘individual’ – was understood.45 Understanding how those who thought themselves full members of a society saw themselves is essential to understanding how they viewed the others who, in various ways, they excluded. Bodin’s analysis, secondly, hints at the importance of religion to understanding early modern slavery. Christian thinking about slavery in this period has been discussed in studies exploring the basis for slavery in Scripture and canon law, and the controversies generated by the encounter with non-Christian peoples outside Europe from the fifteenth century onwards.46 There are two themes which recur in the following chapters. The first can be summed up by the remark of a Jesuit missionary, Jean Mongin, in a 1682 letter from Saint Kitts. Mongin criticised Protestants who did not convert their slaves, noting that while Christians were not allowed to enslave prisoners of war who were also Christian, their faith ‘would have [them] make a Christian of a slave’.47 This allows us some insight into why so many missionaries appear preoccupied 11

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with the treatment of slaves rather than their liberty. For reasons which will be returned to frequently in this book, the African slave was thought to have been subjected to an ineluctable state (of captivity, as Mongin saw it) in the temporal domain before he or she had been transported to the Caribbean. A further theme is the degree to which, as Orlando Patterson writes, the slave in Christianity was marked by ‘exclusion … on the secular level’ and ‘inclusion in the sacred community’. For Patterson, it was ‘relegating each [marginality and inclusion] to a separate domain of cultural existence’ that allowed Catholicism to both ‘declar[e] slavery a sin’ and condone it (in contrast, he characterises Protestant English planters as ‘abandoning’ the religion of slaves).48 With some exceptions, the majority of French testimonies about Atlantic slavery were produced by Catholics, and this factor determines the confessional focus of this study. Its fields of enquiry will include questions concerning the extent of the ‘separation’ of domains described by Patterson, further sites of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’, and the very nature of the ‘community’ itself. Bodin, thirdly, illustrates the importance of antique accounts of slavery, of Roman jurisprudence and of more recent controversies based in natural law to early modern European thinking about slavery. This complemented Christian thought to various degrees; Christian theorists looked for precedents in Antiquity, and they engaged with theories of natural law and the ius gentium. The ‘revival of classical learning’, as David Brion Davis writes, was essential to understanding the perpetuation of ‘traditional justifications for human slavery’ throughout Europe.49 The sixteenthcentury controversies stemming from the Spanish colonisation of the Americas had given rise to a body of works which provided a legal framework for understanding the enslavement of Amerindians (and which could be marshalled by other Europeans opposed to Spanish colonisation).50 The classical heritage could be authoritative in certain areas, and less so in others; Chapter 1 will further discuss the way this heritage influenced French understandings of slavery, and of the distinct social relationships between masters and slaves. What this short examination of thinking about slavery will have illustrated is that it was a concern in certain domains, and far less so in others. Some early modern accounts such as Labat’s Nouveau Voyage might seem to testify to the easy acceptance of 12

Introduction

slavery within France and the colonies. However, it is not the case that, as William B. Cohen concludes, ‘slavery was not a moral problem for Frenchmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’.51 Justifications of slavery, or even criticism of its excesses, are not uncommon in testimonies of this era. One of the interrogations of the present book is what was specific about such moral hesitancy. While questions of morality are implied in the discussion of systems of servitude, the present study widens the focus considerably. There were further interrogations, such as social cohesion and control, that were of concern to colonial populations whose interests lay, for the most part, in the perpetuation of slavery. The present study focuses on three interrelated strands: the socio-­ economic condition of slaves, the corporeal labour they carried out, and how accounts of slave societies reflected approaches to power. Condition, the corporeal and the power of the narrative This book is a study of French approaches to slavery in an extensive corpus of texts (and less frequently, images) dating from the early years of French colonisation in the Caribbean up to approximately 1750. This unique body of source material, for the most part littlestudied, was produced at a time of considerable social transformation within the early French colonies. These narratives reflect often destructive, mass human displacements, and allow us to observe the coexistence of diverse populations during a period of substantive transformations. They also enable us to study the perspectives on colonial, theological, even ‘racial’ discourses of those French subjects who encountered populations around the Atlantic. The reasons for the geographical focus have already been discussed. In being restricted chronologically to French colonisation of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, this study focuses on a socio-economic and intellectual context that pre-dates the great demographic expansions in the colonies during the second half of the 1700s. The distinct conditions of the latter half of the eighteenth century have been demonstrated by Debbasch, who describes the increasing importance of what is now thought of as ‘ethnicity’ to social distinction on Saint-Domingue.52 More recent studies have stressed, for example, the implantation of ‘a more explicitly biological racism’ in the place of a ‘social definition of racial categories’ in Saint-Domingue (John Garrigus), or the progressive distancing of 13

frontiers of servitude

the libres de couleur from the colonial class through legal measures (Frédéric Régent).53 The conditions of the earlier colonies, however, warrant a sustained examination which acknowledges their complexity, and which looks beyond the much more substantial (and more frequently studied) textual production of the second half of the eighteenth century. That the 1600s and early 1700s might, as Madeleine Dobie writes, seem to be an era in which French ‘cultural representation of the colonial world … was extremely limited’ calls for a sustained analysis of this period.54 The present book studies three aspects of narratives of early modern slavery. It explores the condition of commoditised ‘marginal’ slaves, the domain of the corporeal, and the implications of the text as a strategy of domination within a slave society. The first interrogation concerns how the slave was imagined within a circumscribed, proprietary relationship with a master. This will be approached in later chapters which explore such themes as the conception of the slave as a ‘captive’, or the importance of accumulation to distinguishing slave and colonist. What was distinct about slaves can be glimpsed by a French term which was often used to refer to one’s place in society: one’s condition. Condition had a very wide range and, according to an early eighteenth-century edition of the lexicographer Furetière’s Dictionnaire, could encapsulate birth, rank, status (‘état’), employment and in ‘popular’ speech, the ‘right to claim the same things as others’.55 In the colonies, these were all aspects of one’s existence that determined, or were determined, by whether one was freeborn, freed, or a slave. As the present study will show, condition (in italics when referring to the French use) was also a concept through which early modern commentators understood what it fundamentally meant to be a slave. This way of thinking about the distinctness of the slave reflects on the models of ‘marginality’ that have for long been a centre of interest to social scientists and anthropologists. The ‘marginality’ of the slave is explored in Miers and Kopytoff’s classic study, which characterises African slavery as a process in which ‘the individual was wrenched from his own people, losing his social personality, his identity and status’, making of him/her ‘[a] stranger … in a new setting, be it a new kin group, community, region, or even country’.56 Miers and Kopytoff stress the considerable variations in this ‘marginality’; these ‘acquired outsiders’ might be used for many purposes beyond labour, and there might be considerable ‘variation 14

Introduction

in [slaves’] social position’ in different African cultures.57 At the heart of this analysis are what they call ‘rights-in-persons’, which they see as inherent in ‘almost all social relationships’, as varying across cultures according to factors such as sex, or paternity or social status; they understand slavery as the possession of certain ‘rights’ over another.58 Miers and Kopytoff also stress the uniqueness of slavery in the Americas, in which a ‘narrower specialization in the use of slaves … was conducive to the formation of a discrete stratum’, and in which ‘a cultural insistence on the slaves’ racial marginality to society … closed to them a whole range of higher occupations’.59 A second essential paradigm in the theorisation of African slavery is that of Claude Meillassoux (who disputes such aspects of Miers and Kopytoff’s analysis as the extent of ‘rights-in-persons’ or an implied ‘assimilation’ of African slavery to forms of kinship).60 In Meillassoux’s Marxist-influenced analysis, the slave is an ‘alien’ distinct from other outsiders in the incapacity to obtain the full social privileges that accompany integration and the creation of a descendance. For Meillassoux, the ‘essence’ of slavery lies in the ‘social incapacity of the slave to reproduce socially’, or the ‘antithesis of kinship’. He writes that slavery as a ‘mode of exploitation’ depends on the constitution of a ‘distinct class of individuals’, a class which must be ‘renewed constantly’.61 He describes the ‘state’ of the slave as ‘permanent [and] unalterably attached to the captive’, after an initial process of ‘desocial[isation]’ and ultimately of ‘depersonali[sation]’. It is this ‘original and indelible stigma’ that enables the master to put the slave to work at ‘any task’; the tasks slaves carry out define their ‘condition’, but the slave is incapable of gaining a ‘status’ within a slave society.62 What Meillassoux means by the condition of slaves is their function, or the labour they carry out; what he calls their state most closely approximates to what early modern French commentators meant by condition. A further paradigm of ‘marginality’ is that described in Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death (1982). This is a comparative study of sixty-six slave-owning societies, which characterises the ‘social death’ to which slaves are subjected in a host society as the ‘essence of slavery’; the slave ‘lives on the margins between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular’.63 For Patterson, the possession of the slave was not merely an economic attribute. He writes, for example, that the slave was ‘in all slave­ 15

frontiers of servitude

societies … considered a degraded person’, who would feed the master’s ‘sense of honour’. He characterises this as one aspect of a ‘parasitical’ social system in which ‘the slave’s natal alienation and genealogical isolation made him or her the ideal human tool’, one who ‘existed only through the parasite holder, … the master.’64 The use of such paradigms as an analytical tool for understanding the early modern French Caribbean must be subject to some caution. The models proposed by Miers and Kopytoff, and by Meillassoux, are principally concerned with the very distinct cultures of West Africa, with their significant linguistic, socio-economic and religious diversity. Patterson’s paradigm, in turn, has been criticised by, for example, Vincent Brown for its ‘abstract’ nature, as a ‘distillation’ which can be applied with difficulty ‘to explain the actual behavior of slaves’, and which neglects forms of slave resistance.65 In another study, Joseph C. Miller criticises Patterson’s ‘[exclusion of] historical context by definition’.66 In the place of what he sees as Patterson’s reduction of ‘relational beings embedded in social … contexts’ to the ‘master–slave dyad’, Miller stresses the ‘inherently historical’ character of slavery (in fact, Miller’s own thesis is that slaving is a phenomenon itself carried out by ‘marginal’ individuals ‘to convert their marginality toward centrality’).67 These are criticisms that resonate when thinking about the socio-economic contexts of the Antilles from its early settlement onwards. There was constant mutation in the social conditions of slavery during these centuries of great socio-demographic transformation. Conversely, a number of discussions of Patterson and, to a lesser extent, Meillassoux in, for example, Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach’s Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination, have demonstrated what can be gained by the use of ‘structural’ models of slavery.68 I am more cautious about qualifying as ‘slavery’ the relatively wide social and labour contexts that have been suggested on occasion in Swaminathan and Beach’s volume.69 The reasons for this will be seen in a later chapter of the present book, which explores the occasional comparison of the existences of slaves and, notably, European indentured labourers by commentators on the early Caribbean; both groups were distinguished precisely by social position rather than labour. What debates surrounding models of the ‘marginal’ existence can do (and despite Patterson’s limited focus on the early modern French Caribbean) is alert us to the many socio-cultural layers in 16

Introduction

which practices of slavery were embedded. These paradigms are instructive about the importance of ‘rights’ over another, and of the importance of property and accumulation. They illustrate the centrality of condition (or, more approximately, status) to slavery; this was a further attraction, beyond profit, for those who possessed slaves, and lack of status was one strand in understanding the ‘degraded’ slave. Such paradigms also alert us to how subtle the distinctions between free and enslaved people might be. Forms of slavery intruded on existence in ways that went far beyond the master’s control of labour and capacity to inflict violence. That slavery could also be reflected in rites, social interactions and even gestures demonstrates the multiple spheres of slaves’ distinctness. There were further, subtle reflections of what could be thought of as social marginality, or even ‘social death’ in the texts and images that depict the coexistence of slaves and masters. The absence of the voice of African slaves in early modern cultural productions is perhaps the most striking manifestation, and on the rare occasions when the slave’s voice was transcribed, it was considerably mediated. This kind of ‘narrative’ issue can be illuminated by thinking about condition, using paradigms of marginality that are nuanced by an awareness of context. It means, on one hand, acknowledging the constant transformations of the colonial era. Each narrative account of colonial life is a representation of societies which were in constant change, in which the relationships of its inhabitants were in constant evolution. On the other hand, each account is nevertheless a coherent (even synchronic) vision of the human relationships and exclusions in these societies at a given time. In each case, as this book contends, they have the potential to reflect such significant aspects of existence as status, honour and the ownership of human beings. The second strand of the present study, the corporeal, explores the new configurations of the human body within colonial labour. These texts were produced as Western European economies were transformed, extending their reach to Africa and the Americas, and using indentured and slave labour in the nascent plantations of the Caribbean. It was the energy, the very corporeality of slaves, that would be channelled into the production of cash crops for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European markets. There were ambiguous responses to this displacement of human beings forced into labour, ranging from apparent acceptance to interrogations 17

frontiers of servitude

and anxieties. Understanding of the slave was shaped not just by his or her social marginality, but also by discourses concerning labour. The cultural productions of the colonial era might describe the results of labour in detail and even with pride; indeed, some of the missionaries who vaunted the success of slave and heretic conversions also demonstrated considerable interest in colonial labour and profit. Yet labour was also disdained and disavowed. This labour context inflected on thinking about the corporeal. Writing about the body was inherently fraught; there were theoretical and moral imperatives that influenced the apprehension of the body, and one significant source of interdicts, restrictions and limits was Judaeo-Christian culture itself. Manifestations of the body in the early modern Americas could fascinate, as shown by the rich textual and graphic representations of Amerindian populations from the first contacts with Europeans.70 However, the slaves who were increasingly transported to the French Caribbean from the seventeenth century were quite distinct. New discourses concerning physiognomy or, in time, ‘race’ would, as is well known, grapple with their difference. There were also moral and other interrogations about the limits to which the body of the slave could be possessed, controlled or infringed. Mastering the body could be a source of pride, as the portraits of productive, even serene, colonial labour illustrate; depictions of the violence exacted on slaves also demonstrate how fraught it could be. The corporeal was a domain shaped by religious, socio-economic and proto-racial discourses formed between Europe, Africa and the Americas, and is a unique site at which to understand early modern slavery. The third focus of this book concerns how colonial narratives reflect power within a slave society. There are two forms of this power, the use of strategies, and the use of the script, that are of interest. My concept of strategies goes far beyond those which inform Malick W. Ghachem’s concept of ‘strategic ethics’, in an important 2012 study of the legal environment of Saint-Domingue; by this, Ghachem means ‘pragmatic’ legal approaches to contentious issues such as manumission and slaveowner violence (two issues in which he identifies significant tensions between the interests of colonial authorities and planters).71 The types of strategies I mean are those used by individuals or groups in early Caribbean society for such diverse purposes as understanding and mastering the environment, influencing the spirituality of others, and obtaining temporal 18

Introduction

gain (as well as maintaining civil order). These include the strategies of gathering and evaluating information in oral and textual form. Specific strategic approaches were also used for spiritual purposes in the colonies in instructing neophytes, and they were reflected in the accounts of their conversion that reached European readers. A great range of strategic approaches were used in temporal matters that varied from laying out a plantation, or maximising profit, to controlling the movement of slaves. The forms of such strategies will be discussed in later chapters, but it is important to emphasise what they imply at this stage. They acknowledge that human interactions were contextual and variable, and perhaps even unpredictable. They also imply that there were resistances to colonial power. That we apprehend these narratives through script (except for a limited number of printed images) is a consideration so obvious that we overlook it. Yet the medium of the script, the text at its most fundamental level, is essential to understanding how Europeans imagined their shared culture, and thought of culture itself. It is fundamental to the early modern colonisation of the Antilles. Europeans were conscious of the power of the script to transfer information, and that the invention of printing had multiplied that power. In the early seventeenth century, the tragedian-turned-­économiste Antoine de Montchrestien thought of printing as an ‘art’ that, as well as transmitting moral instruction, could conserve the ‘memory’ of worthy individuals and ‘bring to light and conserve’ the ‘labours’ of the learned. Noting that it was now a ‘possession’ of ‘all the Christian peoples’ (‘peuples chrétiens’), he hints that it had become a strand of their very identity.72 What this implied in the encounter with non-European and/or colonised peoples can be illuminated through Michel de Certeau’s important study of ‘orality’ in a sixteenth-century account of a transient French colonial initiative in Brazil, Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage en Terre de Brésil.73 The Protestant Léry’s account of the warrior Tupi was immensely popular, and would inform Michel de Montaigne’s vision of the Cannibales.74 As de Certeau writes, it is the capacity of the text to surpass the limits of time and space that means the script ‘makes history’ (‘fait l’histoire’); it is a process that ‘accumulates’ and ‘stocks’.75 This was a capacity of which, as de Certeau notes, Léry was intensely conscious, and which he saw as distinguishing the ‘nations [of] … Europe, Asia and Africa’ from the inhabitants of the New World.76 Further manifestations of 19

frontiers of servitude

the script/‘orality’ distinction can be seen, notably, in the Spanish Catholic tradition.77 In the settlement of the French Antilles, the consciousness of possessing the script was to be of renewed significance for those French subjects who now lived alongside substantial populations of African slaves. These colonists prided themselves on their access to a unique body of tools for the conservation and distribution of information. How they considered those they thought deprived of these tools will be a recurrent theme in this study. There is another side to this focus on the script and the text. In methodological terms, the ironies of looking for testimony about early plantation life in text will be apparent. It means that we are limited to a medium which was inaccessible to slaves themselves (at least during early colonisation). We can at no stage have access to the unmediated slave ‘voice’. However, the use of the script was only one strand in the processes of control of enslaved populations, and it was a process subject to a number of ambiguities. Colonists were to encounter limits to the capacity of these tools to dominate, particularly within the plantation environment. They also reflect other types of knowledge conceived of as non-textual and perhaps even non-verbal; how early French subjects confronted certain forms of knowledge will show how subversive they were thought to be. One further consideration of the reflections of power in colonial narratives must be underlined at this stage. These narratives performed a variety of functions in early modern society, and might be intended for wide distribution. Descriptions of slaves in such narratives were ultimately constructed by members of the socioeconomic strata which, to various extents, were profiting from slave labour. However, there were also dissenting, critical voices within the ‘colonial’ corpus. These were narratives that describe the collective and individual interests of free Europeans, but they also throw into question the supposed homogeneity of colonial discourse. In approaching the slave society through questions of marginalisation, of the body, and of narrative and power, this study has itself been confronted with the many absences in knowledge about slaves. An attempt has been made to acknowledge them throughout this book. The texts destined for French readers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries often hint at how knowledge was formed beyond the reach of the script. They reflect the multiple flows – of labour, products, data, and even lost oral tales – that constructed 20

Introduction

the colonial world, perhaps as much as the volumes reserved for a select public. In considering the textual corpus as the residue of encounters, of interactions and of struggles, we can acknowledge what is lost to us from this world. Through lending an ear to what remains, we can hope to illuminate new aspects of it. Perspectives and sources This book is based upon a corpus of first-hand accounts of labour and slavery dating from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These include personal and administrative correspondence, missionary narratives, pamphlets, agricultural manuals, and diverse narratives which include nouvelles or the histoires of freebooters. Many of these texts were published contemporaneously or near contemporaneously, and/or were intended for other types of diffusion. As was the case with other Europeans, French participants in colonisation and enslavement were members of diverse human networks. They were participants to various degrees in religious, commercial and military initiatives. They had uneven access to ­ what is now thought of as colonial power, and might be in sometimes ferocious competition with other participants in these ventures. So while their texts demonstrate that certain ideas (about slaves and slavery, for example) could be widely shared during the development of the colonies, it must also be remembered that they were intended for diverse readerships, in which they had diverse functions. One strategy that I have tried to avoid in this study of early modern slave systems is a teleological approach, which would tend to read slave systems in the light of their ultimate dismantling (to consider slavery on eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue principally in the light of the Revolutionary-era violence, for example).78 As Christopher L. Miller characterises it, such an approach implies ‘look[ing] for prefigurations [and] signs that foretell the satisfying conclusion’ of abolitionism, and is ‘inevitable’ within the study of slavery.79 The present book, as will be seen, eschews reading such ‘prefigurations’ within accounts of slavery, and it is hoped that this will prove that such teleological readings are not ‘inevitable’. There has also been much criticism engaging with the legacy of colonial memory in France and its former colonies. Christopher L. Miller’s The French Atlantic Triangle (2008), for example, explores 21

frontiers of servitude

the ‘silences about the slave trade’ in domains of French cultural production such as historiography, film and commemorative initiatives. Miller’s is an explicitly political stance, ‘attempt[ing] to reckon with and to recognize the past’ in contemporary France, and urging ‘new ways to shuttle between’ ‘past and present’.80 However, there has been little focus on the early Ancien Régime colonies among specialists in postcolonial French studies. What focus there is in representative titles such as Marsh and Frith’s France’s Lost Empires (2011), Hargreaves’s Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism (2005) and Forsdick and Murphy’s Postcolonial Thought in the FrenchSpeaking World (2009) has either taken the Haitian Revolution as a departure point, or (in the last title) limited discussion of the prerevolutionary colonies to the late eighteenth century.81 Such postcolonial perspectives help us to understand the post-revolutionary and post-abolitionary environment of the French Caribbean, but tend to tell us far less about the earlier colonies. I have instead attempted to understand what is specific to the cultural productions that reflect the coexistence of colonial populations. The focus on the areas of the social and the corporeal seeks to engage with what is most evidently shared within these narratives: the concepts relating to the exploitation of an ever-expanding stratum of colonial labourers. In thinking about narrative and power, I have tried to acknowledge further dynamics. Colonial narratives illustrate that the text was thought fundamental to the control of knowledge and, ultimately, of people. However, those Europeans who acted in and wrote about the colonies had diverse preoccupations. This book seeks to understand the implications of such diversity for thinking about early forms of colonial slavery. There are two further challenges to this approach which must be acknowledged. The first is inherent in a primary corpus that spans more than a century of cultural productions. The socio-economic environments in which slaves lived and laboured changed enormously over this time; one can at best apprehend different configurations, different moments, in this period of great transformations. The second stems from the consciousness that the present study is itself the product of a precise historical moment. It is informed by determined historically situated critical perspectives, and is written at a remove of many centuries from its source material. These are challenges that call for some humility in apprehending sources. Nonetheless, it is precisely an approach that stresses the unfa22

Introduction

miliarity of the past that has been aimed for in this book. Texts and images reflecting the early French Caribbean must be approached with the awareness of how singular they were. They were produced by the members of a society which was undergoing what was a tentative, hazardous expansion on many fronts. In what is now thought of as the ‘colonial era’, concepts such as community, the individual or the nature of society itself differed radically from those which would be current in later centuries. Questions such as the control of a subservient population, or the capacity to master the tools of domination were of some urgency to early colonists. Social relations were inflected with unfamiliar concepts of marginality, and thinking about the body encompassed realms that went far beyond what is now thought of as the ‘biological’. Colonial-era narratives reflect these domains of the marginal and the corporeal in sharing knowledge about people and resources, and about how to control them. Acknowledging this unfamiliarity will allow us to ask questions about the role of narratives within the transforming societies of the French Atlantic. It will allow us to consider the role of interest groups and actors in narrative production, and how this might change our understanding of colonial power. In the strategies they furnish for social control, they instruct us about where the dominant thought their superiority lay. They are, in turn, telling about the resistances to power and about anxieties surrounding its continuity. These will allow us to explore the functions of narrative within a society negotiating new economic and cultural thresholds. Ultimately, it will lead us to ask how these narratives reflect the understanding of that most marginal of entities, the slave, within the early French colonies. To attempt to answer such questions, this study has benefited from the insights of scholars including historians, theorists of narrative and literary studies, anthropologists and social scientists. The corpus of archive-based studies bequeathed by Gabriel Debien remains an essential foundation to understanding the geographical, socio-economic and demographic context of early modern slavery.82 Historical studies have analysed the economic and social structures of French Caribbean slavery. Although the studies of Stewart R. King and of John Garrigus focus on a social context which postdates that studied in this book, their explorations of Saint-Domingue illustrate the changing nature of concepts of human difference.83 For both, ‘race’ must be understood alongside other 23

frontiers of servitude

significant markers of identity encapsulating the socio-economic. In the case of the ‘free coloureds’ of late eighteenth-century SaintDomingue, King has noted the importance of avoiding an ‘unreflective racialist [theorisation]’, or ‘[thinking of their] skin color as the only thing about their lives that mattered’.84 Garrigus’s account of a ‘mid-[eighteenth] century shift in the way French colonists on SaintDomingue defined their own identity’ includes a number of case studies which, he writes, ‘suggest that early eighteenth-century colonists thought [that] African ancestry’ might not necessarily have to be ‘the dominant feature of [one’s] identity’).85 The value of interdisciplinary approaches in exploring the intellectual background and social context of early modern slavery has been demonstrated by a number of studies.86 These include Rushforth’s Bonds of Alliance, which combines archival research with sources including Jesuit relations and European travel narratives. Studies incorporating anthropology and the social sciences include those of Patterson, and of Miers and Kopytoff, which have already been mentioned. Further studies in these fields explore the ‘public’ and ‘hidden transcripts’ that lie under wide-ranging systems of domination (James C. Scott).87 Literary studies offer further perspectives on the relationships between culture and colonial power. Mary Louise Pratt’s wellknown concept of the ‘contact zone’ stresses ‘the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis’, and alerts us to the ways culture is renegotiated in the coexistence of colonising and colonised populations.88 Two more recent studies directly explore mechanisms of colonial representation in French literary production. Doris Garraway’s The Libertine Colony furnishes a rich examination of libertinage conceived of as ‘a sexual economy that undergirded exploitative power relations among whites, free people of color, and slaves’.89 Garraway, noting that ‘what has been kept out of the canon reflects the most disavowed aspects of a culture’, moves beyond focus on canonical texts to situate the cultural products she studies ‘within the environment in which they emerged’.90 The present study shares with Garraway’s an appreciation of the need to explore precisely such an environment, but foregoes an approach which privileges ‘evaluating slavery as a system of sexual domination’, a system in which ‘interracial sexual fantasies’ could ‘[legitimate] white … social and racial supremacy while … r­ epressing the brutality and sexual violence of racial slavery’.91 24

Introduction

Madeleine Dobie’s 2010 study of eighteenth-century slavery focuses on the ‘mechanisms of avoidance’ which maintained the ‘low profile of the colonial world in French culture’ and which resulted, for example, in an ‘asymmetry’: ‘the bifurcated … ­representation of indigenous Americans and diasporic Africans’.92 For Dobie this resulted in an essential ‘cultural displacement of colonial slavery’ (onto the topos of oriental despotism, for example).93 Her study includes discussion of Labat, and another Dominican who will be frequently discussed in the present book, Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre.94 While the present work focuses on the earliest sources dealing with the Caribbean, it is informed by the awareness that ‘impediment[s] to representation’ similar to those identified by Dobie must be acknowledged and analysed (Dobie emphasises two: the moral, and the ‘absence of a discursive framework’).95 While informed by the insights of such studies, this book differs considerably in its focus and its approach. Its principal novelty is its consideration of narrative and textual production as strategies used by the myriad interests that came together to colonise the early Caribbean. This means, on one side, acknowledging what was shared by this diverse group. They shared a religious and moral heritage which determined significant aspects of their views on slavery. They had in common other views, much more difficult to situate precisely, about who could be enslaved, and who could not. They were conscious of the importance of exclusive forms of knowledge, and of the role of the script in maintaining power, two areas which are extensively discussed in this book. They often adopt a prescriptive tone, demonstrating the consciousness of shared interests with their wide readership. Colonial commentators also acknowledge that there existed alternative knowledges which subverted their common interests and even their faith. These are unequivocally the characteristics of a ‘dominant’ colonial stratum. However, this study also questions the dynamic within the ‘colonizing group’.96 The stratum in which power, wealth and certain forms of specialist knowledge were concentrated was also characterised by some heterogeneity. There was considerable diversity in the social status of the individuals and groups who wrote about slaves and servitors. Factors which varied from human demographics to the minutiae of social interactions were ever-changing within the settlements of the Caribbean.97 The ‘colonial’ text is perhaps as often the site of conflict between ideas and individuals as it is of 25

frontiers of servitude

homogenous responses to dominated peoples. Within, the traces can often be read of individuals and collectivities, jockeying for political and economic favour between the métropole, Africa and the Americas. A further particularity of this book is how it considers the question of colonial labour within the context of the French encounter with the Atlantic triangle. Representations of French slavery as a labour phenomenon have not been the object of a dedicated study. Yet it was this that was the principal motivation for transporting significant human populations across the Atlantic. As later sections of this book will illustrate, a focus on labour gives insight into the further social and cultural contexts in which slavery was understood. Slaves were employed in banal, intense and repetitive activities that rarely merited attention except in the most prescriptive of texts. Yet labour was the force that lay under the ever-changing forms of Caribbean slavery, and the narratives that described it. Primary texts This is a study of the accounts of initiatives involving numerous actors from various socio-economic and religious milieux. There were human displacements to coastal South America, the Antilles, and Saint-Domingue which might entail significant and sometimes spectacular losses of money and life. Many testify to the development of systems of intensive production powered by the labour of Europeans and Africans. The manuscript of an anonymous French flibustier published by Jean-Pierre Moreau is the first direct testimony of slavery in the Antilles in the present corpus.98 It recounts a voyage from France between 1618 and 1620, which included a stay of approximately ten months in the Petites Antilles, during which the narrator witnessed the existence of African slaves in the Caribbean. Another early testimony is that of Guillaume Coppier, who crossed the Atlantic as a member of a French crew, and who would for a time be an indentured labourer on Saint Kitts; his Histoire was published in 1645.99 Among the texts which have remained in manuscript form until more recent times are the journal and letters of the Jesuit Jean Mongin. His 1676 journal is informative about the conditions of the Atlantic crossing.100 Mongin’s correspondence includes impor26

Introduction

tant testimony on the conversion initiatives in the Antilles. Copies exist of two letters sent from Martinique to the Jesuit Provincial of Toulouse, the first in September 1676 (consulted in Médiathèque de Carcassonne Agglo holding), and a second in May 1679 (Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris). A third letter, a copy of which is held in Carcassonne, was sent from Saint Kitts to a gentleman from Languedoc enthused by the missionary initiative (May 1682). The Archives jésuites de la Province de France, Vanves now holds (Fonds Brotier, MS 185) an alternative copy of the letter to the Languedocian gentleman; Marcel Chatillon, who has published a number of Mongin’s letters, notes that this copy incorporates ‘detail on the slave trade’, and information on Creole partly derived from an earlier Jesuit source (Pelleprat).101 A later, particularly vivid Jesuit letter is that sent from Saint-Domingue by Claude Bréban in 1732, in which he describes to his brother the ‘character’ and ‘labour’ of its slaves. It is held in the Archives départementales du Cher (a transcription was published in 1997).102 A high proportion of printed texts were bequeathed by the members, like Mongin and Bréban, of the religious orders present in the Caribbean. This reflects what Gordon K. Lewis has identified as the preponderant role of ecclesiastics in early Caribbean intellectual life from the beginnings of the Hispanic colonies.103 As we have seen, despite the socio-political and economic relationships between these orders and colonial authorities, one must be wary about simply conflating missionary and ‘colonial’ discourses. Identifying a characteristic Catholic discourse in the Antilles is not without its own interrogations. Missionaries belonged to orders which had determined goals and strategies for conversion, and these orders might even be in competition with one another. The readers of their publications, or the letters they sent to metropolitan France, might respond vigorously to their efforts, as Mongin’s correspondence with the gentleman from Languedoc makes clear. One challenge in the use of ecclesiastical narratives for understanding Caribbean slavery lies in how they jar with what is c­ onsidered empirical, according to later standards. Many e­cclesiastical ­narratives describe missionary initiatives; they focus on edifying conversions, and they might acknowledge divine interventions. In some ways, qualifying these as ‘spiritual’ narratives is an artificial distinction. A great diversity of early modern French accounts of the colonies were conceived of within a similar spiritual universe. 27

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Even the founding act of the Compagnie des îles de l’Amérique in 1626 designates conversion as the primary aim of the initiative, and its financial success as determined by divine intervention.104 Missionary narratives also describe interactions with those slaves and labourers who inhabited the lowest socio-economic strata of the colonies. How their voices were refracted within these narratives can tell us much about these early populations. Ecclesiastical texts were also a constant, regular, source of testimony throughout the settlement of the Caribbean. Missionaries were among the earliest witnesses to (and participants in) French settlement. The Jesuit Jacques Bouton (1592–1658) described the colonisation of Martinique at a time when the island was still in part occupied by Caribs, in a relation published in 1640 (there is also a manuscript version with some variations in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer).105 Another Jesuit, Pierre Pelleprat (1609– 67), left for the Americas in 1651. He travelled from Martinique to modern-day Guyana in 1653, but illness forced him to return to France the following year. He published a Relation des missions in 1655.106 The Jesuit Jean-Baptiste Le Pers (1675–1735) spent a quarter of a century on Saint-Domingue from 1704/05 and left manuscripts, including diverse versions of a Histoire of the colony, now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Archives jésuites de la Province de France. These were in part to be the basis for his confrère Charlevoix’s Histoire de l’Isle Espagnole ou de Saint-Domingue which was published in 1730–31; it was Le Pers’s dissatisfaction with Charlevoix’s work that inspired him to write a further Histoire, which would remain in manuscript form (the development of these texts has been extensively studied by Jacques de Dampierre).107 The Jesuit Lettres édifiantes et curieuses are another source of correspondence intended for a wide public, and include, for example, the letters of Margat from Saint-Domingue in the first half of the eighteenth century. Missionaries of other orders include Capuchins such as Pacifique de Provins (1588–1648), who left a short 1645 account of a voyage to the Antilles, and the Carmelite Maurile de Saint Michel (1615?– 69), who left a description of his mission to the French colonies in the late 1640s.108 A number of texts exist for which reliable biographical information is lacking, and they have been assembled by Bernard Grunberg et al. in a collection entitled Voyageurs anonymes aux Antilles.109 The editors identify a Capuchin (whom 28

Introduction

they call ‘l’Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’) and a Dominican (‘l’Anonyme de Grenade’) but they consider the identity of the ‘Anonyme de Saint-Vincent’, author of a post-1697 Description de l’île de Saint-Vincent, to remain unclear. Highlighting its similarities with a 1722 manuscript in Latin by the Jesuit Adrien Le Breton, Grunberg et al. speculate that Le Breton may have been a source for the Description.110 Dominicans include André Chevillard, whose account of the implantation of the French colonies includes descriptions of a range of edifying conversions.111 Another Dominican, Godefroy Loyer, claimed that reading Chevillard inspired him to embark on a missionary route that took him to the Caribbean (Grenada and SaintDomingue) for several years, and later to the coast of West Africa at the turn of the eighteenth century. After surviving shipwreck and serious illness, Loyer would eventually return to France, probably in 1706.112 Another Dominican, Raymond Breton, was proficient in the language of the indigenous Carib peoples. Breton arrived as part of an expedition to colonise Guadeloupe in 1635, where he was to remain for much of his eighteen years in the Antilles. He spent a total of five years on the island of Dominica, to which the Caribs had fled following continual conflicts with the French (it appears that Breton attempted to mitigate the violence of French colonists in these conflicts).113 Breton’s Carib–French dictionary was published in 1665, and his manuscripts in French and in Latin were published in a modern edition in 1978.114 Two further Dominican sources are essential to the present study. Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre resided on Guadeloupe from 1640 to 1642 and from 1643 to 1646/47, then on Martinique for a short period before returning to France in 1647 (he also visited the Antilles for a short time as part of a scheme to colonise Grenada in late 1656).115 Two manuscripts attributed to him and dated to 1648 are held by libraries in Paris, the Histoire de la Guadeloupe (Bibliothèque nationale) and the Histoire des Isles de la Guadeloupe (Bibliothèque Mazarine). These are written in the same hand and appear to be copies of the same work, although with occasional variations.116 More significant structural changes were made to Du Tertre’s Histoire générale des Isles de Saint-Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique et autres dans l’Amérique, which was based on these manuscripts and printed in 1654. It was greatly 29

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enlarged and republished as Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François in 1667–71.117 The second printed edition saw the establishment of the French in the Antilles now allocated an entire volume (volume 1), while the description of the slaves of the Antilles was, tellingly, expanded from a mere nine pages in 1654 to well over fifty.118 This constitutes an unparalled source of information about the treatment of the Amerindian and slave inhabitants of the Antilles during this era. We have already had occasion to discuss Jean-Baptiste Labat, the second principal Dominican source in this study. Labat’s Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique is another extensive text which was the fruit of an extended sojourn in the Americas. Labat arrived in Martinique in January 1694 and was to stay until mid-1705; after a voyage to Europe, he appears to have been refused permission to return to Martinique due to tensions with the Governor General of the island.119 Labat was intimately implicated in the plantation economy. His Nouveau Voyage furnishes a wealth of economic data and advice on maximising production, with detailed illustrations of techniques, tools, and plantation space. Labat was preoccupied with the question of efficiency, and is an invaluable source of information about plantation labour. He claimed that two thousand copies of the first Paris edition were published, and a further two thousand in the ‘pirated’ Amsterdam edition of 1724.120 Although he never set foot on African soil, he also edited a five-volume description of West Africa in 1728 which he claimed to have based on the memoirs of an administrator of the Compagnie du Sénégal, André Brue (it has been claimed that most of this content is in fact attributable to the memoirs of a previous administrator, Michel Jajolet de La Courbe).121 Another important source, this time bequeathed by a Protestant, is the Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l’Amérique of Charles de Rochefort (1604–83), which first appeared in 1658.122 Rochefort was accused both of substantial plagiarism (of Du Tertre), and even of never having been to the Caribbean.123 His work went through several editions, with later ones incorporating correspondence from readers, and that of 1665 including two significant illustrations of the production of sugar and of Poincy’s residence in Saint Kitts.124 Rochefort also left a Relation de l’Isle de Tabago (1666) which depicts an idyllic colony in the early stages of plantation.125 Another Huguenot, Jean Barbot, left a journal in 30

Introduction

French in which he relates the purchase of slaves on the African coast in the late 1670s. A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea, based on a later manuscript of Barbot’s, was published in English in 1732.126 A 1694 manuscript description of the Carib people bequeathed by another Protestant, Moïse Caillé de Castres, was published for the first time in 2002. Caillé was for a time a company administrator for the Danish and the Brandenbourg Companies on Saint-Thomas (Virgin Islands) in the 1680s, during which he appears to have been supervisor of a considerable number of slaves assigned to cotton production.127 The seventeenth-century French expeditions to settle coastal South America inspired several printed relations. The testimony of the initiatives commanded by Brétigny (1643–44) and Royville (1652) illustrate their often fraught circumstances. The unpopular Brétigny was imprisoned by colonists in Cayenne, and Royville was murdered on board ship before his expedition arrived in the Americas.128 Those who had participated in these expeditions include a military officer (Laon) and an unpopular curate accused of Jansenism, and worse, Antoine Biet.129 Biet’s first-hand testimony on slavery is mainly restricted to the practice on Barbados; he was forbidden to land on Martinique, and refers his reader to Du Tertre for a description of Guadeloupe, on which he sojourned.130 A third participant in the expeditions to colonise coastal South America, Le Febvre de La Barre, Lieutenant-General of la France Equinoxiale, furnished a Description which was the result of thirteen months in Guyana from 1664–65.131 A 1671 text attributed to Le Febvre de La Barre (hereafter referred to as the ‘Relation of 1671’) recounts the circumstances surrounding the transfer of the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the mid-1660s. The second volume of this Relation includes the Journal du voyage du Sieur Delbée, an account of a French expedition to coastal Africa to buy a substantial cargo of slaves in 1669.132 Delbée’s journal, in turn, integrates an account of the service of a Sieur Du Bourg (who had died on the return journey) for the Compagnie.133 Although it has been consulted in an edition which lies outside the chronology of this study, one prescriptive source, Élie Monnereau’s Le Parfait Indigotier, gives insight about comparative plantation conditions. Begun in 1736, this is a mid-eighteenth-century manual written by a planter on Saint-Domingue who had passed 38 years ‘sur les lieux’ at the time of the second 1765 edition.134 Monnereau 31

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had read Labat, whom he considered an authority on the production of indigo (he had less respect for a number of other well-known sources).135 Other texts are more challenging to qualify in terms of genre. Alexandre Oexmelin (Exquemelin)’s well-known Histoire des avanturiers contains interesting first-hand testimony about the condition of indentured labourers (the author had been one for a time), as well as an account of the existence of the boucaniers (hunters of feral livestock) on early Saint-Domingue.136 A collection of three anonymous Nouvelles de l’Amérique (1678) relate dramatised interactions between black slaves and Spanish masters in continental South America, between French indentured labourers and masters on the islands, or boucaniers hunting on Saint-Domingue. With its ­ improbable plots, it is of interest for stereotyped representations of masters and slaves.137 The Voyages aux côtes de Guinée et en Amérique of a ‘Mr de N***’, printed in Amsterdam in 1719, includes testimony about the purchase of African slaves in Ouidah (in modern Benin) where the narrator claimed to have spent four months, and the sale of 600 slaves in Portobelo (in modern Panama). It contains isolated tales (contes) of questionable provenance and taste, and frequent anti-Catholic diatribes. The author reserves particular ire for the clergy, whom at one stage he depicts intimately examining female slaves for purchase in Portobelo.138 This corpus of printed sources has been accompanied by exploration of archival sources, the most significant of which has been the Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence. The correspondence of the governors and other administrators of colonies includes Saint-Domingue (series C9A); this has proved a rich source of information about labour practices within the colonies. Among the papers in the Collection Moreau de Saint-Méry (F3) are reports of colonial administrators on diverse islands, extracts concerning rebellious slaves, or recommendations for further colonisation. Plan of chapters The first of this book’s six chapters, entitled Narrating servitude, analyses early modern strategies for understanding and depicting practices of slavery. It evaluates the role of biblical and classical intertextuality, and explores the historicising strategies that imposed 32

Introduction

signification on the peoples who inhabited the early colonial environment. It considers potential responses to colonial representations, evaluating what textual strategies and engravings can tell us about their reach, and how they might constitute knowledge and contemplations of the power exercised over other human beings. The second chapter, Slave economies, explores how accounts of encounters in West Africa and the Americas reflect understandings of the nature of enslavement. The environment of the early plantation was thought of as one of the many systems of slavery throughout the world, but one that was quite distinct in how it maximised production. There were also troubling questions about the place of Christianised slaves in this environment. This is followed by a chapter entitled The labouring body, which explores the role of slaves within intense production processes. This analyses the perception that Europeans possessed a unique body of techniques enabling the mastery of production and of time itself. This supposed mastery was belied by practical and moral concerns about the domination of slaves; controlling their corporeality was a source of significant ambiguities. Chapter 4, Spheres of knowledge, moves away from discussion of transtextual and labour discourses to focus on the interactions between populations in the Caribbean. It discusses the coexistence of populations thought to inhabit distinct cultural, religious and linguistic spheres. Here, the question of the slave consciousness is a constant, often troubling interrogation. Chapter 5, Tensions, order, and the body, considers the preoccupation with the ordering and surveillance of the slave within the colony. Despite the development of processes of discipline and corporeal control, this chapter shows that the mastery of the slave was thought of with considerable ambiguity. A final chapter, entitled Society and slaves, explores how accounts of slavery reflected the concept of society in the colonies. There were concerns about the cohesion of a society built on slaves, and anxieties about the internal and external frontiers of the colony. These were manifested in accounts of exclusions, or of alternative forms of society and sociability. One further significant concern was a context in which métissage and manumission determined the nature of colonial society. This will lead to concluding interrogations about collective representations of the slave condition. 33

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Notes 1 The term nègre has generally been left untranslated, or the terms ‘slave’, ‘black slave’ or ‘African’ used according to context. On terminology and the risk of ‘anachronisms’ see April G. Shelford, ‘Race and scripture in the eighteenth-century French Caribbean’, Atlantic Studies, 10:1 (2013), 69–87 (p. 81, note 1). For further reflections on terminology see Sue Peabody, ‘There Are No Slaves in France’: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 141, note 1. 2 Jean-Baptiste Labat [1663–1738], Nouveau Voyage aux Isles de l’Amérique, contenant l’histoire naturelle de ces pays, l’origine, les mœurs, la religion et le gouvernement des habitans anciens et modernes, 6 vols (Paris: Guillaume Cavalier and P.-F. Giffard, 1722); repr. 2 vols (The Hague: Husson et al., 1724); 1722, vol. 1, pp. 145–59. 3 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, pp. 145, 152, 155. 4 ‘ils avaient un assez bon nombre de nègres, ils cultivaient du cacao, faisaient du roucou et élevaient des bestiaux et des volailles’, Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 159. 5 Caroline A. Williams, ed., Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World: People, Products, and Practices on the Move (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 12; on the ‘interaction and co-operation’ in Brazil, see pp. 17–20. 6 See Trevor Burnard and Allan Potofsky, ‘Introduction: the political economy of the French Atlantic World’, in French History: Special Issue, The French Atlantic and the Caribbean (1600–1800), 25:1 (March 2011), 1–8 (p. 6). See also Williams, Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World, pp. 22–26. 7 On Islamic slave routes across the Sahara, see Jacques Heers, Les Négriers en Terres d’Islam: VIIe-XVIe siècle, coll. Tempus (Paris: Perrin, 2003). 8 Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 9 Frédéric Régent, La France et ses esclaves: de la colonisation aux abolitions (1620–1848) (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2007), p. 9; on the uniqueness of questions of ‘colour’ in La Réunion, see pp. 199–201. 10 See Joseph C. Miller, ‘Slaving as historical process: examples from the ancient Mediterranean and the modern Atlantic’ in Constantina Katsari and Enrico Dal Lago, eds, Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 70–102 (p. 93). 11 See Claude d’Abbeville, Histoire de la mission des Pères Capucins

34

Introduction

en l’Isle de Maragnan et terres circonvoisines (Paris: François Huby, 1614). 12 Jean-Pierre Moreau, Les Petites Antilles de Christophe Colomb à Richelieu (1493–1635) (Paris: Karthala, 1992), p. 217. 13 Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre [1610–87], Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, 3 vols (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1667–71), vol. 1, pp. 4–15, 28–31. 14 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 4–7, 20, 63. 15 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 77–81. 16 On population trends see James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 16–18, 43–71; on Saint Kitts, pp. 46–50; on the evolution of Saint-Domingue, p. 65. 17 Philip P. Boucher, France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 116, 167. 18 Pritchard, In Search of Empire, pp. xxi, 16–17; on social practices, p. 73; on climate, pp. 76–77; on ‘transience’, p. 98. 19 Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 73–85 (p. 73). 20 Robert Chaudenson, Des îles, des hommes, des langues: essai sur la créolisation linguistique et culturelle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), revised with Salikoko S. Mufwene and trans. by Sheri Pargman et al. as Creolization of Language and Culture (London: Routledge, 2001); Creolization, pp. 96–123 (pp. 121, 123). 21 Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens; London: University of Georgia Press, 2001), pp. 18–19. 22 For statistics on the use of indentured labourers and their continuing presence in the French Caribbean ‘well into the eighteenth century’ see Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, p. 84. On French indentured labourers in early Saint Kitts, see Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 39–40. On slavery as an ‘Atlantic’ phenomenon, see Philip D. Morgan, ‘The cultural implications of the slave trade: African regional origins, American destinations and New World developments’, in David Eltis and David Richardson, eds, Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade (London; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1997), pp. 122–45. 23 Jean-Baptiste Margat de Tilly, Letter of 27 February 1725 to unnamed Jesuit, in Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, vol. 7 (Paris: J. G. Merigot, 1781), pp. 107–29 (p. 111) and Letter of 20 July 1743 to Procuror General of Missions, pp. 185–255 (p. 186). Two more of Margat’s

35

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letters from Saint-Domingue are published in the same volume: Letter of 20 November 1730 to Père de la Neuville, pp. 130–48; Letter of 2 February 1729 to Père de la Neuville, pp. 149–85. 24 Sue Peabody estimates there were 465,429 slaves on 1789 SaintDomingue, with 30,826 ‘whites’ and 27,548 ‘free coloureds’. Peabody, ‘“A dangerous zeal”: Catholic missions to slaves in the French Antilles, 1635–1800’, French Historical Studies, 25:1 (winter 2002), 53–90 (p. 75). 25 On the proportions between the sexes, see John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 56. 26 Boucher, Tropics of Discontent, p. 164. 27 Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800 (London; New York: Verso, 1997), p. 282. See Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 438–42. 28 On consolidation, see Boucher, Tropics of Discontent, pp. 168–201. The ‘edict of establishment of the Company’ is reproduced in Du Tertre, Histoire, 1671, vol. 3, pp. 43–60. On the steps of political integration see for example Malick W. Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 33–35. 29 Le Code Noir ou Édit du Roy servant de règlement pour le gouvernement et l’administration de justice et la police des Iles françoises de l’Amérique, et pour la discipline et le commerce des nègres et esclaves dans ledit pays (Paris: Veuve Saugrain, 1718); ‘incapables de contracter à l’avenir aucun mariage valable’, article 8, pp. 4–5. 30 Yvan Debbasch, Couleur et liberté: le jeu du critère ethnique dans un ordre esclavagiste, vol. 1: L’Affranchi dans les possessions françaises de la Caraïbe (Paris: Dalloz, 1967), p. 21. On the respective roles of Roman law and consultation with colonists and administrators, see pp. 30–31. 31 On the Capuchins, see Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 58–59, 303–04. On the Dominicans, pp. 71–75. 32 On the suppression of the Jesuits see Peabody, ‘“A dangerous zeal”’, pp. 80–87. 33 Bernard David gives figures of 200 slaves owned by Jesuits and 90 by Dominicans on Martinique at the turn of the eighteenth century. David, ‘L’Histoire religieuse de la Martinique au XVIIe siècle (et documents)’, Annales des Antilles: Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Martinique, 27 (1988–91), 21–75 (p. 36). 34 Mémoire qui regarde les esclaves nègres des isles de la Martinique et de Saint-Domingue, addressed to Cardinal Zondadari (1732), Rome, Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide (ASPF), Scritte

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Riferite nei Congressi America-Antille, vol. 1 (1634–1760), fols 441r–442v. 35 ‘les esclaves regardaient les jésuites comme leurs protecteurs, et les jésuites se regardaient comme leurs défenseurs’, Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles françaises (Basse-Terre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974), p. 285. Pierre Pluchon, Vaudou, sorciers, empoisonneurs de Saint-Domingue à Haïti (Paris: Karthala, 1987), pp. 34–44 (p. 42). 36 Peabody, ‘“A dangerous zeal”’, p. 78. 37 Jean Bodin [1530–96], Les Six Livres de la République (Paris: Jacques Du Puis, 1576); Latin edn as De Republica Libri Sex (Paris: Jacques Du Puis, 1586); trans. into English as The Six Books of a Commonweale by Richard Knolles (London: G. Bishop, 1606); Six Books, p. 32. Knolles’s translation is used in all quotations in English from Bodin in this book, although I have modernised the spelling. 38 Bodin, Six Books, p. 33. 39 Bodin, Six Books, p. 33. 40 Bodin, Six Books, pp. 33–35. 41 Bodin, Six Books, p. 38. 42 ‘l’an MCC les servitudes étaient quasi abolies par tout le monde’, Bodin, Six Livres, p. 43. The English translation gives 1250 as the approximate year when ‘Christians had shaken off from their necks all bondage’, Six Books, p. 40. 43 Bodin, Six Books, p. 42; Peabody, ‘There are no Slaves in France’, p. 12. 44 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), p. 49. For distinctions between European legislations, see Peabody, ‘There are no Slaves in France’, pp. 5–6. 45 David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 22, 24. 46 See notably David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 84–111. For one recent summary, see Patricia Gravatt, L’Église et l’esclavage (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). 47 ‘elle veut bien que d’un esclave on fasse un chrétien’, Jean Mongin [1637–98], Letter of May 1682 to unnamed gentleman from Languedoc, Carcassonne, Médiathèque de Carcassonne Agglo (MdC), MS 73, fol. 82r; letter reprinted in adapted form in L’Évangélisation des esclaves au XVIIe siècle, ed. by Marcel Chatillon, Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 61–62 (1984), 73–125 (p. 76). 48 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative

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Study (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 71–72. 49 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 107. 50 See for example Anthony Pagden, Lords of all the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 87, 100–02. 51 William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans (Bloomington; London: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 41–42. 52 Debbasch, Couleur et liberté, p. 68; on ‘respect’ to whites, see p. 75. 53 Garrigus, Before Haiti, p. 8; Régent, La France et ses esclaves, pp. 192–211. 54 Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2010), pp. 35–36. 55 ‘prétendre les mêmes choses que les autres’, Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, revised by Henri Basnage de Beauval and Jean Brutel de la Rivière, 2nd edn, 4 vols (The Hague: Pierre Husson et al., 1727), vol. 1, entry condition, non-paginated. 56 Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, ‘African ‘slavery’ as an institution of marginality’, in Miers and Kopytoff, eds, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), pp. 3–81 (pp. 14–15). 57 Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 46, 55. 58 Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 7–11. 59 Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 48, 58. 60 Claude Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery: The Womb of Iron and Gold, trans. by Alide Dasnois (London: Athlone Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 13–15. 61 Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, pp. 35–36; emphasis in the original. 62 Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, pp. 100–01. 63 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, p. 51. 64 On honour, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 79, 81; on ‘parasitism’, pp. 334–42 (p. 337). 65 Vincent Brown, ‘Social death and political life in the study of slavery’, in Gad Heumen and Trevor Burnard, Slavery: Critical Concepts in Historical Studies, 4 vols (London: Routledge, 2014), vol. 1: Origins, Varieties of Enslavement and the Slave Trade, pp. 63–83 (pp. 65, 73). 66 Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History: A Global Approach (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 20. 67 Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History, pp. 20–24 (p. 24).

38

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68 Adam R. Beach, ‘The good-treatment debate, comparative slave studies, and the “Adventures” of T.S.’, in Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach, Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 21–35 (pp. 26–27). 69 On crossovers between slaves and ‘indentured servants and transported criminals who were essentially slaves themselves’, see Swaminathan and Beach, introduction, Invoking Slavery, pp. 1–18 (p. 13). 70 See for example Le Clerc’s engraving of a male and female Amerindian in Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 356–57. 71 Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, pp. 8, 11. 72 Antoine de Montchrestien, Traicté de l’Œconomie politique (n.p.: n.pub., [1615]), repr. ed. by Th. Funck-Brentano (Paris: Plon, 1889), pp. 88–89. On Montchrestien as ‘économiste’, see introduction to 1889 edition, pp. x–xii. 73 Michel de Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 215–48; Jean de Léry [1536?–1613?], Histoire d’un voyage en Terre de Brésil, 2nd edn (Geneva: Antoine Chuppin, 1580); repr. ed. by Frank Lestringant (Paris: Libraire Générale Française, 1994). 74 Michel de Montaigne [1533–92], Des Cannibales, in Les Essais, ed. by Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien and Catherine Magnien-Simonin (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), Book 1, Chapter 31, pp. 208–21. 75 De Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’histoire, p. 224. See also Michael Harrigan, ‘Mobility and language in the early modern Antilles’, SeventeenthCentury French Studies, 34:2 (2012), 115–32 (pp. 130–31). 76 De Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’histoire, p. 223. ‘les nations qui habitent ces trois parties du monde, Europe, Asie, et Afrique’, Léry, Histoire, 1994, pp. 381–82. 77 Aside from Lopez de Gomara’s Historia de las Indias referred to by Léry (see de Certeau, L’Ecriture de l’histoire, p. 223; Léry, Histoire, 1994, pp. 381–82), see Sepúlveda’s qualification of the Amerindians (‘nulla retinent rerum gestarum monumenta, praetor tenuem quandam, et obscuram nonnullarum rerum memoriam, picturis quibusdam consignatam, nullas leges scriptas’) during the Valladolid controversies of 1550. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Demócrates Segundo o de las justas causas de la guerra contro los Indios, bilingual Latin–Spanish edn trans. by Angel Losada, 2nd edn (Madrid: Instituto Francisco de Vitoria, 1984), p. 35. 78 On the ‘hesitations and reversals’ that complicate a teleological approach in French history, see Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 83–84. See also Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History, pp. 5–9. 79 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, p. 83.

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80 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, pp. 34–35, 37–39, 387–88. 81 Yun Kyoung Kwon, ‘“Remember Saint-Domingue”: accounts of the Haitian Revolution by refugee planters in Paris and colonial debates under the Restoration, 1814–1825’, in Kate Marsh and Nicola Frith, eds, France’s Lost Empires: Fragmentation, Nostalgia and La Fracture Coloniale (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), pp. 17–30; Catherine Reinhardt, ‘Slavery and commemoration: remembering the French abolitionary decree 150 years later’, in Alec G. Hargreaves, ed., Memory, Empire, and Postcolonialism: Legacies of French Colonialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), pp. 11–36; Nick Nesbitt, ‘A singular revolution’, in Hargreaves, pp. 37–50; Laurent Dubois, ‘The end of the Ancien Régime French empire’, in Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, Postcolonial Thought in the French-speaking World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), pp. 195–204. 82 See, for example, Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles françaises. 83 King focuses on notarial acts from Saint-Domingue in the last quarter of the eighteenth century in his Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, and Garrigus on notarial acts ‘from the 1760s’ onwards. Garrigus, Before Haiti, p. 18. 84 King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, p. 179. 85 Garrigus, Before Haiti, pp. 4, 48–49. 86 See also Blackburn’s discussion on the development of French colonisation which explores several of the authors in the present study, most especially Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre; The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 277–306. 87 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1990). 88 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London; New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 6–7. 89 Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2005), p. xiii. 90 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 15–16. 91 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 22, 24. 92 Dobie, Trading Places, pp. 6, 128. 93 Dobie, Trading Places, p. 11. 94 Dobie, Trading Places, pp. 131–39, 139–46. 95 Dobie, Trading Places, p. 12. 96 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, p. 21. 97 For an analysis of these challenges as a ‘historical problem’ and an illustration of the myriad of such factors, see Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History, pp. 18–29.

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98 Anonymous, MS 590 (L595), Carpentras, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, published as Un flibustier français dans la mer des Antilles 1618–1620, ed. by Jean-Pierre Moreau (Paris: Payot, 2002). 99 Guillaume Coppier, Histoire et Voyage des Indes Occidentales (Lyon: Jean Huguetan, 1645). 100 Jean Mongin, Journal d’un voyage à la Martinique en 1676, Carcassonne, MdC, MS 73, fols 1–31 (I have used the updated pagination for this manuscript which gives 119 folios); reprinted [published as Mangin] in Annales des Antilles, 10 (1962), 35–58. 101 The copies of Mongin’s letters consulted are as follows: Mongin, Letter of September 1676 (to Jesuit Provincial), Carcassonne, MdC, MS 73 (former code Ma 82, inv. no. 2459), fols 32–41 (updated pagination), reprinted in L’Évangélisation, 37–48; Letter of 10 May 1679 (to Antoine Pagez, Jesuit Provincial), Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine (BM), Fonds Chatillon, Ant MS 9, fols 23–39, in L’Évangélisation, 49–72 (an alternative copy exists in MdC, MS 73, fols 51–68); Letter of May 1682 (to Languedocian gentleman), MdC, MS 73, fols 79–119 (updated pagination; pages 73–78 and final pages of this letter are missing), published with modifications in L’Évangélisation, 73–125; Alternative copy of 1682 letter to Languedocian gentleman, Vanves, Archives jésuites de la Province de France (AJPF), Fonds Brotier, MS 185 [fols 1r–9r reprinted in L’Évangélisation, 127–36]; for bibliographical detail, see L’Évangélisation, 6–9. My thanks to the staff of the MdC for generously supplying digital facsimiles of Mongin’s correspondence, and to the staff of AJPF for facilitating access to Fonds Brotier documents. 102 Claude Bréban [1695–1735], Lettre, au Cap Français, île et côte de Saint-Domingue, le 19 de janvier 1732, Bourges, Archives départementales du Cher (AdC), 2F 788. Bréban’s letter begins with folio 2r. My thanks to the staff of the AdC for generously supplying a digital facsimile. Nicole Dyonet, ‘Le Père Bréban, missionnaire berrichon à Saint-Domingue: lettre inédite de janvier 1732’, Bulletin du Centre d’Histoire des espaces atlantiques, 8 (1997), 103–30. References to the edition of the Bulletin held by the BnF (8° G 23098) are given where original material also features; an alternative, more complete version also exists. 103 Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in its Ideological Aspects, 1492–1900 (Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 90–93. 104 ‘[participer] au profit et à la perte qu’il plaira à Dieu d’y envoyer’, see Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 8–11. 105 Jacques Bouton, Relation de l’establissement des François depuis l’an 1635 en l’isle de la Martinique, l’une des Antilles de

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l’Amérique… (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1640). The manuscript (ANOM, F3 41) gives full publication details of the Cramoisy edition and certain sections appear to have been written in a different hand. 106 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, part 1 of Relation des missions de P.P. de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les Isles et dans la Terre Ferme de l’Amérique méridionale (Paris: Sébastien and Gabriel Cramoisy, 1655), Relation de la Terre Ferme, part 2 (separate pagination). 107 Jean-Baptiste Le Pers, Mémoires pour l’histoire de l’Isle St Domingue, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), MS Fr 8990; Histoire de l’Isle de St Domingue, BnF, MS Fr 8991 and Histoire civile, morale et naturelle de l’Isle de Saint-Domingue, BnF, MS Fr 8992 (MS Fr 8992 after 1731). Manuscripts Fr 8990 and Fr 8991 were in part the sources of Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, Histoire de l’Isle Espagnole ou de Saint-Domingue, écrite particulièrement sur des mémoires manuscrits du P. Jean-Baptiste Le Pers…, 2 vols (Paris: Jacques Guerin, 1730–31) ; see Dampierre’s Essai sur les sources des Antilles françaises (1492–1664) (Paris: A. Picard, 1904), pp. 157–67. On the date of Le Pers’s arrival in Saint-Domingue, see Dampierre, p. 158, footnote 5. Le Pers and Charlevoix, Correspondence and other documents, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 171; Le Pers, Histoire de l’Isle de St Domingue, livre second (incomplete), AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 187; Le Pers, Portrait ou miroir de St Domingue, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 188 (1726? See fol. 22r). 108 Pacifique de Provins, Brève Relation du voyage des îles de l’Amérique (Paris: Nicolas et Jean de la Coste, 1646) and Maurile de Saint Michel, Voyage des Isles Camercanes en l’Amérique (Le Mans: Hierôme Olivier, 1652); repr. in Missionnaires capucins et carmes aux Antilles, ed. by Bernard Grunberg, Benoît Roux and Josiane Grunberg (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013). 109 Bernard Grunberg, Benoît Roux and Josiane Grunberg, Voyageurs anonymes aux Antilles, coll. Corpus Antillais (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013), composed of ‘Anonyme de Carpentras’ [=Anonymous, Bibliothèque Inguimbertine de Carpentras, see note 98], Relation d’un voyage infortuné, pp. 17–111; ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’, Relation des îles de Sainct Christofle, Gardelouppe et la Martinicque (1641–42), pp. 113–32; ‘Anonyme de Grenade’, L’Histoire de l’île de la Grenade en Amérique (1659–60), pp. 133–263; ‘Gentilhomme écossais’, Relatione delle isole americane, pp. 265–78; ‘Anonyme de Saint-Vincent’, Description de l’île de Saint-Vincent, pp. 279–325. Information on dates and circumstances of publication is based on the editors’ introduction, pp. 5–13; the names given by the editors to these authors are used in the present book.

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110 Grunberg et al., Voyageurs anonymes, pp. 7–10. For the ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’ the editors note the hypothesis of Jacques PetitjeanRoget according to whom the manuscript was based on ‘notes edited by La Grange-Fromenteau [lieutenant-general of Saint Kitts]’, p. 9. On Le Breton [1662–1736] as potential source, see p. 13. Le Breton, De insulis Karaybicis relationes manuscriptae (1722), Paris, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Ms 939, trans. by Robert Lapierre as ‘Relation historique sur l’île Caraïbe de Saint-Vincent’, Annales des Antilles, 25 (1982), 35–118. 111 André Chevillard [16  ?–1682], Les Desseins de son Éminence de Richelieu pour l’Amérique, ce qui s’y est passé de plus remarquable depuis l’établissement des colonies (Rennes: Jean Durand, n.d. [1659 or after]). 112 Godefroy Loyer, Relation du voyage du royaume d’Issyny, Côte d’Or, Païs de Guinée, en Afrique (Paris: Seneuze and Morel, 1714), pp. 1–2. 113 On Breton’s objections to early French violence in Guadeloupe, see Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, p. 88. 114 Raymond Breton [1609–79], Dictionnaire caraïbe-françois (Auxerre: G. Bouquet, 1665); Relations de l’île de la Guadeloupe, vol. 1 (BasseTerre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1978). For a comprehensive biography of Breton, see Relations, pp. 9–24; on his five years on Dominica, see p. 206. 115 For a biography of Du Tertre, see Dampierre, Essai sur les sources, pp. 108–14. 116 Histoire de la Guadeloupe, BnF, Nouv. Acq. Franç. 9319; Histoire des Isles de la Guadeloupe, BM, MS Ant 7. My thanks to Dr Goran Proot for facilitating the consultation of the Mazarine manuscript in electronic format. On the dating of the BnF manuscript see Dampierre, Essai sur les sources, pp. 105–06. 117 Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Isles de Saint-Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique et autres dans l’Amérique (Paris: Jacques and Emmanuel Langlois, 1654). Annotated edition in Bibliothèque Mazarine, 4° 30604 [Res]. 118 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1654, pp. 473–81; 1667, vol. 2, pp. 483–539. 119 See the anonymous letter entitled G. B. Labat, contro il Governatore (1705), Rome, Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu (ARSI), Asst. Gall. 106, fols 365r–366v (fol. 365r). 120 Labat makes the claim in his Voyages du P. Labat de l’Ordre des Frères Prêcheurs en Espagne et en Italie, 8 vols (Paris: J.-B. and Charles J.-B. Delespine, 1730), vol. 1, preface, p. ii. 121 Labat, Nouvelle Relation de l’Afrique occidentale, 5 vols (Paris: Guillaume Cavelier, 1728), vol. 1, p. 47; on La Courbe as a source see Prosper Cultru in Michel Jajolet de La Courbe, Premier Voyage du

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Sieur de La Courbe fait à la coste d’Afrique en 1685 (Paris: Champion and Larose, 1913), introduction, pp. v–viii. 122 Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l’Amérique (Rotterdam: Arnould Leers, 1658); 2nd edn (Rotterdam: Arnout Leers, 1665); repr. 2 vols (Lyon: Christofle Fourmy, 1667). I have preferred my own translation to John Davies’s [as The History of the Caribby Islands (London: Thomas Dring and John Starkey, 1666)]; Davies excludes letters and elements such as the description of Poincy’s residence. 123 For the accusation of Rochefort’s plagiarism see Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, preface, non-paginated [1–2/5 pages]. For a biography of Rochefort see introduction to his Histoire, 2 vols, ed. by Bernard Grunberg, Benoît Roux, Josiane Grunberg (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012), vol. 1, pp. 9–19; Labat makes both the accusation of plagiarism, and that Rochefort had never been to the Caribbean, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, preface, pp. xi–xii. 124 The illustration of sugar production is in Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 332–33; that of Poincy’s residence between pp. 52 and 53. 125 Charles de Rochefort, Relation de l’Isle de Tabago ou de la nouvelle Oüalcre, l’une des isles Antilles de l’Amérique (Paris: Louis Billaine, 1666). 126 Jean Barbot [1655–1713?], Journal d’un voyage de traite en Guinée, à Cayenne et aux Antilles fait par Jean Barbot en 1678–1679, ed. by Gabriel Debien, Marcel Delafosse, Guy Thilmans, Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, 40, series B, 2 (April 1978), 235–395; biographical information pp. 237–39; a 1688 manuscript in French written by Barbot has been translated into English in Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa 1678–1712, ed. by P. E. H. Hair, Adam Jones, Robin Law, 2 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1992). It was augmented and published as A Description of the Coasts of North and South Guinea in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, 6 vols (London: John Walthoe et al., 1732), vol. 5, pp. 1–588. 127 Moïse Caillé de Castres, De Wilde ou les Sauvages Caribes Insulaires d’Amérique (1694) (Fort de France: Conseil Général de la Martinique, 2002). For an outline of Caillé’s biography, see the study by J.-C. Germain in Caillé de Castres, De Wilde, pp. 14–54; on Caillé’s role as commandeur, p. 31. 128 On Brétigny’s ‘tyranny’ see Du Tertre, Histoire, 1671, vol. 3, p. 11. 129 J. de Laon, Sieur d’Aigremont, Relation du voyage des François fait au Cap du Nord en Amérique (Paris: Edmé Pepingué, 1654); Antoine Biet [1620–16 ?], Voyage de la France Equinoxiale en l’Isle de Cayenne entrepris par les François en l’année MDCLII (Paris: François Clouzier, 1664). On Biet’s supposed Jansenism, p. 302.

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130 Biet, Voyage, p. 312. 131 Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre [1622–88], Description de la France Equinoctiale, cy-devant appellée Guyanne et par les Espagnols, El Dorado (Paris: Jean Ribou, 1666). 132 Joseph-Antoine Le Febvre de La Barre (?), Relation de ce qui s’est passé dans les Isles et Terre-Ferme de l’Amérique pendant la dernière guerre avec l’Angleterre … avec un Journal du dernier voyage du S. de la Barre en la Terre-Ferme, et Isle de Cayenne … le tout recueilly des mémoires des principaux officiers qui ont commandé en ces pays, par I.C.S.D.V., 2 vols (Paris: Gervais Clouzier, 1671). The Journal du voyage du Sieur Delbée, vol. 2, pp. 347–493. The authorship of the Relation has also been attributed to J. de Clodoré [16?–1731] in Catalogue général des livres imprimés de la Bibliothèque nationale: auteurs, 231 vols (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1897–1981), vol. 30, p. 51; Le Febvre de La Barre is said to be the author in Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, preface, p. xii. 133 Delbée, in Le Febvre de La Barre (?), Relation, vol. 2, pp. 386–87. 134 Élie Monnereau, Le Parfait Indigotier ou description de l’indigo (Paris: Aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1748; repr. Amsterdam; Marseille: Jean Mossy, 1765) [1765 edition consulted]; p. 112, footnote (a); p. 186. 135 Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, p. 24; on Labat, see p. X. 136 Alexandre Oexmelin (Exquemelin) [1646–1717], Histoire des avanturiers qui se sont signalez dans les Indes, 2 vols (Paris: Jacques Le Febvre, 1686); 2nd edn as Histoire des avanturiers flibustiers, 2 vols (1699). 137 Nouvelles de l’Amérique ou le Mercure amériquain, où sont contenues trois histoires véritables arrivées de notre temps (Rouen: François Vaultier le Jeune, 1678); Histoire de Don Diego de Rivera, pp. 5–115 ; Histoire de Mont-Val, pp. 116–89; Le Destin de l’homme, ou les aventures de Don Bartelemi de la Cueba, Portugais, pp. 190–267. 138 Mr de N***, Voyages aux côtes de Guinée et en Amérique (Amsterdam: Étienne Roger, 1719), pp. 70–71, 213–14.

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1  Narrative and servitude

This chapter engages with the most fundamental implications of the texts and images that reflect forms of slavery around the Atlantic. It is concerned with such questions as the reasons why, and in what contexts, practices of slavery were written about in the first place. It analyses the tools that were available for understanding Atlantic slavery, within France and in the encounter with African and American peoples. It also explores what textual and graphic strategies can tell us about knowledge of slavery in France, and about responses to practices of servitude. What one is immediately struck by is the apparent discretion about such practices. That slavery was infrequently the subject of narrative has been observed in diverse social and cultural contexts. For Robert W. Fogel, the ‘acceptance’ of slavery characterised three millennia of thinking by ‘virtually every major statesman, philosopher, theologian, writer and critic’ until ‘the end of the seventeenth century’; Fogel characterises this as thinking that ‘neither excused, condoned, pardoned, nor forgave the institution’ because it ‘did not have to’.1 Peter Garnsey nuances this judgement in a survey of antique slave theory, pointing out that while there were ‘many texts that take slavery for granted’, there were ‘some (few) [that attacked the] institution’ or its ‘abuses or mismanagement’; he sees in this ‘a suspicion that they reflect the moral anxieties and tensions of a slave-owning class.’2 Those studies which acknowledge such ‘absences’ in French literature principally focus on the Enlightenment and afterwards. Christopher L. Miller considers the philosophes as often ‘complicit’ 46

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or even ‘indifferent’ to slavery; he sees them as reflecting a ‘clear conscience’ in French culture, and even amongst traders for ‘every minute of the three hundred years that the triangular trade operated’.3 Madeleine Dobie nuances Miller’s argument, postulating that moral ‘reluctance’ about slavery existed, and considering the ‘silence surrounding colonial slavery as being symptomatic of a process of displacement’.4 Accounts of slavery in the early modern French Atlantic demonstrate ‘acceptance’ on certain levels, and interrogations in others (in fact, as later chapters will indicate, even some slave traders had a ‘conscience’, although it did not stop them trading in slaves). There were certainly questions about what were thought to be abuses in slavery (and long before the end of the 1600s). A discreet illustration of this can be seen in comparison of the two 1648 manuscripts of the Histoire [des Isles] de la Guadeloupe attributed to Du Tertre. The preface of the Bibliothèque nationale manuscript promises that the two final chapters of Part 5 will discuss the planters and slaves of the French colonies. However, these do not actually feature in the text; Dampierre suggests that these chapters were ‘violently ripped out’ because of their criticism of the colonists (and that the volume was stolen and passed on to the Protestant Charles de Rochefort).5 The preface of the Bibliothèque Mazarine manuscript is identical to that of the Bibliothèque Nationale, except for one paragraph, that outlining the contents of Part 5. The Mazarine manuscript indicates that the indigenous peoples are the subject of Part 5, and it makes no mention at all of either colonists or African slaves.6 That both prefaces are otherwise so similar means that one must be a copy of the other (or hypothetically, that they were even copied from a third manuscript), yet one preface promises chapters that do not ultimately feature in the text, and the other differs from it solely in the lines concerning these ‘missing’ chapters. Little more can be said about the evolution of these two manuscripts (or ultimately, which of them was written first). They do however illustrate in the most physical of ways that writing about planters and slaves during early colonisation was not ‘indifferent’; such writing may have been resisted, and an author may have been acutely aware of this resistance even at manuscript stage. However, the conditions through which slavery was ‘accepted’, or instead understood through a radically unfamiliar moral lens, must be situated within a wider complex of socio-cultural relations. 47

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These relations were developing within the early Atlantic environment, and were the background in which accounts of slave existence were produced. They conditioned what it was that would be significant to a narrative, hinting at conditions for slavery’s ‘absence of representation’ which go beyond the ethical.7 Slaves and slave labour were understood in a web of unfamiliar human relationships. Witness the factum sent by Clodoré, the outgoing governor of Martinique, to Colbert (Plaintes et griefs présentés à Monseigneur de Colbert), in which he details the difficulties encountered at the end of his tenure in 1668. One of these related to the violence suffered by a slave at the hands of the high-ranking Le Febvre de La Barre. As Clodoré put it, ‘two days before my departure he encountered one of my slaves, who was keeping my horse beside the door of the Assembly [‘Auditoire’], [and] he set about striking him’. The incident was one of a series of griefs suffered by Clodoré, and he followed it by complaining about an accusation of ‘insolence’ directed at him in public by the same Le Febvre de La Barre. Yet the marginal note which summarises both incidents refers only to Le Febvre de La Barre’s ‘injurious words’ (‘paroles injurieuses’). This indicates their relative importance; what was outrageous about striking a slave was the offence to Clodoré, and it was far less serious than a public ‘insult’ (‘insulte’). What mattered was that, to paraphrase Patterson, a master’s honour had been slighted.8 However obliquely, the vast majority of early French accounts of European settlement in the Caribbean reflect the presence of slave labour to some extent.9 They reflect socio-cultural or socioeconomic milieux or status, but they clearly do much more than this. It is questions concerning knowledge of (and responses to) slavery that are the subject of this first chapter. It evaluates, first, questions of authorship and how the form of colonial narratives reflected human relationships in the colonies. This is followed by an exploration of the theoretical corpus and body of narratives in which practices of slavery were traditionally understood, and of the new responses that were engendered by Atlantic slaveries. A third part of this discussion analyses how the act of writing the histoire imparted a new significance to human interactions within the colonial enterprise. This leads on to explorations of how knowledge about the colonies, and about slaves, circulated amongst readers in French, and of the significance of human space in textual representations of the colonies. A final discussion will 48

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suggest how we might read images of the interactions of planters and slaves in the early colony. Colonial narratives: questions of form and recognition The form and titles of early modern accounts of the colonies illustrate their diverse preoccupations. There were letters, descriptions, relations and histories, with the explicit affirmation of their genre (in the title, for example) hinting at the way they were intended to be received by readers. There are hints that such texts had diverse functions (they might inform, edify and entertain, for example). Many were preoccupied with the success of religious or commercial initiatives rather than with the legitimacy or practice of colonial labour. In this context, the ultimate ‘authorship’ of colonial narratives might be a multi-layered construction. They could be written individually or collaboratively; our knowledge of the extent of editorial influence or shared authorship must frequently remain speculative, but that levels of collaboration occurred is often a possibility. There were further conditions that determined the form of the narrative. A distinct biblical intertextuality could characterise narratives from both the Catholic and Protestant traditions.10 The narrator was a construction which was often intended to speak to readers in a recognisable cultural and religious milieu. The polemical context of early colonial settlement further shaped colonial representations. A narrator might speak on behalf of a group or defend individual interests (in, for example, accounts of conflicts such as Clodoré’s Plaintes et griefs). These are factors that complicate the extent to which the narrator can be considered a witness. We read about slavery in letters, journals, histories and missionary narratives. Each prioritises the ‘empirical’ in different ways; in none is there any such thing as a simple reflection of a social ‘reality’. Acknowledging the complexity of the colonial context and the variety of narrative reflections of slavery can enable us to assess what such texts tell us about shared responses to its practices. A comparison between two very different texts, the anonymous Nouvelles de l’Amérique and Du Tertre’s Histoire, will illustrate the challenges surrounding genre. The first is a collection of tales set, for the most part, in the Spanish and French Americas. These 49

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tales are characterised by rapid changes in fortune, by the narrator’s privileged knowledge of ostensibly secret encounters, and by insight into the emotions of certain protagonists. The second, the Histoire, is the fruit of years of missionary work in the Caribbean. It bases much of its description of the environment and the inhabitants of the Antilles on empirical apprehension. It also has recourse to documentation and to witness testimony.11 Du Tertre (as with Labat and others) has been considered an authoritative source, in studies from Debien’s magistral Les Esclaves aux Antilles françaises, or studies of the development of the sugar industry, up to authoritative studies of ‘political economy’ or even tropical disease. This demonstrates the perception of the ‘historical’ value of the work, and its potential use as a source of data.12 One historical study hints that the use of Du Tertre in this manner is in part a consequence of the dearth of other sources, a tellingly circular demonstration of how text is used to understand the past.13 However, classifying the Nouvelles and Du Tertre’s Histoire as, respectively, ‘fiction’ (or ‘literary’) and ‘factual’ (or ‘historical’) is not clear-cut. The three Nouvelles, according to the title, are histoires véritables. To recognise them as véritables, the reader had to recognise a structure of relationships between human beings and their socio-cultural environment(s) (however improbable the events they recount). To the extent that they reflect the understanding of human relationships which was once shared within a certain milieu, they can be considered ‘historical’. Conversely, a twentyfirst-century reader will at times struggle to recognise the empirical import of Du Tertre’s histoire of the settlement of the Caribbean, with its edifying anecdotes, moral exempla and explicitly ‘extraordinary’ occurrences.14 Thinking about these anecdotes, somewhat uncomfortably, as digressions from the more recognisably ‘historical’ empirical descriptions would be to neglect what they can tell us about the role of these narratives in early modern culture, and about the place of the slave within Caribbean societies. Such considerations lend fluidity to the distinction between both sides of the ‘historically situated literary interpretation’, to use Garraway’s term.15 Colonial-era narratives can, first, be said to be ‘historically situated’ in the way their authors or editors situate them in time. They are, for the most part, dated or related chronologically to other, datable, significant events. They are situated in place (how recognisable that place was, for those many readers who 50

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had never crossed the Atlantic, might be the object of a further discussion). We can also consider them to be ‘historically situated’ for what they can tell us about the interactions between peoples, and between peoples and their environment, at a remove of centuries. The extent to which these texts lend themselves to a ‘literary’ interpretation is also debatable. Once more, part of this difficulty lies in how we classify certain texts. Labat’s Nouveau Voyage is one such case. There are sections which contain a profusion of data about the production of cash crops, and which might well be assimilated to the content of a planter’s handbook; these might be thought to be prescriptive (and therefore to be of ‘historical’ import). However, such traits as the focus on the character of individuals and concessions to style in the Nouveau Voyage might also be assumed to be of ‘literary’ import. A further difficulty with considering many early descriptions of the colonies as ‘literary’ texts – with the implication that they are somehow ahistorical – is that it would underestimate the extent to which they were considered to contribute to knowledge. The editors of the ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’’s early-1640s Relation have proposed that the manuscript was both intended for reading by a director of the Compagnie des îles de l’Amérique and ultimately for publication afterwards.16 An article by François Regourd has demonstrated the importance of Du Tertre, Labat’s predecessor, in circulating ‘colonial knowledge’ in France within prestigious readerships during his own lifetime.17 Certain types of information could enter into circulation with impressive rapidity; from Saint-Domingue, Margat could respond in a letter of November 1730 to an ornithological description he considered erroneous, which had appeared in the Mémoires de Trévoux in 1729.18 Given the variety of ways these texts may be read, they might best be considered as artefacts that reflect human encounters and coexistence to diverse degrees. These are narratives which focus variously on a geographical displacement, on a locus, on human interactions, or on unfamiliar populations. The interest of accounts of displacement or settlement can be seen in the way terms such as Voyage or Histoire were put forward in their titles. They were intended to be received in diverse ways. A majority of texts claim to faithfully represent the colonial environment or human interactions for diverse ‘functional’ needs, and a few hearken back to fictional strategies and appear to be intended for leisure purposes. These are 51

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provisional, fluid distinctions; ultimately, our knowledge of the way contemporaries received colonial-era narratives must, by necessity, remain incomplete. The suspicion surrounding travellers’ tales was proverbial, and the manner in which an early modern reader apprehended testimony is open to interrogation.19 What can be done is to think about the kind of human interactions that are depicted in these narratives, and how they reflect the slave society. Using three categories, the social, the ecological (or using a term perhaps more reflective of early modern concerns, the ‘circa-human’) and the religious may help to clarify this. The first set of social relationships consists in the reflections of the multiple interactions between human actors in colonial societies. Narratives of colonisation were the products of significant permutations in human societies; they are, in their concerns, fundamentally anthropocentric.20 They were produced with at least an awareness of the socio-cultural milieu by which they would be received. These texts also appealed to shared understandings of the socio-economic realm. Rather than the explicit identification with a socio-economic class or cultural milieu, such shared understandings can be seen in the recognisability of social interactions and, of course, of labour. Colonial accounts testify to shared comprehensions of labour, and they also manifest discretion and even silences about certain forms that are notable to a later reader. The reasons for such narrative silences are various; they range from simply avoiding the superfluous (not recounting what was already familiar), up to the more ambivalent forms of discretion that will be the focus of later chapters in this book. The ‘social’ domain is also, by definition, the focus of the polemics that will be discussed in more depth further on in this chapter. Polemics emphasised human agency, and particularly that of the higher-status individuals in whom power was concentrated. The implications of this for lower-status or marginalised individuals will be clear. In polemical narratives, certain actors are significant, and others far less so. Minor actors (often of a less prestigious social status) are differentiated to a lesser degree; some are indistinguishable from one another, and some relegated to the merest of presences in the narrative. As the fate of Clodoré’s slave indicates, this was very often the place of those bound to servitude. Relegating the slave to the margins of the narrative because of such socio-cultural, socio-economic or polemical factors is, conversely, 52

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extremely significant for understanding his or her condition within the slave society. The ‘ecological’, or ‘circa-human’ domain reflects the ways human beings understood their relationships to their ‘surroundings’, or what lay beyond their immediate interactions with one another. The demand for information about the plants and animals of the Americas, and the importance of accelerated forms of production, made this a central preoccupation of colonial accounts. It can be seen in Rochefort’s Relation de l’Isle de Tabago, which describes, in positive terms, the impact of a burgeoning plantation society on a rapidly changing ecology. On the frontiers of the early French colonies, the ecology also remained very much unmastered; how it could intrude on the human order is evident in the reports of the significant consequences of disease and food shortages. There was a fundamental ambiguity in the new understanding of the ecology: there was confidence in a controlled, productive terrain, even as this terrain was surrounded by unmastered, liminal zones (and this is not to mention the occurrence of serious, unforeseen climatic events). There was, of course, a third domain of relationships, beyond the ‘social’ (‘human’) and the ecological (the ‘circa-human’) in which slavery was understood. This was permeated with religion, or the ‘supra-human’ (given how central religion was to early modern existence, this term is approximate). Scripture, as the following pages will demonstrate, informed European understandings of human relationships in the encounters with other Europeans and with non-Christians. It furnished precedents and paradigms for the understanding of servitude. Religion also made events beyond the ‘human’ and the ‘circa-human’ comprehensible; it gave meaning to signs and unexpected interventions, and it was ultimately the teleology against which human beings engaged with one another or with their environment. Colonial-era texts served diverse purposes and reflected human interactions within diverse milieux. Nonetheless, the social, ‘circahuman’ and religious universe they depict can be very instructive about the complex of relationships in which European settlers and slaves were imagined. New forms of coexistence between populations developed, which were also determined by the environment in which these populations lived. Human interactions were never imagined in isolation, however. They were given meaning by a textual corpus inherited from a shared European past. 53

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The heritage of slavery French accounts of early Atlantic slavery drew on a range of discourses in recognising and understanding its practices. These discourses could influence the most fundamental aspects of the depiction of the slave. A pool of secondary narratives also informed the understanding of slavery. There were, no doubt, oral tales which were shared in the spaces of early modern sociability, and which shaped collective perceptions. Before the settlement of the Antilles, slavery was understood principally through Scripture or through the lens of Ancient Greece or Rome, through accounts of the contemporary enslavement of Christians in the Barbary States, or Iberian forms, particularly in the New World.21 Certain privileged narratives formed a significant strand in the cultural capital on which the understanding of slavery was based. Classic studies such as that of David Brion Davis have stressed that slavery was enmeshed in a web of ‘associations and precedents, embodied in Holy Scripture, in the works of philosophers and divines, in the corpora of Jewish and Roman law’.22 French accounts of African and Caribbean slavery demonstrate a variety of responses to the classical, biblical and jurisprudential corpus. Some ambiguity in French attitudes towards familiar discourses can be seen in relation to the Graeco-Roman tradition. Aristotle’s natural slave theory is the most significant theoretical formulation.23 He characterised the slave as a ‘live article of property’ who ‘wholly belongs to the master’, in a natural system in which ‘authority and subordination’ were ‘conditions not only inevitable but also expedient’ to existence.24 For those, he wrote, who were slaves ‘by nature’, and who ‘[participated] in reason so far as to apprehend it but not to possess it’, ‘to be governed by this kind of authority [was] advantageous’.25 Aristotle also acknowledged the existence of a ‘conventional right’ to enslave captives, which was considered to be ‘monstrous’ by ‘many jurists’ because it was based on force.26 He distinguished this from natural slavery; while natural slavery created a ‘community of interest and friendship between slave and master in cases when they have been qualified by nature for these positions’, in that of ‘law and … constraint of force the opposite is the case’.27 The Aristotelian theory of slavery had been one key strand in the mid-sixteenth-century controversies concerning the rights over the 54

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indigenous peoples in the Spanish domains. During the debates at Valladolid in 1550, it was essential to the humanist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s justifications of Spanish colonisation.28 The response in the French context was distinct. It was, for Rushforth, to suffer ‘widespread rejection’ in French intellectual and legal circles in the decades immediately preceding the arrival of the French on Saint Kitts.29 Those Frenchmen who had been resident on the islands, and who engaged with the theory of natural slavery (such as Du Tertre and Mongin), were discreet. Du Tertre is illustrative, acknowledging the existence of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of slavery (or at least, of enslaving Christians), a practice criticised by ‘many people, more pious than knowledgeable’.30 However, as David Brion Davis points out, he deliberately avoided the question of the legality of servitude, and he distinguished his history from the work of the jurisconsulte.31 Du Tertre does explicitly state of the slaves of the Antilles that one might ‘apply [to them] the definition Aristotle gives of slaves, when he calls them the instruments of their masters’. However, this was part of a critique of the rigorous labour slaves were forced to carry out, and of the intense fatigue this caused.32 His repeated assertions of the ‘stupidity’ of the slaves, which will be discussed in Chapter 4, certainly resonate with the Aristotelian model. However, as the same chapter will indicate, Du Tertre shared with many other early commentators a conception of the mental faculties that allowed for their elevation, though under quite distinct conditions. The classical tradition was also a source of exemplary narratives about slavery. A half-century before the settlement of the Antilles, Bodin understood the exploitation or excessive punishment of slaves principally through Plutarch and Seneca.33 Seneca’s depiction of the master–slave relationship, in his Epistle 47 to Lucilius, was frequently referred to during this era. In this letter, Seneca counselled a relationship between slave and master based on respect rather than fear, and condemned the excessive duties demanded by Roman masters and the ‘cruel and inhuman conduct’ which included treating slaves as beasts of burden (iumenta). Slaves, he wrote, ‘sprang from the same stock’ (semina) as their masters and were, like them, mortal, and the fortune (fortuna) which made one person a slave could well humble his master. Treating slaves badly had, he noted, given rise to an adage (proverbium): ‘totidem hostes esse quot servos’ (‘as many enemies as you have slaves’). If a master 55

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treated his slaves humanely, even ‘affably’, he would instead inspire great loyalty from them.34 The adage Seneca referred to (‘totidem hostes esse quot servos’) struck a chord with early modern commentators about slavery. For Bodin, this ‘ancient proverb’ illustrated the true nature of the relationship between a master and his slaves, and for the moralist Pierre Charron in 1601, it showed the rebellious potential of slaves. It was a reference for two late sixteenth-century jurisconsults (Husan and Buonacossa) in a learned treatise about servitude.35 Decades later, during the settlement of the Caribbean, Du Tertre returned to Seneca as a source of maxims about slave behaviour, including (as Du Tertre transcribed it) ‘totidem esse hostes, quot servos’.36 Actualising the Latin text in this manner implied the continuing recognition of a social relationship within slavery. It seemed to have a perennial quality that was recognised within Caribbean slavery, in spite of radical differences with the kind of domestic servitude described by Seneca. Counsel about the governance of African slaves (and the limits to the power of the master) might be found within the precepts furnished by the master and slaves of Ancient Rome. The diversity of thinking about slavery within early modern Christianity is a subject that has generated a wide literature, and only the principal strands can be outlined here. What significant studies have repeatedly stressed is the importance of sin to understanding concepts of slavery. Patterson, highlighting the centrality to Christian thought of redemption from ‘spiritual slavery’, identifies two ‘fundamentally different symbolic interpretations’ of the crucifixion. The first, he writes, is the ‘conservative’ explanation that Christ ‘paid with his own life for the sin that led to … ­spiritual enslavement’, and which implied that Christ ‘became [the] new master’ of the sinner. The second relies on the view that the slave was ‘someone who by choosing physical life had given up his freedom’; Christ had ‘annulled’ this enslavement and ‘gave his own life so the sinner might live and be free’.37 Patterson sees the first interpretation as having prevailed in Christianity, leading to the secular ‘exclusion’ and spiritual ‘inclusion’ of slaves in, for example, the ‘symbolic representation of Latin American slavery’.38 David Brion Davis has described the heritage of slavery from a medieval Christianity which ‘accepted slavery in principle’; if, he writes, Christian thought was marked by tensions, these were ‘contain[ed]’ by the ‘doctrine of 56

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original sin’.39 He writes that ‘at the time of America’s conquest, the Christian view of slavery accommodated a series of balanced dualisms’, that Christianity saw slavery as ‘contrary to the ideal realm of nature, but … a necessary part of the world of sin’, and the slave as ‘inwardly free … but in things e­ xternal … a mere chattel’.40 This importance of the doctrine of original sin can still be seen at the beginning of the eighteenth century in France, where it could be used to justify the purchase and sale of slaves in Africa. One theological exploration of questions surrounding usury explains that it was sin which was the ‘cause of the difference in status [‘états’] that the law of nations had established’; even though all human beings would be ‘born free’ in their prelapsarian state, they were now subject to temporal laws and could be bought without ‘inhumanity’.41 A fundamental source for the jurisprudential corpus was the body of texts assembled under the emperor Justinian in the early sixth century, the Corpus Iuris Civilis.42 It was, for Alan Watson, to be the ‘inevitable model’ for French slave law, given the absence of such models in a France from which slavery had ‘disappeared … long before the discovery of the New World’.43 The Institutes (a key text intended for students) distinguished between natural law (‘ius naturale’), which applied to ‘man [and] … likewise to all other animals’, the law of nations (‘ius gentium’) or the ‘law that natural reason appoints for all mankind’, and the civil law (‘ius civile’) particular to a ‘community’ (‘populus’).44 The ‘ius gentium’ was a response to ‘human necessity’; it was behind ‘almost all contracts’, and behind the ‘captivity and servitude’ inflicted on those defeated in wars. The Institutes also defined slavery as a phenomenon that was contrary to ‘natural right’ (‘contra naturam’), and that resulted from the ‘ius gentium’.45 There are two strands of the jurisprudential corpus that must be stressed. The first is the existence of a tradition that defined what it was to be a slave. The Institutes divided people into free (‘liberi’) and slaves (‘servi’), defined how one could become a slave (through birth, captivity, or selling oneself), and circumscribed the legal existence of slaves in making them Alieni iuris. The slave could own nothing, and was in the ‘power (‘potestas’) of a master who, if liable for punishment if he himself ‘inflict[ed] any extraordinary punishment upon [his] slave’, ultimately still had the ‘power of life and death’ over him or her.46 Those French commentators 57

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who witnessed Atlantic slavery rarely refer directly to Roman jurisprudence, and Du Tertre’s refusal to engage with it may even be indicative; as David Brion Davis writes, the ‘revival’ of the practice in the Americas ‘gave a peculiarly abstract character to discussions governed by the Justinian Code’.47 The Corpus Iuris Civilis was, nonetheless, a source that defined the central concepts and relationships within slavery, and that (as later paragraphs will demonstrate) would still be authoritative at the turn of the eighteenth century. The second strand has been illustrated in Mary Nyquist’s formulation of the ‘war slavery doctrine’ as manifested in the Roman tradition. Noting the ‘highly tendentious etymology’ in the Institutes that attributed the origin of the term ‘servus’ (‘slave’) to the verb ‘servare’ (‘to preserve’), Nyquist writes that the ‘[location of] ­slavery’s origins in warfare’ is ‘often conflated with the power of life and death held by the slave master’. She sees this as a connection ‘implicit in many texts … both ancient and early modern’, and which ultimately characterises the ‘slaveholder’s disciplinary power’ as ‘arbitrarily’ ‘exercised as a means of letting live’.48 Although Nyquist focuses on classical and early modern English rather than French sources (with the exception of Bodin), she highlights a number of important reflections of Roman jurisprudence in early modern thinking about slavery. In drawing attention to the importance of the ‘implicit’ in such reflections, she alerts us to the entrenchment of Roman jurisprudence in European thought. She also prefigures the central importance of conflict in thinking about slavery which, as the next chapter will demonstrate, would become essential to understanding the enslavement of Africans. One singular synthesis of classical, biblical and jurisprudential sources in thinking about slavery is that of the Dutch theorist Hugo Grotius. In his De Iure Belli et Pacis (1625), Grotius furnished a paradigm for understanding slavery in terms of natural law.49 Although he engaged with canonical debates about the obligations of slaves to masters, Grotius had limited recourse to theological sources; in discussing whether slaves had rights to resistance, for example, he based his judgement on the ‘external law’ (‘externum ius’) which upheld the civil order.50 As David Brion Davis notes, it was Grotius’s ‘intimate knowledge of classical authorities’ that was behind his ‘secular defense of slavery’, and at a time of Dutch interest in African slavery.51 Grotius drew principally from the Classics, and especially from Roman jurisprudence, in his vision of the ius 58

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gentium. His model of slavery was based on a situation of warfare. A victor, who was entitled to execute a captive according to the law of combat (‘de jure interficiendi hostes in bello solenni’), spared his prisoner for reasons of ‘utility’, or what he might gain from letting him live. For Grotius, this gave the master a ‘limitless’ power over the prisoner who had become his slave. The master took possession of his property, and the slave (following the Institutes) could own nothing; the master could punish a slave at will, and he could transfer this power (‘dominium’) to another.52 Grotius has received much critical attention in studies of early modern slavery, which emphasise his wide influence.53 Yet he appears to have resonated little with the early French witnesses to slavery who are the subject of this book. Some of this may be attributed to the distance of traders and mariners from intellectual circles; Catholic missionaries, however, continued to think about slavery in terms of what Mongin called the ‘ancient laws’ (‘lois anciennes’) informed by Roman jurisprudence and Christian thought.54 The importance of biblical and jurisprudential tradition to French thinking about African slavery can be seen in the 1698 discussion by the Sorbonne theologian Fromageau of whether it was permissible to ‘sell African slaves’ (‘vendre des nègres’), or if there was ‘inhumanity in buying and selling men’. The difficulty lay in objections to buying ‘something one knew to be stolen’, which was countered by the ‘great benefit’ slaves would receive through baptism once in a ‘Christian land’. Fromageau listed other factors that seemed to justify slavery: the fact that ‘all Christian monarchs’ permitted the trade (and that the pious Spanish and Portuguese practised it extensively), that the French king himself bought Turkish slaves (although ‘few embraced Christianity’), that Africans lived in better material conditions amongst Christians than in Africa, and that enslavement was permitted by African monarchs themselves.55 Fromageau resolved this difficulty by recourse to the authorities of ‘divine and human law’. From the first source, he noted that slavery had been permitted in the Old Testament (Exodus and Leviticus 25:44), the New Testament (1 Corinthians; Ephesians), and by early Church practice. It was in Ephesians, Fromageau noted, that Paul countered early Christian calls for baptised slaves to be freed, which were based on Christ having ‘redeemed us from the captivity of sin through His death’. The Apostle, Fromageau adds, had refused this principle and had instead called for slaves to be 59

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‘obedient to their masters’.56 Fromageau also drew on Casuists such as Antonius Diana (1585–1663) and Luis de Molina (1535–1600) for responses to questions of considerable actuality to early modern Europeans, such as whether Christians could enslave war captives who were fellow Christians, or sell slaves to non-Christians. Fromageau principally drew on the Institutes for jurisprudence from his second source, the corpus of ‘human law’. He paraphrases Justinian concerning the ‘unnatural’ character of slavery, and its roots in the ius gentium which could allow for ‘a man [to] lose his freedom’ in ‘certain circumstances’.57 In surmising that in a ‘just war’ a victor would have ‘the right to put to death the enemies who resisted him’ and ‘even more so, to deprive them of their freedom and enslave them’, Fromageau was also basing himself on an interpretation of the Institutes.58 According to Fromageau’s interpretation of both divine and human authorities, slavery was permitted, and one could ‘sell, buy and exchange’ slaves ‘as with other goods of which one is the legitimate possessor’.59 There was, however, one difficulty, which stemmed precisely from the question of the ‘legitimacy’ of property. Fromageau considered three manners of enslavement, through just war (iure belli), through criminal punishment (condemnatione) and through act of purchase (emptione) to be ‘just within themselves’, but ‘very often not so according to circumstances’. He thought that the first manner was problematic because African peoples went to war ‘out of passion, for trivial motives and with the sole view of acquiring slaves’, expecting that Portuguese or other merchants would buy captured slaves. The second motive was also problematic because ‘nearly all the laws’ of African societies were ‘tyrannical’. The third, the sale (emptio) by Africans of themselves or their children was in turn problematic because Africans did not ­understand the nature of their own enslavement, not to mention that such a sale was ‘outside the cases in which a person can sell himself’.60 As a result, Fromageau considered the African slave trade to be unjust, although he concluded that were one ‘nevertheless, all things considered’ to buy African slaves ‘through just title’, with no ‘injustice or deceit’ on the part of buyers, then they could be traded. Were one to ‘convert and free them’, they could be bought ‘with no examination [of conscience]’. Fromageau’s discussion illustrates how the slave trade was accepted by a French theorist, under certain conditions, on both 60

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the temporal and spiritual levels. It also illustrates the changing terrain with which the understanding of slavery had to grapple. As the starting point of Fromageau’s discussion demonstrates, it was subject to interrogations, and even anxieties (and as Carminella Biondi has shown, referring to Labat’s testimony, planters in turn might resist the judgements of theologians).61 Scripture, canon law and Roman jurisprudence now had to respond to new interactions with the populations of the Americas and Africa. This scriptural and legal framework was applied to forms of enslavement that were radically different to those depicted within the authoritative corpus. There were also difficulties that emerged in the early plantation environment, such as the thorny issue of the status of baptised slaves; such difficulties will be returned to later in this book. There were approaches to biblical narratives in the environment of the Caribbean that were more ambiguous. Du Tertre reflected that the fecundity of African slaves mirrored that of the Old Testament Jewish captives in Egypt (this inspired him to make an edifying reflection on the chastity of Africans). Further on, he contrasted the joy of African slaves in their pastimes with the misery of the children of Israel in their captivity, and concluded that Africans were insouciant about their enslavement.62 What both reflections demonstrate is the simple power of biblical intertextuality; it was a rich source of narratives through which one could either identify one people with another, or at another point in the text, draw contrasts between the same peoples.63 There were other Old Testament narratives that were far more charged, however. Biblical narratives also furnished explanations for the distinct heritage of Africans. The theory that African populations were descended from Ham, the cursed son of Noah, had some authority. In a late sixteenth-century manifestation, the Spanish geographer Marmol advanced the ‘ire of God’ as an explanation for the appearance of certain African peoples (he also, more originally, reserved a role for ‘generation’ which will be returned to in the next chapter).64 As scholars of diverse national and religious contexts have noted, that Africans were descended from Ham was a very malleable theory. Colin Kidd, in a study of race in the Protestant Atlantic, has observed how the crossover of race into lineage, when inflected with Old Testament genealogies, could either unite all of humanity as part of the ‘Noachic family tree’ or conversely, ‘[import] … divinely authorised categories of blessed and cursed’ into human 61

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difference.65 The origins of African servitude within the ‘cursed’ lineage of Ham was, as Andrew Curran writes, an ‘ambiguous’ account; its ‘political implications’ might justify slavery, but it also assumed ‘that all men were part of a shared human genealogy’.66 In Louis Sala-Molins’s vigorous treatment, it was an essential strand of ecclesiastics’ conception of the heritage of Africans.67 However, when they were confronted with narratives which seemed to reflect the heritage of Ham in African slaves, early French responses were actually quite diverse. Those French ecclesiastics who had witnessed slavery in the Caribbean responded in different ways to the extent of the ‘divine wrath’ which ‘one might well think had fallen’ on Ham and his posterity, and which distinguished Africans from the French who were ‘free through [their] natural condition’ (Le Breton).68 Maurile is the most explicit, in a chapter entitled ‘The curse of Noah on his son Ham is the reason for the enslavement of the Nègres’, in which he contrasted the ‘sin’ of Ham with numerous examples of filial devotion.69 Maurile urged ‘compassion’ towards slaves, writing that he praised those colonists who freed them (once they had made back the cost of the slaves). Yet he also saw the fate of African slaves as a living example to ‘all the nations’ of the world of the obligation to parental devotion. He addressed them directly (as ‘pauvres nègres’), urging them not to be ‘astonished’ if they had been ‘born to servitude’ and if ‘[their] lineage will be enslaved until Judgement Day’.70 Others were more ambivalent, especially when it came to recognising the narrative of Ham among African traditions. Mongin, enquiring amongst the slaves of Saint Kitts about the religion of the peoples of the west coast of Africa, was ‘greatly surprised’ by an old man’s account which was ‘quite like’ that of Ham. In this account, the eldest of the god Reboucou’s children (there were two boys and a girl) mocked his sleeping father’s ‘indecent’ position and was enslaved to his younger brother. Mongin limited himself to adding that those who attributed the colour of black Africans to the curse of Ham ‘may say [‘pourront dire’] that the nègres are not completely unaware of the origin of their colour’ (the alternative copy of the same letter states that ‘God alone could know the real cause of this difference between men who all come from Adam and from Noah’).71 In a lay account from the late 1600s, the administrator La Courbe related an explanation given by a Senegalese marabout for ‘the natural inclination that the nègres have for thievery’. The 62

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marabout recounted that their ‘first father’ (‘premier père’) had three sons, one white, one a ‘Moor’ and one black; after the father’s death, the white took his precious stones and absconded, the Moor then took the livestock and left, leaving the black African to vow that he would, from then on, ‘take everything he could’ from both brothers. La Courbe qualified this as a ‘funny enough tale that has something in common with that of Noah’; despite the weak hint of innate difference (the ‘natural’ penchant for thievery), it is clear that some effort would be required to recognise this, as with Mongin’s tale, as an authoritative biblical account.72 The Jesuit’s ambivalence, and the comic potential of the supposed Senegalese account, hint at resistances to reading the biblical narrative within Atlantic slavery. Du Tertre was also ambivalent about the extent of a biblical condemnation. ‘If labour’, he wrote, was the punishment of Man’s ‘rebellion’, then African slaves ‘suffered the most rigorous punishment of this revolt’, and it could be seen by the hard labour they were forced to carry out. However, if he saw labour as the sign of a condemnation, it was a punishment suffered by the entire human race, and in the case of slaves, one exacerbated by the ‘great passion’ of French settlers to amass wealth.73 If Africans were condemned for an inherited sin, it was a punishment of degree, and one worsened by European vice. This was the punishment of a sinful ancestry common to Europeans and Africans. Biblical narratives were still being engaged with into the 1730s. The idea that Africans had been marked with a corporeal ‘sign’ was suggested by Le Pers (for whom the posterity of Ham had been ‘marked’) in the 1720s; another aspect of the question would be discussed in the Journal de Trévoux in 1733 (whether black pigmentation signified descent from Cain).74 Bréban writes that when old slaves were questioned about the reason for their colour, they referred to an ‘ancient tradition’ (‘ancienne tradition’) amongst them that they had been ‘cursed by Heaven’ (‘maudits du Ciel’). He was aware that many European ‘savants’ claimed that Africans were descended from Ham (‘véritables enfants de Cham’), but advised that he was not relaying a ‘proof’ (‘démonstration’). His correspondent, he noted, might well ‘content himself’ with the theory, but could just as well look for explanations in Antiquity or in his own ‘imagination’.75 This kind of response is telling about the ambiguities in reading certain familiar narratives into 63

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the Caribbean environment.76 One fundamental classical narrative essentially distinguished slave and master (Aristotle), while another acknowledged their essential similarities and with them, the existence of an essential conflict within slavery (Seneca). A body of biblical precepts condoned the principle of slavery, but they acknowledged that there were tensions within Christianity from its earliest days concerning slavery (and still other sacred narratives were read with ambivalence in the Atlantic). Jurisprudence based in Roman law allowed for enslavement within a ‘just war’, but the very ‘justice’ of war might itself be uncertain. These are the sort of tensions surrounding authoritative narratives in the early Atlantic. They are the context to the narratives of the new temporality of the colonial era, which implicated the slave within the historicising act. Historicising colonisation There were accounts of early modern colonisation in forms from short correspondence to multiple-volume histories and natural histories. These forms were influenced by such factors as the diverse subjectivities of their authors, by conditions of morality and taste, or stylistic and narrative conventions. Thinking of them as acts of communication by individuals or associations allows us to grasp the range of their original functions within French society. The response expected in shorter, edifying forms must surely have been distinct to that of the relatively select readership of volumes such as Du Tertre’s Histoire. In the ‘semi-literate’ society in which these books and correspondences were received, they may well have been further circulated orally in ways which are now lost to us.77 Each of these acts of communication was contextual, and they were created and received in distinct social and cultural conditions. The texts of the colonial era were often the fruit of personal or collective polemics, which must interrogate the extent to which colonial populations can be said to have been united by ideology. There were tensions, even conflicts, in the colonies between administrators, between governors and missionaries, or between planters and poor labourers. Seen from this perspective, the texts of this era often express conflicting interests, a point that will be explored later on in this chapter. There are also signs of suspicion about the polemical role of the text, or the author’s familiarity with the colo64

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nial environment. Narrative strategies such as identifying oneself with a social milieu or explicitly declaring truthfulness clearly hint that some resistance was expected from readers.78 There could also be ambiguities surrounding genre; the semantic crossovers of the histoire during this era indicate that it could be received as a sort of notable narration, difficult to distinguish from fiction, as much as the vector of ‘truth’.79 Nonetheless, narrative accounts of the early colonies did share a preoccupation with the significance of the new French settlements. The vast majority declare that they reflect a series of human interactions within a recognisable chronology (or in the case of natural histories, that they reflect the synchronic state of the environment). Entitling an account Histoire, or Relation (or in Paul Boyer’s case, Véritable Relation) indicates the desire to be received as an authoritative narrative.80 The stress that such narratives place on their ‘historical’ character is an obvious clue to their ideological import; it hints at their potential to reflect the domination of a people or of a socio-economic stratum. Polemical as they were, these narratives also testify to conceptions of European culture that were widely shared by French colonial actors. They were the result of contextual strategies. Although they might have the purpose of obtaining interest or favour, they reflect numerous, essential shared understandings of human beings and their place in the world. As has been seen, they reflected both the socio-cultural conditions of milieu, and shared socio-economic understandings. They had further implications in what can be considered as an act of historicising, or the construction of an authoritative narrative representation of the colonies. There are three aspects of this historicising act, relating to human agency, chronology and the constitution of knowledge, that are particularly indicative of its power. The implications of these three aspects are vividly illustrated by the second edition of Du Tertre’s Histoire. It is written in the first person, with the narrator claiming either to have witnessed significant events, or to have had privileged access to documents or testimony about such events. That it is an extensive synthesis is trumpeted from the beginning; the subtitle of the first volume states that it ‘contains everything that happened in the establishment of the French colonies’.81 As Du Tertre asserts in his preface, there were ‘few men in France capable of bringing together and giving 65

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to the public the things [he] had collected’ (even if ‘some circumstances’ might have ‘escaped’ him).82 Du Tertre’s Histoire is essentially driven by human agency. As the chapter titles of his first volume reveal, this is for the most part conceived of as temporal initiatives led by high-ranking Frenchmen (such as d’Esnambuc and Poincy, successive governors of French Saint Kitts, and Hoüel, the governor of Guadeloupe), and the spiritual initiatives of missionaries like Du Tertre himself.83 There are certainly interventions beyond human agency, such as Providence and the hand of God saving the early colonists on Saint Kitts from a planned Amerindian attack.84 However, Du Tertre’s focus is principally on the domain of immediate human interactions. Even the awful famine within the colony is explicitly attributed to human vice (avarice) and to lack of foresight. For Du Tertre, its horrors mirror those of a well-known historical famine (Flavius Josephus’s account of the famine in first-century AD Judea) but he conceives of it as an event that occurs within the circa-human.85 The power of colonial histories can also be seen in the use of chronology. The social and ‘supra-human’ domains, and even the realm of nature itself, were understood according to distinct concepts of time. Reading the colonial narrative depended on the recognition of such shared concepts. These were chronologies that were made explicit to different degrees. They hearken back to shared, often discreet, understandings of concepts such as cause and effect (the social and the religious), the nature of changes within the environment (the ‘circa-human’), and ultimately, the place of humanity in the universe (the religious). Chronology is, as such, significant on multiple levels. The implications of such shared understandings of time can be seen in the very form of Du Tertre’s Histoire. It adopts a familiar diachronic structure which would be immediately recognisable to the reader. As a histoire, it interprets a past; it attributes relative significance to the actions of the participants in colonisation. The human agency that, as has been seen, is so central to the narrative is itself understood within a chronology – ultimately, multiple chronologies – that must be recognised by the reader. ­ These most fundamental shared understandings of chronologies underlie accounts of colonisation. Even when they relate the secular interactions of the French settler population, such narratives are ultimately understood within a Christian temporality; this is based principally on a certain conception of the creation of the world, of 66

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the birth and death of Christ, and of the ultimate end of this world. It might be added that missionary initiatives ultimately imply the extension of Christian temporality across the globe (this is made explicit to various extents, and in certain religious currents, might even usher in the end of time itself).86 What was new about the temporality of early French histories of colonisation is that its significance is based on what are essentially socio-economic transformations. The narrative begins with the encounter of Europe with the Americas (depending on the author, this might mean the arrival of Columbus, or the different steps of the French settlement of the Americas).87 The relation of the ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’ (early 1640s) begins with the French attempts to colonise the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards, which resulted in the successful installation of colonies in the Antilles. This colonisation implemented an economy based on agriculture (notably of cash crops), and the accumulation of wealth through the labour of slaves or indentured labourers.88 Du Tertre explicitly situates his account of colonisation within the temporal realm; it opens with the ‘passion’ to accumulate riches which had ‘seized the hearts of the inhabitants of Europe’ since 1493.89 The temporality of the accounts of the ‘Anonyme’ and Du Tertre is based on novel methods of production and of accumulation. In both, we can also glimpse the consequences of colonial time on those other human beings who seemed to lack agency, and who were put to work in new forms of production. This new chronology was also implicit in the domain of ‘natural history’ that was the subject of Du Tertre’s second volume, the Histoire naturelle. This volume furnishes a wealth of data about the flora and fauna of the Antilles in eight treatises (traités) exploring for example (I) the description of the islands (III) Plants and Trees or (IV) Fish.90 The Histoire naturelle is also fundamentally anthropocentric. The interest of the flora and fauna, as with many natural resources, consists in how they might be used or consumed, or even valued as curiosities. Indeed, the Histoire naturelle, like the first volume, also focuses on human interactions, particularly with the ecology; in this sense it is quite literally the ‘environment’.91 The Histoire naturelle reveals how what is now thought of as the ‘ecology’ was undergoing significant change. As the chapters on indigo, sugar cane or annatto demonstrate, its natural resources were subject to accelerated exploitation.92 There was, in other 67

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words, a ‘historical’ side to ‘natural history’. Even the description of the environment acknowledges a chronology based on production and accumulation. There is a further implication in the chronology of Du Tertre’s Histoire naturelle, and it concerns the human presences in the last two treatises. These are Treatise VII, Of the Inhabitants of the Antilles, made up of two chapters on the communities of ‘natural inhabitants’ (the Caribs) and the ‘State of the French colonies’, and Treatise VIII, entitled Of the Slaves of the Antilles of America.93 That the descriptions of these three communities are positioned here, in the second volume, relates as much to chronology as to ‘nature’. After all, the portrait of the ‘State of the French colonies’ is a description of the trade, government and justice system of the islands, and so lies outside ‘nature’. What the portraits of all three communities have in common is that they are all ahistorical to some degree. The depiction of the French colonists is intended to be synchronic, and to complement the account of the past within Du Tertre’s first volume.94 The description of the Caribs is more problematic; Du Tertre says that they gave such ‘diverse’ accounts of their history that he had to have recourse to a Dominican text (Breton’s Dictionnaire), for the most satisfactory version.95 Du Tertre’s portrait of the West African coast (‘Du Pays des nègres’) is limited to the slave trade; he enumerates what were reputed to be the three sources of slaves (prisoners of war, the condemned, and those caught stealing), but he implies that there was some common infraction in the past of Africans that was behind their enslavement, about which he could only avow his ignorance.96 Unlike the French colonists whose history he could write, Du Tertre situated Caribs and African slaves in the Histoire naturelle because he could not construct a coherent narrative of their past. The importance of the third aspect of writing colonial history, the constitution of a body of knowledge, may seem particularly evident in the depictions of Caribbean flora and fauna in texts such as Du Tertre’s Histoire. However approximate these descriptions appear, they hint at how narrative could make cultural capital from the ‘new’ phenomena of the colonies. Animals and plants might be apprehended as potential foodstuffs, remedies or commercial products. In such cases the histoire can be thought of as a repository for commodifiable knowledge. Accounts of the colonies could expand the ecological frontiers of a culture through circulating new forms 68

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of knowledge; they might also enhance the very real potential of its economic exchanges. A further implication was political. Narratives made known the enlargement of the kingdom’s possessions, sometimes (as with Du Tertre’s wealth of supporting documentation) in great detail. The constitution of these various kinds of knowledge was dependent on the script. Du Tertre’s Histoire is a particularly rich text, but it may be the most extensive manifestation of a tendency within early colonial narratives to attribute agency to Europeans, to impose chronologies and to constitute knowledge through script. He demonstrates  the fundamental power of narrative. He describes (and criticises) the Europeans who took possession of land and capital through the  marshalling of human force. He illustrates the ways the members of a script-mastering stratum of European society could reflect the consciousness of a new chronology, and seem to relegate non-­European peoples into ahistoricity. Caribs and African slaves, supposed to be illiterate, were thought unable to access the code through which history was made; with their apparent lack of chronology they appeared somehow outside time itself. Yet if narrative seemed to make dominated peoples non-­ historical, it also struggled with the extent to which these people could be known (a challenge which will be returned to in later chapters of this book). That the description of The Slaves of the Antilles is confined to the last of the eight treatises making up the Histoire naturelle, the second of his 1667 volumes, is telling. It is a reflection of the socio-economic status of the population that made up the base of the labour pyramid. Yet while this population might appear to merit a mere afterthought, it was, quite obviously, not completely excluded either. The description of the slaves also demonstrates how what was considered, as shall be seen, to be a problematic population, could come back to haunt the narrative.97 Circulating narratives Colonial narratives, histories and correspondence were produced in diverse contexts, and inspire interrogations about the way knowledge about slaves was circulated and received within France. These narratives might be the work of a collectivity or of multiple authorship, and might, as has been seen, incorporate significant ­transtextual influences. Addresses, explicit or otherwise, to a public 69

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(following Natalie Zemon Davis’s definition) hint at whom texts were destined, but beyond this, the readership can only be hinted at.98 Some studies hint that early colonial narratives had a relatively wide reach within France (Régis Antoine advances that in the 1600s, a printed missionary account that reached the collèges would have ‘several hundred’ bourgeois and noble readers).99 There are five conditions which appear to have particularly determined how knowledge about slaves circulated during the period of early French colonisation. These stem from colonial polemics, the composition of the readership, the medium of the script, the nature of what was considered to be knowledge, and what may best be described as the ‘transferability’ of certain representations. The textual traces of the slave were conditioned, first, by the diverse preoccupations of the participants in colonial initiatives. Missionaries, unsurprisingly, were concerned primarily with the salvation of their flocks, although they might well be interested in the natural resources of the colony. Yet accounts of conversions, empirical data, and ultimately the representations of slave labour circulated within an often polemical climate. These narratives represented the interests of individuals or groups who might be in significant conflict. There were financial and ideological disputes between investors or members of religious orders, while many of the sources of information about the colonies were produced in the wake of hazardous, expensive initiatives involving multiple interests.100 The printed relations transcribe documents ranging from legally binding initiatives such as articles of peace (‘taken from the original’), to letters sent to colonial authorities.101 Ecclesiastics were involved in the temporal quarrels concerning the governance of the colonies. Mathias Du Puis’s Relation de l’establissement is dominated by the criticism of the governor of Guadeloupe, Charles Hoüel, and his mistreatment of the Dominican order.102 Indeed, that Labat criticises the Relation of 1671 (which he attributed to Le Febvre de La Barre) for being a factum against Clodoré rather than an ‘exact and sincere relation’ is a telling reflection on the purpose of many early colonial texts.103 Du Tertre was another target for Labat’s criticism precisely for his focus on the disputes between the French colonial authorities; Labat suggests that this compensated a fundamental absence of knowledge about the (then) new colonies, and in consequence, would be of ‘little interest to contemporary readers’.104 Such considerations hint once more at the importance 70

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of socio-economic milieu in understanding accounts of slavery; there were significant temporal preoccupations behind what are now thought of as colonial ‘sources’, or even ‘literature’. That access to knowledge about the colonies was determined by factors including socio-economic milieu can be seen in the image of the public, the designated recipients of colonial narratives. Both letters (which one might expect to have been intended for individual correspondents) and printed texts are instructive about their recipients. Both forms construct a persona (and as such, an implicit public) which is revealing about the composition of gender, and about socio-economic, intellectual and religious milieux. Direct addresses to gender testify to the predominance of males both in early modern displacement and, it appears, amongst readers. All but one of the texts studied in this book had a male narrator. The one exception is Léonor de La Fayole’s printed letter, detailing the arrival of the Filles de Saint Joseph in the colonies; however, this is preceded by another (male-authored) text, and as it is the teneur of a letter, must have undergone intervention post-scriptum.105 The perception of a masculine public is evident throughout the printed corpus (most authors are more discreet than Guillaume Coppier, who consistently addresses his readers as ‘Messieurs’).106 There are also hints of the different reading strategies with which the accounts of the colonies were apprehended; aware that some readers might be put off by the official documentation with which he constructed his Histore, Du Tertre directed them to the ‘fine adventures’ (‘belles aventures’) they could find elsewhere in the text.107 The importance of the script was a third condition in determining the reach of knowledge about slaves. Oral information was considered a valuable source worthy of reproduction at the time of the earliest colonies; the Mercure françois reproduced an account of Saint Kitts related to the narrator by ‘a gentleman who [had] always held office in [the] islands’ (the high rank of the witness no doubt added to its authority).108 There was a wide-ranging infiltration of information and colonial representations into France; the texts which have been bequeathed from this era may have been one (privileged) vector amongst many. The promise of the Dominican Philippe de Beaumont that the reader of his 1668 letter would ‘see many things that are not in the tales about this country that have been doing the rounds in France’ illustrates the importance of now-lost popular (and undervalued) forms of perpetuating 71

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news of the colonies.109 In this climate, what was guaranteed to be empirical testimony about the newly encountered environments outside Europe could be greeted with suspicion or wonder. Readers engaged in critical readings of certain texts. One can occasionally pick up hints of the strategies that were employed to verify – and to impart authority to – testimonies about the Atlantic environment. The account of a voyage to the coast of Senegal in the early 1680s by a ship’s surgeon named Le Maire was published by his friend Saviard in 1695.110 In his preface, Saviard writes that Le Maire’s account of the expedition had initially appeared ‘suspect’ to him because of considerable differences with another (unnamed) account. To get to the ‘truth’, he had verified the account by interviewing the other witnesses who had accompanied the author. The ‘uniformity’ amongst themselves, along with a similar confirmation by the high-status director of the Compagnie d’Afrique (who had travelled ‘nearly everywhere in the world’ and who was ‘esteemed by Messieurs Colbert and Seignelay’) then decided Saviard in favour of publication.111 The script, in the form of letters and printed material, was a privileged repository (to echo Michel de Certeau’s formulation of l’écriture) for the data and narratives gathered around the Atlantic.112 The use of the script was authoritative, and it was also a uniquely mobile tool for the transfer of information that could dominate space and peoples. Le Febvre de La Barre’s 1666 empirically based description of Guyana is illustrative, in its description of the physical features of the environment and measurements of certain dimensions (in leagues). These data were intended to facilitate displacement and fluvial navigation, so as to enable colonisation (Le Febvre de La Barre was quite explicit about what the French would do ‘when they have settlements’ there).113 The script could also be vulnerable. A pirate named Raveneau who promised privileged information about ‘unknown countries’ to the Marquis de Seignelay in 1690 also claimed to hold other information which he had not divulged in print for fear of its use to ‘foreigners’, and about which he would be happy to ‘enlighten’ the Marquis if required.114 This unashamed appeal to a high-status male demonstrates the ambivalence of the script; it could escape from the mastery of its intended readers, and distribute dangerous knowledge outside their control. However, this kind of subversion was a risk only amongst those 72

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capable of apprehending the script, the literate (and implicitly, Europeans). The act of reading implied belonging, as well as restriction and exclusion. It was assumed that colonial texts addressed a restricted public. The script shared ideas and concepts with designated recipients, while it also isolated forms of knowledge from large swathes of the colonial population. The importance of the script was also something that the illiterate would keenly appreciate, as Garrigus’s study of later eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue demonstrates; Garrigus shows how ‘free coloureds’ were ‘keenly aware’ of the importance of documents and of documentation for proving freedom or proprietorship.115 Perhaps the most singular aspect of the role of script in circulating knowledge about slaves in the early colonial world lies in the assumptions behind not just who would, but who could read the text. The assumptions behind who could decipher the script, as with the awareness of their socio-economic milieu, were also among the factors that determined what was considered to be worthwhile knowledge. That certain testimonies about the colonies were indeed considered to be valuable sources of knowledge is demonstrated by their reach amongst high-ranking social or intellectual circles. Regourd suggests that Du Tertre’s 1654 dedication to Achille de Harlay lent an air of ‘prestige’ to his text, and that his 1667 ‘evocation’ of the approval of the prestigious circle of M. de Montmore bestowed on his Histoire a near-‘scientific’ authority.116 It is precisely the 1667 edition that contains the most extensive of the accounts of Caribbean slave existence from the seventeenth-century French corpus. It is an enigmatic testimony to the circulation of the printed text that Du Tertre’s account of the violent drudgery of slave life may have been received among this readership. However, the reach of colonial representations within France (as with other parts of Europe) was also determined by their transferability. The circulation of Jesuit productions is particularly telling. Their distinct narrative strategies and wide communicative capacity made them an important vector of knowledge about the colonies in early modern France and beyond. One critic has commented that Jesuit relations ‘obscured many insights that modern scholars wish to glean from them’, while acknowledging them as ‘insightful but carefully scripted’, and noting that they ‘functioned as public performances for a particular French audience’.117 They should instead 73

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be apprehended by thinking about the way this ‘scripted’ nature enabled them to be ‘performed’, and by implication to be received by the public, in the first place. Jesuit relations relied on a considerable intertextuality, and as Klaus-Dieter Ertler has noted, adopted such narrative strategies as stressing the agency of the members of the order.118 These were among the factors that shaped the representation of the slave in this important channel of early modern narratives. The transmission of such narratives within the Jesuit order was very significant, and did not rely solely on the printed medium. Marcel Chatillon has suggested that the multiple manuscript copies of the letters of the Jesuit missionary Jean Mongin may indicate that they were used to ‘introduce future missionaries to [Jesuit] methodology’.119 Another dimension of the reach of correspondence has been suggested by Nicole Dyonet in her publication of Bréban’s 1732 letter; she suggests that the author’s ‘familiar’ tone was tempered by the awareness that his correspondent ‘[would] engage in public readings and in commentaries’.120 While such lost readings can only be partly apprehended at this remove, they hint at further channels which brought representations of slavery into French written and oral culture, and that reached beyond the members of intellectual and religious networks. This diversity of channels through which colonial testimony reached French readers (or audiences) indicates that depictions of slave existence were very oblique. Certain privileged forms (such as conversion accounts) might focus on the slave, and there were also witnesses who criticised their poor spiritual or material welfare.121 Rare authors, such as Du Tertre, thought the existence of the slave to be worth sustained exploration. There were other factors that force us to question what we mean by thinking about colonial-era narratives as ‘testimony’ about slave existence in the first place. Edifying narratives, for example, were representations of behaviours that conformed to Christian models. Authors were also conscious of the groups of readers (and perhaps even listeners) who they expected to receive their narratives. As such, the representation of the slave is to be understood as one aspect of an act of ­communication within diverse socio-economic, cultural or religious circles. The discreet mention of Clodoré’s slave at the beginning of this chapter is indicative. It is a rare narrative that actually considers the slave as an object of knowledge. Accounts of the colonies instead reflect how 74

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the social position of the slave was marginal to the culture and economy of the colonies, and of the metropolis. Slaves and human space Textual or graphic representations of human interactions, or of the Caribbean environment, further reflect the relationship between slave and colonial class. Textual depictions that call attention to their representative role – that self-consciously adopt the form of the portrait, for example – hint at what could gratify, amuse or disturb within colonial society. This is particularly evident in reflections of the coexistence of human beings, and how space was organised within the colony. Spiritual portraits of slaves testify to the attraction of certain forms of representation. Mongin described a slave on Saint Kitts, who was notable for his ‘zeal’ while at work, and his exemplary conduct at worship, as follows: ‘He preaches even more efficiently through the example of his modesty in church, when he waits two or three hours for confession and communion, on his knees, and as immobile as a statue, in the middle of the church, surrounded by his family whom he often takes with him to confession.’122 Mongin adopts techniques similar to those characterised by Ertler as the distinctively Jesuit ‘visual’ and ‘sensual’ techniques which constructed exemplary narratives (exempla).123 Mongin illustrates that a slave could be a narrative subject, in an edifying portrait of piety. There is one significant implication to this strategy which will be observed at this point. It allowed human beings who were enslaved in the temporal domain to edify in portraits of the spiritual. To do so, it depicts these slaves in the only universe – a distinct spiritual ­universe – in which they could exist. The pictorial metaphor and the textual portrait could also reflect temporal concerns, which are particularly evident in depictions of the ordering of space and of human populations. Some hint at what was gratifying in the sight of a mastered social order or environment, while others are more ambiguous. The domination of a substantial slave force might well be a feature of an aesthetically pleasing account of the colonial settlement. A Jesuit named la Mousse, sent to Saint Kitts in the late 1680s, noted that his order occupied the ‘prettiest’ (‘plus beau’) part of the colony, which was inhabited by the ‘best sort’ of people and the ‘greatest number of nègres and 75

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of slaves’. He appreciated the beauty of the Jesuit residence, its gardens, chapel, sugar mill and refinery, and the Jesuits’ own ‘great number of nègres, very-well instructed and good Christians’. ‘It can be said’, he writes, ‘that there is nothing lacking in this house.’124 However, a letter sent from Saint-Domingue by another Jesuit, Margat, in 1725 is representative of a more uneasy vision of the order of the colony. Margat acknowledged that a ‘newly arrived missionary’ might be struck by a ‘charming sight’ (‘un coup d’oeil charmant’): A vast plain, green prairies, well-cultivated plantations, planted gardens, some of indigo and the rest of sugar cane, laid out with art and symmetry; the horizon limited by the sea and by mountains covered with woods that, rising up like an amphitheatre, make for a diverse view composed of an infinite number of different sights. Straight paths, bordered on either side by hedges of lemon and orange trees, a thousand flowers that delight the eye and perfume the air.125

This is the positive, flattering side of the depiction of the settlement, and the importance of human intervention is striking. Margat’s praise of the ‘art and symmetry’ of the plantation environment testifies to the importance of organised space (an importance that has been identified by Keith Thomas in another early modern context).126 This preoccupation with space illustrates how fundamental was the ensurance of existing and introduced resources to fragile human settlements. It also reflects on the importance of maintaining community in this environment; the ‘straight paths’ ensure not only profit, but the very interactions that enable human society. It is also a portrait that is (initially, at least) notable for its stability; it demonstrates how an ordered ecology could be appreciated by early modern settlers. This was, however, an illusory portrait. This ‘sight’ (‘spectacle’), Margat added, might well ‘convince a newcomer that he had found one of those enchanted islands that only exist in the imagination of poets’. Only the dedicated fortune-hunter or missionary could find such a sight agreeable, given the excessive heat, the ‘sudden and violent’ storms between April and November, or the ‘frequent illnesses’ caused by the air, which is ‘always roasting, or thickened by malign vapours’ (‘vapeurs malignes’).127 The mastery of the microclimate was ultimately an illusion and the circa-human fundamentally corrupted. Beyond the unfavourable climatic conditions and 76

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health risks, there were further conditions, social this time, that should disabuse the enthusiastic missionary in Saint-Domingue. A missionary ‘used to the tumult of the cities of Europe and the sociable life of our [religious] houses’ would find himself in a unique social environment, or as Margat put it: ‘he finds himself in an isolated house, surrounded by woods and mountains, far away from the assistance that one may need at any moment, delivered to the mercy of two nègres, whose attention is sometimes entirely devoted to making their master’s life difficult’.128 It is a striking portrait of a European cut off from recognisable social links in nowunfavourable environmental conditions, and suddenly faced with an alternative fraternity. How representative it was of perceptions of social relations is debatable. It was a correspondence ostensibly intended for another Jesuit and it could, as such, be expected to be strongly subjective, and unrepresentative of shared perceptions. However, (re-)printed in the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, it was also a document that entered the public realm. Edification, to be effective, needed to depict recognisable difficulties; Margat’s focus on a missionary and his two hostile slaves seems to have had the potential to resonate amongst readers, precisely because the social conditions it describes were somehow recognisable. The Jesuit’s depiction of corruption at the heart of the plantation is matched by a flawed social relationship on its margins. Another Jesuit on Saint-Domingue, Bréban, illustrates the aesthetics of symmetry and space in the plantation. His focus, however, was on the organisation of human cohabitation. He wrote: You would be charmed to see our habitations, as we call the country houses of the colony. A habitation resembles a village in France. There are up to a hundred shacks with streets which are perfectly straight. The shacks are of the same height, of the same appearance, and equally spaced from one another, this is a sight that pleases the eye.129

This is a portrait that gratifies through the symmetry and regularity of the constructions; it is another testimony to the appreciation of the organisation of resources. Yet it is also an organisation of social space: the capacity to organise the labour of the colony. The focus on the house of the plantation master (separated from the slave cabins and upwind) is also – initially – gratifying:

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It is the best made nègres and the prettiest négresses who are put to domestic tasks. The house of a planter in Saint-Domingue is like the hôtels of great nobles in Paris, where you see majordomos, cooks, scullions, coachmen, grooms, valets and chambermaids, lackeys wearing livery, but different, as you can well believe, from that which most of their masters used to wear in France.130

This depiction of human beings put to service gratifies, through the beauty of those in service, and through the diversity of their roles. Yet in spite of the order it implies, it is ultimately another illusory portrait of the social domain. The social order that appeared initially recognisable, with the status of the colonist assimilated to that of a French aristocrat, is immediately subverted; the colonial hierarchy is assumed to be founded on a ‘nobility’ of base social status. Given the importance of Jesuit correspondence networks (as ­suggested by Chatillon, Dyonet and others), one might well speculate on the ways such vivid portraits circulated among the readers, and perhaps listeners, of the past. Some representations may have had the potential for extensive circulation, thus contributing to the formation of the imagery of the colonies in the collective imagination. The letters of Margat and Bréban demonstrate how even spiritual correspondents could reflect the socio-economic aspects of colonial society; they illustrate some of the criteria that made the use of slaves attractive, as well as hinting at less palatable aspects of life on the islands. Rochefort’s Histoire is one of a limited number of French Protestant testimonies of slavery. This dearth of testimonies means it is difficult to draw significant conclusions about how confessional differences influenced early French representations of temporal domination (in Rochefort’s case, this is further complicated by the rumours he had plagiarised Du Tertre). Rochefort’s reflections about the representative strategies of his Histoire are, however, telling about the aesthetics of depicting domination. He aims for totality, excusing the inclusion of themes explored by others, without which his text would be ‘defective’ (‘défectueuse’). He alerts the reader to the importance of criteria of taste (the example of ‘other historians’ and the advice of friends) in constructing a text which he assimilates to a ‘painting’ (‘tableau’); he compares material which might be considered superfluous to ‘ornamental borders of flowers, fruit and birds’ (‘comme des bordures de fleurs, de fruits, et d’oiseaux, pour l’ornement de la pièce’).131 Such reflections indicate that the text 78

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was conceived of, once more, as aesthetically pleasing. Tellingly, the second edition of Rochefort’s Histoire includes what he claims are letters from some of his readers, in which they respond to precisely this style. One praises his Histoire for being not only ‘judicious, faithful and entertaining’, but also ‘richly embellished with all the ornements [‘agréments’] that the most delicate of minds could desire’.132 A second, Edward Graves, considers precisely the ‘ornamental borders of flowers, fruit and birds’ to be a ‘ravishing embroidery [‘ravissante broderie’] which enhances the value of the [subject] matter’, and even compares them to ‘precious stones’.133 In Rochefort’s textual ‘tableau’, the visibility of slavery is very telling. There are no exempla or textual portraits of individual slaves in his Histoire, but there is one revealing account of the collective practice. This is the extensive description of the residence of General Poincy, the edifice most prized by Rochefort in his account of the island of Saint Kitts in the mid-1600s. It presents a ‘delightful sight’ (‘ravissante perspective’); symmetrical paths led to an ideally situated and well-proportioned residence, ‘embellished’ by ‘rich ornaments’ (‘riches ornements’). Strikingly, the cabins of Poincy’s numerous slaves are distinctly visible in this textual portrait, sitting on raised ground, and explicitly named (the ‘Ville d’Angole’), as is the vast workforce of ‘more than three hundred nègres’.134 Rochefort’s depiction of the workforce will be returned to in a later chapter, but at this stage it will be noted that it seems to enhance the portrait of Poincy’s residence, rather than testifying to any discomfort with the presence of a substantial enslaved population. Once more, Graves’s letter illustrates the response of a contemporary (or at least, an editor’s transcription of this response). While Graves does not refer directly to the slave population, it is clear that such mass domination does nothing to tarnish the harmony of the residence with its ‘sweet charms’ (‘douceurs’), and which ‘has all that artifice and nature can purvey that is most delightful [‘ravissant’]’.135 Rochefort’s depiction and Graves’s letter are distanced from the disharmony that undermines other portraits of the social relationships within the slave society. They are a further strand of responses to the early plantation that are based on secular criteria, and which testify to the appeal of an aesthetic of domination. These textual portraits can be considered to parallel (in a very literal manner) what Sue Peabody has called an ‘image archive’ which could be ‘available to groups or individuals who want to 79

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assert or maintain their status and domination’.136 At the very least, they are part of a spiritual and temporal ‘image archive’ which could be accessed for various needs. Representations of the slave in the religious domain had an edifying potential far more powerful (and perhaps, far more palatable) than those of the labour slaves carried out in the temporal sphere. Representations of the secular world do, however, reflect how gratifying the ordering of the plantation and its subordinate inhabitants could be. Nevertheless, some accounts also demonstrate that there was suspicion about the order of the environment; there are discreet hints, on occasion, of a forbidding social context. Images of slavery The domination of slaves is also one strand of early modern illustrations and engravings of forms of slave labour. The significant volumes of Rochefort, Du Tertre and Labat all feature depictions of slaves cultivating and/or processing plantation crops. Such illustrations were thought to have a specific appeal, and they were a channel through which printing could distribute visual – as opposed to simply textual – representations within France and beyond. They were as such a potential source of knowledge about slavery, and they are instructive about the representation of labour in the colonies. As with all representations, illustrations of slavery are marked by their absences. The slave who is depicted producing manioc in Rochefort’s Histoire is alone, labouring without any explicit need for coercion; the very real social relations underlying forms of production are simply excluded from the frame.137 Rochefort’s textual description of Poincy’s residence is complemented in the second edition by an engraving of a ‘landscape’ (‘paysage’) which features the château (Figure 1.1).138 In this illustration, the traces of human presence referred to within the text are absent from the landscape. The cabins of the slave settlement are visible, but the human interaction in this settlement (in which, it will be recalled, ‘three hundred’ slaves were at work) has been almost completely erased. One of the three African slaves depicted brings a bundle, perhaps of sugar cane, up an embankment. Another, face turned towards Poincy’s residence, is captured in a pose which can best be considered as a contemplation. Unlike the depiction of manioc production, colonists and slaves coexist here, but in a miniscule corner 80

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1.1  Paysage d’une partie de l’Ile de Saint-Christofle, avec un crayon du chasteau de Mr le Général in Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles de l’Amérique (Rotterdam: Arnout Leers, 1665), pp. 52–53.

of the engraving. This is a landscape from which any hints of social relations between slave and colonist have been neutralised. There is another detailed engraving in Rochefort’s 1665 Histoire which, accompanying a chapter describing sugar production, is unhesitant about the representation of slave labour (Figure 1.2).139 This depicts slaves at every stage of the production process, driving the oxen which were the primary energy source, feeding cane into the drums and processing the sugar. There are also isolated Europeans on the edges of this scene. There are European figures in indeterminate poses, one in the bottom left corner, one on the right interacting with a slave carrying cane. A third European observes a slave labouring at the sugar cauldron on the left (and looking at him, rather than his labour), while the slave is occupied with his own labour. The most striking European presence is a group of three males, standing in discussion behind a second cauldron at the right-hand corner of the scene. Like the male figure surveying the cauldron, they wear the costume typically worn by the urban 81

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1.2  La figure des moulins à sucre in Rochefort, Histoire, pp. 332–33.

(non-colonial) Dutch at this time. This engraving depicts two populations, and situates them in relation to the chain of production. Slaves are positioned at the centre of the visual field. The European figures (who do not, unlike the slaves, figure in the interpretative key) appear to have a much more ambiguous role. They are disjointed, and in the case of the group of three figures, the subject of their animated conversation is not indicated by text or visual clues. Not only do they not labour, but they might even, quite literally, turn their backs on the process. The illustrations in Du Tertre’s second edition were the work of the great engraver Sébastien Le Clerc and are of particularly skilful execution. Le Clerc’s vivid depictions of the processing of cash crops are accompanied by a key detailing their various steps. In the sucrerie (Figure 1.3), a male European figure at the bottom right-hand corner of the frame directs slaves, who carry sugar cane, towards a press situated in a vertically superior position.140 This is the commandeur who, as noted by Jacques Petitjean-Roget and by Robert Chaudenson, can be equated with an ‘overseer’ in the early colony, and would later be comparable to a ‘foreman’ (in the present book, the term has been translated according to the context).141 In the 82

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1.3 Sucrerie in Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François, 3 vols (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1667– 71), vol. 2, pp. 122–23.

depiction of indigo production (indigoterie, Figure 1.4) the colonist is on a relative height, in the centre of a frame. Around him (and below him), slaves are engaged in various stages of the production of this dye.142 These illustrations hint at four thematic concerns that will recur in the following chapters, and that reflect on the understanding of colonial labour amongst metropolitan readers during this era. These might be summarised as their paucity, their role as knowledge, their contemplative function and their reflections of power. It might be noted, first, that while the engravings of sugar production may, as Danielle Bégot suggests, be considered a ‘product of the imagination’ (Le Clerc, for example, had never been to the Antilles), they could be reused and adapted in different works over several decades.143 The illustrations of Poincy’s residence and of the sugar mill in the second edition of Rochefort’s Histoire reappear in Mr de N***’s 1719 Voyages.144 Le Clerc’s indigoterie is adapted within the 1724 edition of Labat with a supervisor positioned in closer proximity to production, although in the same stance and carrying the same implement.145 The reuse of illustrations may well, of course, have been motivated simply by the appreciation of a vivid 83

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1.4 Indigoterie in Du Tertre, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 106–07.

engraving, or the availability of materials to hand. However, this recourse to existing sources may also demonstrate that there was a certain paucity of representations of slave labour. The restricted number of graphic sources may hint at a sort of representational absence of slavery, and hint how certain representations of the colonies could become authoritative at this time. A second question concerns the extent to which graphic representations were thought to constitute knowledge about the colonies, a question which reflects on essential preconceptions about labour. Labat’s images quite deliberately aim to be received as knowledge (they will be returned to in Chapter 3), and the illustration of sugar production in Rochefort also hints at this intention. Here, a textual key guides the reader in identifying the tools of production, and the steps in which they were employed. It also explicitly demonstrates how labour was applied with European technologies (‘L: The slaves who serve the mill and who push the canes between the drums’).146 This is, in other words, a representation that is prescriptive, that furnishes a body of specialised techniques. It also relies on central assumptions about the uses of these techniques, about who was labouring, and who was directing the labour at each step. While these assumptions are less obvious in other portraits, such as colonial landscapes, they are not absent. 84

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This can be seen in their contemplative function. The graphic depictions of Poincy’s residence are gratifying because they rely on a similar set of assumptions about order, symmetry and even control of the environment as those in the various texts which have been discussed in this chapter. The harmony of Leclerc’s depictions of the sucrerie and the indigoterie are also notable. The labour in the sucrerie is a relatively minor part of a scene shaded by the natural environment (which almost encroaches on the view of production). In the indigoterie, the foreground is composed of exotic, isolated, plants amongst which the slave workforce executes the tasks of production. The human presences are organised in the form of a pyramid, with a European colonist on its summit and at the centre of the frame. These considerations have implications for how plantation power was imagined, particularly in terms of force and labour. Concerning force, Bégot writes that Le Clerc’s engravings of slave labour are notable for the absence of discomfort or physical suffering, and that they neglect the ‘coercitive aspect’ of slave labour.147 What is perhaps more telling is the discreet ways they do depict force. In the sucrerie the commandeur’s raised baton seems to both direct a chain of labour that snakes up a vertical slope, and point toward the furnaces operated by slaves. The baton is held in a curious, nearhorizontal position; it is both prone, and hinting at its latent force. In the indigoterie the European figure is almost immobile, this time holding the baton at a relaxed, near-vertical angle, its tip barely in his grasp. Both engravings depict the direction of labour, surveillance and violence which is latent to a greater or lesser extent. The indigoterie’s solitary male figure embodies what plantation power meant in terms of labour; he is almost absolutely still, at the summit of what is quite literally a pyramid of (slave) labour. How such illustrations were received by contemporaries is, of course, open to considerable speculation. There are some indications that graphic representation was considered superior to textual representation. Rochefort asserts that the text is an inferior mode of representation to the image (‘discourse [‘le discours’] is the image of thought, but the portrait represents the thing itself’); this is, no doubt, a valorisation of the illustrations in his Histoire, but it is perhaps not indifferent that he also considered illustrations to promise a superior penetration of the idea within the intellect (‘esprit’) through a ‘demonstration’ (‘une démonstration sensible 85

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et palpable’).148 Conversely, other factors – that some illustrations were not representations in situ, for example – may have undermined their value. It may well have been difficult to view these representations of diverse landscapes and diverse interactions between human populations in disinterested terms. Instead, they appear to invite European viewers to situate themselves in relation to their actors, ultimately reflecting the belonging and exclusion that slavery entailed. * This chapter has discussed the principal considerations which determined how early modern French narratives reflected the colonies, and the slaves who laboured within them. Slaves were excluded from literacy and writing and confined to tedious, often brutal, forms of labour. They were very much marginal to the concerns of many sources of narrative in French, and this is mirrored in texts which might enter into relatively wide circulation. The texts and images discussed in this chapter testify to the information and representations available to early modern readers about slaves and slavery. Slavery was still largely understood in the light of the scriptural and jurisprudential corpus (especially when it came to debates about its legitimacy). Nonetheless, there were also discreet reflections of its new forms in descriptions of the colonies. These texts also illustrate the subtle assumptions behind the new colonial temporality and space. They reflect how new ideas could be constituted within the transforming environment of the Atlantic, at a time of profound changes in production on the peripheries of France. There is a curious ambiguity in French representations of the slave population. There were different responses to the interactions with slaves. There is evidence of confidence in the mastery of resources and of information, and of pride in the ability to dominate a slave stratum in the most explicit of forms. Yet the slaves who appeared so completely mastered in iconography were not tranquil. The haunting mention of Margat’s missionary, alone in the woods, ‘delivered to the mercy of two slaves’ is illustrative. This discreet mention of the furthest corners of the colonies hints at anxieties behind domination. These will be returned to regularly in the following chapters. Beyond the immediate surroundings of the plantation, Caribbean 86

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colonies were implicated in the intensive trade in human beings around the Atlantic. Early colonial texts also describe the extensive human transactions that brought slaves to the colonies in the first place. These narratives testify to new conceptions of human difference, and alternative visions of human exchange within Amerindian and African cultures. It is these exchanges that are the subject of the next chapter. Notes 1 Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (London; New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), p. 201. 2 Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 10–11. 3 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, pp. 68–69, 81. 4 Dobie, Trading Places, pp. 6–12 (pp. 6, 8). 5 Dampierre, Essai sur les sources, pp. 107–08. 6 Du Tertre, Histoire des Isles de la Guadeloupe, BM, MS Ant 7, p. 11. 7 See the discussion of the ‘fundamental absence of representation’ in slavery in Dobie, Trading Places, pp. 7–12 (p. 7). 8 Robert de Clodoré, Plaintes et griefs présentés à Monseigneur de Colbert par M. de Clodoré, gouverneur de l’isle de la Martinique… (n.pl., n.pub., [1668(?)]), p. 40. On the importance of honour, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 77–101 (p. 93). 9 Daniel Le Hirbec, who left a concise journal of his voyage to the Antilles in 1642–43, is the only visitor to the French Caribbean in the present corpus who makes no mention of slavery. Voyages de Daniel Le Hirbec de Laval aux Antilles, aux Pays-Bas et en Italie 1642–1644, ed. by Émile Moreau (Laval: L. Moreau, 1890), pp. 20–25. 10 On Calvinist intertextuality, see Frank Lestringant, Jean de Léry ou l’invention du sauvage: essai sur L’Histoire d’un voyage en Terre de Brésil, 2nd edn (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), pp. 17–18, 221–32; on the Jesuit tradition, Marc-André Bernier, Clorinda Donato and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink, eds, Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas: Intercultural Transfers, Intellectual Disputes, and Textualities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). 11 For an illustration of his use of documentary sources, see Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, p. 45. 12 See Christian Schnakenbourg, ‘Note sur l’industrie sucrière en Guadeloupe au XVIIe siècle (1640–1670)’, Revue française d’histoire d’Outre Mer, 55:200 (1968), 267–315; Bertie Mandelblatt, ‘Atlantic consumption of French rum and brandy and economic growth in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean’, French History,

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25:1 (2011), 9–27 (pp. 16–17); for an interesting use of Du Tertre as a source on land-clearing patterns and Labat as a source on tropical disease, see J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 29, 33. Labat is also used as a source on agricultural practice in Garrigus, Before Haiti, p. 29. 13 On recourse to Du Tertre given the dearth of testimonies from early ecclesiastics and colonists, see Boucher, Tropics of Discontent, p. 69. 14 On the ‘very extraordinary’ (‘très extraordinaire’) circumstances of an elderly slave nourishing a young infant, see Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 507. 15 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, p. xii. 16 Grunberg et al., in their introduction to the Relation, highlight a note apparently intended for a printer. See Voyageurs anonymes, p. 8, footnote 14. 17 François Regourd, ‘Capitale savante, capital colonial: sciences et savoirs coloniaux à Paris aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 55:2 (2008), 121–51 (p. 127). 18 Margat, Letter of 30 November 1730, p. 130. 19 On the proverbial unreliability of the traveller, see Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, preface, non-paginated [1/5 pages]. 20 On the anthropocentrism of maritime narratives, see Michael Harrigan, ‘A need to narrate? Early modern French accounts of Atlantic crossings’, in Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1500–-Present, ed. by Charlotte Mathieson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 23–45 (p. 39). 21 See also Bodin on indigenous Amerindian slavery, Six Books, p. 34; see also Pierre Charron [1541–1603], De la sagesse, livres trois (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1601), pp. 249–52, 671–73. 22 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 63. 23 On the resonance of Aristotle (‘the high priest of natural slave theory’) from Antiquity ‘down the ages’, see Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery, pp. 15–16; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, pp. 69–72. 24 Aristotle [384–322 BC], Politics, bilingual Greek–English edn trans. by H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), pp. 17, 19. 25 Aristotle, Politics, p. 23. 26 Aristotle, Politics, p. 25. 27 Aristotle, Politics, p. 29. 28 Sepúlveda, Demócrates Segundo, p. 12. 29 Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, pp. 88–95 (p. 95). 30 ‘plusieurs personnes, plus pieuses que savantes’, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 483.

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31 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 175. 32 ‘Aussi l’on peut à bon droit leur appliquer la définition qu’Aristote donne des serviteurs, quand il les appelle les instruments de leurs maîtres’, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 524. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, pp. 173–76. 33 See Bodin, Six Books, pp. 36–37. 34 Lucius Annaeus Seneca [c.5 BC–65 AD], Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, bilingual Latin–English edn trans. by Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 300–13. 35 Bodin, Six Books, p. 45; ‘Autant d’ennemis que d’esclaves’, Charron, De la sagesse, p. 251. Friedrich Husan and Ippolito Buonacossa, Tractatus de servis, vel famulis, et hominibus tam liberis quam propriis (Cologne: J. Kinchium, 1590), p. 3. 36 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 499. See also Chapter 5 of the present book. 37 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 70–71. 38 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, p. 72. 39 On original sin, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 92; on the ‘accept[ance]’ of slavery ‘in principle’, p. 98. 40 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 165. 41 Jean Laurent Le Semelier, Conférences ecclésiastiques de Paris sur l’usure et la restitution, 4 vols (Paris: Jacques Estienne, 1718), vol. 4, pp. 84–85. 42 See, for example, Alan Watson, Roman Slave Law (Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 5–7. 43 Alan Watson, Slave Law in the Americas (Athens; London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), pp. 83–90; on the absence of slave law in France (unlike Spain), see p. 83 (on this, Watson references Bodin, Six Books, Book 1, Chapter 5); on ‘Roman law … [as an] inevitable model’, p. 85. 44 Justinian, D. Justiniani Institutionum libri quatuor, bilingual Latin– English edn trans. by George Harris as The Four Books of Justinian’s Institutions [usually translated as the Institutes], 3rd edn (Oxford: Collingwood, Newman & Baxter, 1811), Book 1, Titulus 2 (pp. 6–7). 45 Justinian, Institutes, Book 1, Titulus 2, 2 (pp. 7–8); Titulus 3, 2 (p. 12). 46 For the division into free and slaves, Justinian, Institutes, Book 1, Titulus 3 (p. 11); on how one was enslaved, Book 1, Titulus 3, 4 (p. 13); on potestas and the proprietary relationship, Book 1, Titulus 8, 1; on ‘extraordinary punishment’, Titulus 8, 2 (p. 22). 47 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 108. 48 Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2013),

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pp. 7–9. The etymology of ‘servus’ is at Justinian, Institutes, Book 1, Titulus 3, 3 (p. 12); see also Bodin, Six Books, p. 34. 49 Hugo Grotius, De Iure Belli et Pacis Libri Tres (Paris: apud Nicolaum Buon, 1625). On Grotius, see notably David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, pp. 114–16; Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, passim. 50 Grotius, De Iure Belli et Pacis, pp. 639–40. On this defence of the obedience of slaves as ‘an expression of the world’s rational order’, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 116. 51 On Grotius’s ‘making law independent of both divine revelation and the transitory conditions of life’, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, pp. 114–16 (p. 114). 52 Grotius, De Iure Belli et Pacis, Book III, Chapter 7, De Juri in Captivos, pp. 635–40. On the right to kill prisoners, Book III, Chapter 4, pp. 590–604; on sparing a captive’s life, p. 637; ‘Effecta verò iuris hujus infinita sunt’, p. 636; ‘Ipse servus qui in potestate alterius est, ait Justinianus, nihil suum potest habere.’ pp. 636–37, quoting Justinian, Institutes, Book 2, Titulus 9, 3 (Harris, p. 109). 53 Notably, Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, pp. 94–95; Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, p. 226. 54 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 94r; Alternative copy of Letter of May 1682, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 18r; L’Évangélisation, p. 89. 55 Adrien-Augustin de Bussy de Lamet and Germain Fromageau, Le Dictionnaire des cas de conscience… (Paris: J.-B. Coignard and H.-L. Guerin, 1733); ‘les autorités respectables du Droit Naturel, de l’Écriture, et de la Tradition’, vol. 1, preface, p. i; vol. 1, entry esclaves (dated 15 April 1698 and signed G. Fromageau), pp. 1437–44. See also Jean Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage: l’esclavage colonial et l’opinion publique en France au XVIIIe siècle (Brussels: André Versaille, 2008), pp. 97–101. 56 De Lamet and Fromageau, Dictionnaire, pp. 1440–41. On Ephesians see also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 86. 57 De Lamet and Fromageau, Dictionnaire, p. 1442, with reference to Justinian, Institutes, Book 1, Titulus 2. 58 De Lamet and Fromageau, Dictionnaire, p. 1442. 59 De Lamet and Fromageau, Dictionnaire, p. 1442. 60 De Lamet and Fromageau, Dictionnaire, pp. 1443–44. On the tradition of theological opposition to buying African slaves, see also Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fols 81v–82r; L’Évangélisation, p. 75. 61 Carminella Biondi, Mon Frère, tu es mon esclave! Teorie schiaviste e dibattiti antropologico-razziali nel settecento francese (Pisa: Editrice Libreria Goliardica, 1973), p. 39, quoting Labat, Nouveau

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Voyage, 1722, vol. 4, p. 120; see also Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, p. 97. 62 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 505, 526. 63 On intertextuality, see Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré, coll. Poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 8. 64 ‘[La] generación, y por ventura fue la pena de la yra de Dios’, Luis del Marmol y Carvajal, Segunda Parte y libre septimo de la descripción general de Africa (Málaga: Juan René, 1599), fols 40v–41r; trans. into French as L’Afrique de Marmol by Nicolas Perrot, 3 vols (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1667) vol. 3, p. 108. 65 Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 21–22. On the resulting ‘pronounced tensions’ with ‘the universal message of the New [Testament]’, see p. 22. 66 Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), p. 78. 67 Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), pp. 22–23. 68 ‘[Les] Français, tous libres par condition naturelle’; ‘[les] esclaves, ou Ethiopiens, sur lesquels il est permis de le croire, est tombée jadis la divine colère, le jour où, jadis, Dieu maudit Cham’, Le Breton, ‘Relation’, 1982, pp. 71–72. 69 La Malédiction de Noé sur son fils Cham est le sujet de l’esclavage des Nègres, Maurile, Voyage, 1652, pp. 87–94. Maurile is also discussed in Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, pp. 22–23. 70 Maurile, Voyage, 1652, pp. 90–91. 71 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 91r; Alternative copy of 1682 letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 15r; L’Évangélisation, p. 85. ‘Dieu seul peut savoir la véritable raison de cette différence des hommes qui viennent tous d’Adam et de Noé.’ Alternative copy of 1682 letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 6v; L’Évangélisation, p. 133. 72 ‘une histoire assez plaisante qui avait quelque rapport avec celle de Noé’, La Courbe, Premier Voyage, pp. 78–79. A later Jesuit source relates the ‘tradition’ amongst the Senegalese that they had been destined for servitude because of the ‘sin of their Papa Tam, who made fun of his father’ (‘le péché de leur Papa Tam, qui se mocqua de son père’); Charlevoix, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 498. This is assimilated to the story of Ham without acknowledgement of its differences by SalaMolins, Le Code Noir, p. 23. 73 Du Travail qu’on exige des nègres, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 523. On the ‘discretion’ of Du Tertre with respect to the curse of

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Ham, see also Jacques Petitjean-Roget, ‘Archéologie de l’esclavage à la Martinique (1635–1660)’, Dialogues d’histoire ancienne, 11 (1985), 738–52 (pp. 746–47). 74 Le Pers, Portrait ou miroir de St Domingue, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 188, fols 57r–57v; Auguste ***, le Père, Mémoire sur l’origine des Nègres et des Américains, in Journal de Trévoux ou Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux arts, vol. 33 (Trévoux: Imprimerie de S.A.S., November 1733), 1927–77 (p. 1935). On the criticism that this inspired because of the implications about ‘l’unité du genre humain’, see Ehrard, Lumières et esclavage, pp. 105–06. 75 Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 5v. 76 On the ‘systematic appropriation of the classical and Christian traditions’ characterising a number of Portuguese Jesuits but lacking in early modern writers such as Du Tertre and Labat, see Rafael de Bivar Marquese and Fábio Duarte Joly, ‘Panis, disciplina, et opus servo: the Jesuit ideology in Portuguese America and Greco-Roman ideas of slavery’, in Katsari and Dal Lago, eds, Slave Systems, pp. 214–30 (p. 215). 77 Here I apply retrospectively Robert Darnton’s assessment of literacy in mid-eighteenth century France. Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 79. 78 For a defense of vérité, see the Lettre des Révérends Pères Alexis de Saint-Lô et Bernardin de Renouard, envoyée au Père Provincial des Capuchins de Normandie transcribed in Alexis de Saint-Lô, Relation du voyage du Cap-Verd (Paris: François Targa, 1637), non-paginated. 79 Pierre Richelet, Dictionnaire françois (Geneva: J.-H. Widerhold, 1680), p. 403. Furetière, Dictionnaire, vol. 2, entry histoire, non-­ paginated. I have explored the connotations of histoire in these sources in ‘Seventeenth-century French travellers and the encounter with Indian histories’, French History, 28:1 (March 2014), 1–22. 80 Paul Boyer, Sieur de Petit-Puy, Véritable Relation de tout ce qui s’est fait et passé au voyage que Monsieur de Bretigny fit à l’Amérique Occidentale (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1654). 81 ‘contenant tout ce qui s’est passé dans l’establissement des colonies françoises’, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1. 82 ‘les choses que j’ai recueillies’, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, preface, non-paginated [3/5 pages]. 83 For example, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, Chapter 1, Sections 1–4, pp. 3–20. 84 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, p. 5. 85 Horrible Famine dont la colonie est affligée, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 77–81.

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86 ‘Praedicabitur hoc Evangelium regni in universo orbe, in testimonium omnibus gentibus, et tunc veniet consummatio.’ (Matthew 24:14). D’Abbeville, Histoire, preface, fol. 2v. 87 On French settlements in Brazil, Maranhão and the Antilles, ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’, Relation, pp. 115–17; on the contested possession of the Americas by the Spanish, Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 281–82. 88 On tobacco, cotton and sugar, see ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’, Relation, pp. 116, 121. 89 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 1–2. 90 Traité I, Description des Antilles, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 5–42; Traité III, Des plantes et des arbres, pp. 82–194; Traité IV, Des poissons, pp. 195–245. The first book of Rochefort’s Histoire is also a Histoire naturelle. 91 ‘tout ce qui regarde les terres qui ont servi comme de théâtre à tous les événements dont j’ai fait le récit’, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 1. 92 De l’indigo et de la manière de le faire, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 107–10; Des cannes de sucre et de la manière qu’on le fait, pp. 122–25; Du Roucou, p. 149. 93 Traité VII, Des habitants des Antilles, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 355–482; Chapter 1, Des habitants naturels des Antilles de l’Amérique, appelés Sauvages, pp. 356–419; Chapter 2, De l’état des colonies françaises, pp. 419–82; Traité VIII, Des esclaves des Antilles de l’Amérique, pp. 483–539. 94 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 420. 95 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 360–61. 96 ‘Je ne sais ce que cette nation a fait, mais c’est assez que d’être noir pour être pris, vendu et engagé à une servitude fâcheuse qui dure toute la vie.’ Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 494. 97 The chapter on Slaves is also the last in the 1654 edition of Du Tertre’s Histoire. 98 I follow Natalie Zemon Davis’s definition of public (‘those to whom authors and publishers addressed their works’), though prefer readership to Davis’s audiences for ‘those who actually read the books’. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 192–93. 99 Régis Antoine, Les Écrivains français et les Antilles: des premiers Pères blancs aux surréalistes noirs (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1978), p. 30. 100 See, for example, Boyer’s indictment of Brétigny’s ‘tyranny’, Véritable Relation, p. 76. 101 Articles de paix, in Biet, Voyage, pp. 140–43; Lettre […] à Monseigneur du Parquet, pp. 300–01.

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102 Mathias Du Puis, Relation de l’establissement d’une colonie française dans la Gardeloupe…. (Caen: Marin Yvon, 1652). 103 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, preface, p. xii. 104 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, preface, p. ix. 105 Léonor de La Fayole, Relation de ce qui s’est passé à l’arrivée des Filles de S. Joseph en l’Amérique, écrite par leur Gouvernante, à Mlle de l’Estang, leur Supérieure Institutrice, du 12 décembre 1643 (Paris: Pierre Targa, 1644). 106 Coppier, Histoire, pp. 48, 89. 107 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, preface, non-paginated [3/5 pages]. 108 ‘je ne priverai pas le lecteur de ce que j’en ai appris depuis par la bouche d’un gentilhomme qui a toujours eu commandement dans ces îles’, Mercure françois ou suite de l’histoire de notre temps, vol. 23 (Paris: Olivier de Varennes, 1646), p. 332; the description of Saint Kitts is listed under the year 1639. 109 ‘les gazettes qu’on a débitées en France de ce pays’, Philippe de Beaumont, Lettre du Révérend Philippe de Beaumont de l’ordre des Frères Prescheurs, ancien missionaire apostolique dans les Indes Occidentales; écrite à Monsieur C. A. L. Escuyer Seigneur de C. F. M. etc. demeurant à Auxerre, où il est parlé des grands services rendus aux Français habitants des Iles, Antilles, par les Sauvages, Caraibes et Insulaires de la Dominique (Poitiers: Jean de Fleuriau, 1668), p. 4. 110 Jacques-Joseph Le Maire, Les Voyages du Sieur Le Maire (Paris: Jacques Collombat, 1695). 111 Le Maire, Les Voyages, preface, non-paginated [2–3/6 pages]. 112 See de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’histoire, p. 224. 113 ‘lors que les Français y auront des habitations, ils pourront reprendre cette route’, Le Febvre de La Barre, Description, p. 18. 114 Jacques Raveneau de Lussan, Journal du voyage fait avec des flibustiers à la mer du Sud (Paris: Jean-Baptiste Coignard, 1690), dedicatory epistle to the Marquis de Seignelay, non-paginated [4–6/8 pages]. 115 Garrigus, Before Haiti, pp. 85–95; on the importance of manumission papers, see pp. 86–87; on the documentation of ‘events that might be interpreted as theft’, see p. 91. 116 Regourd, ‘Capitale savante’, pp. 128–29. 117 Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, p. 18. 118 Klaus-Dieter Ertler, ‘Les Relations des jésuites et la construction de l’observateur européen face au monde indigène’, in Bernier, Donato and Lüsebrink, eds., Jesuit Accounts, pp. 276–90 (pp. 277–78). 119 Chatillon, in Mongin, L’Évangélisation, p. 8. 120 Dyonet, in Bréban, Letter, 1997, p. 105. 121 See Biet’s criticism of the ‘bestial’ ignorance in which slaves (and common people, le peuple) were left in the colonies, Voyage, p. 322.

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122 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 107r; Alternative copy of 1682 letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 31r; L’Évangélisation, p. 104. 123 Ertler, ‘Les Relations’, p. 279. 124 Jean de la Mousse, Relation du voyage du Père Jean de la Mousse, de Cayenne aux îles de l’Amérique, et des îles à Cayenne, et ses missions à Tullery, dans la Terre-ferme de l’Amérique, les années 1688, 1689, 1690, 1691, extraite de quelques unes de ses lettres, in Les Indiens de la Sinnamary: Journal du Père Jean de la Mousse en Guyane (1684–1691), ed. by Gérard Collomb (Paris: Chandeigne, 2006), pp. 155–204 (p. 164). 125 Margat, Letter of 27 February 1725, pp. 115–16. 126 For Keith Thomas, writing about early modern English planting, it was ‘neatness, symmetry and formal patterns [that] had always been the distinctively human way of indicating the separation between culture and nature’. Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 256. 127 Margat, Letter of 27 February 1725, pp. 115–16, 119, 121–22. 128 ‘livré à la merci de deux nègres, dont toute l’attention est quelquefois de nuire à leur maître’, Margat, Letter of 27 February 1725, pp. 124–25. I have translated nuire as ‘making [one’s] life difficult’ in place of the more sinister possibilities. 129 ‘Vous seriez charmé de voir nos habitations, c’est ainsi que nous appelons les maisons de campagne de la colonie. Une habitation ressemble à un bourg de France. Vous y comptez jusqu’à cent cases avec leurs rues toutes tirées au cordeau. Les cases sont de la même hauteur, de la même figure, et à égale distance les unes des autres, cela forme un aspect qui fait plaisir à l’œil.’ Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 9v; 1997, p. 118. 130 ‘Ce sont les nègres les mieux faits et les plus belles négresses qu’on emploie aux offices domestiques. Il en est de la maison d’un habitant de Saint-Domingue comme des hôtels des grands seigneurs à Paris, on y voit maîtres d’hôtel, cuisiniers, marmitons, cochers, palefreniers, valets et femmes de chambres, laquais portant livrée, mais différente, comme bien croyez de celle que portaient la plupart de leurs maîtres en France.’ Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 10r; 1997, p. 118. 131 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, non-paginated, preface [2–3/5 pages]. 132 Letter from De Val Croissant, 1659, in Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, non-paginated [2/2 pages]. 133 Letter from Edward Graves, 1660, in Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, nonpaginated [4/9 pages]. 134 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 51–53. 135 Letter from Graves, 1650, in Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, non-­paginated [5/9 pages].

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136 Sue Peabody, ‘“A nation born to slavery”: missionaries and racial discourse in seventeenth-century French Antilles’, Journal of Social History, 38:1 (autumn 2004), 113–26 (p. 113). 137 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 105. See also the illustrations of male and female slaves in various stages of staple production in Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1724, vol. 1, part 1, pp. 126–27. 138 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 52–53. 139 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 332–33. 140 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 122–23. 141 Jacques Petitjean-Roget, La Société d’habitation à la Martinique: un demi-siècle de formation 1635–1685, 2 vols (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1980), vol. 2, p. 1421; Chaudenson, Creolization, p. 112. 142 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 106–07. 143 ‘une œuvre d’imagination’, Danielle Bégot, ‘Sucre, îles, images: iconographie et histoire aux Antilles françaises’, in Danielle Bégot and JeanClaude Hocquet, eds, Le Sucre de l’Antiquité à son destin antillais (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2000), pp. 21–40 (p. 36). On the continuing recourse to Le Clerc’s engravings, even in the 1700s, see pp. 30–31. 144 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 332–33; 1667, vol. 2, pp. 114–15. See also Mr de N***, Voyages, pp. 302–03, 336–37. 145 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1724, vol. 1, part 1, pp. 90–91. 146 ‘Les nègres qui servent le moulin, et qui poussent les cannes entre les moulins.’ Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 332–33. 147 Danielle Bégot, ‘L’Image du noir dans l’iconographie française de la traite et de l’esclavage, de la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle au milieu du XIXe siècle: enjeux et discours’, in Myriam Cottias, Elisabeth Cunin and António de Almeida Mendes, Les Traites et les esclavages: perspectives historiques et contemporaines (Paris: Karthala/Ciresc, 2010), pp. 309–24 (p. 310). 148 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, preface, non-paginated [3/5 pages].

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2  Slave economies

Early French accounts of the Antilles reflect the transformations in settlement patterns from initiatives with a strong military and commercial character, to more established patterns of plantation colonisation. A number of testimonies have also been left by participants in the transportation of slaves across the Atlantic to the Americas. These texts reflect significant displacements and societal changes. They illustrate how human beings were introduced into new circuits of exchange, and how African slaves were commoditised according to transforming concepts of their labour potential. As the previous chapter indicated, some depictions of the colony hint that the contemplation of the plantation could inspire a gratifying aesthetic response in a viewer or reader. The representation of marshalled, organised slaves testifies to the unique attraction of human labour. As Montchrestien had written in the decade immediately preceding the first French Caribbean settlements, the human being was a ‘living instrument’ (‘instrument vivant’), a ‘moving tool [‘outil mouvant’], responsive to all discipline, capable of all tasks’. Whomsoever could ‘use [this human being] properly’ could ‘pride himself on having reached in his household the highest point of economy [‘œconomie’]’. Montchrestien was referring to the precolonial domestic economy in France and his point of reference was, along with what he called the ‘northern peoples’, well-known Roman slaveowners including Cato and Crassus.1 He indicates how putting a human being to use – even a member of the slave stratum – could gratify, and he did this before the establishment of stable 97

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colonies in the Caribbean. As Furetière’s Dictionnaire would later demonstrate, the œconomie, beyond such connotations as ‘wise conduct, prudent direction of one’s property, or that of others’, was a concept with a wide range that might encompass notions of harmony and order (‘le bel ordre, et la juste disposition des choses’).2 While both texts testify to the appreciation of the harmony and order of good œconomie, neither considered it beyond the European context. Yet by the time Furetière’s Dictionnaire was published, the nature, extent and value of human beings as ‘property’ was being thought about in radically different manners. These depended on factors such as an individual’s origin, or the economic circuits in which he or she laboured, or profited from labour. Around the Atlantic, those French subjects who observed or participated in enslavement were exposed to changing forms of human economy. They described unfamiliar manifestations of captivity and human exchange in societies of the Americas and of Africa to which they had often been little exposed. Atlantic slavery was considered as the trade in captives and those reduced to indigenous forms of servitude, and their integration into new systems of slavery in the Americas. These are concerns which are essential to understanding thinking about what it was that made one a slave. Thinking about human captivity and enslavement encompassed such concepts as the value of the human being as a prestige or labour commodity, and what made a human being eligible for, or excluded from, enslavement. It is on such exchanges that this chapter will focus. Beginning with an examination of how early witnesses to slavery thought about human exchanges, it will then explore the ways human difference itself was conceptualised. The comparison of representations of three slave societies (of West Africa, of Amerindian communities in the Caribbean, and of the European plantation) follows. This analyses how early modern ‘readings’ of these three economies reflect such concepts as society, and the nature of accumulation. As the following pages will demonstrate, these also reveal the centrality of distinct forms of labour to early French understanding of Atlantic slavery. The chapter ends with a discussion of the issues surrounding the place of the Christian slave within plantation society.

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Human transactions Studies of Atlantic slavery have stressed the uniqueness of the development of slavery in the Americas by Western Europeans, or the fact, as Christopher Tomlins writes, that they ‘had not … taken [the institution] for granted for hundreds of years’ in their own lands.3 However, slavery was integral to how French commentators conceptualised societies outside Western Europe. Economies across large swathes of the globe were thought to be supported by slave labour. Jean Bodin, as has been seen, saw slavery as a practice which was widespread throughout the world in 1576. The world was ‘full of slaves’, from the Islamic populations who would ‘circumcise and instruct in their religion’ Christian slaves but still ‘compel [them] to serve’, to the Spanish who kept Africans and their children as slaves.4 This concept of slavery as a ‘universal’ practice (if one curtailed within Europe by its unique historical circumstances and its conception of enslavement) was shared by the moralist Pierre Charron in 1601.5 In the century which saw the beginnings of French settlement of the Caribbean, accounts of the voyages made by Europeans reflected the apparently ‘universal’ nature of slavery. Throughout the seventeenth century, forms of enslavement appeared repeatedly in the representations of societies outside Europe available to French readers. Around the Indian Ocean Basin, in Goa and in Batavia, slaves were ubiquitous.6 The bad treatment they suffered, or their potential to disrupt the social, even ‘ethnic’ order, were often vividly recounted.7 They might also be a source of ambiguous fascination, as in the Dutchman Linschoten’s textual and graphic depictions of the slaves sold ‘like beasts’, or prostituting themselves, in the market of late sixteenth-century Goa.8 However, enslavement in the Barbary States had a distinct resonance for European Christians.9 As Charron illustrates, the Mediterranean was thought of as a religious, as much as a geographical, frontier. His condemnation of the cruelty of classical-era masters to their slaves by comparison with contemporary practice in the Barbary States illustrates the place of Islamic slavery within the European consciousness.10 William Henry Foster has suggested that ‘when early modern Europeans considered’ slavery, it was of the ‘proximity’ and ‘genuine physical peril’ of Islamic slavery that they thought.11 Phérotée de La Croix, the author of a 1688 99

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c­ompendium based on the ‘best’ authors and ‘new relations’, is representative of shared perceptions; he lamented the mistreatment and poor diet of the slaves of Muslims, and noted that ‘there is no place where slaves are worse treated than in the kingdoms of Algiers and of Tunis’.12 The accounts of ocean voyages are marked by the spectre of sighted (or, it appears on occasion, imagined) Barbary corsairs, who threatened to enslave Christians. The crew of the ship on which the Capuchin Alexis de Saint-Lô had embarked in 1635 were terrified by the sight of a Dutch ship they mistook for a Barbary vessel. Several members of the crew had taken to regaling the company with tales of their experience of ‘Turkish’ barbarity, but the Capuchin’s greatest fear was that the ‘twelve young lads’ on board would fall victim to what he called the Islamic ‘penchant for sodomy’.13 Enslavement by Muslims may also have had an immediate resonance among certain French crews who travelled to the Antilles. There were, according to Du Tertre, indentured labourers in early Guadeloupe ‘who had been captives in Barbary’; starving and mistreated in the early colony, they ‘cursed the hour they had left there’.14 Within France, accounts of the enslavement of Christians circulated widely in textual and other forms. Those produced by missionary organisations such as the Trinitarians, who were dedicated to the redemption of Christian captives, emphasised the brutality of Muslim captors.15 Robert C. Davis’s study of Barbary slavery illustrates how extensively it preoccupied the ‘Europeans of all ­ classes and creeds [who] spent considerable time wrestling with … [its] religious and psychological implications’. Davis depicts the process which followed the ransom of European captives (a minority); they entered a temporary ‘tacit bondage’ to the Church, and would participate in significant public processions which, in their Italian forms, he describes as ‘ritual[s] of regeneration’.16 Such processions also took place in France; they made visible the redemption of Christian captives to urban populations throughout the land, in what Jean-Claude Laborie qualifies as an orchestrated ‘spectacle’, producing a ‘near-cathartic effect’.17 Text, image and physical manifestations made ever-present the Muslim enslavement of Christians; it was a deep-seated trauma for an entire society, requiring a collective rite to reintegrate such captives into Christianity. It is striking that French subjects (and no doubt, other Europeans) could be traumatised by the prospect of enslavement, but quite 100

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capable of imposing it on others. Guillaume Coppier, in his 1645 account of a descent along the Barbary Coast, is particularly illustrative. He vividly imagines what would happen were his vessel to be stranded on the coast, where the crew could expect to be captured, and subjected to a ‘living death’ (he qualifies this captivity as both a ‘mourante vie’ and a ‘vivante mort’) with ‘no hope of ransom’. The crew might be sold on inland, and even ‘sold on [again] to others according to [the inhabitants’] caprices, so that no one would ever have had news of our servitude’.18 In this illustration of the anxieties inspired by the prospect of enslavement (in which the ‘living death’ curiously anticipates Patterson’s ‘social death’), Coppier testifies to a profound apprehension of being separated from Christendom. He was also apprehensive about his own commoditisation, in a later combat with two corsair vessels resolved, he writes, to bestow on each of the crew ‘an iron collar and garters’ and to bring them ‘in this dreadful and pitiful state to Morocco, to be sold there for pretty deniers to the highest bidder’.19 Yet Coppier, who had so feared becoming a captive, was himself a captor. His crew had already taken a pair of caravels off the Barbary Coast, from which, Coppier writes, the French ‘had taken fifty-seven morisques, or mulâtres who are born from [unions between] the Portuguese and black African women [‘négresses’]’. Most of them had thrown themselves overboard in an attempt to escape. They were forced back on board by Coppier and his shipmates, who took care ‘not to injure them in any way, so that [they] could use them, or better sell them in the [West] Indian islands’.20 In one context, Coppier saw enslavement as a dreadful fate from which the European crew had barely escaped, yet he participated in inflicting a similar fate on a substantial number of other human beings. It appears unlikely that the mulâtres were enslaved on purely religious grounds (Coppier makes no mention of their religion, but one might expect a certain number of Christians among such a population, given their Portuguese heritage). It may well have been the matrilineal, African heritage of this group that designated them for enslavement. Coppier’s own terminology may illustrate how this context reflected on nascent Atlantic slavery, for it is precisely as ‘captives’ that he considered the slaves of the early plantations on the Frenchheld islands.21 His formulation indicates a crossover between the two terms. Gillian Weiss has noted that this was a crossover ‘in 101

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common usage’ in the context of early modern Mediterranean slavery (and that a ‘happy endpoint’ of ransom was admitted by ‘those most familiar’ with different forms of captivity).22 Other critics have stressed the distinctions; William D. Phillips, in his discussion of Iberian–North African conflicts, writes that captivity was conceived of as a ‘temporary status’ (even if, he notes, captivity could well become slavery in the absence of a ransom).23 Winthrop D. Jordan’s description of captivity in English thought about slavery is illustrative; it was, he writes, precisely this ‘captivity [that] differentiated slavery from servitude’, and slavery, unlike servitude, ‘was a power relationship’.24 Such inflections hint how the capture and enslavement of human beings in the early French Atlantic was understood and appreciated; this was an economy in which other human beings could be accumulated. Enslavement was a fate that might be imposed on Europeans, and which Frenchmen conceived of as a ‘captivity’ they might in turn impose on others in the right context. Some of the ‘blind spots’, absences or silences concerning Caribbean slavery within early colonial texts may well be attributable to the moral interrogation of the practice, as critics such as Garraway and Dobie theorise. What must also be stressed is that the condition of the slave shaped multiple aspects of human existence. It influenced both moral responses to, and representations of, the slave. One aspect of this condition was, as has been seen, determined by ‘captivity’; another stemmed from labour. Caribbean labour underwent significant transformations throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most notably with the advent of large-scale plantation agriculture. To the marginality of an enslaved ‘captive’ was added the associations with low-status, little-valued and harsh forms of labour. While forms of the ‘mechanisms of avoidance’ advanced by Dobie undoubtedly explain some of the silence concerning slaves, a considerable part also reflects a socio-cultural condition unworthy of the attention of a European observer.25 Rather than ‘avoiding’ the issue of slave labour, French observers, under certain angles, did not appear to see it as problematic (or, one might even say, did not ‘see’ it at all). The discretion of some concerning the use of slave labour can appear remarkable. In the letter of the Dominican Beaumont printed in 1668, the only reference to it is a passing mention of a gang of slaves who ‘cleared a passage through the woods’ in Guadeloupe during the Anglo102

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French conflict.26 Given the substantial use of slave labour in the Antilles by this time, this ‘absence’ is clearly significant in some way. The question is how much it implies a refusal to acknowledge a practice because of moral or similar criteria, or how much it reflects the perceived ‘significance’ of the practice in the first place. How the assocations with captivity and labour determined understandings of the slave economy may be seen in the accounts of two Frenchmen who participated in it most directly. In the late 1690s, the naval engineer François Froger bemoaned the ‘unhappy condition’ of slaves, and the severity of the physical punishments to which they were subject. His illustrations of the physical punishment inflicted on the slaves of both the Portuguese and the French are among the most explicit graphic representations of violence inflicted on slaves that have survived from the seventeenth century.27 Yet the same Froger was himself a participant in the transport and sale of a cargo of slaves. In a description of the commerce of the island of Cayenne, he described their fate as follows: ‘the slaves that we had sent on the Féconde nearly all died before arrival, because they were delayed by calms, and lacked food and water; we still had about forty which we sold for five hundred livres each. The merchandise that is brought there from France is wine, brandy [etc.].’28 In the first context Froger explicitly depicts the violence inflicted on slaves, and indeed testifies to moral hesitations concerning the practice of slavery. In the second, he avows that he participated in (and profited from) the trade, and he even enumerates the casualties that this caused. He appears to consider this transaction to lie within the domain of commerce, and he recounts it unashamedly and, apparently, with serenity. One might well argue that the brevity of this account betrays an attempt to minimise the deaths of numerous slaves. Yet the mention of profit (the ‘five hundred livres’) may well hint at another response, indicating how practice and profit were thought of as two separate domains. The violence inflicted on slaves appears to have belonged to the moral domain of practice. Transporting and selling them seems to have been considered part of another, that of trade, in which morality may have had little or no place. In this context, starvation may well have been a circumstance from which moral responsibility was distanced, or even detached. A second telling illustration of the reflections of captivity and labour can be seen in a volume published in 1718 and attributed to 103

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a naval officer named Dralsé de Grand-Pierre. Dralsé was a participant in an expedition which brought a significant number of slaves out of Benin to Annobon in 1712. He describes the embarkation as follows: ‘on 7 February … we left the kingdom of Ouidah [‘Juda’] after having embarked 550 slaves on our ships, to go to the island of Annobon’. This was a great number of human beings, yet after this simplest of enumerations, Dralsé makes no more mention of them; they quite simply disappear from the text.29 The absence of slaves in the narrative is all the more striking when it is compared with Dralsé’s account of a population on the other side of the Atlantic. He opens up a description of the Americas with ‘what most struck’ him, which was ‘the manners and customs of the savages who are the former inhabitants [‘anciens habitants’]’. He depicts what he considered the vices (absence of religion, ‘sensuality’, ‘vengeance’, cannibalism, nudity, etc.) and the ‘good qualities’ (vigour, ‘magnanimity’ and ‘virtue’, or ‘noblesse d’âme’) of the ‘savages’ in a portrait which would have been quite familiar to readers by the early eighteenth century. He completes it with a description of the Amerindians’ adornments; despite some reservations (about the habit of applying a mix of roucou and grease to the skin, notably), he was fascinated by how they brought a certain ‘splendour’ (‘éclat’) to their appearance.30 The contrast between the minimal enumeration of a vast cargo of slaves, and an extensive, heavily stereotypical description of the former inhabitants of the Caribbean is clearly significant, and one might well ask if it is an instance of the ‘avoidance’ of representations of slavery proposed by Dobie.31 This officer, who was directly implicated in the transport of a significant number of slaves, could be thought to have carried out an especially flagrant narrative concealment pointing to moral unease. However, enslavement was not just understood in moral terms. In the New World, Dralsé not only acknowledged the existence of slavery, but he also eulogised the great profits one might make from it (his account will be returned to later in this chapter); he shows no compunction about the use of slave labour per se.32 His description of the Amerindian illustrates what it was that qualified a non-­European as an object of interest, and even of fascination; this was also bound up with questions of status and labour. Dralsé considered Amerindians to be illiterate and pre-technological (‘barbarous’), but also a martial people who were fundamentally noble 104

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in their values (and even in their physical embellishment). They were a people ‘only concerned with satisfying their desires at whatever price’ and ‘insubordinate to discipline’.33 Driven by their own desire, they would clearly be resistant to any productive economy. There is a further implication in this depiction of the former inhabitants of the Caribbean; this portrait of a people who refuse labour is curiously atemporal. Dralsé’s portrait is motivated by nostalgia for his own, imagined (European) construction of noble values, and he looks for it in the past of the islands. It is a striking contrast with his brief evocation of the presence of the African slave on the plantation (Dralsé makes a cursory mention of what a colonist might earn ‘with one slave’). Unlike the Amerindian, the slave is occupied in the basest of labour and belongs to the lowest stratum of production; he is unworthy of attention.34 This illustrates how considerations beyond morality shaped the representation of populations around the Atlantic. Dralsé’s depiction of the Amerindian is not just a foil for the slavery of Africans; it rather demonstrates the kind of values that were appreciated in, or that were projected onto, certain peoples. It is also clear that the African slave was not thought to possess these values. Froger and Dralsé both appear to testify to the kind of ‘dualisms in thought’ that, according to David Brion Davis, are ‘inherent’ to slavery.35 Froger’s distinction of his own role in slavery from the practice of others, and Dralsé’s preference for the depiction of the ‘embellished’ Amerindian over that of enslaved Africans are flagrant ‘dualisms’, but they are not unique.36 They illustrate how such ‘dualisms’ could be present within an individual morality (Froger), and that they were also determined by further criteria defining who it was who had ‘value’ and where that value was concentrated (Dralsé). The very enumeration of transported Africans by Froger, Dralsé and others has one essential implication. At its most basic level, the numbering and pricing of captives is an assessment of the value of human beings who could be evaluated.37 It implies, as has been seen, a certain tranquillity in the principle of possession. Froger might well condemn the excesses of slavery, but he did not question the principle of ownership. This enumeration also tells us very starkly that these captives had now entered an economy; they could now be evaluated, accumulated and exchanged. The implications of this will be returned to repeatedly in this chapter and the next. 105

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Early French witnesses to slavery, from mariners fleeing corsairs off the Barbary Coast to traders in substantial cargoes of African slaves, illustrate how this ‘captivity’ was thought of in diverse spheres. Thinking of slaves as an essentially marginal population and understanding certain human beings within slave economies were, perhaps as much as moral hesitation, responsible for significant absences in French Atlantic narratives. Early French observers also hint at how they conceived of their own society, and who belonged to or was excluded from it. They demonstrate how inclusion or exclusion might be based on religious appurtenance or what is now called ‘ethnicity’, but also depended on understandings that are best thought of as socio-economic. It is the site of differences which will now be explored. The domains of human difference The importance of ideas of human difference to systems of slavery (and the site of that difference) has been the object of a considerable body of literature. The construction of race in France and/or the French Caribbean has received sustained attention in studies from Biondi (1973) to Garraway, and the transformative nature of a race model has been studied by critics including Elsa Dorlin.38 The distinct environment of the second half of the eighteenth century, with the great transformations on Saint-Domingue and what Debbasch calls its ‘racist systematisation’, have been frequently studied and need no further discussion here.39 What will instead be emphasised in the following pages is the diversity of approaches to human difference before the mid-eighteenth century, even as thinking about ‘belonging’ was based on certain privileged criteria. This was an environment which some scholars have considered as largely pre-racial. Guillaume Aubert depicts an ‘early seventeenth-century Caribbean, … [in which] French concep­ tualizations of ethnicity were cultural rather than racial, with a special emphasis on religious differences’, and which gave way at the ­beginning of the 1700s to race-based fears about the purity of French blood.40 Indeed, race itself is a term that, for Michael Banton, was ‘rarely used either to describe peoples or in accounts of differences between them’ in the first place, at least within the period with which the present study is concerned.41 In an early modern context in which concepts of race might cross 106

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over into what is essentially lineage, the site of an essential, corporeal difference is uncertain.42 There is little reference to the longstanding location of human difference in the balance of humours, for example, in early French colonial writing on Africans.43 One defining moment according to a number of critics is François Bernier’s formulation of race in his 1684 Nouvelle Division. He divided the peoples of the earth into ‘four or five espèces or races’, theorising that the explanations for the physiognomy of Africans should be ‘sought in the particular contexture of their bodies, or in [their] seed or in [their] blood’.44 For Pierre H. Boulle, Bernier constitutes a ‘startling departure’, in ‘[insisting] that the transmission of characteristics by inheritance predominates over environmental or cultural determinants’ and is ‘reflective of a shift in thought that occurred in the second half of the seventeenth century’.45 Dorlin stresses the importance of Bernier in the ‘genesis of racism’; following Colette Guillaumin’s sociological approach, Dorlin sees Bernier as shifting from external ‘marks’ such as the ‘conventional or contractual’ to those ‘existing both independently and prior to … [their apprehension]’.46 There are certainly reflections of such models within the French Atlantic and the Caribbean.47 Something approaching Bernier’s ‘contexture’ might be read into Labat’s claim that sharks preferred to attack blacks rather than whites (and dogs over either), because of the different ‘corpuscles’ each emitted.48 A striking manifestation can be seen in the posthumous English edition of Jean Barbot’s Description (it was printed in 1732 but, Robin Law observes, he was working on this until at least 1711).49 The Description contains a discussion of the ‘blackness of the people of Nigritia, Guinea, Ethiopia, Madagascar’. It was an analysis based on authoritative sources, according to the narrator, who wrote: ‘I have been as inquisitive as possibly I could in this particular, and examined the arguments brought by several authors and geographers, but without any satisfaction.’50 It is Marmol’s sixteenth-century analysis that is ultimately preferred. Marmol had denied that there were links between physiognomy and climate, basing himself on the observation that the distinct physical characteristics of human populations were inherited in unfamiliar climates if they married amongst themselves. In the 1667 French translation of Marmol his ‘generación’ (Spanish) had become ‘race’ (French), and it was to become ‘blood or race’ in Barbot’s English text.51 What the English edition also 107

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does is to keep ‘blood or race’ as an explanation, but subtly distance the ‘ire of God’ that Marmol also saw as a possibility. So while the Barbot text strikingly illustrates the location of human difference in ‘internal’ characteristics, it is at the same time a response to what the narrator qualifies as a lack of general consensus (or ‘satisfaction’). Barbot’s Description testifies that there was continuing uncertainty about human difference in the early 1700s as much as a widespread ‘shift in thought’. As shown by the early modern missionaries who discussed lineage based on scriptural authority, there were diverse responses to even those explanations which the Bible seemed to offer. Other locations of the site of human difference were drawn upon, perhaps uncertainly, and for some time. One potential response to physical difference may well have been to attribute it to the environment. Claude Jannequin, who visited coastal West Africa in the late 1630s, suggested that his reader might have been tempted to believe that the ‘nature of the land’ (‘la nature du pays’) was responsible for the physiognomy of Africans. Jannequin rejected this suggestion, writing that the inhabitants of the same environment could have diverse physiognomies, and suggesting that West Africans’ appearance was caused by childrearing practices (a ‘cultural’ explanation, in later terms). He does, however, illustrate that environmental explanations were among the responses to be expected amongst readers.52 The ‘environmental’ interpretation that Jannequin refuted might be thought of as one of several causes of physical difference. In the mid-1670s a company administrator named Chambonneau, writing about the Senegalese, noted that it was ‘widely reported’ that black Africans were descended from Ham; he concluded that as they were ‘descended from Ham’s lineage [‘lignée’]’, they had been ‘distinguished from other men, in eternal memory of [his] curse’. He also engaged with the question of the influence of climate and environment. Chambonneau refuted the idea that skin colour was caused by ‘the heat of the sun’ (given that black Africans were black from birth), or by the ‘climate’ (as there were light-skinned ‘Moors’ in neighbouring countries, and ‘white métis children’ had been born from unions between European men and black women). However, Chambonneau thought that the air had a ‘great influence on the nature [‘naturel’] of men’. The influence of this air was particularly strong on the Senegalese, made what he called their esprits ‘heavy, thick and dim’ (‘pesants, grossiers, et ténébreux’) and ‘weighed 108

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their bodies down’ with ‘thick humours’ (‘grosses humeurs’). He concluded that the Senegalese were of a distinct nature (‘un autre naturel que nous’); this was demonstrated by the distinct susceptibility of Europeans and the Senegalese to sickness depending on the climate (the former were regularly ill in Africa, and the latter in cold climates). To complicate this still further, Chambonneau noted that those who lived around the French settlement and ‘frequented’ Europeans, engaging in ‘commerce’ with them, appeared ‘more subtle, civil, frank and of better will’ (‘plus spiritualisés, civils, francs, et de bonne volonté’) than other West Africans.53 In this account written by an administrator who explicitly distanced himself from intellectual milieux, the difference of Africans is conceived of as both ‘internal’ (a cursed heritage and susceptibility to air) and ‘external’ (the air itself, acting on the humours, and the influence of contact and influence with Europeans), to use Dorlin’s terminology.54 It gives us an idea of the kind of constructions of human difference that were circulating amongst those in most direct contact with Africans. The idea that a race model was decisively imposed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries must be further nuanced by the continuing importance of what is now thought of as culture to understanding difference. Beyond pigmentation, lineage or environment, behavioural traits could be the principal site of difference. Loyer, in his 1714 Relation du voyage du Royaume d’Issyny, makes no mention of a biblical curse. Although he implies that dark pigmentation was not an ‘agreeable’ trait, he attaches no explicit signification to it (he even claims that colour might fade with age).55 There is little sense of the permeation of the category of race in this text, published thirty years after Bernier’s. Loyer repeatedly affirms that Africans were slothful, and certain formulations (‘the nègres in general are all lazy’, or ‘naturally lazy’) might seem to imply a degree of the innate.56 Yet the absence of any clear theoretical foundation seems to situate difference in the organisation of African societies. Issyny, according to Loyer, was a kingdom in which wealth was concentrated in the hands of merchant nobles, and in which the ‘miserable’ populace, risking starvation, were obliged to constantly labour, or even ‘enlist themselves as perpetual slaves [‘esclaves perpétuels’]’ to survive.57 Africans might be enslaved in recurrent internecine conflicts, and slaves might be the victims of human sacrifice.58 The differences between Europeans and Africans 109

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are manifested in the economic and social spheres rather than the innate. The question of difference was particularly charged within the plantation context (as later pages will illustrate). At this stage, a letter sent by the Jesuit Margat de Tilly in 1725 will demonstrate one further condition that should alert us to questions surrounding ‘race’. On the subject of the ‘character’ (‘caractère’) and ‘intelligence’ (‘génie’) of slaves, Margat distinguished himself from ‘some of our traders who think they are honouring them in distinguishing them from mere beasts, and who have trouble imagining that peoples of a colour so different to their own, could be of the same species [‘espèce’] as Europeans’.59 The use of the term species should be qualified here; at this time the term may well reflect ‘physical form or appearance’ without its later ‘scientific’ connotations.60 The implications of Margat’s observation, that those who most profited from slave labour adhered to the most radical separation between human groupings, are clear, in any case. Margat himself was not immune to wide-ranging generalisations that might seem to reflect on the innate. He considered the capacities of the ‘character’ and ‘intelligence’ of African slaves to be generally inferior to those of Europeans in this 1725 letter, and he qualified their (intellectual) ‘conception’ as inferior in that of 1743.61 As a discussion of esprit in Chapter 4 will propose, the distinctions he drew seem to be more closely related to what would now be thought of as acculturation than to innate capacities. His view of how planters distinguished themselves from slaves illustrates how socio-cultural and economic factors contributed to maintaining radical conceptualisations of difference. These perspectives on human difference illustrate heritage/ climate (Chambonneau), or the ‘societal’ (Loyer) or the ‘cultural’ (Margat). They also demonstrate that thinking about corporeality cannot be isolated from the manifold discourses in which human beings were understood. Amongst these discourses, religion was of particular importance. Early colonial texts testify to some anxieties surrounding the new proximity to African bodies.62 Yet, even outright repugnance towards Africans could be changed into appreciation of their ‘agreeable’ appearance after they had been b ­ aptised, as the Jesuit Pelleprat demonstrates.63 Critics have highlighted the fundamental importance of religion in early modern thinking about human difference.64 Sue Peabody (who also draws attention to 110

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Pelleprat’s appreciation of the appearance of converted slaves) considers religion rather than ‘race’ as the ‘crucial divider’ until the demographic superiority of the black population in the eighteenth century led to the ‘legal apparatus of race [being] invented and applied’.65 The intersection of the religious and the corporeal domains led to some interesting manifestations of belonging and of exclusion. The Protestant Rochefort illustrates the importance of religious appurtenance. Eighteen years before Bernier, Rochefort had reminded his readers that while the colour of slaves’ skin (their ‘teint’) was different to theirs, slaves were ‘nonetheless men like them, whom God has created in His image [‘à sa semblance’]’. This was not the most significant difference between slave and settler in Rochefort’s eyes, as far more important was the distance of slaves from ‘the marvellous light of truth that we [the colonists of Tobago] profess’.66 In 1666, Rochefort indicates that human difference was commonly located (apparently by colonists) in skin pigmentation. His gentle reminder to his compatriots about the extent of corporal difference also hints at what may have been a source of tension in thinking about the body. Whatever colonists might have thought, one might differ in complexion and yet be made in the image of God. Rochefort illustrates how a religious discourse could refute the idea of radical corporeal distinctions between human beings, yet he also indicates how firmly non-Christians were excluded from belonging. Conversely, skin colour might be apprehended in popular piety in a more familiar manner. Mongin noted that the feast of the Epiphany had been chosen for what he called the ‘fête des nègres’, which was attended in 1682 by slaves from all over Saint Kitts. It was apt, he noted, ‘because in the paintings of this mystery, one of the three kings is usually depicted as being of the colour of our nègres’.67 Rochefort and Mongin illustrate approaches to religion and corporeality from two distinct spiritual and social contexts. The first hints that the corporeal (as opposed to the ‘racial’) could be construed as distinct, without meaning absolute difference. Mongin shows that corporeal difference could instead become somewhat familiar, in the right circumstances. ‘Belonging’, it appears, was made up of multiple strands. The religious was an essential – perhaps the most essential – strand within the socio-cultural bind, but it was threaded amongst others. The corporeal was one such strand, but what it 111

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actually meant to individuals appears to have depended on a very mobile range of contextual and historical factors. The construction of socio-cultural binds and exclusions has in turn been the object of critical attention. Colette Guillaumin firmly situates the shift from ‘conventional marks’ to classification by ‘somato-morphological criteria’ in the context of the need for labour in the French Atlantic. Guillaumin refuses a distinction between ‘black’ and ‘white’ slaves in the seventeenth-century colonial environment, qualifying the exclusive use of Africans as slaves as a consequence of the need for European labour in Europe.68 The problem with this approach is that it glosses over the many strands which made up ‘belonging’ (an exploration of the status of indentured labourers later in this book will clarify this). A much more fluid model for these distinctions between Europeans and slaves has been furnished by David Eltis, who emphasises the nature of the distinction between ‘outsiders – those who are eligible for ­enslavement – from insiders, who are not’.69 In Eltis’s view, early modern ‘Europeans defined as insider anyone brought up as European’, which meant that slavery was ‘a fate for which only non-­Europeans were qualified’.70 Eltis stresses the importance of ‘possessive individualism’ in European conceptions of property and slavery; this ‘recognition that one owns full rights in oneself and … [can] bargain away such rights’ amongst Europeans was accompanied by the exclusion of these rights amongst slaves, which was ‘played out along an ethnic divide’.71 Other critics have proposed that the colonial slave was the product of a system which granted legal status in ‘variable proportions, entailing different legal capacities’ (Jean-François Niort) or that ‘identities in the Americas [which] were situational and rational’ were inapplicable to African slaves, who were then ‘categorized … in the superficial, hence abstract terms of … appearance’ (Joseph C. Miller).72 The ‘ethnic’ aspect evoked by Eltis may well have been fused into the interactions between Europeans and African slaves (or, as they were unfailingly termed, nègres). Yet this aspect is remarkably resistant to being pinned down to one site. Some aspects may have been of more significance than others in certain encounters (echoing, perhaps, Miller’s ‘situational’ model). There may even be parallels with pinning down what it was that made someone belong; witness the initial refusal of La Courbe to purchase the ‘white man who looked like a Moor’ (‘avait la mine d’un Maure’) 112

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offered to him by Africans in the Senegambia of the 1680s, and for whom he ultimately offered ‘the value of two captives’. This was a young Spaniard who had been kidnapped, circumcised and raised ‘in Muslim law’ before his ultimate escape. While La Courbe does not elaborate on his motives for paying for – ransoming, in essence – the young man, his brief assertion that he was ultimately to die ‘as a good Christian’ gives us a significant clue.73 This discussion of human difference has left aside the question of métissage, which inspired a host of other interrogations (and that will be discussed later on in a specific context). What is notable in early African encounters is the apparent fluidity with which human difference could be apprehended. There seem to have been a diversity of mechanisms for understanding difference within early modern French culture, which were employed in various contexts. At least some witnesses seem to have acknowledged the inconsistencies or ambiguities of these mechanisms with relative serenity. After all, in the mid-1730s, in his Essai politique sur le commerce, Jean-François Melon could engage with such issues of concern to the legislator as motivating slaves through the promise of freedom, or the inadvisability of creating a class of mulâtres; yet he considered the very question of the influence of climate on pigmentation as one of those ‘uncertainties abandoned to dispute’ unworthy of a legislator’s attention.74 Those who, unlike Melon, interacted with African and Caribbean populations, continued to encounter them in contexts in which their difference remained ‘uncertain’. In the colonial contexts, perhaps the most consistent aspect of approaches to certain forms of difference (at least up until the mid-eighteenth century, and excluding religion) was how adaptable they were. Accounts of African slavery Early French accounts of Western Africa reflect the different levels of exposure of European ecclesiastics, mariners and officers to African cultures. Some seafarers had little or no exposure in situ, while certain agents and missionaries might gain considerable familiarity with these cultures.75 French accounts of West African economies are revealing about the role of forms of ‘translation’ in understandings of unfamiliar societies, and hint that such understandings might be based on essentially limited contacts. Their descriptions of processes of enslavement within Africa are themselves written 113

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from a peripheral perspective. They reflect French conceptions of the structures of African societies, and by extension, questions surrounding the legitimacy of servitude. In their descriptions of labour within Africa, they also reflect shared concepts of what was considered to characterise European culture. The understanding of West African societies was conditioned by diverse interactions, and there are hints that peripheral contacts might allow seafarers to make substantial generalisations. Coppier relates that one of two slaves he had brought from Cape Verde to Saint Kitts was an aristocrat, who had been sold because he had stolen ambergris from his master (he had in turn exchanged the ambergris for brandy from the French). This led him to the conclusion that ‘criminals and those neglecting their duty are sold to the first merchant ships which appear on their coasts’.76 More sustained interactions could allow observers to make more elaborate constructions of social organisation, even as they testify to the challenges in understanding African societies. The Capuchin Alexis de Saint-Lô described a Norman trading expedition in 1634–35 to the coast of modern-day Senegal that illustrates the limits to exchanges of communication. While the inhabitants of Rufisque ‘spoke a French that was comprehensible enough’, further south in Portudal the French had recourse to intermediaries. A Jewish interpreter interceded for the monarch who, despite ‘speak[ing] very good Portuguese, thought it below his rank to use another language when speaking to foreigners’.77 In another audience some time later, the king, according to Alexis, illustrated the ‘number of enemies he had killed and taken’ in a battle between indigenous peoples the previous day by ‘count[ing] to ten, and [then] starting over, counted to twenty’. At this point, the Capuchin writes, the monarch was ‘unable to go further, because Africans [‘les nègres’] can only count to this number’; he then made a series of marks (Alexis estimated there were perhaps ‘as many as one hundred’) in the sand with his finger.78 This is an interesting illustration of how an observer, dependent on translation, could be led to conclude that there was an essential conceptual absence at the heart of a culture. This belief in the absence of numeracy was, as it happens, to be widely shared, and would be repeated even by those who had never been to Africa.79 These early portraits testify to how unfamiliar the societies of coastal West Africa were, but they also demonstrate that observ114

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ers could see some coherence within their practices. Six years after Alexis de Saint-Lô, Claude Jannequin considered West African societies to be composed of ‘men who are ignorant of all the sciences’, who ceded to whatever ‘brutality [‘la brutalité’] suggests to them’.80 However, Jannequin also understood that these Africans observed a distinct set of social practices which were related to the environment. He had, as has been seen, refuted the influence of the ‘nature of the land’ on physiognomy. He also noted how West African populations stocked up on food supplies, adapted building practices, and even reduced their displacements because of an intense rainy season which led to flooding (Europeans, in contrast, were literally ‘up to their necks’ in water).81 This was a limited relativism which did not extend to Jannequin’s assessment of the economy. He disparaged in what ‘royalty’ consisted in West Africa, and reflected that the ‘most unfortunate’ of the French ‘would not have wanted to swap his condition, with that of the king’.82 It is in this context of fragmentary encounters that French travellers understood the enslavement of human beings within Africa. The principal features can be seen in a comparison of the accounts of Jannequin, Le Maire and Delbée. Jannequin discusses the military practices of great swathes of peoples on the west coast of Africa, contrasting their manner of conducting hostilities with that of Europeans. He saw West Africans as lacking in the ‘ambition to conquer the lands of [one’s] neighbours’, instead undertaking ‘incursions’ into enemy lands to take portable chattel like livestock and human beings. Jannequin considered this a debased form of conflict, characterised by ‘brutality’ (‘brutalité’) rather than a noble ‘generosity’ (‘générosité’).83 The surgeon Le Maire (who voyaged to Africa in the 1680s) distinguished between what would now be called North and sub-­ Saharan Africa according to criteria of ethnicity, character and economic systems. He characterised the inhabitants of the ‘sterile’ lands north of the Senegal river as distinct in colour and physiognomy, and in their mobility, trading ability and calculating intelligence (‘esprit fin et délié’), from the inhabitants of present-day Senegal.84 He characterised the latter as a ‘sedentary’ people, who were ‘big and well made, but slow-witted and without intelligence’ (‘niais, et sans génie’), and who inhabited a land fertile in pasture and grain.85 It was the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa who were enslaved, captured in wars in which their kings engaged for ‘the 115

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‘lightest of pretexts’ and remaining prisoners ‘as if the war were eternal’.86 The king might have ‘two or three’ slaves rounded up indiscriminately from the ‘first village [encountered]’ and given to a departing envoy.87 The ‘perfidy’ of the king, who might enslave his neighbours and ‘sell them for brandy’, was matched by his subjects, who ‘sell each other, with no regard to blood ties, so that the father sells the son, and the son his father and mother’.88 In what he called ‘aventures’, Le Maire also related even more imaginative manifestations of African slavery. In one, a son, realising that his father wanted to sell him into slavery, pre-empts his fate by selling the father beforehand (apparently to the French) and denying any blood link to him. Returning home, the ‘crime’ is punished by the son being himself sold into slavery by his lord.89 The interest of this kind of narrative expansion lies in part in its ironies; an individual suffers the unjust fate he had intended for another. It also contributes to the construction of an image of Africa characterised by frenetic enslavement. Delbée’s 1671 account of a large French expedition is particularly instructive about what those involved in the transportation of slaves thought about enslavement in Africa. Delbée saw the ‘commerce’ of the kingdom of Ardres as limited to ‘men and foodstuffs’, with the slaves made up of prisoners of war, ‘contributions’ from neighbouring kingdoms, criminals and hereditary slaves who might be employed by their masters ‘as with an ox or a horse’.90 Punishment of sedition might be borne by ‘all [one’s] wives and relations’, and the wives of debtors might be confiscated.91 Indeed, the very social structure of the kingdom is characterised, in Delbée’s account, by radical imbalances of power between the sexes and between different ranks. He considered the isolation of the ‘sixty to eighty’ ‘wives’ of a minister (‘marabout’) to be ‘a mark of submission which is very close to servitude’. The queen had ‘near-absolute power on all the king’s other wives’ and might ‘sell a number into slavery, when the king refuses her one of her requests’.92 Delbée even claimed to have bought eight such women, whom he ‘distinguished’ from other women on board. This was a step that gave them so much ‘joy and satisfaction’ that none of the eight died during the Atlantic crossing (during which, he estimated, one hundred slaves had died, leaving 334 upon arrival in Martinique).93 Voyages to the African coast such as those of Le Maire and Delbée ultimately imply that Atlantic slavery transferred Africans 116

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from one slave economy into another (or as Cohen writes, that ‘no particular change was seen in [their] status as [they] crossed the Atlantic’).94 Commentators who had not been to Africa also appear to have considered the traite in a similar way. According to Pierre Pelleprat, the ‘principal cause’ of the enslavement of Africans was the ‘continual wars’ between their monarchs, during which the victors enslaved prisoners of war, as well as women and children; indeed the ‘laws of the land’ (‘les lois du pays’) allowed monarchs to enslave subjects ‘whenever they wished’.95 The slave was ‘merchandise’ (‘une marchandise’) acquired through a transaction: a father ‘would sometimes sell one of his children for six or seven axes, or for some other metal pieces, or haberdashery’ of little value.’96 For Du Tertre, however, the arrival of European merchants on the coast of Africa would lead a merchant to contact a ‘petty king’ or governor. He, in turn, would trade ‘men, women and children of all ages for iron bars, grindstones, silver coins of little value, brandy, cloth, or other goods that they most need’. These could be prisoners of war, the condemned to death or thieves. However, Du Tertre also claims that ‘unjust’ merchants might kidnap the ‘innocent’, through, for example, attracting them on board with gifts.97 Brett Rushforth has provided a stimulating analysis of several of the accounts of African slavery mentioned in this study, in which he considers them in the light of Bodin and Grotius’s model of the law of nations (which in turn ‘required that captives be taken in a justifiable war’).98 He considers that accounts such as those of Jannequin, Bouton and Pelleprat promoted a vision of ‘African enslavement as a product of the law of nations rather than the law of nature, with captives bought from sovereign African allies rather than enslaved by the French’ (with Du Tertre as a notable exception), qualifying them as ‘rationalizations’ of slavery.99 Early French commentators certainly emphasised, as Rushforth points out, the source of their slaves in forms of conflict.100 However, there are questions concerning legitimacy, the nature of the transaction, and the very nature of ‘African’ society, which are more ambivalent. It is true that certain French accounts stress the principle of legitimacy evoked by Rushforth (it is particularly evident in Pelleprat). However, as Mongin writes in 1682, there had been a background of interrogations about slavery since the Portuguese first engaged in this ‘strange trade’ (‘étrange trafic’) along the African coast. He writes that theologians considered slavery to be ‘legitimate’ 117

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when it was the result of ‘birth, criminal conviction or the law of conflict’ (the latter two were, as we have seen, the conditions that would also be accepted in principle by the theologian Fromageau). According to Mongin, one of the difficulties these theologians had was precisely the idea that there could be a just war, or just ‘procedure’ (‘procédé’), amongst ‘such brutal peoples’ who had enslaved ‘families and their posterity since time immemorial’. To ease the ‘qualms’ of the Portuguese, Mongin writes, their kings had given ‘very precise orders’ to merchants that they should establish the ‘vendor’s right’ in Africa (although these orders were ‘perhaps not always very well observed’). This, Mongin adds, was a trade that was carried out with most ‘equity’ by the French, and with most ‘usefulness’ for slaves by Catholics; he had learned from slavers that ‘the slightest injustice’ was punished ‘by order of the court’.101 There is clearly some ambivalence in Mongin’s account of the way this legal dilemma had been resolved. Others, such as Mongin’s fellow Jesuit Bréban, considered conflicts in Africa as being motivated primarily by the Atlantic slave trade itself, and it has been noted earlier that this was one of the reasons that led Fromageau to explicitly question whether there could be a slavery based on just war in Africa.102 These are the sort of theologico-legal concerns that made questionable the foundations of slavery in a just war. There were also accounts of slavery that reflected on the legitimacy of purchase. The Relation of 1671 states that on the entire West African coast from Senegal to Angola, European slavers purchased principally prisoners of war, but also criminals, debtors and even the ‘debauched’ who would ‘sell their freedom for two or three good meals, and what could get them drunk for three or four days with their friends’.103 In 1718, Dralsé de Grand-Pierre related that the inhabitants of Benin ‘give you slaves that they take from their neighbours with whom they are always at war’.104 The king had ‘absolute authority’, and the men had ‘despotic power’ over both wives and slaves. Dralsé even claimed that this power extended to men selling a wife upon developing the ‘slightest distaste’ for her, ‘thus mak[ing] money on the most bothersome of the things of this world: … a woman who is unattractive [‘une femme qui ne plaît pas’]’.105 Both can be said to situate enslavement in forms of conflict, or even in forms of legitimacy, according to Rushforth’s criteria. Yet they also claim that there existed a much wider range of motivations for enslavement. 118

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The Relation of 1671 and Dralsé’s account claim, respectively, that Africans could be enslaved through the inability to recognise the concept of freedom (selling oneself), or excessive marital power (selling a wife). These are, ultimately, forms of transaction, but transactions from which the notion of equity is very far-removed. Such depictions also reflect on the very concept of society in West Africa. The accounts of Le Maire and Delbée, which have already been discussed, are among a number that stretch the concept of legitimisation to its limits. In passing, it might be noted that Le Maire depicts the victims of slavery in Senegal as being of inferior génie, which may have some rare Aristotelian overtones. More significantly, Delbée writes that a criminal or traitor’s family might also bear the punishment for his infractions (this had also been noted by Maurile, although his testimony is exceptional in hinting that slaves bore the inheritance of Ham).106 It also been seen how, according to Le Maire, Africans could be enslaved through the infringement of the closest of familial bonds (the assertion was repeated by Froger, who declared in 1698 that a passion for strong alcohol might lead West Africans to sell their own fathers to procure it).107 Loyer describes a monarch who ‘wages war on his own subjects’ for European products or for ‘brandy, of which he is so inordinately fond that he needs six pots per day’, and would ‘hold an entire village responsible for the wrongs of an individual’.108 In these diverse portraits of African polities, the bonds of family, or a recognisable justice, seemed to offer no protection from enslavement to the individual. These were societies thought to be built on the weakest of bonds between individual, family and political authority. This fundamentally undermines the ‘sovereignty’ which Rushforth sees as essential to French justifications of the slave trade with African polities. Just how can be seen by comparison with Bodin’s own view of what constituted a polity. For Bodin, the Republic (in the English translation, Commonwealth) was a ‘lawful government of many families’ (in French, ‘ménages’); it was this ‘lawful government’ which distinguished the polity from bands made up of ‘robbers and pirates’, to which the ‘laws of arms’ did not apply. It was family that was the ‘true seminary and beginning of every Commonwealth’.109 In the accounts of African societies which have been discussed, there was little or no recognisable link between the subject and the polity. Government was despotic, and even the family – that, for Bodin, was the foundation of the polity 119

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– had been dissolved. From such a perspective, the African polities that were said to lack the most fundamental binds also lack the basis of ‘lawful’ exchanges. They are marked by a profoundly antisocial character. How much difference this made to thinking about slaves on the other side of the Atlantic is, in any case, debatable. Labat freely avowed that most slaves in Africa were rounded up illicitly either with the complicity of monarchs or by ‘merchants’ who were nothing more than ‘highwaymen’. He even claimed to have discovered – after purchase – that one of his own slaves had been rounded up arbitrarily in this way, with his brother.110 It seems to have made no difference to Labat’s proprietorship. One might well advance that narrative accounts of African polities blurred as much as legitimised slavery, creating a distance between what went on ‘over there’ and what was in front of one’s eyes in the colonies. There is, however, a further ‘transactional’ aspect to French accounts of enslavement in West Africa, and that is epitomised in Pelleprat’s and Du Tertre’s descriptions of the cheap tools, trinkets or currencies for which slaves could be exchanged. Travellers to West Africa considered the slave trade to be founded on unequal, even debased, forms of exchange. Naturally, as traders well knew from their experience, Africans were capable of making significant profits in commercial exchanges.111 Nonetheless, it is difficult to escape the impression amongst French commentators that slaves were obtained in very advantageous circumstances. Le Maire notes in a description of trade on the island of Saint-Louis (Senegal) that such valuable commodities as ‘hides, ivory [and] captives’ could be exchanged for ‘cloth, cotton, copper, tin, iron, brandy and a few glass trinkets’, giving a profit of ‘eight hundred per cent’. An excellent slave might be bought for ten francs, and a ‘slave of good enough quality’ for ‘four or five pots of brandy’.112 Le Maire, who participated in the trade, makes explicit what were mere hints of gratification in Pelleprat and Du Tertre’s accounts.113 There are hints of a similar appreciation in the ecclesiastic Loyer’s account of the purchase of African ‘merchandise’ (‘marchandises’), and of slaves, the ‘most precious merchandise’. He acknowledges that Africans themselves profited from the trade, but does not fail to mention that Europeans gave ‘brandy, iron, knives, bad rifles, coral and glass beads’ in exchange.114 Such testimonies are enthusiastic about European profit, and 120

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they also characterise African labour practices as fundamentally unprofitable. The inhabitants of Benin, according to Dralsé, were relatively ‘industrious’ (‘industrieux’) in comparison with the other peoples of the West African coast, but they lacked sufficient ‘industry’ to construct buildings that were ‘rich’ and in ‘good taste’.115 French observers perceived that the lack of skilled labour (‘industrie’) complemented the absence of intensive labour practices. The same Le Maire who rejoiced in the profits to be made in t­ ransporting Africans across the Atlantic bemoaned the conjunction of ‘sterility’ with the ‘lack of industry’ of the inhabitants of what is now Senegal, in the 1680s.116 He found practices of agricultural labour ‘amusing’ (‘plaisante’); he thought the soil was inefficiently dug and sown, and noted that one hour of manual labour was followed by two passed in conversation.117 Froger considered the peoples of the West African coast ‘from the Senegal river’ to be ‘robust and well made’, but ‘very lazy, and always [having] a pipe in their mouth’.118 Such testimonies often resulted from a superficial encounter with African societies, but they also testify to a wider European confidence in the mastery of production. The ‘riches’ of Africa, according to Labat, were ‘almost useless in the hands of its inhabitants’.119 The source for his Nouvelle Relation (a Company administrator in Senegal) repeatedly attributed ‘sloth’ (‘paresse’) to Africans. It was this, he thought, which stopped them from ‘profiting from the abundance of cotton’, creating a surplus, and preventing Europeans from dominating the market in such fabrics.120 He further characterised the industry of Africans by the lack of specialisation (edge-tool makers, or taillandiers carried out what would be seven different trades in Europe), by the lack of specialised tools, and by inefficient labour. He thought that Africans were unaware of the productive value of their lands and the profit it could bring them and (like Le Maire) was amused by their agricultural practices (a ‘divertissement’).121 In these overwhelmingly Catholic testimonies, one can glimpse a similar concept of ‘rational self-interest, and the correct estimation of the absolute value of material things’ that, as Wyatt MacGaffey writes, constituted early modern Europeans’ ‘mercantilist self-conception’ in the encounter with Africans.122 Comparatively few graphic depictions of the human exchanges on the African coast remain from this era. There are, however, a number in Froger’s Relation which are among the most exemplary manifestations of slave iconography in the corpus.123 The title page 121

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(Figure 2.1) depicts an exchange between Europeans and Africans taking place against a maritime background. It is an engraving that, in Christopher L. Miller’s view, ‘idealizes “trade” as fair exchange’. Miller notes that while commodities are depicted in this engraving, slaves are absent from it; he also notes the presence in the background of ‘a sign of inequality, a European weapon of mass destruction: a ship’.124 However, both Froger’s text and images indicate a perspective on trade to which the notion of ‘fairness’ may be quite foreign. Froger’s low estimate of the ‘currency’ (the ‘knives, a few sheets of paper, small pieces of iron and other similar things’) which the crew exchanged for ‘pirogues loaded with fish’ around Gorée is evident.125 On the title page, similar low-value products (knives, scissors and paper) occupy the foreground between European and African figures. This engraving does not illustrate the exchange of slaves, but another one (Figure 2.2) explicitly places a European at the centre of the frame between two chained slaves and another African (presumably the vendor), this time clothed in a check tunic.126 Such an explicit depiction does little to gloss over what was actually being traded with Africans; there is little sense of any unease with what was taking place. What both engravings have in common is rather their unashamed representation of profit. This range of ‘translations’ of West African societies appears to have been considered with at least some authority by contemporaries. Certain sources were considered as authoritative knowledge; Le Maire’s testimony on Senegal, for example, was an important source for an article in Bruzen de la Martinière’s Le Grand Dictionnaire historique et critique.127 The oral testimony of mariners who had been to the African coast could be gathered in the Antilles and included in correspondence sent to metropolitan France; Bréban, in his letter to his brother, summarised the testimony of ‘many Frenchmen who [had] been along the coast’ about its poor climate and fertility, and relayed a vivid portrait of an African queen who had been described by the Carmelite chaplain of a slave vessel.128 That West Africa was also an environment in which oral narratives were received in unique conditions can be seen in Barbot’s journal, in which he gathered the testimony of fellow Europeans concerning trading patterns a full two hundred leagues inland.129 He transcribed the description of the populations around Accra recounted to him by a Danish official, adding that he could not vouch for its veracity.130 If Barbot indicates that oral information 122

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2.1  Title page in François Froger, Relation d’un Voyage fait en 1695, 1696 & 1697 aux Côtes d’Afrique, Détroit de Magellan, Brezil, Cayenne & Isles Antilles (Paris: Nicolas de Fer and Michel Brunet, 1698).

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2.2  Commerce des esclaves in Froger, Relation, pp. 16–17.

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was avidly sought on the coast, he also demonstrates that there were strategies in place to filter through this information. In early 1679, he writes, a canoe from Cabo Corso travelled twenty-five leagues to exchange two slaves for one held by the French crew. This proved to Barbot that ‘the father does not sell the son, nor the father his son, as some claim’.131 It is unclear whether Barbot is referring to the ‘claims’ in oral or written accounts of Africa, but it is striking that he writes this a full fifteen years before Le Maire’s Voyages would make precisely such a claim. Barbot hints at how distanced Europeans might be from first-hand knowledge about African societies, and as such, perhaps, about enslavement. He also shows that while the most extravagant accounts might benefit from at least some authority in situ, there was also resistance shown by some witnesses, and to be expected from some readers. The depictions of slavery on coastal Africa were ultimately to be a source of knowledge which was transferred through diverse oral and textual channels. That there was also hesitancy about how accurate these depictions were may be seen in the continuing importance of empirical responses (as is the case with Barbot). They are ultimately fragmentary depictions of African societies, both in their peripheral nature, and in their reflections of polities which seemed to lack the most fundamental social bonds. French observers reflect the consciousness of a unique capacity to evaluate and to draw profit from the labour of human beings. This is further evident in accounts of other forms of thinking about the ‘value’ of human beings, within distinct cultures around the Atlantic. American economies of slavery Various descriptions of Amerindian forms of captivity in the Caribbean islands and mainland South America were available to early modern French readers. Descriptions of the Brazilian Tupinamba had become familiar in France by the turn of the seventeenth century, thanks to Léry and Montaigne. These authors wrote from different confessional perspectives, and had radically different exposure to Amerindian peoples. The Calvinist Léry frequented the Tupinamba for many months in Brazil, but Montaigne’s closest encounter with Amerindian peoples was, as is well known, a translated exchange in Rouen. Early accounts of Brazil are also notable for their extensive intertextuality. The importance of accounts of 125

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Amerindian populations to understanding early modern slavery has escaped some critics. For Lestringant, the total lack of interest in the ‘material’ or labour in the captivity of Montaigne’s Cannibales means that it does not constitute enslavement.132 This is an interpretation that will be nuanced in the following pages, which explore depictions of indigenous slavery in Brazil in the early seventeenth century, and in the Caribbean during later colonisation. It was a French colonisation initiative in Maranhão (Brazil) from 1611 to 1614 that brought the Tupinamba back to France again (and literally so; several were presented to the French court in 1613).133 Two published accounts of the Maranhão settlement were written by first-hand observers, the Capuchins Claude d’Abbeville and Yves d’Évreux. D’Abbeville and d’Évreux had spent, respectively, periods of four months and of two years in the settlement. Only d’Abbeville’s Histoire de la mission would be published contemporaneously, as the changes in the political relationship between Portugal and France meant d’Évreux’s Voyage would be lacerated (it would not ultimately be published until the mid-nineteenth century).134 D’Abbeville extensively describes such Tupinamba customs as marriage, the raising of children and hospitality. This hospitality, he claimed, was extended to members of the same tribe, although the Tupinamba reserved a different treatment for French visitors, who were expected to give material tokens for hospitality (d’Abbeville had been told that increasingly significant tokens had been expected in recent years from the French). D’Abbeville also depicted the Tupinamba as a martial people who were ‘continually’ engaged in furious tribal wars. There was a disproportion between the numbers of women and men because the males were engaged in ‘exterminating each other’. This disproportion also fed the practice of polygamy. The Tupinamba also had ‘slaves’ who were (in the case of men, apparently) well treated, could ‘come and go as they pleased’ and could even have sexual relations with women from their captor’s kin. Female slaves worked in domestic and agricultural labour, but the ultimate fate of slaves of both sexes, d’Abbeville writes, was to be slaughtered and consumed by the Tupinamba. He extensively describes the slaughter of male captives, which took place in a public ritual that lasted several days. The Capuchin’s account stresses the visual, spectacular aspects of this ceremony, and he even transcribes the ‘discourses’ made by a 126

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Tupinamba elder and by the prisoner, before the execution. It was a rite that, to judge by its recurrence in early modern texts, fascinated and repelled d’Abbeville’s contemporaries. What is interesting about this understanding of Tupinamba ‘slavery’ is how important honour is to it (Patterson, as will shortly be seen, characterises Tupinamba slavery as honour-based ‘tribal’ slavery precisely from his reading of d’Évreux).135 D’Abbeville relates that Amerindian leaders motivated warriors before battle by urging them to be ‘virtuous’ and not to ‘lose, through weakness and cowardice [and] to their great dishonour, the honour and reputation that their people [‘nation’] had acquired’. It was a sense of honour (exacerbated in the Capuchin’s view by the devil himself), that made captives prefer to be executed and consumed to escape; so important was honour that if they returned to their own villages they would be vilified for cowardice. These considerations make significant d’Abbeville’s preference of the term ‘prisoner’ [‘prisonnier’] to qualify those who he initially called ‘slaves’ (at least in the case of males).136 Tupinamba captives, in his view, were taken during wars waged for acquiring ‘honour’ and taking revenge rather than territorial expansion or riches.137 D’Évreux distinguished his account of the colonial initiative from that of d’Abbeville. Noting that he had spent two years in Maranhão as opposed to his confrère’s four months, he promised the reader not to repeat anything described by d’Abbeville and only to add what he had gained from ‘experience’.138 D’Évreux’s understanding of Tupinamba slavery was based on the testimony of slaves in Brazil, whom he had questioned with the aid of a translator (truchement). D’Évreux had reproached the sloth of one of the slaves who had been assigned to him, and the slave had in turn ‘admonished’ him by observing that it was not the Capuchin who had ‘put his hand on [the slave’s] shoulder in combat’. D’Évreux then ‘recognised’, with his interpreter’s help, that it was this act that signified enslavement during combat. Once a captive had been struck on the shoulder, he would acknowledge himself to be ‘vanquished and a slave’ and would follow his new master, ‘serving him faithfully’ until the day he would be executed and consumed by the community.139 It is precisely on d’Évreux’s account that Patterson bases a short discussion of Tupinamba slavery. He observes that Tupinamba captivity was indeed a form of slavery, but one representative of 127

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‘honour-based’ slavery, from which ‘economic motives were wholly absent’.140 He quotes the testimony of one slave who had been interrogated about his condition by d’Évreux, and sees in the slave’s response the reflections of a ‘sense of degradation … as intense as his master’s sense of glory’.141 While it is impossible to comment on how this actually reflected Tupinamba experience, it is clear that d’Évreux, like d’Abbeville, saw Tupinamba as precisely this sort of ‘honour-based’ slavery. D’Évreux also read Tupinamba slavery as a coherent, recognisable system. The Capuchin saw an essential coherence in Tupinamba slavery, which he considered as governed by a system of ‘laws of captivity’. Slaves were obliged to present what they had caught while hunting or fishing to their masters, who would take their preference and leave the slaves the rest. They were subject to their masters’ will concerning their marriages, and were even restricted in the manner they entered domestic spaces; D’Évreux writes that they would be executed if they passed through the thin walls made up of palm leaves (as was commonly done by their captors) instead of the door. If they tried to flee they would also be executed. Yet slaves also benefited from many of what the Capuchin called ‘privileges’. Within a relationship in which, he writes, they ‘considered their masters and mistresses as their fathers and mothers’, they were treated without violence. They might even have sexual relationships with free unmarried women (although the women might be subject to a generally humorous suggestion of slight impropriety).142 Tupinamba captivity was also a phenomenon that appeared recognisable to d’Évreux. He assumed that cannibalism remained the ultimate fate of captives, although he was much more discreet about the practice than d’Abbeville (perhaps respecting his promise to limit himself to his own ‘experience’). 143 However, his reading of Tupinamba servitude was based in large part on European practice and scriptural precedent. D’Évreux saw some parallels between Tupinamba and French customs of servitude; he writes that a married Tupinamba woman who engaged in sexual relations with a slave would be subject to as much shame as a French lady who had similar relations with a servant.144 Explaining unfamiliar practices (in this case, the social opprobrium concerning slaves) through comparison with French practices was a strategy that was commonly used in the encounter with non-European cultures. What is more original about d’Évreux is his recognition of a sign, which 128

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inspired him to reflect on what he saw as commonalities in the practice of slavery in all humanity (he refers to both pagans and Christians). This sign was precisely the physical gesture that indicated possession, the ‘striking the captive on the shoulder with the hand’. It reminded d’Évreux of an ‘ancient custom’ of considering the shoulder as the site of domination (in, for example, Isaiah).145 He considered such ‘external ceremonies’ as having been ‘invented to represent the inner attachments [‘les affections de l’intérieur’] with simplicity’. In so doing, he also assimilated Amerindian slavery to the manifestations familiar to Europeans.146 D’Évreux’s understanding of Tupinamba society was based on mediation through a translator (as were so many encounters across the Atlantic in the ports of Africa). What is significant is how he seemed to recognise unfamiliar practices, by establishing parallels between the customs of the Old World and those attributed to the tribal societies of the Americas. It tells us how in the second decade of the seventeenth century, the constructions of slavery in European cultural heritage continued to influence what were (ostensibly) empirical descriptions of Amerindian practices. D’Évreux’s ‘recognition’ of Tupinamba slavery in this sign had further implications. It led him, through what he called a ‘belle prophétie’, to a biblical verse which described the condemnation of the Canaanites: ‘Tolle molam, et mole farinam: denuda turpitudinem tuam, discooperi humerum, revela crura, transi flumina’ (Isaiah 47:2).147 He recognised parallels between Tupinamba and Canaanites in their ‘turpitude’, the frequent crossing of water undertaken by the Tupinamba, and their ‘uncovered shoulder’, which indicated they were ‘subject to this great captivity, common to all these nations’. That d’Évreux qualified this as a ‘belle prophétie’ may imply that we should read it primarily on a metaphorical level. Nonetheless, the injunction to take up stone also reflects in a striking manner on the encounter between European and Amerindian cultures in the second decade of the seventeenth century. The French use of iron-based implements (‘ferrements’) contrasted with the Tupinamba reliance on stone axes for building and agriculture, and on a tool made of wood and stone for preparing their food staple.148 The contrast between European and non-European technological and agricultural practices could be a further strand in recognising in the Tupinamba a people who had been reduced to enslavement in the Bible. 129

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There was one more feature of Tupinamba culture, according to the Capuchin accounts, that is very telling about the nature of European encounters in the Atlantic. It appeared to d’Évreux that the Tupinamba lacked full numeracy; as his compatriots would later say about Africans, they could not count.149 This trait would also be attributed to other Amerindian populations; the Caribs seem to have been thought deficient in numeracy from the earliest contacts.150 D’Abbeville writes that the Amerindians of Maranhão used no currency between themselves, and that they ‘[did] not know what it is to buy or to sell for gold and silver, for which they have no use’.151 Throughout the seventeenth century this reading of Amerindian exchanges as essentially non-commercial would also be extended to the Caribs. Even in the 1680s, the administrator Caillé de Castres claimed that ‘the Caribs engaged in no [profit-bearing] commerce amongst themselves’ and that they only carried out ‘trade’ (‘négoce’) with Europeans. He writes that a well-informed European might make great profits in trading with those Caribs unfamiliar with the going rates for basic tools or trinkets (one might exchange ‘hatchets, billhooks, knives’ or ‘a hundred other trinkets [‘bagatelles’]’ for annatto or hammocks, a ‘good merchandise’). Europeans might even buy the slaves the Caribs had taken from their enemies at an advantageous price (the implication is that these were slaves of African descent).152 This thinking of non-European societies as being pre-­ technological, lacking in numeracy, and refusing accumulation has, of course, parallels with how West African peoples were described at this time. West African and Amerindian societies were also attributed significant differences. While it was thought that Amerindian peoples were excluded from the early capitalist economy, certain types of exchange in human beings were consistently attributed to them. French commentators considered that Amerindian tribes carried out exchanges of Amerindian and of African peoples in distinct ways. There are two aspects of the exchanges in Amerindian captives or slaves that reflect early modern preoccupations, and that shed light on why certain representations were more privileged than others. These concern the questions of honour and of the spectacular form. French commentators noted that Carib raids observed a regulated pattern of exchange, for example in the distinct fates reserved for male and female victims. Du Tertre writes that the Carib raiders of 130

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mainland South American peoples would ‘devour’ a certain number, keep the women for their ‘pleasures’, and sell the remaining boys and men to Europeans.153 Throughout the seventeenth century, it was said that Caribs, before they went to war, gathered in social assemblies where they exhorted one another to combat (Caillé de Castres even transcribed one such harangue that he claimed to have ‘heard from the mouth’ of an old Carib).154 As with d’Abbeville’s account of Tupinamba captivity, this was warfare that was thought to be motivated by the acquisition of ‘honour’ and ‘revenge’.155 It was said that males, in the Carib forms of captivity, would be ultimately consumed (it has also been written that trophies were made from executed prisoners).156 What is remarkable about accounts of Carib tribal warfare is how they draw on a very long-lived intertextuality. It is particularly flagrant in the accounts of the cannibal rite throughout the seventeenth century. That Caribs ‘always ate their male captives’ has been ­qualified as an ‘often-repeated myth’ by John Thornton, and its popularity can be seen in French texts.157 Lestringant has demonstrated the ‘transmission’ of the topos of the cannibal rite, across the ­confessional divide from the Calvinist Léry to the Capuchin d’Abbeville, with it reappearing in the texts of Du Tertre and Rochefort, and as such ‘transported’ from one Amerindian group (the mainland Tupinamba) to another (the island Caribs).158 Rochefort furnishes a particularly explicit demonstration of such transtextual influence. He transcribes the speech of the Carib prisoner facing death, noting that ‘it has a strong resemblance’ to the Tupinamba prisoner in Montaigne. A topos originating in sixteenth-century Brazil could be read about in a metropolitan text (Montaigne) and recognised in the seventeenth-century Caribbean.159 That the topos of the execution of the Amerindian prisoner was so long-lived is, no doubt, in large part because of the fascination and horror inspired by the consumption of human flesh. It is also instructive about the importance of honour to appreciating Amerindian societies. In the early Antilles, the anonymous flibustier saw (male) Amerindian captivity as essentially non-labouring. He writes that captives were ‘fattened for five or six months during which [their captors] allow them to do nothing except eat, drink and sleep’, and during which they showed no signs of distress.160 They would ultimately be executed and consumed, clearly the most absolute refusal of exploiting the labour potential of the human being. 131

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The Carib execution rite was, like the Tupinamba manifestations described by Léry and d’Abbeville, conceived of as a spectacle. The fascination it inspired can be seen in the account of Caillé de Castres, who had been an administrator in the Caribbean in the 1680s. He depicted a recognisable rite; it was a ‘magnificent feast’, a public event entailing conspicuous consumption of alcohol (and ultimately, of the body). Caillé, as with other authors, portrayed the captive in a rich ekphrasis, ‘painted and anointed with as many ornaments as can be lent to him’.161 He would be served as if he were a ‘comrade’ (‘camarade’) and not ‘the main actor in a bloody and inhuman tragedy’ (‘tragédie’), an interesting assimilation to a familiar narrative form.162 The fate of the captive was also familiar in ritual, and even alimentary terms; led to the site of his execution by his captor, he would be accompanied by ‘flutes and drums’ and bedecked like ‘a fat ox’ at a religious feast.163 Caillé also considered this to be a spectacle based on honour. This rite was essential to a martial society in which men refused to work; it was an account of a resilient death. The captive faced death with a defiant harangue (as captives did in other French accounts).164 The captive would enumerate the prisoners he had himself taken (and eaten), and his resistance would, Caillé writes, make of him ‘the victor up until his death’.165 The spectacle would end with the captive’s execution, and with the cannibal scene that had become familiar at the time Caillé was writing. How much this account reflected Caillé’s own experience, in the 1680s, is very debatable.166 Perhaps the most that can be said is that Caillé reflects a continuing trend throughout the 1600s to describe Amerindian cannibalism. The narrative strategies used to do this are telling. Du Tertre, for example, describes the familiar features of the cannibal rite: the triumphal procession, insults and resistance, the dismemberment and the use of the boucan.167 He crowns it with a vivid description of ‘a prodigious and astonishing thing to see’, the ‘intense passion or rather the rage of the women’ (‘la manie, ou plutôt la rage des femmes’), who in eating human flesh, ‘chew it, chew it again, grip it with their teeth’ (‘elles la mâchent, remâchent, la serrent entre leurs dents’).168 This is another vivid spectacle, in which the use of the present tense gives much of the vividness, and makes of it a repeated phenomenon, or a ritual. Yet for all this, Du Tertre does not actually claim to have witnessed the cannibal ritual. The closest he gets to 132

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it is to declare that ‘when [he] was in Martinique, a savage brought a roasted leg into a cabin’; he uses the kind of narrative tactics typically used in empirical testimony, without explicitly saying that he had witnessed cannibalism.169 Asserting that the Caribs ‘now abstain from a thousand cruelties [‘mille cruautés’], that it was their custom to carry out before killing [their captives]’, he hints that they were evolving, bringing them ever further away from their former ‘cruelty’.170 In Du Tertre’s ambiguous position as near-witness to the ritual, there are parallels with the continuing ‘infinite postponement’ of cannibalism that Peter Hulme has described in European and Amerindian encounters. For Hulme, there is always a ‘rumour’ of societies ‘just beyond the next hill’ which practise cannibalism; this seems to maintain these practices just on the borders of culture. They are never actually apprehended, nor can they be fully discounted.171 Du Tertre adopts a position on the edges of empirical apprehension; he maintains the idea that such practices exist, but through discreet strategies that may well have allowed ‘rumour’ to play a part. As with Rochefort and Caillé, Du Tertre relays spectacular testimony of the consumption of the human body at a time in which Amerindian peoples were becoming increasingly distanced from European colonial populations. There are some parallels here with a fundamental observation about French accounts of Carib society (and in particular Du Tertre’s) that has been made by Madeleine Dobie. Dobie notes that this remarkable continuity in accounts of Carib society, their ‘[continuing occupation of] a central place in colonial narrative’, was concomitant with Africans ‘[occupying] a marginal position’ in narrative ‘despite their growing numbers’. She attributes this, in large part, to discursive issues in the case of Du Tertre; in her view Du Tertre could apprehend the Caribs ahistorically, as a people ‘determined by culture and natural environment’, while he lacked a discursive mechanism to describe African slaves.172 What are of interest to understanding representations of slavery are the further implications about the condition of the captive, or slave. The attractiveness of the depictions of Amerindian captivity, of the spectacle, was based on attributing disinterested, honourable values to these peoples. Representations of Amerindians were attractive because they were said to refuse subjection, to prefer death to dishonour. Africans were instead thought to have been subjected to captivity, 133

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to the basest forms of enslavement, and for the most tenuous of motives. These questions of condition are a further strand in what would determine absences (and repeated presences) in colonial-era representations. Accounts of Amerindian captivity also contrasted with the descriptions of the chattel slavery Europeans inflicted on Amerindians, or that Europeans and Amerindians inflicted on Africans. Slave labour was a practice that predated French settlement of the Antilles.173 The anonymous flibustier in 1618–20 tells of male captives carrying out tasks of food production (manioc preparation) in Carib society alongside women; it is unclear if these captives were Amerindian or of African origin.174 Within Amerindian societies, African peoples were subjected to distinct forms of slavery. The anonymous flibustier relates that on their arrival in the Carib community, Africans were separated from Amerindian prisoners, and were reserved for tasks of food production. They might be put to death upon their master’s demise (although unlike other captives, they could be entitled to a reprieve).175 The flibustier encountered one such slave on Martinique who told him that he spent his time working continuously, to escape being ‘clubbed to death’.176 The practice of employing Africans as slaves also appears to have entered Carib mythology, if the flibustier is to be believed, and was a feature of one vision of the afterlife.177 There are few accounts of the ways Caribs enslaved Africans, especially given the progressive marginality of Carib communities. Nevertheless, two testimonies do illustrate French thinking about the conditions of such enslavement. Caillé, nearly three-quarters of a century after the flibustier, describes a similar use of black slaves among the Caribs. They were captured during raids and would be employed in agriculture upon the return to the assailants’ community. Yet there is a notable contrast between Caillé’s meticulous, spectacular description of Carib execution, and the attention he accords to African slaves.178 His chapter On Agriculture totals a mere eight lines of the modern text, makes no mention of the slaves who carried out this labour, and focuses instead on the distinction between idle Carib men and the women who ‘cultivate the earth, make the bread and generally do everything that has to be done’.179 The ‘Anonyme de Saint-Vincent’ provides an account of the fate of a large number of African slaves washed up on the island of Saint-Vincent in 1657 after shipwreck.180 This was enslavement 134

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of Africans in a non-capitalist society, where they were ‘used’ as slaves despite the Caribs ‘having no need of them’ (they did, however, furnish a useful ‘little help’ given the continual conflict with European powers). However, the most telling indication of what was thought specific about African slaves lies less in terms of labour than in status. The ‘Anonyme’ recounts that over time, this ‘people of slaves’ (‘nation d’esclaves’) had become a considerable population who continued to bear the ‘title [‘titre’] of slave, although in reality they [were] only so in name’ and ‘lived in every way like their supposed masters’. Despite this title being ‘abhorred by all free peoples [‘nations libres’]’, it was ‘in no way disagreeable’ to those of African origin as they were in fact ‘slaves who had only changed master’. The distinction between Caribs and slave descendants would, during some ‘great ceremony’, be trumpeted by the former as it signified ‘their valour, their courage’ and that they had renounced the ‘yoke of servitude’ in occupying Saint-Vincent.181 Once more, this is a formulation that approaches Patterson’s concept of ‘honour-based’ slavery. It appears to have distinguished the members of an increasingly mixed ethnic group, converging with French perceptions of those who could be subjected to slavery, and those who could not. The Caribs had apparently rejected a ‘yoke’ that African peoples and their descendants continued to accept. What accounts of Amerindian servitude demonstrate is that populations in the Americas were thought to engage in specific types of exchanges. To use Coppier’s vocabulary, ‘captivity’ was envisaged distinctly according to the society in which it was practised. While Amerindian societies might well be thought to use slave labour (particularly that of Africans) to some degree, what most intrigued French commentators about them was a rite that was essentially non-productive. This was supposed to result in the consumption of the body itself. This reveals much, not just about who might be reduced to servitude, but what kind of human transaction was thought of interest to readers. How Amerindians were said to use the bodies of captives differed fundamentally from the ways Europeans harnessed labour in their colonies. The economy of the islands Early French commentators were conscious of a unique capacity to appreciate the labour potential of the slave, and reflect on the ­distinct 135

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exploitation of labour within early plantations. In this they also reflect the wider context of European encounters with the Atlantic environment. As Thornton reminds us, Europeans had concepts of property, and the relationship to the land, which were quite distinct from Amerindian and African societies.182 French accounts of the Atlantic economy shed light on the centrality of accumulation to colonial preoccupations. They also signpost some of the key strands of what proprietorship of a slave actually meant to Europeans. The central importance of accumulation and mastering labour to how French observers conceived of European culture is evident from a very early stage of colonial implantation. It can be seen in somewhat unexpected sources. The Carmelite Maurile (1652) was, as has been seen, the commentator who most stressed the irreconcilable difference of Europeans and Africans through the curse laid on Ham. However, Maurile saw Europeans as distinct in other domains. It was they who taught Amerindians the notion that pearls could have a ‘price’, leading them to ‘esteem’ them and to ‘search them out’.183 The distinctiveness of Europeans was not necessarily positive. Basing himself on a reading of the geographer Gerard Mercator’s description of Haiti, Maurile contrasted the ‘interest’ and ‘avarice’ of ‘Christians’ with the ‘innocence’ of the original inhabitants who held property in common and refused to enclose their land.184 For Maurile, the peoples, raw materials and products of the world had been divinely ordered for a greater good. In a Moral Reflection on Commerce, he depicts a world in which all ‘useful and necessary goods’ had been distributed by God so as to promote communication, exchange and union. Through ‘reciprocal commerce’, ‘each continent finds what it needs, and becomes a world complete in goods and commodities’.185 Asia had its spices, jewels, gums and porcelain. Europe had ‘its cloths, its iron, its copper and its fruits, which Africa does not have’; the importance to Europeans of the mastery of iron (which they traded so frequently, along with cloth, in West Africa) will be noted at this point.186 However, Maurile singled out only one of Africa’s many ‘commodities’, that central commodity that would ‘serve the other parts of the world and principally America’: slaves.187 It was their labour, he wrote, that was indispensable for bringing precious metals and quicksilver from the great mines of continental South America. The confidence in the European capacity to evaluate, exchange 136

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and profit reaches a pinnacle in a popular commercial guide (what Cohen calls the ‘vademecum of French traders’), Jacques Savary’s Le Parfait Négociant (1675).188 The guide extensively treats such trade-related concerns as the comparison of regional measurements or customs duties, the mobility of money through lettres de change or the terms through which companies were established. A chapter entitled ‘On the French islands of America, Canada, Senegal and the Guinea coasts’ details the measurements of the islands, their products and revenue, and the foodstuffs, alcohols, clothing, metal objects and hardware to be traded in the Americas or in Africa. The trade in African slaves was, according to Savary, ‘all the more advantageous in that they cannot do without nègres in these islands to work at sugar, tobacco and other tasks’.189 Savary had anticipated some dissension concerning this trade; he noted that it ‘appeared inhuman’ (‘inhumain’) to those who were unaware of its advantages. He explained that the purchase of Africans from their enemies by Christians would ‘take them out of a cruel enslavement’ and allow them a less rigorous servitude, as well as bringing them to ‘the knowledge of the true God’. Savary gave further advice to the prospective trader. He advised that one should bring along appropriate foodstuffs for slaves, and immediately set sail once all the slaves were boarded, to avoid them committing suicide. Ensuring there was a musician on board so as to ‘make them dance, and keep them gay’ (‘les faire danser, et tenir gais’) during the passage was another tactic.190 Maurile and Savary demonstrate how slaves were imagined in the movement of capital, goods and labour, between Europe, Africa and the Americas (and as Maurile illustrates, even a deeply spiritual commentator could appreciate forms of temporal exchange and production). Both saw African labour as the motor of a new world economy centred on the Americas. In the Caribbean context, accounts of the developing plantation economy reflect further aspects of the slave condition. Within the economy of the islands, the plantation slave was first and foremost a source of labour. Du Tertre makes a telling comparison of Amerindian and African slaves; he thought that enslaving Amerindian peoples was particularly challenging, and ­ that the Caribs could ‘never be reduced to servitude’ as they scorned the condition of those who laboured (‘la condition laborieuse’).191 Those mainland South American peoples who could be enslaved 137

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(Du Tertre distinguished between the ‘Arawaks’ and the ‘Brazilians’) would only serve in a certain manner, and through the use of certain behavioural strategies, or through what Blackburn calls ‘the outcome of an unequal and uneasy species of negotiation’.192 Du Tertre claims that the Arawaks themselves drew a distinction between the types of labour they would undertake and that reserved for African slaves, refusing agricultural tasks and tobacco preparation. The French ‘studied’ them so that their ‘preferences’ (‘inclinations’) were revealed, and these would be the only tasks they would carry out (as it happens, Du Tertre says they would usually only hunt or fish).193 The ‘Brazilians’, thanks to their interactions with the Portuguese, benefited from greater mental capacities (‘esprit’); just one could ‘keep game and fish always on the master’s table’ (although they would not ‘work the earth’ either).194 There was a distinction between the sexes; the women were excellent domestic slaves, cooks and laundresses, excellent managers of their time, and ‘as attached to their work, as the men are to sloth’.195 As with the Arawaks, the Dominican advised that one should leave Brazilian slaves ‘thinking that they are free [‘dans l’opinion qu’ils sont libres’], and only order them to do the things that please them [‘qui flattent leurs inclinations’]’, as they would not obey if they thought they were being ordered to do something ‘as one does with slaves’.196 According to Du Tertre, what made Amerindians reject authority was precisely the title of slave (this can be compared with the slaves of African heritage raised on Saint-Vincent according to the ‘Anonyme’). In fact, in refusing to obey all orders but those which suited their own (apparently free) will, they seemed to reject not just the title of slave, but the essence of slavery itself. For the men at least, this was ‘slavery’ more reminiscent of a system of tribute than of the absolute exploitation of labour. This contrasts with Du Tertre’s depiction of how African slaves thought of liberty. Even if, he wrote, African slaves seemed to inherit the desire for freedom that he considered ‘natural to all men’, it was a concept that they ‘valued little’. For Du Tertre, Africans considered ‘the whole world as their homeland [‘patrie’], once they can eat and drink’. He attributed what he saw as their ‘indifference’ (‘insensibilité’) to the freedom they had lost in the Antilles to the ‘extreme hardship’ (‘extrêmes misères’) they suffered in their homelands.197 They preferred to be enslaved amongst the French, when well treated, than to ‘die of hunger’ in their homeland 138

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(as, Du Tertre claims, he had been told himself by many slaves).198 The Dominican illustrates how a (recognisable) liberty was thought to be of value only to certain populations. His comparison of the enslavement of Amerindian and African peoples also demonstrates how the idea of liberty was inseparable from other ideas concerning honour and labour. The focus on the question of the treatment of slaves in early colonial descriptions of slave economies is telling. The early ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’ assured the reader that African slaves obtained on the coast of Africa by English and Dutch ships were ‘bought honestly and more honestly treated’.199 For Bouton, the comparatively gentle treatment of the French meant that it was a ‘joy’ (‘bonheur’) for Africans, who were usually already slaves in Africa, to be among the French.200 These are assurances that may hint that some critiques of slavery were expected.201 They also hint that French observers thought little about the liberty of slaves on the islands; as accounts of African slavery related, these were captives to be put to labour. The implications can be seen in a number of depictions of slave labour. The Jesuit Adrien Le Breton writes in a 1722 description of Martinique that the French ‘employ [African slaves] for all uses, buying them, renting them, selling them as they wish’, ‘transport[ing] … an enormous mass’ of them, so that ‘day by day the land is more and more cultivated and the inhabitants enrich themselves’.202 Le Breton’s explicit use of the transactional vocabulary (‘buying’ and ‘selling’ human beings) might appear somewhat ambiguous, and it may hint at some resistance on his part. However, his confidence in European mobility, accumulation and labour exploitation is quite clear. The Relation of 1671 demonstrates a further implication of this ordered, profitable plantation labour. It depicts the transformation of highly valued ‘merchandise’ (‘marchandise’), the slave cargo, from the point of its arrival in the islands. The ‘corporal needs’ (‘nécessités corporelles’) of slaves would be looked after, their masters would ‘procure a marriage that is agreeable to them’, and they would be given ‘little plots of land to cultivate, which attach them to their masters’. There were, it notes, sucreries composed of ‘whole families enslaved for up to two generations, having great friendship for each other, and conserving the same sentiments that paternal love inspires amongst us, living as satisfied with their 139

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c­ ondition as our peasants in France [‘aussi satisfaits dans leur condition que sont nos paysans de France’]’.203 This account crystallises the paternalistic overtones of Caribbean slavery in an obvious form. This is, in essence, a depiction of the foundation of a new type of family, headed by a master. It is a vivid contrast to the visions of broken, anti-social families at the root of African societies in accounts such as Le Maire’s. Even the most discreet of depictions can be instructive about the attractions of slavery. Dralsé (whose principal focus, as has been discussed, was the Amerindian) makes a remarkably concise, telling summary of the slavery of Africans. He depicts the idyllic, fertile Americas, which might ‘offer its planters [‘habitants’] the commerce of the universe’. The climate around Cap Français was so favourable as to ‘barely require the cultivation and labour of Man [l’homme’] to bestow all its fruits’ and, he added, ‘with a single nègre working at sugar and indigo, one stands to make a considerable trade’. There were no planters in the Americas who did not have a ‘great plot’ of ‘precious’ sugar cane around their residence, and who did not profit immensely from it.204 There is little hint in the Relation of 1671 and in Dralsé’s account of anxieties about the principle of buying slaves and putting them to work. With some parallels with Rochefort’s appreciation of Poincy’s residence on Saint Kitts, they also hint at further ways in which the mastery of human beings might be appreciated. The Relation of 1671 describes a ‘family’ made up of a substantial labour force, and Dralsé, in the briefest of mentions, summed up what might be accumulated through the ‘industriousness’ he saw lacking on the West African coast. These are unashamed testimonies to slave labour that demonstrate the capacities that French commentators attributed to themselves. They are also assurances that slavery could be characterised by continuity, social harmony and (for Dralsé) minimal effort. There may well have been a dissonant note. The Relation of 1671 and Dralsé’s account reflect the attraction of servitude without apparent reflections of coercion. They are among the most gratuitous depictions of the slave economy and of plantation labour discussed so far, but there are hints of further tensions. Du Tertre acknowledged that negotiation could enter into the slave–master relationship, although he attributed it to Amerindians alone. The assurances that slaves were in fact being well treated hints at aware140

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ness of what possessing another human being could actually entail. There are hints in accounts of the Caribbean economy that possessing and accumulating another’s labour was not entirely without its preoccupations. These will be even more evident in accounts that focus most directly on plantation labour that will be discussed in later chapters. The Christian slave Thus far, this discussion has focused principally on temporal slavery. Yet as Savary demonstrates, it was also claimed that slavery could integrate Africans into the Christian community. Du Tertre’s 1667 claim that the enslavement of godless slaves would enable them to ‘know God, to love Him, and to serve Him’ is representative.205 However, the extent to which a socially marginalised slave could be part of a spiritual community was a source of significant interrogations; thinking about the Christianised slave would, to use David Brion Davis’s model, be another site of fundamental ‘dualisms’. One of the most vigorous critiques of the role of ecclesiastical narratives in justifying practices of slavery is Garraway’s study of the transactional nature of conversion. Studying Pelleprat and Du Tertre, she characterises missionaries as participating in a ‘conflation of spiritual and material indicators of worth’, a ‘dualism’ in which ‘the slave mediates between two contrary systems of value that collude in the colonial enterprise’. She sees the Code Noir as epitomising this ‘collusion’, in which religion ‘functioned as a strategy of inclusion … to incorporate the slave into the colonial social order’, and in which religious instruction was ‘at best an indoctrination … and at worst a perverted approximation of rituals nearly forgotten by the French’. Garraway’s analysis also has a strong focus on the corporeal; she sees the ‘dominant Christian ideology of the slave trade’ (or, to use her metaphor, the ‘beating Christian’) as ‘openly embrac[ing] the suffering of slaves as a path of salvation’.206 Garraway shines valuable light on the ambiguities surrounding the missionaries who might themselves profit from and employ slave labour in the Antilles, even to a significant degree. However, there were also variations within missionary practice and thinking, as Peabody notes in her study of French ecclesiastical approaches to slavery. Peabody portrays Catholicism as ‘a cultural and social system that undermined the hierarchies of the material 141

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world with the tenet that all souls are equal in the eyes of God’ while still supporting slavery. She also identifies forms of ‘collaboration between missionaries and slaves’ and of missionary resistance to slaveholder violence.207 Peabody’s approach acknowledges some of the lived specificities of human interactions, and signposts the ways Catholic commentators thought about distinctions between secular and spiritual domains. Interrogations about the crossover of these two domains were perhaps most especially concentrated on the baptised slave. Certainly, one does not have to look very far for testimony about how a slave could be integrated into both secular and spiritual ‘systems of value’. Amongst the edifying conversions described by the Dominican Chevillard in 1659 was that of a female Amerindian slave purchased ‘with several Moors [‘Mores’] at a good price’, and bought ‘more for the salvation of [her] soul than the temporal profit to be expected from such slaves’; all that could be hoped from her was ‘making cassava bread and other minor domestic occupations’.208 The Jesuit Margat suggested in 1725 that it was ‘Providence’ which had brought slaves to the colonies, with the desire to ‘reward their temporal servitude … with the true freedom of the children of God’.209 Nonetheless, there were, as has been indicated, divergences concerning slavery amongst ecclesiastics. In the French colonies there were distinctions between the practices of the different religious orders; Peabody has contrasted the ‘zealous’ Jesuit and ‘passionate’ Capuchin approaches to conversion with the Dominicans’ ‘more exclusive notion of Christian doctrine’.210 Indeed, the governor of Saint-Domingue favourably compared the Jesuits’ ‘zeal for the instruction of slaves’ with the Dominicans who lacked their ‘talent’ in 1715.211 How individual ecclesiastics thought about the treatment of slaves was also marked by contextual specificities; this can even be seen in their understanding of the use of violence. Garraway extensively highlights Labat’s own participation in the violent punishment of slaves who participated in non-Christian rituals (this will be returned to in a later chapter).212 Bréban appears to consider the blows that the slaves of Saint-Domingue received from their godparents, to punish moral faults, as a salutary example of the piety of both (apparently, black godparents; Bréban favourably compares their diligence with the lack of interest of white godparents).213 As both demonstrate, ecclesiastics might well consider violence as a 142

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necessary, if unfortunate, aspect of the treatment of slaves. Such ecclesiastics also demonstrate how certain forms were thought more appropriate than others, according to the relationship (proprietory or moral) with the slave; the difference between the two types of ‘beating Christian’ in the testimonies of Labat and of Bréban would have been evident to contemporaries. There were also some missionaries who openly questioned the principle of slavery itself. Such direct interrogations are relatively sparse, but they do imply that religion was more than a tool for ‘collusion’. Maurile describes the early Capuchin debates with the governor of Saint Kitts about the liberty of slaves; the order’s perspective was that the ‘children of Christian slaves should be free and emancipated from slavery, after baptism’.214 Maurile himself sympathised with those who bought slaves so as to Christianise them and who ‘gave them an honest freedom’ (he recalled the parable of the Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18).215 An illustration of the diversity of thinking about slavery within the Church is the fate of the French missionary Épiphane de Moirans who, with his fellow Capuchin Francisco José de Jaca, was deported from the Spanish possessions in the early 1680s for seditious preaching. Both left texts in which they refuted the theoretical bases for slavery, with Épiphane heavily criticising the Jesuits’ own use of considerable numbers of slaves ‘without a qualm of conscience from those who should be the salt of the earth’.216 Both Capuchins ‘scandalised’ the public of 1680s Havana by purportedly refusing absolution to those who would not undertake to free their slaves.217 The perspectives of Maurile and of the Capuchins in Cuba do not by themselves contradict Peabody’s assertion that the freedom of slaves was not a ‘primary concern’ for Catholic clergy. What they do nuance is the idea that ‘the Church hierarchy saw no inconsistency in the promotion of slavery’, as she writes.218 The principle of freedom was certainly little discussed by ecclesiastics, but there were interrogations about the extent of, and limits to, slavery. As Maurile demonstrates, it was in relation to baptised slaves that the question of freedom might even become urgent. The sacrament was the most pressing preoccupation for those m ­ issionaries who worked amongst the slave population. Receiving baptism also appears to have been popular amongst slaves themselves, and Peabody has explored a number of reasons for the receptivity of slaves to baptism, including African religious syncretism and 143

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the possibilities of social and linguistic advancement offered by baptism.219 In 1667, Du Tertre estimated the number of baptised African slaves at more than 15,000 (in contrast, he thought that the number of Amerindian slaves totalled a mere twenty after ‘thirtyfive years’ of missionary work).220 Whatever the extent of the ‘easy renunciation of pagan superstitions’ Bréban saw amongst the slaves of Cap Français in 1732, he was not alone in stressing how they ‘tired [ecclesiastics] out with insistent requests to baptise them’.221 Baptism was of central importance to ecclesiastical narratives, and a source of significant spiritual interrogations. For ecclesiastics, the question of how much instruction a neophyte had to have before being baptised was often fraught. In 1655, the Jesuit Pelleprat anticipated criticism of the practice of waiting until slaves had learned French before giving them religious instruction; a critic might object, he noted, that ‘death had not undertaken to wait’ until slaves (whom Pelleprat called ‘poor infidels’) ‘had learned French, and that if they were struck down before their baptism, there would be no salvation for them’.222 As Pelleprat’s account hints, judging at what stage to baptise was a fine calculation. He tells of a male slave on Saint Kitts who was ‘extremely insistent’ about being baptised because, the slave claimed, he was being constantly beaten by the devil. The slave’s master said he had been baptised, while the slave maintained that this was not the case. Pelleprat then consulted the vendor of the slave, who confirmed the slave’s account. After ‘upbraiding the master for his little care for a matter of this importance’, Pelleprat then put in motion the process of instruction; he ‘postponed it for two months’, ordering the slave to attend cathechism (although he carried out a brief exorcism to deal with the troublesome issue of the beatings from the devil).223 Baptism might be important to slaves, but of little concern to a master, and as Pelleprat’s care with this case shows, the sacrament was of fundamental significance in Catholicism. Crossing the threshold of baptism would bring the heathen to salvation, and it also introduced him or her into a spiritual community. Christianised slaves remained slaves, for the vast majority, and this is clear from the testimony of missionaries themselves. Nevertheless, keeping fellow Christians in slavery was, somehow, unavoidably problematic in principle. This can be seen in the various targets of ecclesiastical condemnation. Du Tertre, in his 1654 edition, criticised the planters’ ‘shameful trade, the selling 144

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and buying of their fellow men [‘leurs semblables’], I say even Christians, reborn like them through the waters of the sacrament of baptism’.224 Interestingly, this is an early criticism of slavery itself; that Christians were enslaved only accentuated what was already a ‘shameful’ practice. Concerns about baptism illustrate just how important religion was to early modern community, and to the cohesion of the early colony. This can be seen in the 1664 règlement that penalised the offence of blasphemy, and aimed to ensure religious orthodoxy amongst Jews and Protestants (it also ordered other forms of orthodoxy including the standardisation of weights and measures). Its sixth provision ordered planters to ensure the baptism of slaves ‘who disembarked from ships’, the marriages of these slaves and ‘the baptism of any [of their] children’.225 At this time, belonging to the community (whether fully or ‘marginally’) meant conformity to religious rites. Baptism transformed what would come to be distinguished as the spiritual condition of slaves, but it also had social effects. The different confessional approaches to baptism also demonstrate how spiritual belonging implied forms of temporal belonging. The confessional implications can be compared with the discovery by Richard Ligon, a mid-1600s English visitor to Barbados, that Protestant planters might refuse to baptise slaves to avoid having to free them.226 Labat claimed to have discussed the matter with English Protestant ministers, who used what Labat called the ‘excuse’ that it was ‘unworthy of a Christian to keep his brother in Christ in servitude’. Labat’s response was to question if it were not ‘even more unworthy of a Christian’ not to instruct those ‘souls redeemed [‘rachetées’] through the blood of Christ’ in the true God, although he ultimately left it ‘up to the judgement of [his] readers’ to resolve the debate.227 There is a certain ambivalence in this response, even if Labat was in favour of Catholic conversion strategies; in judging them with comparative favour, he acknowledged the essential immorality of slavery. Labat was, of course, an ecclesiastic who was implicated to an exceptional degree in the temporal interests of the plantation. Yet even he indicates an essential tension within Christian thinking about the enslavement of fellow Christians; in theological terms, it is difficult to reduce this to mere ‘collusion’. Tellingly, the spiritual integration of slaves would be ­problematic 145

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in familiar aspects of the temporal domain, even after they had been converted. Peabody has noted the existence of ‘material cues’ which continued to ‘emphasize … the social distance between master and [converted] slave’ within the physical space of the church.228 Mongin, in his description of the Epiphany Mass in early 1680s Saint Kitts, relates that French choristers had refused to sing at certain services in which slaves were heavily represented (it is unclear if this was because of the presence of slaves among the congregation or the choir).229 As it happened, the ‘excellent voices’ of many slaves were still required, which led to them ‘no longer needing the [French] choristers’, and themselves singing the Mass that was much appreciated.230 Under these circumstances, one can see how complex, uncertain or uneasy, were the ‘dual’ secular and spiritual existences of slaves within the slave society. It is also Mongin who vividly demonstrates the continuing social marginality of slaves in an extract which directly relates to the question of integration into the Christian community. He compares the large procession of slaves which followed the 1682 Epiphany Mass on Saint Kitts with the exhibition of redeemed Christian slaves in Europe. The Fonds Brotier letter gives: This great troop [‘grande troupe’] … made an admirable impression because of the number, the colour and the neatness [‘propreté’] of all the slaves that day. One could not look upon this procession without feeling a great tenderness [‘des sentiments bien tendres’]; it was compared to the processions of slaves whom the Mercedarian and Trinitarian Fathers redeem from servitude to the infidels, and whom they lead with ceremony in the towns of Europe. The difference that was observed was that [European Christians] triumph over the chains of the Mohammedans, and [African slaves], thanks to the slavery that subjects them to Christians, triumph over [enslavement to] the demon, and begin to enjoy the liberty of the children of God.231

There were, of course, further differences between the fates of those participating in the processions of redeemed Christians in Europe, and of converted slaves in the Caribbean. The former might hope for socio-economic (re)integration, precisely because they were European Christians. Those participating in the slave procession would remain in a distinct colonial socio-economic sphere, and Mongin readily criticised the violence and desperation of their existence. Nonetheless, the spectacle of the procession inspired an emotive reaction in the narrator (and, he hints, other specta146

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tors amongst the colonists). For a fleeting moment, they appear to have participated in a sort of collective identification of their slaves to their fellow Europeans. This was a transient recognition, which would remain metaphorical (the slaves were ‘compared’ to Europeans). In any case, these Christianised slaves were to remain in servitude. It is also another manifestation of the gratifying contemplation of slaves; colonists seem to have experienced this as an edifying spectacle, and it is clear that Mongin expected the same reaction in his reader(s). This collective experience ultimately illustrates how the spiritual and temporal domains could be separated, even when the commonality between Christians of European and African origin could appear, quite literally, before the colonists’ eyes. * Atlantic economies had many further specificities, that can be seen to a greater or lesser extent in these accounts of human beings valued for the labour or honour they brought. The sex of a slave determined his or her function to different degrees. The labour, and even the bodies, of Amerindian men and women were used distinctly in both indigenous and European forms of captivity or slavery. Plantation labour had its own conditions, given what may be thought of as its principal and incidental functions. Paul E. Lovejoy distinguishes the relatively equivocal attitude towards the sex of slaves within transatlantic European slavery from the market for women in African and Muslim forms (and which, he writes, contributed to a numerical superiority of men in European forms).232 In the plantations, as it is well known, slave women could also be subjected to significant levels of sexual coercion. In the Antillean context, Arlette Gautier distinguishes their treatment from that of ‘white women [who] were used to extend the network of alliances’.233 However, sexual coercion ultimately had the potential to create alternative ‘networks’, as King’s study of the late eighteenth-century transfer of goods on Saint-Domingue indicates. It also implied significant moral infringements which were frequently decried by French commentators, ­particularly ecclesiastics, as a later chapter will demonstrate. The condition of the slave varied according to contextual factors, such as whether he or she was primarily a source of honour, labour, sex or profit. Yet behind these significant contextual differences lies the central importance of the notion of captivity. It was thought to 147

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have been imposed, perhaps arbitrarily, on slaves in West Africa (and to have been refused, in place of honour and death, in visions of Amerindian societies). Even in the plantation environment which is the focus of the remaining chapters of this book, captivity was a state that inflected on the European understanding of the slave. Constantly, perhaps discreetly, it was one dishonourable strand in his or her condition. It accompanied the social (and, with the Code Noir, legal) distinctions that differentiated every aspect of the slave’s life and his or her interactions with planters or with missionaries. There was a further implication of the ‘captivity’ that bound the slave to the master. As Tomlins has observed of the early modern theorisation of slavery, that ‘slavery originated in capture’ implied that the slave remained ‘on the constant edge of physical death’.234 This ‘original’ capture, whether it had been experienced or inherited by the slave, infused his or her condition with that fundamental menace. It is a further aspect of the condition of servitude, one that could motivate and justify the violence to which slaves were subjected. Certain types of corporeal exploitation could be subject to condemnation, at least in principle, when they exceeded moral and religious limits. It was, in turn, certain types of corporeal labour that would gratify French observers of the colonies. These were forms of labour which required control and direction. A number of French commentators demonstrate how important were notions of privileged understanding, and specialised, transmissible techniques to understanding how they saw their place in relation to labour. These forms of labour, as the following chapter will demonstrate, were not themselves without ambiguities and resistances. Notes 1 Montchrestien, Traicté, 1889, p. 25. 2 Furetière, Dictionnaire, vol. 3, entry œconomie, non-paginated. 3 Christopher L. Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America 1582–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 412, footnote 45; on how ‘unnatural an institution slavery was for seventeenth-century northern Europeans’, see David Northrup, ‘Free and unfree labor migration, 1600–1900: an introduction’, Journal of World History, 14:2 (June 2003), 125–30 (p. 127).

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4 Bodin, Six Books, pp. 42–43. 5 ‘Usage des esclaves universel et contre nature’, Charron, De la sagesse, p. 249, marginal note. For a discussion of slavery in Charron (a ‘faithful summary of Bodin’s views’) and Montchrestien, see Henry Heller, ‘Bodin on slavery and primitive accumulation’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 25:1 (1994), 53–65 (p. 63). 6 See, for example, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia: 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History, 2nd edn (Chichester; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 240. 7 See Michael Harrigan, ‘Métissage and crossing boundaries in the seventeenth-century travel narrative to the Indian Ocean Basin’, Cahiers du dix-septième: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 15 (2013), 19–45 (pp. 29–30, 40–44). 8 Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, Histoire de la navigation de Jean Hugues de Linscot Hollandois et de son voyage ès Indes Orientales (Amsterdam: Theodore Pierre, 1610), pp. 73, 76–77. 9 See Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). 10 ‘ils leur faisaient labourer la terre, enchaînés comme encore en Barbarie’, Charron, De la sagesse, p. 250. 11 William Henry Foster, Gender, Mastery and Slavery: From European to Atlantic World Frontiers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 45. 12 A. Phérotée de La Croix, Relation universelle de l’Afrique ancienne et moderne, 4 vols (Lyon: T. Amaulry, 1688), vol. 1, preface, nonpaginated [3/10 pages], pp. 6–7. 13 ‘la crainte que douze petits garcons que nous avions ne tombassent en la puissance de ces pervers’, Alexis de Saint-Lô, Relation, p. 6; ‘Turc sujet à la sodomie’, marginal note. This incident is also discussed in Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, p. 83. 14 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, p. 81. 15 See for example, Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barbarie et de ses corsaires (Paris: Pierre Rocolet, 1637). 16 Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 191, 183–84. 17 ‘un effet proche de la catharsis tragique’, Jean-Claude Laborie, ‘Les Ordres rédempteurs et l’instrumentalisation du récit de captivité: l’exemple des Trinitaires, entre 1630 et 1650’, in François Moureau, ed., Captifs en Méditerranée (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles): histoires, récits, légendes (Paris: PUPS, 2008), pp. 93–102 (p. 100). 18 Coppier, Histoire, p. 7.

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19 Coppier, Histoire, p. 15. 20 Coppier, Histoire, p. 9. 21 Coppier, Histoire, p. 46. 22 Weiss describes the terms captive and esclave as ‘synonyms without modern racial or temporal distinctions’ in French; Captives and Corsairs, p. 10. 23 William D. Phillips, Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), p. 39. In African slavery, Meillassoux distinguishes the status of captive, a ‘captured individual’, from that of the slave who has undergone ‘insertion into the host society’. Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, p. 101. 24 Jordan, White over Black, p. 55. 25 Dobie, Trading Places, p. 6. 26 Beaumont, Lettre, p. 7. 27 François Froger, Relation d’un Voyage fait en 1695, 1696 & 1697 aux Côtes d’Afrique, Détroit de Magellan, Brezil, Cayenne & Isles Antilles (Paris: Nicolas de Fer and Michel Brunet, 1698), pp. 148–51; ‘Malheureuse condition des esclaves nègres’, marginal note, p. 148; illustrations, pp. 150–51. 28 Froger, Relation, p. 158. 29 Dralsé de Grand-Pierre, Relation de divers voyages faits dans l’Afrique, dans l’Amérique, et aux Indes Occidentales (Paris: Claude Jombert, 1718), p. 171. 30 Dralsé, Relation, pp. 176–79. 31 Dobie, Trading Places, pp. 6, 131–32. 32 Dralsé, Relation, p. 182. 33 Dralsé, Relation, p. 178. 34 ‘avec un seul nègre’, Dralsé, Relation, pp. 181–82. 35 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, pp. 108, 119. 36 For a further manifestation of the focus on Amerindians, compare Gautier du Tronchoy, Journal de la Campagne des Isles de l’Amérique qu’a fait Monsieur D*** (Troyes: Jacques Le Febvre, 1709), pp. 47–50 with 182–219 (the latter pages are heavily indebted to Du Tertre). 37 For one such enumeration and sale on Guadeloupe, see Dralsé, Relation, p. 144. 38 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, p. xii; Elsa Dorlin, La Matrice de la race: généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation française (Paris: La Découverte, 2009), p. 230; see also Carl H. Nightingale, ‘Before race mattered: geographies of the color line in early colonial Madras and New York’, American Historical Review, 113:1 (February 2008), 48–71. 39 ‘La systématisation raciste’, Debbasch, Couleur et liberté, p. 53.

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40 Guillaume Aubert, ‘“The blood of France”: race and purity of blood in the French Atlantic world’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 61:3 (July 2004), 439–78 (pp. 460, 477). 41 Michael Banton, Racial Theories, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 25. 42 ‘Lignée, lignage, extraction’, Furetière, Dictionnaire, vol. 4, entry race, non-paginated. See also Harrigan, ‘Métissage and crossing boundaries’, pp. 22–24; Kidd, The Forging of Races, pp. 21–22. 43 One mid-seventeenth-century manifestation does attribute the religious ‘inconstance’ of slaves to ‘[le] chaud et [le] feu’, Maurile, Voyage, 1652, preface, non-paginated [26/42 pages]. 44 ‘la contexture particulière de leur corps, ou dans la semence, ou dans le sang’, François Bernier, Nouvelle Division de la Terre, Journal des Sçavans, 12 (lundi 24 avril 1684), 133–40 (p. 135). 45 Pierre H. Boulle, ‘François Bernier and the origins of the modern concept of race’, in Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall, The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 11–27 (pp. 15, 20). 46 Dorlin, La Matrice, p. 215. Dorlin references Colette Guillaumin, L’Idéologie raciste: genèse et langage actuel (Paris; La Haye: Mouton, 1972; repr. Paris: Gallimard, 2002), p. 331. 47 One interesting manifestation is the Fonds Brotier copy of Mongin’s 1682 letter from Saint Kitts which refutes ‘external’ influences in favour of race, but it cannot be considered representative given the impossibility of attributing or dating it accurately. ‘Cette différence vient sans doute de race, et non point par aucune température de l’air, ni par aucun principe étranger, car des noirs engendreront immanquablement toujours des noirs’, Alternative copy of 1682 letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 6r–6v; L’Évangélisation, p. 133. 48 ‘cela ne peut venir que des corpuscules qui sortent différemment de ces trois corps’, Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 6, p. 472. 49 See Robin Law, ‘Jean Barbot as a source for the Slave Coast of West Africa’, History in Africa: A Journal of Method, 9 (1982), 155–73 (p. 155). 50 Barbot, Description, 1732, p. 8. 51 ‘That this blackness must be in the blood or race, as Marmol argues, can be further proved from [the different marriage patterns of Jews in Europe].’ Barbot, Description, 1732, p. 9, quoting l’Afrique de Marmol, vol. 3, p. 108. 52 ‘La raison donc pourquoi ces hommes sont camus, c’est parce que les femmes ayant toujours leurs enfants sur leur dos …, elles battent leur mil avec eux, et … leur [font] continuellement donner du nez contre

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leurs épaules.’ Claude Jannequin, Le Voyage de Lybie au Royaume de Senega le long du Niger (Paris: Charles Rouillard, 1643), pp. 91–93. See also Le Maire, Les Voyages, p. 160. 53 Louis Moreau de Chambonneau, Traité de l’origine des Nègres du Sénégal coste d’Affrique (1677?), in ‘Deux Textes sur le Sénégal (1673–1677)’, ed. by Carson I. A. Ritchie, in Bulletin de l’IFAN, series B, 30:1 (1968), 289–353 (pp. 305–37); quotations from pp. 310–12. 54 ‘je n’ai pas envie de faire l’auteur’, Chambonneau, Traité, p. 310; ‘un principe de détermination externe’, Dorlin, La Matrice, p. 215. 55 ‘Otez la couleur noire aux gens de ce pays, ils n’ont rien de désagréable dans le corps, ni dans le visage’, Loyer, Relation, pp. 137–38. 56 ‘Les nègres en général sont tous paresseux.’ Loyer, Relation, p. 64; ‘naturellement fainéants’, p. 189. 57 Loyer, Relation, pp. 219–20. 58 Loyer, Relation, pp. 181–82, 249. 59 Margat, Letter of 27 February 1725, p. 109. 60 This has been discussed in Harrigan, ‘Métissage and crossing boundaries’, p. 23. Margat would later write extensively in the Mémoires de Trévoux (1738) about the physiological difference of Africans (and what Shelford characterises as the ‘mutability’ of this difference). Shelford, ‘Race and scripture’, p. 80. 61 Margat, Letter of 27 February 1725, p. 109. On the ‘conception dure’ of the nègres of the Cap (Saint-Domingue) see Margat, Letter of 20 July 1743, p. 240. 62 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1654, p. 475; Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 56. 63 ‘Je ne sais si mes yeux étaient charmés, mais je les trouvais pour l’ordinaire bien faits, et agréables après leur baptême.’ Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 57. 64 Aubert, ‘“The blood of France”’, pp. 457, 460; Peabody, ‘“A nation born to slavery”’, pp. 117, 119. 65 Peabody, ‘“A nation born to slavery”’, pp. 121–22. 66 Rochefort, Relation de l’Isle de Tabago, p. 119. 67 Mongin, Alternative copy of Letter of May 1682, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 44r; L’Évangélisation, p. 119. 68 On ‘la marque conventionnelle’, Guillaumin, L’Idéologie raciste, 2002, pp. 331–35; on ‘critères somato-morphologiques’, p. 336; on the labour context, pp. 337–38. 69 Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery, p. 59. 70 Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery, pp. 224, 84. 71 Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery, p. 22. 72 Jean-François Niort, Le Code Noir: idées reçues sur un texte sym-

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bolique (Paris: Le Cavalier Bleu, 2015), p. 45; Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History, p. 126. 73 La Courbe, Premier Voyage, pp. 183–84. 74 ‘ces incertitudes abandonnées à la dispute’, Jean-François Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce (n. pl.: n. pub., 1734), p. 72. 75 On missionary knowledge of oral traditions, see for example, John K. Thornton, ‘New light on Cavazzi’s seventeenth-century Description of Kongo’, History in Africa, 6 (1979), 253–64 (p. 259). 76 Coppier, Histoire, p. 67 ; emphasis in the original. 77 Alexis de Saint-Lô, Relation, pp. 32, 140–41, 143–44. On the unique role of the Portuguese as intermediaries see Heers, Les Négriers, pp. 256–57. 78 Alexis de Saint-Lô, Relation, p. 168. 79 ‘Les Guinois ayant conté jusqu’à dix, avaient accoutumé de faire une marque et puis de recommencer.’ Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 467. On the ‘persist[ence] in … cultural translations’, see Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), p. 59. 80 Jannequin, Voyage, p. 102. 81 Jannequin, Voyage, p. 184. 82 Jannequin, Voyage, p. 84. 83 Jannequin, Voyage, pp. 86–87. 84 Le Maire, Les Voyages, pp. 74–75. 85 Le Maire, Les Voyages, p. 75. 86 Le Maire, Les Voyages, pp. 182, 186. 87 Le Maire, Les Voyages, pp. 173–74. 88 Le Maire, Les Voyages, pp. 80, 82. 89 Le Maire, Les Voyages, pp. 82–83. 90 Delbée, Journal, pp. 436–37. 91 ‘toutes les femmes et parents sont faits esclaves’, Delbée, Journal, p. 438; on debtors’ wives, p. 426. 92 Delbée, Journal, pp. 431–32. 93 Delbée, Journal, pp. 433, 469. 94 Cohen, The French Encounter, pp. 41–42, with reference to Bouton, Relation (Cohen gives p. 103; p. 102 more appropriate). 95 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 51. On Pelleprat, see Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, pp. 107–08. 96 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, pp. 54–55. 97 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 494. 98 Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, pp. 92, 95. On Bodin and Grotius, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, pp. 111–16. 99 Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, pp. 104, 108–10. 100 Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, p. 99, in relation to Jannequin and André Brue.

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101 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fols 81v–82r; L’Évangélisation, p. 75. 102 Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 3v; 1997, p. 113; De Lamet and Fromageau, Dictionnaire, p. 1443. 103 Le Febvre de La Barre (?), Relation, vol. 1, pp. 41–42. 104 Dralsé, Relation, p. 165. 105 Dralsé, Relation, p. 170. On the sale of wives, see also Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 3v; 1997, p. 113. 106 ‘le roi dispose de toute la famille et les vend comme bannis’, Maurile, Voyage, 1652, pp. 79, 81–83. For another report of the injustice of African monarchs (from Saint Kitts), see Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 83v; L’Évangélisation, p. 77. 107 Froger, Relation, pp. 15–16. 108 Loyer, Relation, pp. 48–49. 109 Bodin, Six Books, pp. 1, 8; Six Livres, pp. 1, 8. 110 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, vol. 4, pp. 117–19. 111 On profits in the sale of salt in West Africa, see Barbot, Journal, p. 325. 112 Le Maire, Les Voyages, pp. 72–73. 113 On the exchange of African slaves as a ‘merchandise, sold at a cheap price’ [‘marchandise, vendue à … vil prix’], see Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 84r; L’Évangélisation, p. 77. 114 ‘la marchandise la plus précieuse ce sont les esclaves’, Loyer, Relation, pp. 74–75. 115 Dralsé, Relation, pp. 165, 168. 116 Le Maire, Les Voyages, p. 71. 117 Le Maire, Les Voyages, pp. 98–99. 118 Froger, Relation, p. 15. 119 Labat, Nouvelle Relation de l’Afrique, vol. 1, preface, p. x. 120 Labat, Nouvelle Relation de l’Afrique, vol. 2, p. 304. 121 Labat, Nouvelle Relation de l’Afrique, vol. 2, pp. 305–06, 309. 122 Wyatt MacGaffey, ‘Dialogues of the deaf: Europeans on the Atlantic coast of Africa’, in Stuart B. Schwartz, Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 249–67 (pp. 265–66). On seventeenth-century ‘Atlantic credit’ in African slavery, see Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History, pp. 109–15. 123 Froger, Relation, preface, non-paginated [4/6 pages]; the most significant engravings are on the cover page; pp. 6–7; pp. 16–17. 124 Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, p. 12. 125 Froger, Relation, p. 6. 126 Commerce des esclaves, Froger, Relation, pp. 16–17.

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127 Antoine-Augustin Bruzen de la Martinière, Le Grand Dictionnaire historique et critique, 9 tomes in 10 vols (The Hague: P. Gosse et al., 1726–39), tome 3, D–F (1726), part 2, article Foules, p. 137. 128 ‘selon ce que j’en ai appris de plusieurs Français qui ont parcouru la côte’. Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 5r; 1997, p. 115. See also editor’s introduction, 1997, p. 106. On the African queen, AdC, 2F 788, fols 3v–4r; 1997, pp. 113–14. 129 Barbot, Journal, p. 324. 130 On the transmission of Mr Olrichs’s account, Barbot, Journal, 334. 131 ‘ce qui marque bien que le fils ne vend pas son père, ni le père son fils comme aucuns le prétendent’, Barbot, Journal, p. 329. 132 Frank Lestringant, Le Cannibale: grandeur et décadence (Paris: Perrin, 1994), p. 173. 133 On the reception of the Tupinamba, see Jacqueline Penjon, ‘Tupinambá-Topinambour’, in Jacqueline Penjon and Anne-Marie Quint, Vents du Large: hommage à Georges Boisvert (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002), pp. 49–64 (pp. 54–58). 134 Yves d’Évreux, Voyage dans le Nord de Brésil, fait durant les années 1613 et 1614, ed. by Ferdinand Denis (Paris: A. Franck, 1864). 135 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, p. 81. 136 On male–female disproportion, D’Abbeville, Histoire, fol. 278v; on the ‘treatment of slaves’, fols 282r–282v; on hospitality, fols 286r– 286v; on the chief’s exhortation, fol. 288r; on the role of the devil, fol. 290r; the ‘discours’ are transcribed on fols 292v–293r. 137 D’Abbeville, Histoire, fol. 287v. 138 D’Évreux, Voyage, p. 7. 139 ‘Tu ne n’as pas mis la main sur l’épaule en guerre’, d’Évreux, Voyage, p. 45. 140 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 77–101 (p. 81). 141 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, p. 81, quoting d’Évreux, Voyage, pp. 46, 56. 142 Des lois de la captivité, d’Évreux, Voyage, pp. 48–52; Des autres lois pour les esclaves, pp. 52–56; ‘réputant leurs maîtres et maîtresses comme leurs pères et mères’, p. 54; on the privilèges, p. 54; on the ‘petite reproche [qui] … tourne plutôt à risée’, p. 56. 143 On the dissipation of the cannibalistic tradition, see d’Évreux, Voyage, p. 46. 144 D’Évreux, Voyage, p. 48. 145 ‘Cette connaissance me réveilla l’esprit d’une vieille coutume’, D’Évreux, Voyage, pp. 45–47 (p. 46). On the ‘rituals’ of enslavement see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 51–62. For a different account of the Tupinamba rituals according to Alfred Métraux, see Patterson, p. 52.

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146 D’Évreux, Voyage, p. 46. 147 D’Évreux, Voyage, p. 47. 148 ‘Ils ont l’épaule découverte, sujet à cette grande captivité, commune à toutes ces nations’, D’Évreux, Voyage, pp. 47–48. 149 ‘après qu’ils ont compté jusqu’à vingt, ils sont au bout de leur rôle’, D’Évreux, Voyage, p. 232. 150 ‘ils comptent par les doigts des mains et des pieds, et passé cela ne savent plus compter’, Anonymous, ed. Moreau, Un flibustier français, p. 209; ‘[ils ne peuvent] même compter plus que le nombre de dix et cela en montrant leurs doigts’, Caillé de Castres, De Wilde, p. 104. 151 D’Abbeville, Histoire, fol. 299r. 152 Caillé de Castres, De Wilde, p. 109. 153 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 484. 154 Anonymous, ed. Moreau, Un flibustier français, p. 221; Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 401; ‘il leur a fait le dénombrement des pertes qu’ils ont faites nommant à chacun d’eux « toi ton père, toi ton oncle etc. »’, Caillé de Castres, De Wilde, p. 103. On assemblies amongst the Tupinamba, see d’Abbeville, Histoire, fols 287v–288r. 155 D’Abbeville, Histoire, p. 287v. 156 See Jean-Pierre Moreau’s analysis of this ‘ritual’ consumption in Un flibustier français, pp. 26–27. On the use of executed captives’ bones to make flutes, pp. 225, 228. 157 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400–1800, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 289. 158 Lestringant, Le Cannibale, pp. 208–17 (p. 215). 159 ‘A quoi se rapporte fort bien cette bravade sanglante et enjouée qui se lit d’un prisonnier brésilien’, accompanied by marginal reference to Montaigne, Book 1, chap. 30, in Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 538. 160 Anonymous, ed. Moreau, Un flibustier français, p. 226. 161 ‘il se fait peindre et oindre le corps et orner d’autant d’ornements qu’on veut lui prêter’, Caillé de Castres, De Wilde, p. 111; ‘les principaux chefs portent sur la tête des guirlandes faites de plumes de perroquet toutes d’une couleur, aux poignets des bras et en ceinture, comme aussi des coquilles aux jambes en forme de sonnettes’, Anonymous, ed. Moreau, Un flibustier français, p. 226. 162 Caillé de Castres, De Wilde, p. 111. 163 ‘Ensuite, vient le prisonnier chargé de parures comme gras bœuf le Jeudi gras.’ Caillé de Castres, De Wilde, p. 111. 164 On the ‘verbal joust’, see Lestringant, Le Cannibale, p. 177. The flibustier, unusually, links the captive’s courage to alcohol, Anonymous, ed. Moreau, Un flibustier français, p. 227. See also Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 537–38.

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165 ‘le vainqueur jusqu’à la mort’, Caillé de Castres, De Wilde, p. 112. See also Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 405. 166 On the potential sources for Caillé de Castres, see editor’s introduction, De Wilde, pp. 9–10. 167 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 405–06. 168 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 406. 169 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 406. 170 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 406. 171 Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797 (London; New York: Methuen, 1986), p. 83. 172 Dobie, Trading Places, pp. 131–33 (p. 131); for the suggestion that Du Tertre ‘grapples with the challenge of describing practices and modes of behaviour that are strongly determined by historical contingencies’, p. 138. 173 See Thornton, Africa and Africans, p. 290. 174 On Carib slavery, see Jean-Pierre Moreau, introduction to Un flibustier français, pp. 25–27; see, for example, the description of manioc preparation, p. 157. 175 Anonymous, ed. Moreau, Un flibustier français, pp. 184, 225. 176 Anonymous, ed. Moreau, Un flibustier français, p. 184. Moreau notes the presence of such slaves as a result of Carib raids on the Spanish possessions, p. 312, note 82. 177 On the demon who promised an afterlife in which Caribs would be served by African slaves, see Anonymous, ed. Moreau, Un flibustier français, p. 183. On the ‘modernity’ of this myth see Moreau, p. 312, note 80. 178 Caillé de Castres, De Wilde, p. 106. 179 Caillé de Castres, De Wilde, Chapter 22, De l’Agriculture, p. 115. 180 ‘Anonyme de Saint-Vincent’, Description, pp. 283–84. See also Le Breton, ‘Relation’, 1982, p. 38; Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 494. 181 ‘Anonyme de Saint-Vincent’, Description, p. 284. 182 On the parallel between Amerindian and African societies which ‘did not have the institution of private property in land’, Thornton, Africa and Africans, p. 289. 183 ‘Quand vous verrez ces sauvages … les estimer aujourd’hui et en faire recherche’, Maurile, Voyage, 1652, preface, non-paginated [36/42 pages]. 184 ‘Leurs jardins étaient ouverts à tous’, Maurile, Voyage, 1652, preface, non-paginated [27/42 pages]. 185 Maurile, Voyage, 1652, pp. 115–16. 186 Maurile, Voyage, 1652, p. 116. See for example Montchrestien’s 1615 eulogy of ‘la forge’, ‘the art of arts’. Montchrestien, Traicté, 1889, pp. 46–47.

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187 Maurile, Voyage, 1652, p. 116. 188 Jacques Savary, Le Parfait Négociant ou instruction générale pour ce qui regarde le commerce (Paris: L. Billaine, 1675). Cohen, The French Encounter, p. 158. 189 Savary, Parfait Négociant, Book 2, pp. 136–42 (p. 139). 190 Savary, Parfait Négociant, Book 2, pp. 139–40. 191 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 485. 192 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, p. 287. 193 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 486. 194 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 488–89. 195 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 489–90. 196 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 490. 197 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 535; Rochefort writes that slaves prefer ‘servitude’ to ‘liberté’ once they have a ‘good master’ on the islands. Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 341. 198 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 535. 199 ‘[les] esclaves maures et nègres … sont tous honnêtement vendus et plus honnêtement traités’, ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’, Relation, p. 121. 200 Bouton, Relation, p. 102. 201 For one formulation of the French right to practice slavery, see Le Breton, ‘Relation’, 1982, p. 72. 202 ‘la terre est de jour en jour de plus en plus cultivée, et … les habitants de l’île s’enrichissent’, Le Breton, ‘Relation’, 1982, p. 72. 203 Le Febvre de La Barre (?), Relation, vol. 1, pp. 42–46. 204 Dralsé, Relation, pp. 181–82, 187. 205 ‘leur servitude est le principe de leur bonheur, et … leur disgrâce est cause de leur salut’, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 502. Garraway notes in this extract Du Tertre’s argument for the ‘perfectability of Africans’, Garraway, The Libertine Colony, p. 159. 206 On the ‘conflation’, Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 158–59, referring to Pelleprat’s observation that Africans were ‘des âmes rachetées du sang du Fils de Dieu’ (Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 55); on religion as a ‘strategy’, p. 161; as ‘indoctrination’ and an ‘approximation’, p. 162; on the ‘ideology’ of violence, p. 158; on the ‘beating Christian’, pp. 159, 164. 207 Peabody, ‘“A dangerous zeal”’, pp. 78, 90. 208 Chevillard, Les Desseins, p. 132. 209 Margat, Letter of 27 February 1725, p. 109. 210 Peabody, ‘“A dangerous zeal”’, pp. 72, 74; on Capuchin proposals for a ‘spiritual hierarchy within the slave community’, see p. 85. 211 ‘l’on ne peut que rendre de bons témoignages de leur zèle pour l’instruction des esclaves’, Blénac (governor) and Mithon (intendant),

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6 March 1715, from Léogane, Saint-Domingue, ANOM, C9A 11, fols 48r–61v (fol. 48v). 212 For Labat’s corporal punishment of a slave ‘sorcerer’ in 1694, see Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, pp. 497–98. On this see Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 168–70. 213 ‘Bel exemple pour les blancs qui sont si peu fidèles aux engagements qu’ils ont contractés en tenant des enfants sur des fonts de baptême.’ Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fols 19v–20r; 1997, p. 125. 214 Maurile, Voyage, 1652, p. 80. 215 ‘leur donnent une honnête liberté’, Maurile, Voyage, 1652, preface, non-paginated [23–25/42 pages]. 216 ‘sine stimulo conscientiae ab his qui debent esse sal mundi, cum sint doctores aliorum’, Epifanio (Épiphane) de Moirans [1644–89?], Servi Liberi seu Naturalis Mancipiorum Libertatis Iusta Defensio (1682); repr. bilingual Latin–Spanish edn by Miguel Anxo Pena González et al. as Siervos libres: una propuesta antiesclavista a finales del siglo XVII (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2007), p. 94; Francisco José de Jaca [1645?–90?], Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios (1681); repr. ed. by Miguel Anxo Pena González (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2002). 217 Testimony of Don Lope de Hoces y Córdoba (1682) in Jaca, Resolución, pp. 165–66; see also González in Épiphane, Siervos libres, pp. xxi–xxii. 218 Peabody, ‘“A dangerous zeal”’, p. 60. 219 Peabody, ‘“A dangerous zeal”’, pp. 66–68. 220 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 501. 221 ‘ils renoncent sans peine aux superstitions païennes et nous fatiguent de leurs importunités pour nous engager à les baptiser’, Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 19v; 1997, p. 125. 222 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 54. 223 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, pp. 62–63. 224 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1654, p. 473. 225 Règlement de M. Tracy, Lieutenant Général de l’Amérique, touchant les blasphémateurs et la police des Isles, 19 June 1664, in Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions des Colonies françoises de l’Amérique sous le vent, 6 vols (Paris: Moutard et al., 1784–90), vol. 1, pp. 117–22 (p. 118). On the significance of this règlement in relationship to the punishment of sexual transgressions, see Garraway, The Libertine Colony, p. 201. 226 Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 2nd edn (London: Peter Parker and Thomas Guy, 1673), p. 50.

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227 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 5, pp. 42–43. 228 Peabody, ‘“A dangerous zeal”’, p. 67. 229 Mongin writes of ‘le refus que les chantres ordinaires leur avaient fait depuis un an de chanter dans une pareille occasion’, Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 117r; Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 44v; L’Évangélisation, p. 119. 230 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fols 117r–117v; AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 44v; L’Évangélisation, p. 119. 231 Mongin, Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 45v; L’Évangélisation, p. 120. The Carcassonne copy refers, in place of the slaves’ ‘colour and neatness’, to their ‘colour, enhanced by the white fabric of their clothes’ (‘couleur, rehaussée par la blancheur de la toile de leurs habits’), MdC, MS 73, fols 118r–118v. 232 Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd edn (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 20. 233 Arlette Gautier, ‘Sous l’esclavage, le patriarcat’, Nouvelles Questions féministes, 9–10, Antillaises (spring 1985), 9–33 (p. 14). 234 Tomlins, Freedom Bound, pp. 421–22.

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3  The labouring body

The testimonies examined thus far hint at conceptions of human relations which appear radically unfamiliar to a reader from a postslavery context. They reflect the transformations from the earliest days of Caribbean colonisation, in which isolated settlements might struggle for adequate resources, to the relative stability of a plantation society. They demonstrate how forms of Caribbean and Atlantic enslavement were understood through authoritative discourses, encounters in situ and empirical apprehension. Accounts of colonial societies reflect ever-changing socio-economic relationships, and new ways of understanding the condition, the labour and the bodies of slaves. Some scholarship has placed focus on the body in the context of the European colonisation of the Americas. Patricia Seed has stressed both the importance of ‘body language’ in ceremonies of French colonisation, and the significance of that of ‘indigenous’ peoples ‘in nearly all French narratives’ of the process.1 Garraway’s study of plantation society characterises the ‘black body’ in the writings of Labat as a ‘fetish for colonial authority’ and an ‘object’ to be ‘[demolished] in labour, torture, and rites of absolution’.2 What this chapter will focus on, however, are issues surrounding labour and the body in the New World. Slaves carried out a multitude of tasks in the French colonies. They carried out base labour tasks, such as those slaves who retrieved water and wood and looked after livestock, for a military garrison in 1720 Saint-Domingue who simply ‘could not do without them’.3 As the administrator de Paty had 161

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hinted several years previously, using slaves to fetch supplies could also accentuate prestige, flattering the great ‘vanity’ of the ‘planters of America’.4 However, as the previous chapters have illustrated, what was new about colonial labour was principally the forms it took on the plantation. There are three conditions that call for focus on corporeal labour. The first stems, inevitably, from the socio-economic conditions in which colonial narratives were produced. Some colonists fared better than others; some would become extremely prosperous, and missionaries (of certain orders, at least) and military officers fared better than indentured labourers. It would, however, be difficult to characterise the existence of many of the French men and (less frequently) women who crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century as particularly privileged.5 Nonetheless, the French colonial population was in large part involved in transporting, directing and profiting from Atlantic labour, or involved in activities which depended on this type of labour for their continued existence. These texts echo shared ideas about labour and labourers, as well as how to control and profit from them. As Coppier (the former indentured labourer) demonstrates, it was not the fact of labouring that made one a slave, and certainly not in early colonisation. European labour in the colonies was not, at any stage, slave labour; when the two forms were assimilated this was intended to produce discursive effects. One aim of this chapter will be to pinpoint the specificities of each group, and to identify further manifestations of belonging and exclusion in the colonies. A second focus concerns the extent to which the body of the slave could be mastered. This is telling about such concerns as the proprietary relationship, forms of resistance, and even the will of the slave. The body might be mastered, directed or punished within the proprietary relationship. This relationship was itself understood within a complex of wider relationships to the community and to the kingdom. The body was also the site of fears, taboos and interdicts both familiar to European culture and peculiar to the colonies. The novelty of plantation labour was that it massed multiple bodies to carry out repeated processes of labour. These were forms of labour that were often reliant on European technologies, and they ultimately produced for European markets. The body was, in other words, implicated in new corporeal processes. These in turn led to new preoccupations concerning the social and moral consequences of the control of labour. 162

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There is also a third question which relates to the evanescent nature of labour itself. Some of the implications of writing about labour can be seen in Hannah Arendt’s instructive distinction between labour, work and action, according to which ‘the mark of all laboring [is] that it leaves nothing behind, that the result of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent’.6 This was the hallmark of plantation labour, which for the most part consisted in hard physical effort. The most enduring products of such labour were those manufactured from cash crops such as tobacco or sugar; they were intended for a certain sort of deferred consumption, in the time necessary for them to be transported across the ocean and, if necessary, to be refined. Yet when products such as tobacco or sugar were consumed, one would be hard pressed to imagine a more definitive form of consumption. This kind of consumption might well serve as an analogy for thinking about narratives of slavery, in which we are looking for the traces of a population whose ‘effort’ was most consistently applied to evanescent processes. This socially marginalised population was essentially non-productive, in terms of the kinds of cultural artefacts on which we base ‘historical’ or ‘literary’ readings. We read about slaves in the texts and images produced by those who benefited from their labour. Questions relating to consumption are among the principal concerns of this chapter. In focusing on the processes of labour, we will be confronted with an essential tension between the accumulation of one population stratum, and the evanescence of another. This is telling about such concepts central to understanding slavery as how ownership was imagined, and how much it could monopolise the labour, and even the time, of another human being. How narratives reflected marginalised labour, the fraught uses of the body, and essentially non-productive processes is evidently the most evasive of themes to explore. It is, nonetheless, what this chapter will attempt to do. Its starting point will be a discussion of the significance of property, and of the techniques of plantation production that colonial observers ascribed to themselves. This was knowledge that prescribed the use of the body within intensive production processes, and that also testifies to the uniqueness of time within the plantation environment. However, r­ esistances were also acknowledged to the control of slave labour. There were doubts about thinking about human beings in terms of their absolute labour potential. It was also acknowledged that men and women were 163

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social beings and desiring beings; there were a range of responses to the absolute domination of another. Property and the techniques of accumulation The transforming socio-economic conditions of slavery in the French Caribbean have been discussed in studies exploring, for example, population movements and the intensification of cashcrop production in the early modern period.7 The role of environmental and demographic factors in shaping slave societies has been extensively analysed by economic historians.8 French descriptions of slave societies also share central assumptions about the nature of colonial production. They illustrate the importance of property and of accumulation to defining both colonists and slaves. These concepts were also at the root of a preoccupation with techniques of intensive production that is demonstrated in a number of early modern texts. A number of critics have noted the central importance of property to early modern conceptions of liberty and of labour. A discussion in a study by Keith Thomas proposes that early modern conceptions of freedom depended on the ownership of ‘a property in one’s own labour’ and, in consequence, the control of this labour.9 Henry Heller has discussed how, in a context of land disappropriation, certain late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century French thinkers conceptualised ‘attachment to the land’ as the condition of free labour (leading some to associate wage labour with slavery).10 The implications can be seen in John Locke’s late seventeenth-century formulation of property. Locke saw the possession of ‘positive laws to determine property’ as the characteristic of ‘the civilized part of mankind’.11 Property was based on the ‘mixing’ of labour with what man had removed from the state of nature; as Locke put it, ‘’tis the taking of any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state Nature leaves it in, which begins the property’.12 It was a universal principle, which applied even to the ‘wild Indian who knows no inclosure’.13 One might also come to own property by harnessing another’s labour (one’s servant cutting ‘turfs’), as well as through one’s own.14 The ownership of property was the privilege of the free. That, in contrast, the slave was non-proprietary had been the essence of slavery in theoretical frameworks from Justinian, to Grotius to the 164

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Code Noir. Locke would also qualify slaves, or ‘captives taken in a just war’ as ‘not capable of any property’. The implication of this was that they were excluded from ‘any part of civil society’, precisely because the ‘chief end’ of such society was the ‘preservation of property’.15 In the nascent plantations, whether or not one could own property was also central to defining entire populations. This proprietorship extended to the ownership and control of labour, in a context in which European concepts of labour were thought radically distinct to those of Amerindian and African peoples. The Tupinamba and the Caribs, as has been seen, were considered to be non-labouring peoples. According to Du Tertre, even those ‘free Brazilian savages [‘sauvages’]’ who had been transported by the Dutch to the Antilles were ‘extremely poor, because they do not want to work the land to make products [‘marchandises’]’.16 West African peoples were also thought to be essentially non-productive. Accumulation and productivity were also essential to how early French colonial commentators saw themselves. The construction of the colonies of the French Caribbean took place in this context, through the use of intensive forms of labour. The correspondence from early Saint-Domingue testifies to the demand. In 1700, as the governor Galiffet writes, planters were ‘crying out for slaves and indentured labourers’.17 Despite the efforts of the administration to ensure the presence of European labourers, it was slave labour which would be the dominant form.18 Slave labour was central to the conception of colonial existence on all levels, as demonstrated by the official de Paty, in a report protesting the effects in Saint-Domingue of the tax levelled on colonists for each of their slaves. Those colonists he qualified as ‘petits habitants’ made ‘neither sugar nor indigo’ and had ‘only one to four slaves’; they produced food for the urban centres, ‘usually lived in the mountains’ and earned little. Those who had ‘one or two slaves had gone into the mountains where they live like animals from their hunting, and sometimes bring salted meats to sell to have powder and bullets and a few pieces of cloth’.19 One might possess slaves and still be considered to live at subsistence level. This sort of existence contrasts with the gratifying depictions of the plantation existence that have been seen, such as that concentration of labour and property that Rochefort attributed to Poincy on Saint Kitts. One strand in the poverty that de Paty attributed to certain colonists on Saint-Domingue was their precarity of 165

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s­ettlement. Here, one could be a master by owning labour, even without possessing significant or stable property in land. Wherever this property was thought to be principally situated (be it in the land, in the labour of others or in their bodies), it enabled forms of accumulation which were based on a shared understanding of their distinctness amongst Europeans (echoing, once more, Eltis’s formulation of ‘possessive individualism’). In contrast, the human beings who were the principal labour force of the Caribbean could in theory neither own nor accumulate property or labour (the practice, as a later chapter will indicate, was somewhat different). This centrality of accumulation has implications for how we consider the ideological import of forms of colonial ‘knowledge’ in such fundamental areas as numeracy, the environment, and the nature of wealth. What it presupposes can be seen in the prescriptive tone that is adopted by certain colonial commentators. Pelleprat’s brief description of the process of sugar production was a response to the ‘numerous people’ he had met who ‘were desirous of learning [from him] how to make sugar’.20 The same process is also extensively described in Du Tertre’s manuscripts, and in the printed editions of 1654 and 1667.21 Both Pelleprat and Du Tertre furnish, to different degrees, step-by-step descriptions from the preparation of the cane, its processing at the mill, to the stages of the refining process. As Du Tertre illustrates, knowledge about sugar was also thought to be important, privileged information. In his 1654 edition, he recounts how a ‘certain secret’ to ensuring the perfection of the process, which had been extracted under duress from an ‘expert’ Portuguese sugar-maker, had passed to Poincy, governor of Saint Kitts, and had assured him supremacy in the market.22 French commentators (as, indeed, other Europeans) considered that they possessed a distinct body of techniques and of technologies; these could take the form of texts or diagrams.23 These techniques, exclusive to certain groups or even individuals, were also thought of as the exclusive preserve of Europeans. Rochefort saw the capacity to make sugar (as opposed to the mere knowledge of the plant) as one of a series of ‘inventions of recent centuries’. These distinguished the peoples who possessed and mastered them from the Ancients. They included ‘our clocks, our compass, and our art of navigation, our telescopes, our printing, our artillery’.24 The explicitly military advances that had enabled colonisation were part of a much wider range of inventions that 166

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enabled different types of space to be mastered. Among them were also advances in controlling information (‘our printing’) and even time (‘our clocks’). These, in turn, were essential to new processes of production. These were technologies that might complement one another, as the textual description and engravings of sugar production in both Du Tertre (1667) and Rochefort illustrate. Printing enabled the distribution of specialised knowledge, and even visual contemplation, amongst a readership. It also complemented a concept of numeracy as the exclusive preserve of Europeans. The capacity of accumulation through numeracy-based techniques was reflected in thinking about the plantation environment. The ecology might be conceived of as a force to be harnessed for the production of cash crops. Rochefort appreciated the ‘beautiful rivers’ (‘belles rivières’) of Tabago (and he claimed their number had been underestimated). What he appreciated most of all about them was their motion. While on their ‘winding’ course, they encountered ‘rocks, or slopes’, from which they would ‘hurl themselves with force’ as waterfalls. They would then be a source of energy which could ‘constantly turn the wheels of mills which are used to break [sugar] cane’, and would be less expensive and more convenient than mills powered by animal force.25 There were opportunities for the environment of the island to be transformed and channelled, but they were reserved for those who could accumulate and could profit. Such ideas reflect on thinking about slaves, as well as colonists. Perhaps the most obvious reflections surround the evaluation of the labour potential of slaves. Du Tertre considered slaves to be the essential motor of the island economy, ‘since all the riches of the land come from their labour’.26 According to witnesses, one’s worth was dependent on the number of slaves owned (as Du Tertre writes, ‘a man is only considered in the islands according to the number of his slaves’). Indeed, masters, according to Du Tertre, had such ‘absolute domination’ (‘domaine’) over slaves and such a ‘total ownership’, that they ‘belonged to him as an asset [‘comme un bien’] acquired through an act of purchase’.27 Planters themselves unashamedly evaluated their own wealth in a similar manner. Monnereau stated this a century after Du Tertre (‘we only calculate our earnings according to the number of slaves of one and the other sex who are employed in our establishments [‘manufactures’]’).28 The type of slavery described here reflects that which, as Philip D. 167

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Curtin writes, ‘became dominant in the American plantation’, in which ‘the slave was purchased to serve as a unit of labor, normally labor in agricultural work under continuous supervision during the entire work day’. This was, to use Curtin’s phrase, ‘tightly disciplined gang work’ in the case of the sugar plantation.29 There was, however, some ambivalence concerning the very question of accumulating slave labour. Settlers defined themselves by their possession of both property and techniques, and defined slaves by their exclusion from access to either. Colonial accounts illustrate how certain techniques, which were reliant on numeracy itself, were prized information. Yet as Du Tertre illustrates, there are hints of some unease about what he called the ‘absolute’ domination of a human ‘asset’. Possession was not unproblematic either. The very mobility of labourers (whether slaves or Europeans) made their flight from the French to the Spanish colony a serious concern on Saint-Domingue in the early 1700s; property concentrated in corporeal force – in another’s labour – demanded social mechanisms to ensure continuing proprietorship.30 Curtin’s qualification of plantation slavery hints at the social mechanisms also required to ensure intensive labour, and by implication, that there was a further source of resistances. As we will see, there were limits to what extent human force could be estimated and controlled. Ordering production The techniques of accumulation also reflect concerns about imposing order on labour, space and productivity. These illustrate, once more, the centrality of numeracy to the preoccupations of the plantation environment. They also illustrate how assumptions about who had access to colonial ‘knowledge’ had fundamental ­implications in terms of belonging and exclusion. A tradition of agricultural literature from the classical era was already familiar within Europe by the time of early modern colonisation. There were numerous printed editions of the treatises of Cato the elder (234–149 BC) and Varro (116–17 BC), which furnished advice on such tasks as the laying out and construction of buildings or enclosures, or the planting of crops and processing of foodstuffs. Both also treated themes relating to slave labour, Cato in a discussion of the character of a farm overseer, and Varro (in a more extensive treatment) on such themes as the number of slaves 168

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required for an estate, and how to motivate them.31 However, writing about the Caribbean plantation was a new departure. It reflected forms of intensive production and market concerns that were based in economies outside Europe, and which relied on very distinct forms of slavery. Labat’s Nouveau Voyage is a particularly rich illustration about what was distinct within the organisation of plantation labour and space, about the nature of productivity, and the implications in terms of belonging and exclusion. Labat furnishes detailed analyses of the division of labour and the tasks slaves should be assigned, using as his model a sugar plantation with 120 slaves. He tabulates the division of labour (there would be, for example, five slaves at the sugar press, twenty-five to cut the cane, and so on). He describes the tasks that should be assigned to each, and how much each could be expected to produce (two coopers, for example, could make three barrels per day). He estimates the ‘Necessary expenditure for the nourishment and maintenance of 120 slaves’, and also tabulates this expenditure (such as food and the coarse fabric which clothed slaves). He evaluates each slave, from skilled workers (masons and carters) to labourers (those who would cut the cane) to the elderly and infirm, in terms of his or her capacity to contribute techniques and labour (or conversely, to use resources unproductively).32 Labat’s concerns about questions of plantation space stretched to explicit advice about the layout of a plantation, such as where to locate the buildings in relation to the crops, or in relation to each other.33 He was also concerned by mastering the location of slaves in the plantation space. His instructions for the harvesting of the sugar crop relied on situating slaves precisely in space (‘when the canes are ripe, and ready to be cut, the nègres and négresses are positioned along the plot of land …’).34 His description of the ‘Number of people necessary to run a mill, and their function’ is a blueprint for the organisation of slaves when processing the cane, and specifies the role of each in interacting with the technology of the sugar press.35 There is, in fact, a not dissimilar concern with space in Monnereau’s later Le Parfait Indigotier. Monnereau’s text is a manual, and is much more consistently prescriptive, but his preoccupation with situating bodies in space and in time (in planting indigo, or in ensuring that coffee production continued with regularity [‘rondement’]) is the natural prolongation of Labat’s concerns.36 Both claimed to give privileged access to exclusive techniques, which 169

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were ultimately concerned with the mastery of energy. As well as telling us about their shared concern with profit, they also tell us of new concerns about mechanical and human force. Labat’s techniques illustrate some of the most fundamental implications of productivity, and they are illustrated in his account of the administration of a sugar plantation. Perhaps the most fundamental assumption is that the multiplication of energy potential and of production was desirable. The section on Sugar Mills is representative.37 Labat based his authority on visual apprehension, or on experimentation, much of which he had supposedly undertaken himself. He names and describes the components of the press, gives precise measurements for each and even, in certain cases, the angles at which they were to be positioned.38 He describes the operation of the mill, and the precautions to be taken to ensure smooth running of the extraction process.39 Basing himself on his own, or shared, experience, he refused certain components or techniques. One was the discarded technique of having a central drum of greater size than the two peripheral drums in the sugar press; although common in the early colonies, it had been ‘recognised since that this caused more inconvenience than profit’.40 These techniques are based, to a greater or lesser extent, on the fundamental assumption that the exploitation of non-human (animal labour, natural energy sources and technology) and human energy (slaves) was desirable, and that the reader shared this perspective. There is a further implication in Labat’s concern with uniformity and forecasting. To keep the sugar-extracting process in motion, certain key components had to be of uniform size. These included the spaces between the cogs which transferred motion from the main shaft of the press to the drums (and which enabled the compression of the sugar cane). A cog (‘dent’) spaced further apart than the others would, Labat writes, receive a proportionally excessive force and would ‘split into pieces’. The solution to this was forecasting; Labat advises that a good number of these cogs should be stockpiled to be replaced as necessary.41 This capacity to forecast, in turn, was essential to the production of sugar. Labat claimed to have invented a new design for the heavy tables that were positioned under the press, and that had to be frequently cleaned. This invention, he wrote, would minimise the time lost in cleaning, which could now be done ‘without halting the mill’.42 Maintenance, another form of forecasting, would ensure that the process of production 170

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continued (for example, regularly applying grease to the cogs of the drums, before a problem actually developed).43 The tactics of productivity Labat was proposing here have become recognisable, post-Industrial Revolution, but what they imply should be emphasised. Uniformity meant mastering matter through numeracy, and forecasting meant mastering time itself. Both strategies implied the control of resources and, ultimately, human beings. The challenges to sugar production illustrate a third implication of productivity. Considerable challenges arose from the accelerated interactions between non-human energy and metal-based technology, to which ensuring uniformity and forecasting difficulties were only partial solutions. One might overstretch machinery and cause the cogs of a drum to break. A water-driven mill, Labat warned, was powered by such an enormous quantity of energy that it could not easily be halted, and could ‘ruin an entire mill’.44 There was a further unpredictable element in accelerated production. As will be seen later in this chapter, this great energy might have significant consequences on the human beings who were also essential to the process, or slaves could themselves subvert the optimistic forecasts of the planter. There were, by necessity, external and human limits to productivity. These textual strategies for organising labour and maximising profit are complemented by precise engravings, for the most part of isolated apparatus, such as the Chassis of a Sugar Mill.45 The engraving is accompanied by a textual key which names each part of the apparatus, and signposts its role within the process of production. This graphic apparatus is much more immediately applicable and precise than, for example, Rochefort’s depiction of sugar production. Text and image interact to explicitly reinforce the ­prescriptive function of Labat’s account of production. It is the prescriptive tone of the Nouveau Voyage that has led Dobie to compare what she calls its ‘long and rather technical descriptions’ to the content of a ‘how-to book’, and she also notes how it ‘foster[s] identification between Labat, his readers, and colonial entrepreneurs’.46 However, in his claims to give privileged access to the instruments of production, profit and precision, Labat tells us much more about the fundamental assumptions that lay behind colonial ‘knowledge’. One strand in ‘belonging’ was having access to this knowledge – even if this access was purely theoretical – and another was having the capacity to accumulate. This, in turn, reflected on the exclusion of others. 171

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Access to knowledge about the instruments of production was restricted. ‘Complex tools’, as Paola Tabet writes, gave the ‘possibility of prolonging [one’s] body and [one’s] arms’, and of ‘increasing [one’s] power over nature’ (for Tabet, it is consistently the privilege of men in a great diversity of societies).47 In Labat’s depiction of sugar technology, the access of slaves (male and female) to such ‘complex tools’ is generally limited to carrying out designated, often dangerous steps within the production process. Understanding the overall process, however, depended on numeracy and on literacy. This information was encoded through script which was only comprehensible to a literate minority, or within images which often relied on a key (a text) to be understood. In theoretical terms, Labat’s metropolitan readers may well have had more ‘access’ to such tools than the slaves who interacted with them on a daily basis. The texts that have come to be thought of as ‘sources’ were once ‘media’. The printed medium had significant potential to transmit what were in effect the techniques of domination. Labat furnished strategies for the evaluation and control of energy. He made them available for wide access through text, but in the consciousness that they would be restricted to literate Europeans. In this chain, the printing press, that most powerful of precision tools, was a potent link. Printing could multiply knowledge of the tools of domination, in space far beyond the plantation. It is uncertain how much a text like Labat’s was used in practice as a source of techniques by early modern readers; his volumes could be read in several ways (for example, for curiosity or entertainment), and his declarations about his profit-generating capacities might even have been read with caution. Whatever the recourse that planters, or future planters, actually had to Labat’s diagrams and instructions about sugar preparation, their potential is clear. They are a blueprint for the control of technology and of labour. Printing magnified their power, creating multiple copies and creating a substantial capital of knowledge. Yet access to this specialist, profitable knowledge was limited to those who held power or profited from it. Access to these strategies for plantation production was also limited to those who could possess. Labat reflects the principle, common to early French accounts of plantation agriculture, that those who would read his texts could profit from colonial labour. It is perhaps this fundamental bond that he most reflects. Conscious of belonging to a dominant stratum of a slave society, he shared key 172

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assumptions and values with his public, a public increasingly made up of consumers of the products of slave labour. However remote these readers were from the colonies, they shared with colonists the most fundamental capacity of ownership and accumulation. Numeracy, accumulation and profit through labour all had the most basic shared meanings to those who could participate – again, however remotely – as full members of an economy. Such affirmations of capacity reflect on those who were distinct because of their incapacity; they were central to the concept of the slave. As with so many aspects of the existence of slaves, the explicit focus on their labour in colonial texts is somewhat sporadic. However, an idea of a range of possible responses can be given. In 1640, the Jesuit Bouton favourably compared the West African slave to the indentured labourer in terms that reflect on the principle of accumulation: A black slave is much more useful than a French servant who is only [contracted] for three years, who needs clothing, asks for wages, and is not accustomed to the heat, whereas the blacks [‘les noirs’] are there for their whole life, only need a rag to cover their modesty, have nothing but their life, and live miserably, being satisfied with cassava and peas, and are used to the air and the heat.48

This portrait from the earliest days of the colony is notable in spelling out the advantages of slave labour. A slave required minimal accessory costs, and ‘owned’ nothing except life. There is a clear implication that this was a peculiar ‘possession’ of life itself, without any of the privileges that possession normally bestowed. Bouton implies that it might be drawn on as a fundamental source of energy, making the slave a near-absolute source of labour. In his correspondence nearly a century later, another Jesuit, Bréban, depicts a vessel ‘laden with human flesh’ ‘speeding’ from the West African coast to sell its cargo in the Americas.49 Bouton and Bréban, members of the same religious order, hint at diverse responses to slave labour. Reducing human beings to mere sources of labour, to bodies in the most fundamental of ways, could gratify, or it could repel. The appreciation of ordered plantation labour as a spectacle also implies the essential capacity of accumulation. It can be seen in Rochefort’s depiction of Poincy’s residence in Saint Kitts. Here, the ‘beauty’ of the construction and gardens is complemented by their 173

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‘usefulness’ (‘utilité’). In the courtyard ‘three machines, or mills for crushing sugarcane, can be seen, which assure their master profit and income’. A large slave workforce is essential to the portrait: More than three hundred slaves, who belong to the General, cultivate these lands and are employed in the service of these mills and in the manufacture of diverse other merchandises that this island produces benignly [‘heureusement’]. … Everything is done in this house and its dependencies without confusion and hurry. This great number of black slaves [‘esclaves nègres’] is so well-policed, directed and regulated, that each goes to the occupation and the task that has been assigned to him(/her) by the chief of production, without getting mixed up in the duties and the occupations of the others.50

This is another portrait in Rochefort’s ‘embroidered’ depiction of the Caribbean that was, as has been seen, to be so highly praised by his readers. There are two notable aspects. The first is that the ordering of slave labour is essential to how Rochefort appreciated the aesthetics of Poincy’s residence. A mass labour force carrying out repetitive work in a regulated manner could be part of a harmonious portrait. So explicit is he that one might compare his enthusiasm with that ‘[appreciation] [of slaves] … for their sheer subordinated presence’ that Joseph C. Miller advances as one further function of slave labour in agricultural societies.51 This is, secondly, a depiction of the prestige of a colonial settler. To appreciate such a representation, one would have to recognise the shared values it conveys; and not least among these was the appreciation of capitalist production itself. Europeans reading this portrait would be invited to situate themselves in relation to the social relationship it depicts. These readers were ultimately the members, however distant, of the stratum that could accumulate, and could profit from slave labour. There are even more discreet hints of the appreciation of the order of labour. It may even be seen in Bréban’s description of the songs sung by slaves in the fields. Although he was aware of the violence that was always ready to fall on a ‘lazy’ worker, the Jesuit still perceived a certain harmony in the spectacle of gang work. He described how a young female slave would sing a verse and ‘the chorus reply, admirably in tune. They beat time with their hoes, raising them and letting them fall in unison.’52 This is another isolated response to labour, but it has been seen how Bréban appreciated the organisation of space in the plantation. In this case, the consciousness of his distance from labour may well have allowed 174

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Bréban to appreciate both the songs of slaves and the order of their bodies as aesthetic phenomena. However, as the following section will demonstrate, the harnessing of the body for intensive production might be particularly fraught. Corporeal dynamics and desire While some accounts of Caribbean slavery are characterised by their relative serenity, focus on the uses of the body could illustrate more problematic dynamics. These are particularly evident in Labat’s account of the processes of intensive production. There were also early interrogations concerning the uses of the body which reflected on questions of morality (through the disruptive potential of sex), and even the order of the plantation. Labat, as has been noted, developed strategies for intensive production which were based on numeracy, on the capacity to evaluate labour. There was, however, a paradox within the very act of evaluating and organising human labour. His strategies for organising large-scale labour depended on those those who carried it out being essentially mastered, and even interchangeable. This fundamental mastery of labour was implied in slavery; it can be seen in Bouton’s characterisation of slaves as possessing ‘nothing but their life’, or in Labat’s constant, though not exclusive, use of the possessive with the term nègre.53 However, it was impossible to reduce the slave to a pure unit of productivity. Even in the accelerated labour processes of the plantation, human beings had distinct labour capacities. These could be the result of innate differences, of physical condition, age, skills or character. Labat himself was quite aware of these differences, and he took account of them in his advice to planters. He also demonstrates that slaves might compromise how the planter applied his specialist knowledge. He acknowledges that there were corporeal and social dynamics that could disrupt even proto-industrial processes. Labat’s account of indigo production illustrates both the nature of specialist knowledge and its limits. Indigo production required intensive labour at all stages, from the sowing of the plant, to the carrying of the freshly cut harvest to the soaking vats, to the rigorous stirring of the vats that separated the usable dye from the remains of the plant.54 This was labour that had to be guided by specialist knowledge, and this knowledge centred on controlling 175

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time. Planters ordered the transportation of the harvested plants in diverse manners. Some had them wound into bundles so that a slave ‘could carry them easily’ to the vats, but most had them wrapped in great sheets of thick fabric, which would reduce the handling of the plant and, most importantly, would economise time. Time, as Labat reminded the reader, was ‘precious everywhere, but especially in America, where one cannot take enough precautions so as not to waste any’.55 It was precisely in the reading of time that this specialist knowledge could be gauged. It was the knowledge of the exact moment at which to interrupt slave labour (the beating that separated the dye from the plant) which enabled one to ‘recognise the knowledge [‘science’] of the indigo-maker’; too little or too much agitation would cause the loss of the indigo, and ‘a considerable loss [of money] to the proprietor’.56 However, Labat also acknowledged that there were compromises to the ways knowledge could control labour. It can be seen in his account of the sowing of the indigo plant. The land had to be weeded ‘up to five times’, after which a labour gang (Labat writes that it might be made up of ‘slaves or other [labourers]’) would cover the terrain in three precise stages.57 In the first, they would walk backwards in a line, all the while creating holes in the ground which were a set depth and distance from one another. They would then return (walking forwards this time) and seed the holes. In a third stage, they would walk back over the land, covering over the seed with earth. The planting, Labat writes, was the ‘most laborious work’ in the process of indigo production, demanding that the labourers were bent over continuously for over two hours as they worked regularly across the land.58 It demanded the precise direction of the bodies of slaves, yet there was a practice which ultimately escaped this direction. There was, Labat writes, a ‘superstition’ amongst slaves which made them always plant an odd number of seeds. He ‘did not approve of the practice’, he notes, but he decided against ‘showing’ the labourers its ‘uselessness and ridiculousness’, as he would ‘waste his time and labour [‘peine’]’.59 There is a rich irony in Labat’s refusal to confront the practice. It was a limited agency within the labouring force. Planting an odd number of seeds was a form of numeracy, but of non-productive numeracy, or a ‘superstition’. Labat compromised with it, precisely because interfering would impact on time and labour, the two commodities that the successful planter had to master. 176

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Labat’s model, as such, acknowledges the uniquely human character of slave labour. This form of labour also had to contain potentially disruptive corporeal and social dynamics. He counselled making further compromises to maximising labour, precisely because human labour had a distinct character. His compromises acknowledged that slaves were both subjective and social beings. He congratulated himself on his habit of sending a large plate of food and some eau de vie so as to keep his slaves ‘satisfied [‘contents’] and sufficiently nourished to tolerate the fatigue of labour’ (and maximising yield). He also had the nourishment of the plantation’s children looked after himself, so that slaves did not have the ‘pretext’ of ‘missing several hours of work’ to look after them.60 Keeping slaves ‘satisfied’ as well as well-nourished implies that their labour required an input in morale, as well as energy. What Labat was counselling was a compromise to yield based, in part, on acknowledging the subjectivity of slaves. Feeding their children demonstrates a second problematic dynamic based, this time, on the inherently social nature of human relations. Labat also demonstrates that this uniquely human aspect of slave labour could even disrupt the ownership of property and labour. He noted that slaves might consume during the process of production. Adults and children consumed the vesou, or refined cane juice, although there were, Labat noted, planters who would not ‘allow their slaves to enter the sugar refinery and to drink the vesou, thinking that this would significantly reduce their harvest’.61 Labat did not agree. Quoting Scripture, he declared that it was a ‘false economy’, even a ‘harshness’ not to allow slaves to profit from what he called a ‘petite douceur’ which was ‘the fruit of their labour’.62 He thought that slaves should be allowed the drink the vesou once they ‘asked permission from the refiner’. This, he wrote, was a gesture that would ‘conserve the proper order and subordination that there should be on a plantation’.63 There was clearly more at stake than the simple consumption of a by-product of sugar. By acknowledging the consumption of the vesou, Labat illustrates what was problematic not just in the order of slave labour, but moreover, in the principle of owning it. The slave continued to desire and retained his or her will (even in the mere desire for a sugar product). A master, as Labat shows, could empathise with the slave’s desire; both could experience the value of the object of the slave’s desire. The slave wanted to consume this ‘petite douceur’, 177

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while the master derived profit, rather than consume it himself. Labat’s account is notable in implying that the product of travail should in some way profit the labourer, the slave who could not own. His solution is to make the slave ask the master’s permission to consume what was actually ‘the fruit of [his/her] labour’. Asking for permission would be an avowal of the master’s ownership. This is a sort of verbal transaction, where one partner is faced with the product of his or her labour (or as Locke might have it, its ‘mixing’ with a natural resource); he or she affirms that the other partner has the right to it, and obtains permission to consume it. What may be most important to the ‘master’ here is the slave’s verbal affirmation of his proprietorship. In this passing mention of a by-product of sugar production, Labat illustrates how forms of unregulated consumption could also have considerable theoretical implications. The ‘order’ and ‘subordination’ of the plantation depended on acknowledgement of who owned the product of labour, and Labat hints that it was experienced in the day-to-day life of the plantation. This is the kind of discreet irony that puts into question what Dobie qualifies as Labat’s creation of a ‘social grammar [in which] … slaves are depicted as moving parts in the colonial machine’, as his ‘reification of slave labour’, or his ‘dehumanization of the enslaved worker’ that she sees as symptomatic of ‘[Labat’s reluctance] to make slavery the focal point of his discussion’.64 The metaphor of the ‘colonial machine’ is certainly appropriate to how Labat idealises his production techniques. However, he consistently acknowledges that there were human dynamics that disrupted production. One central raison d’être of his accounts of production is precisely to propose solutions for desires that were common to both slaves and masters. In certain spheres, the slave was all too human; in others he or she did not exist. One area in which the ‘humanity’ of the slave was illustrated was through the sex of the individual. Sex was a factor in the division of plantation labour, and distinct male or female labour capacities were of central importance in maximising production. Labat writes that low-labour-intensive tasks, such as the knotting (‘amarrage’) of cane bundles, might be reserved indiscriminately ‘for young male or female slaves, or others who cannot do harder work’.65 However, there was a strict sex-based distribution of labour in more intensive tasks. Labat notes that sugar extraction in the mill was assigned to between four and five female slaves. One would unload the bundles 178

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of sugar cane; another would feed them into the press; a third would fold the cane and feed it back for a second pressing, and the fourth (and fifth, if present) would take what was left of the crushed cane (the ‘bagaces’) to be prepared for re-use as fuel or as food for livestock.66 Labat considered this the acceptable side of sex-based specificities on the plantation. Such specificities could also be extremely problematic; desire, this time sexual in nature, could interfere with the capacity of the slave to generate capital. Du Tertre’s chapter on the mulâtres illustrates how African slave women were the victims of particularly malevolent forms of violence on the plantation. He thought slave women were worthy of ‘compassion’ as they were forced to submit to sexual coercion. They normally submitted to what he called the ‘filthy desires’ of the planters and overseers he referred to as ‘lost men’, because of their ‘fear of bad treatment, the terror of threats with which [men] terrorise them, or by the force which these frenzied men [‘passionnés’] use to corrupt them’. Du Tertre unequivocally condemned this use of force, which he saw as ‘a crime that God detests’, although he also refused to ‘criticise anyone in particular’, lending a certain distance to his condemnation.67 Du Tertre also illustrates that such crimes could infringe the proprietorship of a slave-owner, and could be sanctioned in these terms by the judicial system. An overseer (commandeur) he knew who had impregnated a slave had to pay a substantial sum to the proprietor ‘for the loss of his slave’s time’ (‘la perte du temps de son esclave’), along with another payment for the child’s upkeep. Du Tertre demonstrates how sexual coercion was considered to be antiproductive as well as sinful. Removing a female slave from cashcrop labour (loss of time) had to be compensated (the early decree that métis children were to be freed also removed these children from the labour force).68 There were other slave-holding contexts in which women’s labour consisted in reproductive labour.69 In the plantation context depicted by Du Tertre, this was essentially a diversion of profitable labour.70 Unmastered desire could have subversive consequences for production, and for the ownership of cash crops and human beings. There is a further implication to accounts of the slave society that reflects on the domination of the body. These accounts were written in the context of the constant demographic expansion of the slave population. Accumulated human force might well be ­appreciated 179

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for its order in the Caribbean plantation, but it could inspire varying responses. Bouton asserted in 1640 that African slaves were ‘good for labour, once they are watched over and pushed’, otherwise they would ‘pass the time sleeping or chatting’; here the force of the (growing) slave population is notably latent.71 Over a century later, Monnereau would obsessively insist on the necessity for the économe to calculate time and organise labour, and seems to testify to a much-changed dynamic. He was evidently preoccupied by largely economic concerns, given the need to direct labour (and competing with non-profitable tasks such as laundry or public works).72 Yet writing about labour – and especially, counselling strategies to direct it – acknowledged a fundamental force. The will that Labat saw in the innocuous desire for cane juice in the sugar mill lay within each slave. In accounts of the plantation in which one was ‘always occupied’, there is a sense of enormous energy to be constantly channelled.73 It may even be seen as a prefiguration of Arendt’s formulation, after Marx, of labour’s great ‘power’; she writes that such power, when ‘exploited’, is ‘channelled’ through ‘violent oppression’ so that ‘the labor of some suffices for the life of all’.74 All accounts of the plantation environment were constructed in the context of this ‘channelling’ of essential force. As later chapters will demonstrate, the escape of this force would be a considerable concern. Time and transience The importance of evaluating and ordering production in the nascent cash-crop economy was also reflected in how time itself was imagined. The plantation economy was a further strand in the chronologies in which French colonisation was understood. Within this environment, the social conditions of planters and slaves were shaped by how they were understood in relation to time. The existence of the inhabitants of plantation economies was defined by temporal frontiers. Christian subjects lived in a temporality which was ultimately limited; there had been a Creation and there would be an end to time. This was the temporality in which the authors of French Caribbean texts lived, as did the planters they described. Those Christianised slaves who would share in salvation ultimately participated in this eschatology. In the day-today existence of both, the Church, in Masses and in its calendar 180

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of feast days, ultimately structured the year (and for ecclesiastics, the day itself). Religion influenced the way the ‘temporal’ domain was experienced; religious time was ultimately inseparable from ‘secular’ time. There were further significant implications to the experience of time. Edward Muir has highlighted how the hour has its ‘peculiarly Christian origins in the rule of the Benedictine order’, and that the ‘spread of the monastic sense of ritual time’ instilled ‘discipline’ and ‘social solidarity, [through] coordinating the activities of all members of a community’.75 However, in the plantation world, notions such as ‘coordination’ and ‘solidarity’ meant different things depending on whether one was free or a slave. Its inhabitants were characterised by distinct levels of belonging. Some had always been full members of the collectivity and some had become members. The existence of slaves was circumscribed within the private domain of their proprietors. This will indicate how the fundamental meaning of time in the plantation was determined by such factors as religion and community. Within itself, time has been qualified by Johannes Fabian as something that ‘we speak … through’, something that is ‘much like language or money, … a carrier of significance’.76 In the early colonies, time also ‘signified’ possession and accumulation, and it was fundamental to how planters understood themselves and slaves. It was also the source of some anxiety concerning how it could be controlled. The understanding of time was inseparable from accumulation. Those who owned labour could profit from two strata of labourers. There were the European indentured labourers, such as those the curé Biet encountered on Guadeloupe in 1653. They were, he writes, ‘contracted [‘obligés’] to masters for three years’ and it was ‘for this reason that they are called, through derision, trente-six mois’.77 Indentured labourers had allocated a certain duration of their labour to their ‘masters’; it appears that this temporal, temporary service was at the root of some scorn. Although such labourers might be treated very poorly, their service – the labour that was demanded from them – was finite and (in principle) finished upon the end of their contracts.78 Slaves made up the second stratum of labourers. They were defined by being incapable of accumulation, but also by time. Their service was only restricted by their own mortality. There was a clear 181

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attraction to this service, absolute in temporal terms, as Bouton showed in his favourable comparison of the African slave, who would serve ‘for his entire life’, with the indentured servant (‘only [there] for three years’).79 Slaves owned neither their labour, nor the time through which it was imagined. What is more, as the Dominican Chevillard observed in 1659, the master also owned the time of slaves’ progeniture: If most planters look after these poor miserable people, it is often rather because of self-interest than charity, given that they [African slaves] are not only perpetual servitors, but are in true enslavement, because when they die, their bloodline (I mean their children and all their descendants up until the last generation of [the planters’] first slaves) are considered the property of the master … [who] acquired them through his industry and the sweat of his body.80

Chevillard was not only conscious of the unchristian motives of planters; he would also object to their mistreatment and excessive punishment of slaves. Yet he was equivocal about the possession of slaves in itself. He outlined the different African lands from where ‘they were most commonly taken’ and ‘brought’ (‘on les amène’) from Africa to the Americas. The only clue he gives to how he thought of their acquisition is a passing mention of the punishment of ‘captives’ (‘captifs’), but without elaborating further. It appears to have been this captivity that allowed the master to acquire the most absolute form of time; that of the descendance of slaves.81 In this context, the capacity to measure, order and control time that Rochefort attributed to Europeans takes on new significance. Some of its implications can be seen in Norbert Elias’s analysis of the instrinsically ‘social’ nature of time. Here, Elias describes a historical process in which human groups developed a ‘relative autonomy’ from nature, and from ‘natural time-meters such as the movements of the moon, the changing seasons [etc.]’. For Elias, the ‘autonomy’ he describes can be gauged by the shift towards the ‘dependence on human-made devices’ for measuring time. Elias also considered the act of ‘timing’ to be a ‘social activity’, in that it ‘[relates] to each other the positions of events’ in ‘change-continua’.82 Early Caribbean societies differed significantly from the ‘highly urbanized and industrialized’ modern societies Elias had in mind in his analyses (not least in how vulnerable they were to the environment).83 However, the chronologies on which mechanisms for understand182

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ing and controlling time depended had been imported from Europe into the early Caribbean. There were ‘change-continua’ that were specific to plantation labour, and which illustrate how time measured possession, and even power itself. Being able to control and to distribute time was central to power in the plantation. Labat describes how to do this in a sugar plant: This is how time is divided up [‘partagé’] in a sugar plant. The slaves are woken to take part in prayer about a half hour before daybreak, at five in the morning. About an hour passes before they are ready … . Those who must serve at the furnaces or the mill of the sugar plant go in there and stay there until six in the evening. They work out a time amongst themselves to have breakfast and lunch but in such a way and so speedily that the work is not suspended or neglected.84

A master distributed and allotted time to slaves, but slaves were limited to redistributing it under certain conditions. Labat’s preoccupation with time was, of course, explicitly capitalist. He created strategies for controlling the time of multiple slaves so as to ensure the maximum production of commodities. In fact, controlling time had, to use Fabian’s term, a further ‘significance’ here. Time ‘signified’ labour, and it was therefore a master’s property. As a result, time could never be indifferent. Ownership implied being able to order time and labour, but there was no tranquillity in this sort of possession. As well as being the key to ensuring productivity, the mastery of time was also a source of anxieties about order. Time, as Labat qualified it, was ‘precious’. It was, he reflected, ‘the dearest thing [‘la chose la plus chère’] there is, especially on the islands, where a good proportion of the planter’s attention should be directed towards profiting from every moment, and forecasting and anticipating, if he can, everything he has to do’.85 It is a telling prefiguration of later plantation concerns.86 For Labat, the planter had not only the capacity, but also the obligation, to foresee and to plan: ‘he must [‘il doit’] … always be ahead of his work, plan a task a long time before he has to undertake it’.87 For Monnereau, the économe also had to have a ‘plan’, and every day had to be used usefully (‘utilement’).88 Both illustrate what was at stake in owning time; ordering this ‘precious’ commodity was extremely fraught. Time, in fact, seemed to have a remarkable capacity for escaping and becoming useless. Compromises had to be made when directing labour, and intensive processes could be disrupted. There were also 183

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specificities to human force. Labat illustrates the kind of compromises that had to be made in directing labour. There was a delicate balance between extracting as much labour as was profitable, and the danger of reducing the labour potential of slaves. Given, he writes, that the loss of time was ‘irreparable, and of a dangerous consequence’, the planter must not ‘force work’. He should prefer a ‘continual’, even ‘mediocre and moderate’ rhythm to ‘vehement’ labour which would exhaust slaves and beasts of burden and cause a task to be abandoned. It was ‘wise and regular conduct’ that would ensure the conservation of all.89 The conduct Labat counselled is somewhat reminiscent of the harmonious œconomie in Furetière’s Dictionnaire. It implies a process of constant calculation, estimating the relationship between labour, natural resources and the market. However, Labat makes it clear that the planter could not, in fact, ‘forecast and anticipate’ everything, even in carefully organised processes. Labat was aware of the negative consequences that the work on the sugar plantation would have on slaves ‘more often malnourished than not’ (and Monnereau would later propose solutions to the illnesses that dogged early plantation life).90 The Dominican was inspired to divide up his slaves into ‘squads’ which, he said, gave him ‘the right to demand prompt, assiduous and vigorous labour’ from them.91 However, harnessing human labour to natural sources of energy, or to technology, entailed a great multiplication of power. These sorts of power had a tendency to escape their confines. According to Labat, accidents involving slaves were more frequent in mills powered by water than in those driven by horses, precisely because the movement of horses could be stopped more quickly. Sugar presses (where female slaves fed cane into the drums) had been the scene of several accidents in which slaves and refiners had been horrifically mutilated.92 The accelerated process of plantation production might itself ‘consume’ the source of labour.93 There were, in other words, contextual limits to power. There were also, ultimately, limits to ownership which stemmed from the nature of human force. Time was a preoccupation in another domain. The planter, in principle, possessed and controlled the labour, the massed, collective time of his slaves. However, in owning, he was also bound to his slaves. Time, like labour, had to be constantly channelled. The role of the foreman was to distribute labour; those who were able ‘were never lacking’ in tasks with which to ‘occupy the slaves’.94 Mastering time meant controlling 184

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(or, following Arendt, ‘channelling’) force. In this environment, time was force, as well as money. These associations between time, accumulation and power are clearly significant for understanding writing about the slave. They illustrate further reasons for the evanescence of slaves in colonial texts. Indeed, Elias has stressed how concepts of time determine constructions of knowledge itself, or a society’s culturally determined ‘knowledge continuum’; he sees such concepts as necessary to forms of experience common with one’s ‘fellows’, and to ‘selfexperience’ itself.95 We can have no access to slave ‘self-experience’, but it is clear from Labat’s account that French colonists had a very definite conception both of what time meant, and who their ‘fellows’ were. The ‘knowledge continuum’, the very understanding of time, that they reflect implied the exclusion of the slave stratum. This is ultimately another shade of the narrative absence of slavery. However, in the corpus of colonial-era narratives, there is one exceptional reflection on how slaves considered time. This is in Du Tertre’s evaluation of each of the three factors which made the labour of slaves extremely difficult. He considered the intense heat to which slaves were continually exposed to be one such factor, and the terrible brutality and violence of slave-drivers to be a second. The worst of the three, however, was the consciousness of the fruitlessness (‘infructuosité’) of their labour: For well they know that all their sweat has been for their masters’ profit, and were they to accumulate mountains of gold for [their masters], they would never have any of it, and were they to live for whole centuries, working even harder than they already do, they would not receive one sou of profit for their travails.96

Du Tertre depicts a slave who is conscious of the unbreachable gap that separated his labour from capital and time. What most marks this portrait is what constitutes the essence of slavery in the eyes of a French observer. Rather than physical suffering or coercion, it is precisely the awareness of condition that is the most awful aspect of the slave’s existence. It consists in the total incapacity of accumulation. Here, Du Tertre makes the endlessness of service – what was so attractive to proprietors – a source of the most fundamental suffering. The slave is marked by an ever-frustrated desire. This is a rare instance of the narrative acknowledgement of a slave consciousness, and it hints at one more reason why this consciousness 185

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was suppressed in colonial texts. This focus on the slave exposes an essential conflict between dominator and dominated, centring on the possession of time itself. The intemporality of slaves was, in other words, an essential strand in their social marginality. It was reflected, most obviously, in terms of labour and property. There is a considerable irony in the very recourse to texts in attempting to understand such intemporality. The aim of the settlers and ecclesiastics who produced such texts may well have been to influence or to justify themselves before their contemporaries, rather than the generations to follow. Nonetheless, it is their texts that have passed through the centuries, and to which we are condemned to have recourse. These texts bear witness to the capacity of script to itself surmount time, and to the anxieties of the planter obsessed with its escape. Engagés, slaves and beasts Thus far, these accounts have testified to a confidence in manipulating labour, tempered by the consciousness that there were fissures in the chain of production. Plantation labour was intensive, harsh and repetitive. Even the production of cassava, a food staple, was assigned to a ‘strong’ female slave as it required ‘continuous stirring for ten or twelve hours’.97 There was little room for eulogy in slave labour; it was characterised by the lack of agency and of any recognisable social mobility. The social condition of the slave debased labour, and slaves were debased by the strenuous, often degrading labour they carried out. As Arendt has shown, there had been ‘contempt for labouring’ in much earlier historical contexts, and ‘­contempt’ also deepened what ‘cultural repression’ of slavery there was in early modern France.98 Not unlike the Dutchman Bosman, who cut short his observation of the peoples of the West African coast at the turn of the eighteenth century, certain categories ‘need[ed] no other account to be given of them, than that they are common people and slaves’.99 Nonetheless, by focusing on labour itself, it is possible to gain further insight into the slave condition. This can be seen when slave labour is compared (as it was, with some regularity) to the labour of human beings who were not enslaved, or even to the labour of animals. The early colonies hosted considerable populations of indentured labourers, those ‘young and poverty-stricken Europeans … 186

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lured into a temporary condition of semislavery’, as Philip Curtin describes them.100 These engagés carried out intensive labour, but as the nuances in Curtin’s formula show (‘temporary’ and ‘semislavery’), they differed essentially from the slave population. The distinction between slavery and indentured labour – or the existence of a distinction – has been treated in a number of studies.101 In early French accounts, observers were struck by the harsh lot of indentured labourers, and even the most tranquil of observers might equate the treatment afforded to them with that of slaves. The ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’, recounting the ‘fair’ (‘honnête’) treatment of African slaves, distinguished them from the engagés uniquely by the limited duration of indentured labour.102 There were, however, further distinctions that can be seen in different genres of colonial narrative. Indentured labourers might certainly find themselves working in extremely poor conditions. One might sign on as a baker in the early eighteenth century, and find oneself clearing forests in an environment that was fearful for even those Europeans most familiar with the country.103 Du Tertre lamented the ‘harsh treatment’ (‘dureté’) of French indentured labourers, who were ‘overworked’ and ‘badly fed’ (he even claims that a planter he knew in Guadeloupe had ‘buried more than fifty’ such labourers who had died from overwork and neglect). He claimed that they were worked even harder than black slaves, precisely because planters wanted to gain maximum profit from their three-year service.104 In the event of sickness, once their three-year contracts were up, they might find themselves having to resort to charity.105 There were further troubling aspects to this condition.106 Beyond the intensive labour, indentured labourers may well have experienced some unease about their social status. According to Du Tertre, the ‘obligation to work alongside [a master’s] slaves’ would ‘distress these unfortunate people [the indentured labourers] more than the excessive hardships that they suffer.’107 A Frenchman in his late thirties named Guillaume Massonier, who had been at the service of Labat since their departure from Paris, discovered in the Martinique of the mid-1690s that this condition was a ‘very rough and arduous slavery [‘un esclavage fort rude et fort pénible’], which only differed from that of the nègres in that it only lasts three years’. Although, Labat noted, Massonier was not overworked by the Dominicans (he had been 187

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put to work making rum), ‘this idea had struck him with such intensity that he was unrecognisable’.108 These two testimonies illustrate the aversion of French labourers to proximity with the ‘outsider’ (to use Eltis’s formulation). There are two depictions of Caribbean life, Oexmelin’s Histoire, and the Nouvelles de l’Amérique, that shed further light on the conditions of slavery and indentured servitude. Oexmelin spoke from his own experience as an indentured labourer. He described the planters’ ‘commerce’ in the engagés whom they would ‘sell’ amongst themselves, subjecting them to a regime of exhaustive labour and violence. He had himself been ‘exposed for sale’ on la Tortue in 1666, and claimed to have been ‘enchained’ during a period of degrading service under one master.109 The second of the Nouvelles de l’Amérique describes the fate of a character named Mont-Val, who had been betrayed and illegally sold as an indentured labourer on Saint Kitts. He is depicted carrying out the most degrading labour, and is employed at the ‘basest functions of a great kitchen’, from feeding pigs to cooking vegetables. One of his tasks was to call in a gang of workmen, apparently distinguished by colour (‘Messieurs les Noirs et les Blancs’), to eat. Mont-Val even carries out service for slaves; this European who ‘had had valets to serve him, now saw that he was the miserable valet of black and white slaves [‘esclaves noirs et blancs’]’.110 He is informed that he might gain his freedom ‘if he were to buy a Noir in his place’.111 In a study of the theme of commerce in Oexmelin’s Histoire and in the Nouvelles, Ellen Welch has drawn attention to the question of labour in these two works. She observes that the offer made to Mont-Val to buy a black slave in his place reduces him to ‘the price of his own labour’. She highlights Oexmelin’s ‘expos[ition] for sale’ and his own comparison of his condition to an ‘awful slavery’, and the significance of his ‘metonymically equating the plight’ of indentured labourers and slaves, given what she calls the ‘technical’ distinction of both conditions.112 However, what distinguished indentured labourers and slaves was much more than a ‘technical’ distinction, and it is reflected even in these texts. The Nouvelles and Oexmelin’s testimony may appear, on the surface, to assimilate the indentured labourer and the slave. Mont-Val’s condition, like that of Oexmelin, is at times explicitly equated with slavery; it is written that his comrades consider another poor European to be ‘enslaved and in servitude [‘dans l’esclavage et la servitude’] as they were’, and that by the time 188

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Mont-Val had been ‘enslaved [‘dans l’esclavage’] for six months or more’ he had begun to ‘lose hope of soon changing this miserable condition for a better one’.113 These narratives might seem to blur the exclusive reservation of slavery for ‘outsiders’, and to admit that a European might be enslaved. However, the ‘slavery’ in Oexmelin and the Nouvelles is hyperbolic. The fundamental distinctions between indentured labourers and slaves are what give these accounts such a strong dramatic charge. The ‘metonymical equation’ observed by Welch is so striking precisely because the conditions of ‘slave’ and ‘engagé’ could not be assimilated. MontVal, however ‘miserable’ his state, might ultimately change it. He suffered rigorous treatment, like Oexmelin, but remained an individual who could not only be ‘valued’ (to paraphrase Welch), but could also re-enter an economy. Both had sold (or were thought to have sold) their labour for a finite period, precisely because they could own it in the first place. Narrative form reveals a further distinction between indentured labourer and slave. At least two accounts, those of Coppier and Oexmelin, are the voice of former indentured labourers. It is telling that in others, it is the consciousness of indentured labourers, rather than slaves, that is transcribed. Whether disgruntled labourers (in Du Tertre and Labat), or a potentially fictional character reduced to servitude (Mont-Val in the Nouvelles), the engagés experience a recognisable response to the presence of slaves. Slaves, however, were very rarely granted a narrative voice except under the most specific conditions (such as the conversion accounts that will be discussed in later pages). The capacity of a narrative voice is a distinction that reminds us that slavery is to be understood in spheres encompassing much more than labour. How this distinction stretched beyond the purely economic sphere is suggested in Patterson’s analysis of the importance of ‘honour’ to slave systems ranging from the tribal to those of the southern United States.114 He notes, in his analysis of the role of ‘honour’ in slavery in Antiquity, that ‘in all slave societies, even the poor who may have owned no slaves felt a sense of honour in the presence of slaves’.115 A not dissimilar question of ‘honour’ hints at the causes of both the distress recognised by Du Tertre and Labat and the degradation recognised by the nouvelle. Even plantationera narratives reflect how the distinction between slave and nonslave fundamentally transcended labour. 189

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The comparison of slaves with beasts illuminates further aspects of the slave condition. Assimilating slaves to beasts, in different forms, long pre-dated French colonisation in the Caribbean. Aristotle saw slaves and animals as comparable in their limited ‘apprehension’ of reason and in their ‘usefulness’.116 Seneca, as has been noted, instead criticised the treatment of slaves as if they were beasts of burden. In early modern national and religious traditions beyond France, the assimilation of the slave to a beast might also be the source of unease.117 They might be compared because they were treated as property. Slaves, as the moralist Charron wrote in France at the turn of the seventeenth century, ‘have neither [their] bodies, nor goods within their power, but belong completely to their masters, who can give them [away], engage, sell, resell, exchange and use of them as working animals [‘bêtes de service’]’.118 Neither slave nor beast could accumulate, and their very bodies appeared, to the moralist, to belong to another. In accounts of the settlement of the Caribbean, the comparison of slaves with beasts was principally based on three features of slavery: forced labour, the act of sale, and branding (the last will be discussed in Chapter 5). Forced labour could be accepted for reasons that have already been discussed. Pelleprat accepted that slavery was ‘extremely harsh’ and that it was ‘infinitely difficult for these poor people to see themselves sold, often by their fathers and by their lords, to strangers who transport them where they wish, and leave them in countries where they are used like beasts of burden’.119 This was attractive because it would lead slaves to an alternative ‘freedom’ within the spiritual domain.120 Yet Pelleprat also acknowledges that plantation labour was dehumanising in that of the temporal. The condition of both the slave and the beast, as Pelleprat and others demonstrate, entailed an act of sale.121 The ‘exposure’ of slaves was viewed by some with repugnance. Bréban related that they were ‘washed and scrubbed … like horses to be displayed at a market’ in Cap Français (a similar comparison is made in the Fonds Brotier copy of Mongin’s 1682 letter).122 There were more ambiguous responses, and Mr de N***’s early eighteenth-century account is perhaps the most explicit. He gives a detailed description of the steps to take when inspecting slaves for sale on the West African coast. They should be ‘carefully examined’; one should ‘look at their heads, make them open their mouths to see if they 190

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are missing teeth’, ensure that there is ‘nothing missing’ about their bodies, and inspect their gait. He furnishes approximate prices, noting that adult female slaves sold for ‘little over half’ the price of male slaves.123 On the other side of the Atlantic, in Portobelo, he was greatly amused by the sight of Catholic clerics selecting from the many hundreds of slaves he had himself helped to land. He says of the clerics that ‘the parts to which they should have paid least attention were those that they most [carefully] examined’. He was most amused by an elderly Jesuit who he claimed to have seen ‘examining these négresses with his eyeglasses … as if he were only twenty-five or thirty years of age’.124 Mr de N*** prided himself on his commercial acumen, and on the excessive prices the crew could demand from Catholic clerics for their slaves in South America. Whatever the accuracy of his depictions of the act of sale, they illustrate the ambiguity concerning the bodies of slaves. He relates the strategies used in Africa to assess their value, giving the steps in what is a visual, and ultimately invasive, tactile procedure. It is an assessment of a certain, acceptable form of labour potential. The buyers performed another visual inspection in Portobelo, which entailed an even more intimate examination of the body. This, however, became an opportunity to ridicule a despised religious confession. Mr de N*** appears to have considered the use in manual labour of slaves, as of animals, to be unproblematic. Using slaves for sex (or at least overtly displaying this intention) was not. This is an exceptionally vivid account of the transaction, and it also illustrates that, even in the act of sale, a distinction remained between human slave and beast. Robin Blackburn sees evidence of a ‘widespread practice of seeing slaves as beasts of burden’ in the fact that they were ‘listed side by side’ in inventories, and sees legislation as rendering slaves ‘equivalent to beasts of burden in most … aspects’ aside from their disobedience and their ‘menace to civil order’.125 It is true that the plantation slave, as with the beast of burden, was primarily valued for his or her labour potential. However, what is more telling about the attraction (as well as the hazards) of slavery lies in how it was distinguished from animal labour. The consistent use of comparison or metaphor (to be ‘like beasts’) proves this distinction; even the plantation slave could not be converted ‘into a Christian and a beast of burden’, to use Garraway’s term.126 The labour carried out by slaves was not 191

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just functional; it also had distinct forms of meaning. This can be seen in three aspects of slavery: in what was specific about human labour, in the apprehension and mastery of the body and the soul, and in human power. Slave labour was fundamentally distinct to that of animals. As Meillassoux notes, despite the ‘de-personalization’ entailed in slavery, and even the assimilation of slaves to ‘living livestock’, their ‘reason’ was employed, whatever labour they carried out.127 What so titillated Mr de N*** when selling on slaves in early eighteenthcentury South America was that he supposed that their sexual services would be appropriated by proprietors to whom these services were typically proscribed. The human being was a far superior source of labour to the beast. As well as profit, human beings could also furnish different types of pleasure. Even the terms in which human slavery was condemned shows what was unique about it. Bréban, on Saint-Domingue, writes that slaves were ‘bought and sold … like horses or oxen’, that ‘most did the work of these animals’ and that ‘half of them’ had ‘barely anything human about them except for the body and the voice’.128 It was precisely the voice that distinguished slaves from ‘inarticulate’ and ‘mute’ ‘instruments’ (respectively, cattle and ‘vehicles’) in classifications as far back as the ancient Roman agricultural treatises.129 However the voice, as the following chapter will illustrate, was not only unique to the human being; it could also be very difficult to master. Continuing references to the theme of the bestiality of the slave are telling about the ambiguity surrounding the control of the body. ‘Bestial’ labour exposed that the relationship between master and slave was based on force. It could indicate practices of slavery that exceeded certain limits, as with those slaves to the Portuguese who, Froger writes, were ‘[made] work the earth like oxen, were malnourished, and were beaten with a stick for the least fault’.130 As Froger shows, even a participant in the slave trade could criticise the exactions of slave-owners. There was also the question of the limits to which the body might be mastered. The slave’s body was a human body, and it was particularly attractive for plantation labour. It also had a common essence with the master’s body (even if, in the case of Africans enslaved to Europeans, one was not entirely assimilated to the other). The violence inflicted on slaves (or, as Froger shows, the slaves of others) could inspire some resistance when it infringed corporeal limits, 192

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as Chapter 5 will demonstrate. Perhaps most essentially, the slave (unlike the animal) could never simply be a body, because the slave had a human soul. This concern may have done little to limit the exploitation or punishment of slaves, but it implies that they were not ‘seen’ as, or assimilated to animals. As Fromageau’s cas de conscience illustrates, it was buying and selling ‘men’ that inspired some unease in Christians. There was, however, another side to enslaving a human being. Possessing a human being meant more than having power over a body or a source of labour. This can be seen in Mr de N***’s account of the buying and selling of slaves on either side of the Atlantic. He not only acknowledges what made their bodies attractive to consumers, but he also illustrates how power might be a source of delectation. He shows no compunction about his capacity to explore, and even invade, the bodies of slaves during purchase. He attributes the desire to do this to his buyers in South America. However one used this power, it shows that slaves were much more than corporeal commodities. It may well have been common humanity that gave ‘bestial’ treatment a particular attraction. In 1654, Boyer enumerated the types of merchandise that would be useful in the Atlantic economies. One could source manufactured goods in Europe, hides, herbs and resins in the Americas, and on the coasts of Africa, human beings. In Africa, one could obtain, he wrote, ‘[a] great quantity of slaves at a good price, who will be yours for the rest of their lives, who you can treat as you would a beast [‘disposer comme d’une bête brute’] and that you can use with little expenditure in the service of your house, or in cultivating the land, while feeding them with little’.131 This depiction of the labour possibilities of the slave is remarkably enthusiastic, most evidently concerning profit. One could invest little in money and alimentation, and obtain a great return in labour. However, these are qualities that, in principle, might be obtained from animal labour. It is clear from the passage that there was some further quality, some additional aspect to the transaction, that made it attractive. Here, it is the very possibility of treating the slave as ‘a brute beast’ that enhances the attractiveness of the offer. In this case, it is precisely what distinguished human being from beast that makes slavery attractive. * 193

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This chapter has examined concepts of the nature of property and the proprietary relationship, and of profit and harnessing labour, that were widely shared. They demonstrate the importance of strategic approaches to managing labour and maximising production. Yet they also complicate the idea that the human being was, as Montchrestien had written, ‘a ‘living instrument’. Slaves had a tendency to escape being reduced to sources of labour, and to disrupt the chain of processes within the plantation. As demonstrated by the simple consumption of sugar products in the mill, the slave, like the planter, continued to desire. There were ultimately limits to the knowledge that guided the plantation environment, and this is reflected in thinking about the consciousness of the slave. Colonial-era texts rarely acknowledge the consciousness of slaves; Du Tertre’s depiction of their awareness of the futility of their labour is exceptional. Accounts of the plantation do, however, testify to ambiguities concerning this consciousness, which could make domination problematic or pleasurable. How recognisable this consciousness was demands exploration. It is this that will be the subject of the next chapter. Notes 1 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 55. 2 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 170–71. 3 ‘Le fort Saint-Louis ne pouvant pas s’en passer’, Du Clos reporting on state of fort in 1720 in letter of 4 April 1727, from Petit Goave, SaintDomingue, ANOM, C9A 27, non-paginated [fols 2r–2v/4]. 4 ‘Les habitants de l’Amérique sont remplis de vanité; ils sont dans l’usage d’envoyer quérir leurs besoins par leurs esclaves avec une lettre qu’ils écrivent aux capitaines’, de Paty, Récapitulation, undated [1715], from Petit Goave, Saint-Domingue, ANOM, C9A 11, fols 239r–240v (fol. 239v). 5 On the conditions of indentured labourers, see for example Marcel Chatillon and Gabriel Debien, ‘La Propagande imprimée pour les Antilles et la Guyane au XVIIe siècle, recrutement ou racolage?’, Annales des Antilles, 24 (1981), 57–98. 6 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 7, 87. 7 For one estimate of the increase in sugar production and concomitant

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slave population increases, see Bernard Moitt, ‘Sugar, slavery and marronnage in the French Caribbean: the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries’, in Moitt, ed., Sugar, Slavery and Society: Perspectives on the Caribbean, India, the Mascarenes, and the United States (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), pp. 51–71 (p. 56). 8 For an account of the progressive transfer of the economic model of the sugar plantation across the early modern Atlantic, see Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, pp. 17–28; in the case of Saint-Domingue, see for example, the chapter entitled The Land in King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, pp. 16–41. 9 Keith Thomas, ‘Work and leisure in pre-industrial society’, Past and Present, 29 (December 1964), 50–66 (p. 63). 10 On the ‘blur[ring] of the distinction between the slave and the wage laborer’ by Charron and Montchrestien, see Heller, ‘Bodin on slavery’, p. 63. 11 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1698), p. 187. 12 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 186. 13 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 185. 14 Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 186–87. 15 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 228. 16 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 492. 17 ‘on demande à hauts cris des nègres et des engagés’, Galiffet, from Le Cap, Saint-Domingue, 4 March 1700 (Duplicata), ANOM, C9A 5, fols 59r–61r (fol. 60r). 18 The royal ordinances relating to the proportions of indentured labourer to slave are summarised in Shelby T. McCloy, The Negro in the French West Indies (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), p. 3. 19 ‘[Les] petits habitants, qui ne font ni sucres ni indigo, qui n’ont qu’un jusqu’à quatre nègres, ils s’occupent à faire des vivres qu’ils portent vendre dans les bourgs, leurs petites habitations en sont fort éloignées, étant pour l’ordinaire dans les montagnes, en sorte que ces gens-là fatiguent beaucoup et gagnent peu …; ceux d’un et deux nègres se sont jetés dans les montagnes où ils vivent comme des bêtes de leur chasse, et portent quelquefois vendre des viandes salées pour avoir de la poudre, des balles, et quelques morceaux de toile’, de Paty, 8  February 1715, from Petit Goave, Saint-Domingue, ANOM, C9A 11, fols 214r–229v (fols 226r–226v). 20 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 9. 21 Des cannes à sucre, et de la manière qu’on le fait, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1654, pp. 169–74; Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 122–25. 22 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1654, pp. 172–73. 23 For an example from the English tradition see diagrams of a sugar mill

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and plant in Ligon, True and Exact History, 1673, pp. 84–85; Index, non-paginated (after p. 122). 24 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 332. 25 Rochefort, Relation de l’Isle de Tabago, pp. 9–10. 26 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 483. 27 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 504. See also Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 343. 28 Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, p. 118. 29 Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, p. 40. 30 ‘des fugitifs blancs et noirs qui passent en leurs quartiers en si grand nombre que la continuation de ces abus serait capable de fortifier considérablement leur colonie au détriment de la nôtre’, Galiffet, Mémoire to Pontchartrain, from Léogane, Saint-Domingue, 30 August 1702, ANOM, C9A 6, fols 45r–82v (fol. 60r). 31 Marcus Porcius Cato, De Agri Cultura in Cato & Varro: De Re Rustica, bilingual Latin–English edition trans. by William David Hooper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 1–157 (on the overseer, pp. 12–15); Marcus Terentius Varro, Rerum Rusticarum, in Cato & Varro, pp. 159–529 (on slaves, pp. 224–33). 32 État des Nègres qui sont nécessaires dans une habitation, Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 416–17; Emploi des nègres et négresses ci-dessus, pp. 417–38; on the tonneliers, p. 423; Dépense nécessaire pour la nourriture et l’entretien de 120 esclaves, pp. 438–48; Compte de la dépense d’une habitation fournie de 120 nègres, p. 448. 33 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 448–58. 34 ‘on dispose les nègres et les négresses le long de la pièce’, Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 171. 35 ‘Combien il faut de gens pour servir un moulin, et leur emploi’, Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 202–04. 36 Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, pp. 36–37, 166–67. 37 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 176–255. 38 See for example Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 181–92. 39 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 186–87. 40 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 189. 41 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 195–97. 42 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 218. 43 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 197. 44 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 196. 45 Chassis d’un moulin à sucre, Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 181–82. 46 Dobie, Trading Places, p. 142. 47 Paola Tabet, ‘Les mains, les outils, les armes’, L’Homme, 19:3–4 (1979), 5–61 (p. 45).

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48 Bouton, Relation, p. 99. 49 ‘Voilà un vaisseau qui a fait sa traite en Guinée, et qui chargé de chair humaine, vole aux côtes de l’Amérique pour en faire le débit.’ Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 6v; 1997, p. 115. 50 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 53–54. See the letter from Edward Graves, in Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, non-paginated. For another, shorter, textual portrait of Poincy’s plantation, see Maurile, Voyage, 1652, pp. 44–45. 51 Joseph C. Miller, referring to ‘hoe cultivation’ societies, in The Problem of Slavery as History, p. 49. 52 ‘Le chœur répond avec une justesse admirable. Ils battent la mesure avec leurs houes, qu’ils élèvent et laissent tomber à terre en cadence.’ Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 13r; 1997, p. 120. 53 ‘un baril de farine de manioc pour mon nègre’; ‘je fis signe à mon nègre d’y aller’, Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, pp. 318, 339. 54 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, pp. 268–95. 55 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 284. 56 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 286. 57 ‘les esclaves ou autres qui doivent y travailler’, Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 280. 58 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 281. 59 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 281. 60 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 211. 61 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 212–13. 62 ‘L’Écriture ne défend-elle pas de lier la bouche du bœuf qui foule les gerbes de blé?’ Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 213. 63 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 213. 64 Dobie, Trading Places, p. 142. 65 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 174. 66 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 202–03. 67 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 511–12. 68 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 512–13. 69 On reproductive labour in the English colonies, see Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). On the ‘reproductive labor’ in the Pays d’en Haut, Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, p. 59. 70 For an analysis of the ‘unprofitable’ nature of ‘raising slave children’ in late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, see King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, pp. 105–06. 71 Bouton, Relation, pp. 100–01. Maurile reaches a similar conclusion, Voyage, 1652, p. 86. 72 Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, pp. 190–91.

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73 ‘l’occupation ne manque jamais sur une habitation’, Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, p. 103. 74 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 88. 75 Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 62–86. On the ‘four levels’ of time see p. 64, on the monastic origin of the hour, pp. 85–86. 76 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. ix. 77 Biet, Voyage, p. 312. 78 On the poor treatment of the French engagés see Biet, Voyage, p. 312. 79 Bouton, Relation, p. 99. 80 Chevillard, Les Desseins, pp. 193–94. 81 Chevillard, Les Desseins, p. 192; on the punishment of ‘les captifs ou engagés’, pp. 194–95. 82 Norbert Elias, Über die Zeit, part trans. by Edmund Jephcott as Time: an Essay (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 41–43. 83 Elias, Time, pp. 41–42. 84 I have translated ‘déjeuner’ and ‘dîner’ contextually by, respectively, ‘breakfast’ and ‘lunch’. Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 210–11. 85 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 408. 86 ‘Le temps est trop précieux dans nos Îles où l’on ne cherche qu’à faire diligenter le travail’, Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, p. 37. 87 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 458–59. 88 Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, pp. 85, 87, 177. 89 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 459. 90 Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, pp. 170–73. 91 ‘j’étais en droit d’exiger de mes gens un travail prompt, assidu et vigoureux’, Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 216. 92 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 205–07. 93 This ‘consumption’ of labour has also been observed by Garraway, The Libertine Colony, p. 140. 94 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 175. 95 Elias, Time, pp. 70–71. 96 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 524–25. 97 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, pp. 393–94. 98 On the ‘contempt for labouring’ in Ancient Greece, see Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 81; on the ‘cultural repression’ because of the ‘morally problematic’ nature of slavery, see Dobie, Trading Places, p. 225. 99 William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London: James Knapton, 1705), p. 137.

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100 Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, p. 80. 101 For a review of these studies, see Ann Campbell, ‘Indentured servitude as Colonial America’s “semi-slavery business” in Sally Gunning’s Bound’, in Swaminathan and Beach, Invoking Slavery, pp. 133–51 (pp. 133–35); see also editors’ introduction, pp. 13–14. In the English tradition, see Jordan, White over Black, pp. 53–56. 102 ‘[les] esclaves … ne différant en rien des serviteurs français, sinon qu’ils sont serviteurs et servantes perpétuels’, ‘Anonyme de SaintChristophe’, Relation, p. 121. 103 Blénac (governor) writes of one such baker who signed on ‘pour travailler … de son métier’ in 1713 but who was sent ‘faire du bois à la Tortue … [dans] un lieu en friche que les plus anciens boucaniers du pays ont bien de la peine à supporter’. Blénac, 1715 (otherwise undated), from Saint-Domingue, ANOM, C9A 11, fols 181r–182v (fols 182r–182v). 104 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 477. 105 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 472. 106 On the evolution of distinctions between slave and indentured labourers, see Arlette Gautier, ‘Sous l’esclavage’, p. 21. 107 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 477. 108 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 109.  109 ‘Ils commercent de ces hommes les uns avec les autres, et se les vendent pour trois ans’, Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, p. 143; on Oexmelin’s own experience of being ‘exposé en vente’, pp. 14–16, 143. 110 Nouvelles de l’Amérique, pp. 129, 131, 133. 111 Nouvelles de l’Amérique, p. 127. 112 Ellen Welch, ‘Risking life and limb: commerce and the value of life in Caribbean adventure narratives’, Cahiers du dix-septième siècle, 15:2 (2014), 121–39 (pp. 127, 131); on the ‘technical’ distinction, see footnote 17. On Oexmelin’s ‘fâcheux esclavage’ see Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, pp. 15–16. 113 Nouvelles de l’Amérique, pp. 135, 137–38. 114 On the southern United States under slavery as a ‘timocracy’ see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 94–97. 115 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, p. 92. 116 Aristotle, Politics, p. 23. 117 On English criticism of ‘treat[ing a man] … as a beast’, see Jordan, White over Black, p. 54. 118 Charron, De la sagesse, p. 671. 119 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, pp. 55–56. Of Guadeloupe, Raymond Breton notes: ‘Nigritarum (qui Africae populi sunt et mancipiorum more vel potius bestiarum ad omnia servilia opera emuntur a suis regibus’, Brevis Relatio Missionis Fratrum Praedicatorum

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in Insulam Guadalupam (1654), in Breton, Relations, pp. 129–59 (p. 159). 120 ‘ils jouissent de la liberté des enfants de Dieu’, Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 56. 121 ‘on les achète, de même que l’on ferait des bêtes de service’, Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 340. 122 ‘Après qu’on a bien lavé et frotté les nègres, comme des chevaux qu’on va exposer au marché’, Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fols 8v–9r; 1997, p. 117. ‘L’on les vend au marché comme l’on fait des chevaux’, Alternative copy of Mongin, 1682 letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 3r; L’Évangélisation, p. 129. 123 Mr de N***, Voyages, p. 71. 124 Mr de N***, Voyages, pp. 213–14. 125 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, pp. 324–25. 126 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, p. 159. 127 On the distinction from ‘objects or animals’ to which an ‘ideological fiction’ reduced slaves, and the ‘use of reason’ in ‘fact’, see Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, pp. 9–10; on ‘de-personalization’ and the consideration of slaves as ‘living livestock’, pp. 107–09. 128 ‘on les vend et on les achète, sans comparaison comme des chevaux ou des bœufs, aussi en font-ils toutes les fonctions pour la plupart, et la moitié d’eux, ainsi que les Suisses, n’ont guère de l’homme que la voix et le corps’, Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fols 2r–2v; 1997, p. 112. 129 ‘instrumenti genus vocale et semivocale et mutum, vocale in quo sunt servi, semivocale, in quo sunt boves, mutum, in quo sunt plaustra’, Varro, Rerum Rusticarum, pp. 224–25. 130 Froger, Relation, p. 148. 131 Boyer, Véritable Relation, p. 334.

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4  Spheres of knowledge

The preceding chapters have considered ordered representations of colonial labour, accounts of captive labour in the plantation economy, and the evaluation of slave labour. These narratives, as has been seen, had to acknowledge that there were resistances to human domination. The accounts of plantation labour acknowledged that it could be disrupted by desire, and that the slave was ultimately a subject. Colonial histories and conversion narratives were also drawn to acknowledge forms of slave consciousness, to various degrees. These narratives further recognised that slaves were ‘social’ beings; they hint that there were forms of culture which were their exclusive preserve. This chapter and the next will discuss the slave as a subject, by focusing on the manifestations of slave consciousness. The present chapter will explore how French commentators understood the consciousness of the slave. It begins with an analysis of the sites in which it was most frequently situated, and which might encompass the temporal and spiritual realms. It will then explore its reflections in the linguistic context of early Creole society. Progressing from the linguistic to the supra-linguistic levels such as sensibility or emotional bonds, this chapter ends with an exploration of those forms of knowledge with which colonial commentators most struggled.

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Esprit, génie, raison African slaves were often thought distinct to Europeans in something approaching what would come to be called ‘intellectual capacity’. Both populations were frequently said to differ in their esprit and génie. There was some diversity in perspectives about where exactly these differences lay, and they could be located in the temporal and spiritual consciousness. They are also telling about the significance of socialisation within the colonial environment. Du Tertre’s 1654 and 1667 Histoires illustrate where these differences in slave consciousness could be situated. He writes that while most slaves could competently carry out the tasks they were assigned, some were ‘so stupid’ (‘si stupides’) and ‘so simpleminded’ (‘si grossiers’) that it was extremely difficult to make them carry out orders.1 They seemed to him to be unaware of their situation (like the slaves in the classical tradition who had been touched by Zeus). The faculties of (in French) ‘jugement’ (1654 edition) or ‘esprit’ (1667) of Caribbean slaves seemed to have been diminished, sparing them the awareness of their ‘condition’. He concluded in his second edition that slaves did not think about their condition at all, except (briefly) ‘when they were mistreated’ (a conclusion he would nuance elsewhere, as will be seen).2 However, he also wrote that the ‘esprit’ of slave children could be ‘opened up’ by contact with those of their masters.3 Whatever deficiency Du Tertre saw in ‘jugement’ or ‘esprit’ (one term, curiously, replacing the other in the second printed edition of the text) was not necessarily transmitted over generations. Esprit was traditionally associated with the intellectual faculties (with the Latin ingenium, or mens, for example).4 Furetière’s Dictionnaire illustrates that esprit had a wide range of meaning by the turn of the eighteenth century. Esprit could be thought of as the human soul (‘l’âme’), the ‘various functions of the soul inasmuch as it conceives, judges, imagines and remembers’ or ‘the humour [‘humeur’], the intelligence [‘génie’] of each person, his/ her application for something, and the ease with which he/she succeeds’. This has much in common with later conceptions of the intellect. However, the Dictionnaire also indicates that esprit was not thought of as a totally ingrained faculty, citing the illustrative maxim ‘Nature furnishes one part of l’esprit, and the commerce of the world the other.’5 202

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The range of the term esprit illustrates the challenges to locating early modern understandings of human consciousness in terms which are recognisable today. Translating the terms used to qualify esprit is challenging, as it frequently means introducing still further unfamiliar notions. The adjectives grossier and hébété, which were used to describe the esprit of African slaves, illustrate this difficulty. The figurative definition of grossier in Furetière’s Dictionnaire reflects most closely a lack of refinement, which is illustrated by that of the ‘savages’, or Amerindians (‘les sauvages sont grossiers et malpolis’). It might also indicate an esprit which ‘could not be taught anything’. Hébété designated a person who was ‘no longer capable of doing anything’, but typically referred to an imposed state (Furetière uses the examples of the consumption of alcohol, or old age).6 I have translated grossier and hébété in the following pages by respectively ‘simple(-minded)’ and ‘dull(-witted)’, with the awareness that early modern concepts of intelligence are incommensurable with those of the present day. There are regular testimonies that indicate that slave faculties were thought inferior by French missionaries and settlers. The Jesuit Bouton, on Martinique in 1640, wrote that ‘the esprit of most Moors [=African slaves] is so simple [‘grossier’] and dull [‘hébété’], that none of them know how to read and write, and it is thought nearly impossible to teach them how’.7 His fellow Jesuit Pelleprat claimed in 1655 that African slaves had an essential deficit in esprit (which meant that teaching them required much ‘patience’ and ‘labour’).8 To judge from Mongin’s 1682 letter to the Languedocian gentleman, certain members of the public in France thought that African slaves were lacking in reason; the letter is a response to the gentleman’s urgent request to know how the Holy Spirit might touch ‘people without religion and without reason’.9 Mongin himself bemoaned the ‘extreme dullness’ (‘étourdissement’) which was an impediment to baptising the slaves of Saint Kitts, and which meant that some ‘could not get it into their heads after twenty years how many gods there were’; their ‘ignorance’ might be the result either of ‘a lack’ (‘défaut’) of esprit or be ‘their own fault’.10 There are two further aspects of Mongin’s testimony that will be returned to. He distinguished, first, the relative capacities of slaves who were more ‘recently arrived or [had arrived] at a more advanced age’, more established slaves, and Creoles. He considered more established slaves and Creoles to be quite capable of instruction, and 203

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Creoles to be endowed with a particularly quick esprit that they preferred to employ in vice.11 The distinction between the learning capacities of these populations is based essentially on socialisation. It is, secondly, clear that Mongin also thought of esprit in spiritual terms; he measured the faculty by the capacity of slaves to apprehend concepts of Christian theology. The temporal aspects of this deficiency are all the more significant in the plantation context. Charlevoix’s Histoire, written during the period of intensification of this economy in Saint-Domingue, includes a remarkable illustration in a portrait of the slave’s esprit: With regard to esprit, that of all the nègres of Guinea is very limited; many appear stupid [‘paraissent stupides’] and as if they were dullwitted [‘hébétés’]; some of them can never count beyond three, nor learn the Pater Noster. By themselves, they never think of anything, and the past is as unknown to them as the future. They are machines whose springs must be wound up each time one wants to set them in motion. Some people have thought that there is more malice in them than defective memory [‘défaut de mémoire’], but they were mistaken; to be persuaded of this, all one has to do is to reflect on their lack of foresight in things that concern them personally.12

Without reference to reason, temporal esprit is marked here by multiple levels of absence. The terms of this portrait testify to how limited the apprehension of the slave consciousness could be; the slaves ‘appear’ to be deficient in esprit, and the terms ‘stupides’ and ‘hébétés’ hint (as has been shown) at external effects as much as essential incapacity. Reading the absence of thought, or the possession of ‘defective memory’ as early ‘biological’ or ‘racial’ apprehensions of difference in this 1731 text must also be subject to caution. Deficient esprit is manifested in the areas of numeracy (inability to count), temporality (lack of awareness of past and future), memory and planning (or, one might say, the ability to distribute force across time). Yet these, as has been seen, are precisely the areas which were thought to be exclusive to the planter class. In this context, this depiction of the slave as a ‘machine’ to be ‘wound up’, the assimilation of a human being to a mechanical apparatus, is an apt reflection of the processes appreciated in plantation agriculture. What perhaps most belies the idea that Africans were essentially different are the contradictions within the text itself. This portrait of slave esprit is immediately followed by a discussion of a range 204

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of deceitful tactics that slaves were commonly assumed to employ against their masters.13 These contradictions will be returned to later in this chapter, but it will be clear at this stage how they subvert any notion of an empty slave consciousness. The idea that slaves were deficient in the temporal faculty of esprit may appear somewhat reflective of natural slave theory. It has been seen how the Jesuit Bouton was enthusiastic about early slave labour (although he cautioned that slaves needed to be directed) and that he also supposed African slaves to be deficient in esprit. Indeed, Mongin made explicit reference to the Aristotelian model in his 1682 letter, noting that black Africans ‘particularly seemed to be born for’ slave labour, having the ‘corporal strength and weakness of esprit’, which were ‘qualities required for slavery, according to Aristotle’ (the Fonds Brotier copy of his letter nuances this, adding that many slaves were ‘not lacking in understanding [‘entendement’]’, and would be ‘capable of all sorts of arts and sciences’ if they had been educated appropriately).14 However, for the most part, commentators saw the supposed deficiencies of slaves as nonessential; they might distinguish between populations, conceive of the transformation of slaves’ esprit, or think of their difference in what would later be called ‘cultural’ terms. As in so many domains, religion and the script were essential to conceptions of esprit. Distinctions could be perceived between African peoples. Chevillard had distinguished the inhabitants of Cape Verde, who had some ‘trace of the Mahometan’ (‘teinture du mahométan’) but with esprit that was ‘shallow’ (‘matériel’) and ‘simple’ (‘grossier’), from the peoples of Guinea and Angola whom, he claimed, possessed a ‘subtle intelligence and facility for learning language’.15 A further distinction is illustrated in the Dominican’s discussion of the different strategies used to instruct Amerindian and African neophytes. A combination of vivid image and text was required to instruct Amerindians, whereas Africans were ‘better speakers and more intelligent [‘intelligents’], so that they understand instructions with greater ease’. Chevillard attributed the greater ‘openness’ (‘ouverture’) of their esprit to ‘domestic familiarity’.16 This conception of ‘intelligence’ would appear to be based less on the possession of inherent faculties than on a concept of socialisation. Another Dominican, Loyer, encountered a people with ‘exquisite esprit and judgement’ on the coast of Africa at the turn of the eighteenth century. They were ‘subtle, clever and crafty’ (and, he added, very dishonest).17 205

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It is in the potential of esprit to be transformed that one can see further indications of its non-essential nature. Among the Amerindian converts, as Chevillard writes, it could be raised from the ‘simple’ (‘grossier’) and ‘shallow’ (‘matériel’) to a level that would edify the reader.18 The missionary Margat, in 1725, claimed that the slaves on Saint-Domingue were usually ‘simple-minded, stupid, brutal [‘grossiers, stupides, brutaux’], to a greater or lesser degree, according to their place of birth’. However, these were traits that might be modified by ‘commerce’ with Europeans and long-established slaves, which would ‘civilise them and make them docile’; many had ‘intelligence’ (‘esprit’) and a ‘talent for the arts to which they are applied, and in which they often succeed better than the French’. For Margat, this esprit was particularly receptive to the ‘impressions of Christianity’ (‘impressions du Christianisme’), given the ‘natural simplicity’ (‘simplicité naturelle’) of African slaves. He wrote that the second generation of slaves, learning the ‘principles and maxims’ of religion, ‘have almost none of the slow-wittedness [‘grossièreté’] of their fathers; they have more esprit and speak our language with more purity and ease than most French peasants and artisans’.19 Margat is also informative about the role of ‘culture’ in thinking about inferiority in esprit. His favourable comparison of the esprit and mastery of language of the Caribbean-born generation of slaves, with those faculties among French ‘peasants and artisans’ is telling. It can be compared with Pelleprat’s assertion, in 1655, that Amerindian slaves were ‘better made, have better esprit, and are more gentle and reasonable’ than African slaves and that they had ‘no less esprit than our peasants in France’.20 Here, that the esprit of French men and women who were either unskilled, or engaged in work with a strong manual component, might be comparable with that of Caribbean-born Amerindians (Pelleprat) or black slaves (Margat) is telling. It implies that esprit was less an essential (or biological, or ‘racial’) trait than the product of something between class and culture.21 Both Jesuits illustrate, once more, the mutability of the site of esprit. They also demonstrate the debasement associated with labour and the manual, in France as much as in the Caribbean. At this point the implications of Mongin’s view of esprit as a spiritual faculty can be returned to. Missionaries, particularly Jesuits like Mongin, engaged with slaves on the religious terrain 206

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with which they were preoccupied. Specifically Catholic concepts and uses of language were the measure they used to evaluate esprit. What this means can be seen in a positive depiction of Creole slaves, in a 1709 manuscript housed at the Bibliothèque Mazarine and attributed to another Jesuit, Guillaume Moreau. It qualifies Creoles as ‘astute and having a good memory’ (‘ils ont de la vivacité et de la mémoire’), and black slaves in general as having ‘as much penetration’ (‘autant de lumières’), where faith was concerned, as the often-immoral French; the Jesuit view, the author notes, contrasted with the ‘grossièreté’ the other orders attributed to slaves. This illustrates, certainly, that the idea that slave faculties were inferior was widely shared, even by the orders whose ‘lack of zeal’ Moreau criticised.22 It shows, furthermore, that missionaries encountered slaves and free colonists in spiritual contexts; perhaps most importantly, it illustrates that intellectual penetration (‘lumières’) itself was a spiritual faculty. The distinct strategies used to convert slaves and European heretics to Catholicism reflect how the consciousness of each was perceived. In the charged religious climate of early modern Europe and its colonies, the esprit of Europeans could be the site of considerable resistance. The Protestants who inhabited the early French colonies were a great preoccupation for missionaries. The Dominican Chevillard vividly describes a series of conversions of European Protestants (with one Anabaptist), some on their deathbeds, and others abjuring before a considerable number of spectators.23 Amongst them was a ‘studious’ Gascon Calvinist who was ‘entrenched in his opinions’, and who resisted the missionaries who never ‘missed any opportunity to talk to him about his salvation’. He was finally converted when Father Raymond Breton had him pray using a Catholic support, the rosary beads.24 A planter on Guadeloupe who ‘always had that horrible monstrosity, Calvin’s Institutes, on his table’ converted on his deathbed. He kissed the rosary beads, ‘called for his nearest neighbours for the edification of each’, and finally had ‘all his books brought to him, [and] put them into the hands of [a] priest’.25 One of three exempla that figure in a report sent from 1682 Martinique by the Jesuit Martin Poinsset demonstrates the path of a young Dutchwoman to such conversion. She was committed to Calvinism because of family ties and ‘reading heretical books’. When enjoined by priests to renounce her heresy, she would either flee or mount a vigorous defence ­(sophismata and 207

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argutiae). The visit of a passing Jesuit finally inspired a turning point. His ‘salutary counsel’ to pray for discernment led her to call for him directly. She proffered ‘arguments’ (argumenta) against Catholicism which were refuted by the Jesuit, who ‘gave her a summary of Catholic dogma’.26 How this long battle to guide the girl to Catholicism was fought is very telling. Her considerable resistance was verbal: through rhetorical strategies (the ‘sophisms’). The Jesuit’s argumentation was supported by a text (presumably printed), so that the battle took place in a second, literate domain. The strategies used in this battle differed significantly from the tactics used by missionaries to slaves. This might demand considerable effort, or ‘industrie’, as the Jesuit Pelleprat put it, in his description of the Jesuit initiative to teach doctrine to Amerindian and African slaves. The missionaries energetically catechised slaves, even as they laboured by night or day. They had, he writes, translated prayers into slaves’ own languages, but their efforts ranged from having French settlers ensure the prayer of slaves on plantations, to simply pausing with the slaves they encountered to pray with them.27 There was also an important place reserved for nonverbal strategies. For Pelleprat, one might ‘penetrate the esprits of slaves through presents’, with ‘an Agnus Dei, an image or a medal sometimes more useful than a long speech’, although, he added, a bonnet or clothing was generally more appreciated by the black slaves he considered ‘simple and materialistic’ (‘grossiers, et matériels’).28 For Mongin, ‘external things’ surrounding Church ceremonies were necessary to inspire devotion and particularly so in the ‘material’ souls of the slaves of Saint Kitts.29 At the end of the year he decided to ‘examine and reward the progress that each had made in catechism and prayers’. He filled a bag with devotional gifts, and on the branches of a bush, spread out his ‘merchandise’, consisting in ‘images, medals, rosaries of all sorts’ which, with brightly coloured ribbons, ‘marvellously struck the sight of these poor people’. Mongin then interrogated each slave, assessing, with the aid of his catalogue, the degree to which each had made progress since the previous year and rewarding each accordingly. He writes that those who had not made any such progress ‘took away nothing but shame’ which was heaped on them by the other slaves.30 The conversion strategies of Pelleprat and Mongin were the tactics of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, in which the image 208

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was of central importance (they were also extensively used with peoples far removed from the Caribbean). Yet missionaries engaged with slaves in a distinct set of conditions. While an intermediary (rosary beads) featured in the conversions of European Protestants described by Chevillard, these were victories over heretics well versed in scriptural tradition. The sophisticated linguistic joust described by Poinsset is in vivid contrast to the non-linguistic tactics used to convert slaves. These were not unproblematic tactics; objects of devotion might be assimilated to other (purely) material objects, as Pelleprat demonstrates. There is also a suggestion that slaves were particularly susceptible to visual stimulation in Mongin’s account. This did not preclude the verbal formulation of doctrine, as he demonstrates in ‘interrogating’ slaves on their piety, and awarding devotional gifts in proportion to this.31 Nonetheless, it is clear that sophisticated forms of argument, particularly in the textual domain, were thought the preserve of Europeans (male and female). The diversity of approaches to slave esprit might well be read as a parallel to the ‘marginality’ of the slave within colonial society. From the vague Aristotelian connotations to the assertion, in Charlevoix’s Histoire, of deficiencies in thought, the consciousness of the slave was at times apprehensible, at times opaque. Accounts of its simplicity and receptivity to binding dogmas seemed to make it comprehensible. Yet there was also an impenetrable side to this consciousness. In these conditions, the transfer of narratives, particularly the key narratives of salvation, was of considerable urgency. Language, and the transmission of the Word, was a source of some preoccupation in the colonial environment. Language The colonisation of the Antilles brought diverse linguistic groups into sustained contact with one another, inspiring reflections on the languages and linguistic capacities of non-Europeans. The study of languages was of interest to certain missionaries in the Antilles, as in other locations around the globe. Raymond Breton, as has been seen, was an indefatigable student of Carib language during his years on Dominica, and other ecclesiastics have left transcriptions of Amerindian languages, of varying complexity (e.g. Pelleprat on the Galibis, 1655). These led to some conclusions which reflected on the relationship between language and culture; the languages of 209

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Amerindian communities, for example, were thought to be characterised by essential, representative absences in the religious, economic and even historico–temporal vocabularies.32 The languages of the African slave communities transplanted to the Caribbean were not subject to the same focus, to judge by the textual record. In 1655, Pelleprat explained one reason for this; he had identified thirteen languages amongst the African slaves alone, so one would ‘need the gift of tongues’ to be able to communicate with them in their native languages.33 Plantation slavery brought together populations speaking different languages, and it was French (or the ‘language of the masters’, as Mongin wrote from Martinique) that was spoken. As related in the Fonds Brotier copy of Mongin’s letter from Saint Kitts, slaves from as many as ‘ten or twelve’ linguistic groups might cohabit in the cabins of the settlement in the early 1680s. This meant that speaking French was necessary for mutual understanding, but ‘for very good reasons’ slaves were also ‘forbidden to speak their native tongue’. The communication of masters or missionaries with slaves took place either in French or in Creole (a unique ‘advantage’, Mongin notes, compared with other Jesuit missions).34 At first glance, testimony about slaves’ use of French or Creole language seems to indicate that it was perceived as essentially defective. In the early colony, Pelleprat considered the use of Creole as an ‘accommodation’. The slaves’ ‘way of speaking’ was characterised by the absence of conjugation of verbs, so that a temporal marker (e.g. ‘demain moi manger’) was necessary.35 Their evangelisation, he writes, was a difficult process, given that ‘most [slaves] only halfunderstand the things that are being said to them’. Interpreters came up against the difficulty of untranslatable words and concepts, so that they had to have recourse to gestures, and the use of ‘a hundred words to make one [word] understood’.36 In the Saint-Domingue of the early 1730s, Bréban perceived an absence on the level of grammar (for example, the absence of conjugation of verbs) and of vocabulary (‘they do not have as many words and circumlocutions as us’). For this Jesuit, the use of African structure(s) in French was one of the factors that made it ‘bizarre’, while what he called the ‘deformation’ (‘défigurer’) of words made them ‘impossible to recognise’ (and also amused him).37 Both Pelleprat and Bréban were aware of the complexities concerning the equivalence of concepts in different languages. They also imply that Africans (whom both saw 210

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as deficient in esprit or génie) were deficient in their manipulation of language, either in the expression of time (Pelleprat) or in their lexical poverty (Bréban).38 This supposed deficiency might demand a considerable investment on the part of a missionary. The letters of Margat illustrate the unique conditions of the linguistic contact between slave and missionary, a contact which was inevitably a source of ‘work’ (‘travail’) for the missionary. According to his letter in 1725, the slave population was unable to make an adequate confession, as they either remained totally silent, or exhaustively recounted matters which were of little concern to the priest.39 A letter in 1743 describes further toils on Saint-Domingue, this time undertaken by the missionary Boutin. Having gained some knowledge of the ‘baragouinage’ (Creole) of new slaves, Boutin would preach to them ‘adapting the style of his sermons to their manner of expression’.40 This, Margat wrote, was an extremely difficult task, as the instruction of a nègre ‘with limited intelligence’ required one ‘to reformulate in a hundred different ways, and in his manner of thinking, the basic principles of religion’.41 In the letter of 1725, one might speculate on the conditions of the (lack of) exchange in confession; this might concern conditions relating to concepts of sin or the place of the sacrament in Creole culture, as well as the linguistic environment.42 However, the 1743 letter supposes that there was a difference in modes of thought between French interlocutor and slave, which is manifested in the mastery (or not) of religious discourse. The importance of missionary accounts in early colonial textual production means that the supposed voice of slaves is encountered within edifying contexts. Pelleprat transcribes the assertion of one particularly ‘intelligent’ and ‘clear-sighted’ slave that he ‘preferred’ his servitude to the French to being the ‘slave of Satan’.43 In these contexts, the imperfect use of language might testify to the humility of the neophyte, or to the resourcefulness of the missionary. As Pelleprat illustrates in the histoire of a young baptised African slave from Saint Kitts, imperfect speech might still convey exemplary behaviour. A boy whose brother was ‘in danger of death’ ‘assembled all the black children he could’ and brought this group of ‘little innocents’ to a chapel. There, with an effusion of tears, the boy implored God’s mercy and urged his brother to confess, in ungrammatical French (‘Seigneur, toi bien savé que mon frère luy 211

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point mentir ….’).44 Here, language illustrates Christian ‘simplicity’, reflecting the operations of the soul and potentially, of the esprit. The account of Catholic instruction through French with Creole elements could also integrate a methodological approach. Chevillard describes how Catholic doctrine could be taught to slaves by neglecting the standard use of conjugations and modes of verbs, personal pronouns, and so on, in French, and instead favouring communication through a lingua franca. He furnishes what is in essence a blueprint for this in a two-paragraph summary of Christian doctrine in Creole. This specifies doctrinal points such as monotheism (‘Toi savoir qu’il y a un Dieu, lui grand capitou’) and the punishment of the damned (‘Enfin lui envoyé [sic] méchant en-bas en enfer’). It also relies on familiar analogy, such as illustrating God’s divinity through His ability to create a world through thought, unlike Man (‘l’homme’), who had to ‘look for hatchet for wood, then cut down reeds’ (‘chercher hache pour bois, puis couper roseaux’). Chevillard implies that the use of this language also required some creativity on the part of a missionary. He writes that one of his fellow missionaries, Father Beaumont, was interrogated during his catechism by a young slave. Having been instructed that a Christian, upon death, would ‘go above with God’ and that a bad person would ‘go down below to burn’, the slave asked: ‘Where is the big ladder to go up, and the hole to fall and go down?’ The priest replied that baptism was the ladder, ‘grace and merit’ its rungs, but that it was sin that led instead to the ‘abyss of suffering’.45 The report of this exchange was clearly intended to amuse as well as edify, but it has further implications concerning the use of language by slaves. Beaumont’s reply implies that metaphor was considered to be within the reach of slaves. Bréban described another manifestation on Saint-Domingue in 1732. He nuanced the absences in the ‘bizarre’ language of slaves by adding that they were capable of expressing themselves ‘in a very pathetic manner, and that they make images following nature’. They expressed strong anger through the phrase ‘Cœur à moi brûler trop’, and one, to Bréban’s delight, described a bearded Capuchin by comparing his appearance to that of goat.46 Bréban saw slave language as far removed from standard French (he writes that none would ‘ever have the honour of being admitted to the Académie Française’). Yet however comical it seemed, he also acknowledged a certain richness and inventivity (he added that it took him much time and effort to 212

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‘find the key to the Nègre dictionary’).47 Understanding or using metaphor implied that language had novel possibilities. Even reports of the poor esprit and flawed language of slaves mention their often merciless humour.48 Bouton’s ‘Moors’ (although he thought them ‘hébétés’) were ‘nevertheless, given to laughter and mockery, and note well enough whatever seems to them to be untoward’.49 From Saint-Domingue, Bréban informed his brother of the existence of slave ‘poets’ (he mentions that his account may ‘perhaps be hard to believe’, which may hint at shared perceptions concerning slave esprit in metropolitan France). Bréban noted that it was ‘the whites as much as, and still more than the blacks’ who were the victims of their ‘satires’. The ‘poets’ were good at ‘capturing the ridiculous side of people’ and Frenchwomen of dubious reputation might be particularly targeted.50 On Saint Kitts, Mongin’s attempts to talk to slaves about the subject of arranging marriages between them was met with ‘hilarity which lasted for the whole day’. Those whom the priest had projected to marry were the object of vicious jeering (‘railleries très sanglantes’) by ‘these people who are the greatest jeerers [‘railleurs’] in the world’, and who ‘neglected none of their faults, particularly those of the woman’. The – ­seemingly persistent – scoffing of slaves was often to ‘test the patience’ of Mongin.51 All such transcriptions of the slave ‘voice’ are ultimately marked by significant exclusions. They are voices that were heavily mediated, and we now apprehend them in text, in a form to which slaves themselves had no access. Some seem to acknowledge their subservience, such as those slaves who, according to Du Tertre, supplied the Dominicans with food during a time of penury on Guadeloupe, ‘[saying] in their baragouin that they were good nègres, and wanted to give us good food’.52 Yet even criticism of slavery testifies to the mediation of the slave voice. There are a number of letters in the Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide in Rome which circulated in ecclesiastical networks and which describe the cruelty of French slaveowners. Written in French and Latin, they were sent in 1732 from the colonies. They describe, for example, the fate of an unfortunate cook who had been been subjected to constant criticism from the wife of a French colonist on Martinique. One day, the letter relates, the woman ‘began once more to criticise the slave who said these words to her: “My lady, I am very unhappy to be unable to make anything to your taste.”’53 According to the letter, the slave was 213

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viciously punished, and would eventually die from his injuries. This correspondence was a vigorous assault on the violence of French colonists towards their slaves. It seems to transcribe the ‘words’, the voice of a slave, in the most immediate of ways. Yet even in this case, the voice of the slave is a remarkably distant construction. It was mediated through different languages, and if it is read at face value, it could at best have been the testimony of an anonymous witness to the exchange. Even here, the voice of the slave is at most an echo within the narrative. Transcribing the slave voice might even expose a certain instability in colonial culture. Asserting that this voice was pathetic or amusing implies that it reflected a docile consciousness, but there was another, more subversive side. The alternative possibilities of language, such as the metaphors described by Bréban, might be considered amusing (and allow one to poke fun at an ecclesiastic from another order). However, they also hint at how unmastered language actually was in the colonies. In the era of the great standardisation of the French language, Creole remained remarkably unstandardised. It was diverse and ever-changing, and it might even be said to resist transcription, or to be non-textual. It was one of the many cultural forms which were beyond the mastery of the colonial, text-controlling strata. Creole also acknowledged that there were social links between those who used it, and from which colonists were excluded. In these circumstances, the slave voice could do more than ‘test the patience’ of a well-meaning Jesuit. Even slaves put to the hardest of labour could subvert through humour, at the expense of their masters as well as of other slaves. It was the voice, as Bréban noted, that was still possessed by slaves, even when they were subjected to the most beastlike treatment. Implicitly, and unlike the labouring body, it might well remain beyond the reach of coercion. There could be no such thing as an indifferent transcription of the slave voice. Sensibility and fidelity The focus in a number of colonial-era narratives on what was essentially supra-linguistic – on affectivity or affective bonds – is also instructive about the condition of slaves and their relationships with their masters. This kind of focus demonstrates how fundamentally 214

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social constructions could structure human experience: what it was that could enable empathy, or what instead made the experience of another human being unrecognisable. It also illuminates how the bond between masters and slaves was imagined in early modern France. There are two manifestations in Du Tertre’s work that hint at how the sensibility of slaves was imagined in the early colonies. In his 1654 Histoire he describes an encounter he witnessed between two young African sisters during his short stay on Antigua. These were slaves who had been separated in childhood and who were reunited briefly in his presence. However, Du Tertre was shocked by the absence of displays of affection between the sisters, and their ‘coldness’ and ‘indifference’ towards one another. He saw within them a ‘hardness of heart and insensible stupidity’ that was representative of a ‘brutal insensibility’ shared by slaves of African origin, compared to the effusion of tears and displays of emotions that would be expected from his compatriots.54 This is in vivid contrast to his 1667 depiction of one of the Dominicans’ own slaves, an adult male named Dominique, in a chapter entitled ‘Of the marriage of slaves and the affection they have for their children’. Dominique had lost his wife, the mother of his two children, and would mourn her beside her grave, accompanied by the children, every day for a period of two years. This was behaviour that Du Tertre thought ‘quite singular’; he does not indicate why, although the context implies that it was a notable example of affection.55 What is significant in the accounts of these human interactions is the unfamiliarity of the contexts in which they took place. They hint at the ways social condition structured experience, and how both were reflected in textual representations of slaves. In 1654, the Dominican denied that two sisters (and by extension, African slaves in general) were capable of sensibility, and in 1667 he recognised the exacerbated sensibility of another slave. There may well have been strong contextual reasons why two sisters, observed by their European masters, made no recognisable displays of affection. In contrast, Du Tertre clearly had much greater familiarity with the slave Dominique (the fact that he was referred to by name at all may indicate that he was a domestic slave). This was, furthermore, an environment in which physical manifestations of sensibility (through tears, for example) could be important guarantees of faith or belonging, in such collective experiences as the abjuration 215

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of heretics in the Antilles.56 The exact role these factors played in Du Tertre’s depictions of slave (in)sensibility is uncertain. They do, however, hint at how the perception of the sensibility of slaves was constructed; it could be completely negated and reflect on an entire people in one context, or be exacerbated (and edify) in the very slave one possessed. Sensibility also illustrates the detached social sphere in which early modern Frenchmen thought of slaves. They appear to have been able to empathise with the victims of enslavement on coastal Africa, and even when they were directly involved in the trade themselves. In the mid-1630s, Alexis de Saint-Lô testifies to the collective ‘great compassion’ (‘extrême compassion’) experienced by French observers, at the sight of a large number of women and children enslaved during an indigenous conflict in modernday Senegal.57 In his journal, Jean Barbot relates the moment an enslaved African man was reunited with his wife and two children on a slave ship in 1679: I have not seen anything equal to the joy of this poor wretch [‘pauvre misérable’] at the sight of these three objects [‘objets’], so much tenderness in a woman and such good character [‘bon naturel’] in children of this nature [‘cette nature’]. They spent more than a half hour embracing one another and shedding a torrent of tears caused by the joy of seeing each other again.58

In a marginal note this is described as a ‘Very singular encounter, which inspired much pity in us’.59 It is a compelling illustration of how sensibility reflects constructions of belonging or of exclusion. The European observers appear to have shared an emotional response during this reunion, and they may also have recognised a subjectivity in common with those they enslaved. Yet this did not stop them embarking the family and, as it transpires, ultimately selling them in Martinique. The mention of their distinct ‘nature’ may go some way to explaining this. It is a passing mention, but it signposts those remarkably mobile concepts, discussed in Chapter 2, in which human difference was concentrated. The transaction in slaves may also have been viewed, as was the case with others, in the detached realm of trade. It appears that Europeans could share the intense sensibility of slaves and have ‘pity’ for them even as they detached slaves’ experience from their own, and detached themselves from their role in the transaction. 216

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Labat compellingly illustrates how even a plantation slaveowner could recognise the subjectivity of a slave. He furnishes an exceptional portrait of a young slave who he thought remarkable for his excellent judgement. Although the adolescent was only ‘sixteen and a half years of age’, he had ‘more esprit, order, fidelity and good will than could be desired in a much older person’. His great pride (which, Labat says, was common to all nègres) was his only fault, and the Dominican, who ‘loved him tenderly’ (‘tendrement’), had planned to ‘have him see Europe’ (‘lui faire voir l’Europe’). The slave was to die, in 1705, before the Padre could make the voyage with him. This is a portrait that is remarkable on many levels. It considerably complicates the assertions, made by so many of Labat’s compatriots, that the slave consciousness was inferior. Labat, exceptionally, used the term ‘personne’ (as well as nègre) to qualify the slave, and praised the boy’s esprit, and his capacities in managing time (Labat’s own great preoccupation). Labat’s original plan to ‘have him see Europe’ might well have been motivated by factors such as the need for assistance with his commercial or other affairs, or even the prestige or curiosity value of a Caribbean slave. Nonetheless, he wanted him to see; Labat was not only conscious of the slave’s subjectivity, but he also appears to have attached some (considerable) value to it. 60 Labat illustrates how servitude (even the less intensive domestic servitude this slave appears to have been subject to) was perpetuated, even in the awareness of a slave consciousness that was so recognisable it inspired deep affection. He hints (again) at the consciousness of the subjectivity in slave esprit, where others supposed a fundamental deficiency. His description of the young slave may in part be compared to the sort of ‘affective incorporation’ which, according to anthropological approaches, could be undergone by certain slaves over time in a slave society. Miers and Kopytoff characterise this as a ‘change … in the sphere of emotion and sentiment rather than formal and legal codes’ in the case of African slave societies. In the radically different plantation slavery of the early Caribbean, there was little question of the kind of concomitant, potentially significant ‘mobilities’ (in ‘status’, for example) proposed by Miers and Kopytoff.61 What Labat does seem to show, however, is that a master could experience affectivity for a slave who was marked by radical ‘formal and legal’ exclusion. The ironies in Labat’s eulogy, that seem so apparent to later readers, may be a 217

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symptom of d ­ istance from certain aspects of the coexistence of slave and master. Ties based on sensibility were also manifested in accounts of the fidelity of slaves. According to Du Tertre, slaves would do anything for a master once they felt ‘affection’ for him, preferring torture to revealing the whereabouts of a threatened master (on Saint Kitts), and defending the plantation of a ‘good master’ from rebellious slaves (on Martinique).62 There were a ‘thousand examples’ of their fidelity, in which Du Tertre identified the reflections of Roman slavery. If slaves were well treated, then as Seneca had written, slavery became friendship: ‘servi sunt? Imo contubernales. Servi sunt? Imo humiles amici.’63 Labat even recounts a first-hand illustration of reciprocal devotion, during the 1703 conflict with the English on Guadeloupe. Finding himself uncomfortably close to the enemy forces, he claims to have dismounted from his horse and put a young slave on in his place, so that the boy could ‘save himself’. Labat writes that the child was so insistent on remaining with him that he was ‘obliged to threaten him’ before he could make him leave.64 There are very obvious inflections of paternalism in how Labat thought of his relationship with some of his slaves (and he did, in fact, urge planters to ‘consider their slaves like their children’).65 There may, to some extent, be a contextual element to this, with it reflecting types of service which differed from massed plantation labour. His paternalism also hearkens back to conceptions of the integrated household slave which were at least as old as Aristotle. How this kind of relationship was thought to inspire affection can be seen in one theoretical model of slavery dating from the 1730s, Melon’s Essai politique sur le commerce. For Melon, it was precisely the right to sell labour that distinguished the domestic from the slave and that, in turn, created the special relationship between slave and master. A domestic’s freedom would engender ‘distaste’ for work and lead him to seek out a master who would have him do the least possible. The master, in turn, would not seek to better the lot of a domestic through ‘costly instruction’ as it might simply turn ‘to the profit of another’. The slave, however, would be motivated by the hope of a ‘happier future’, and even freedom. His children would receive an education which would make them ‘useful’ to the master; the master would also be inspired by ‘affection’ and tenderness for these children, freeing a certain proportion and so making ‘good citizens’ of them.66 What is interesting with Melon is 218

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how he assumes that it is principally a paternal master who experiences affection, but that it is essentially self-interest that motivates the slave. However harmonious this depiction of the slave–master relationship appears, it is undermined by the conflict of interests at its heart. This conflict of interest which undermined the fidelity of slaves is reflected both in first-hand and more obviously fictional accounts. They acknowledge that slaves belonged to other forms of community, beyond the slave–master bond. Belonging to a religious confession was one such community. The religious fidelity of converted slaves could edify; Labat claimed that slaves on the French possessions on Saint Kitts fled the English invaders precisely because of their attachment to Catholicism.67 Labat relates that a Portuguese slave presented himself to the French on Guadeloupe during the Anglo-French conflicts in 1703, claiming to have fled because of a desire to be ‘amongst Catholics’ once more. He also claimed to have gleaned information about a forthcoming English landing. While the information was considered a possible trap and ultimately not acted upon, the freedom he was promised illustrates how a more fundamental conflict of interest could be recognised as accompanying confessional sympathy.68 Caution about slave fidelity also extended to the domestic context. Bréban related a vivid anecdote, apparently ‘discovered’ only several weeks before he wrote his letter to his brother, about a slave who was thought a ‘model of fidelity’ by his master. The slave was seen one night by a passer-by (a ‘white’) through gaps in the walls of his cabin, drinking wine of ‘a charming colour’, and was found to have been taking great quantities of his master’s wine and hiding it away.69 The principle that the loyalty of slaves was undermined by self-interest can also be seen in the Nouvelles de l’Amérique (1678). These are informative in that they hint at popular perceptions of the relationship between masters and slaves. It is as intermediaries between suitors that a noir and (two different) négresses play a subtle role in the Nouvelles. In the first, it is a ‘petit noir’ who leads a nobleman named Don Diego through Lima and who facilitates his intrigues with a noblewoman.70 In this nouvelle, there is even a rare instance of a slave speaking in direct discourse, with a slave questioning Don Diego in Cartagena, inquiring after his identity so as to facilitate another intrigue.71 In the third, a female slave on Tortuga who ‘spoke good French’ explicitly promises ‘total 219

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fidelity’ to a young man named Bartelemi who intended to elope with his married lover. The narrator explains that because ‘black slaves are extremely loyal’ (‘les noirs sont fort fidèles’), Bartelemi had ‘no difficulty’ in telling her all.72 Nevertheless, this was an ambiguous fidelity. In the first nouvelle, a female slave in Santa Marta repeatedly allows an undesirable suitor to alter the letters that her mistress and Don Diego exchange, and this ultimately separates the two lovers. The suitor ‘bought’ (‘gagna’) the slave’s complicity; the nature of the advantage she obtains is not made explicit, but the narrator qualifies her as ‘perfidious’ (‘perfide’).73 In the same nouvelle, another slave promises an undesirable suitor access to her noble mistress’s apartment (in contravention of her mistress’s wishes); she is motivated by a combination of fear, the promise of liberty and ‘a good sum of money to get married’. She mitigates this deceit by declaring it to her mistress soon afterwards, and her mistress considers punishing her until she ‘considers [the slave’s] innocence and fidelity’.74 In both these cases, the loyalty of slaves was either bought, or exploited through fear. In these (ultimately, fictional) settings, a slave might certainly declare fidelity, but it could be subverted by those preying on the vulnerability of slaves or on their desire for liberty. The affection of the slave could be corrupted by self-­ interest.75 There is a further subversive side to even apparently unproblematic manifestations of fidelity. The slave who communicates with Don Diego in Cartagena (first nouvelle) facilitates the adultery of her own mistress, and the ‘total fidelity’ to Bartelemi on Tortuga (third nouvelle) is promised to the lover of a married woman. The fidelity that slaves promised to wives, or even to their lovers, was ultimately subversive in the domestic sphere. It could subvert the patriarchy, and it was fundamentally anti-social. These responses to fidelity illustrate the dynamic that was thought to lie within the slave–master bond. There was, Charlevoix’s Histoire notes, ‘no other form of service more flattering to human pride than that of one’s slaves’, but it was an ‘unhappy’ planter who had ‘no other domestics’. Slaves would be a constant source of concern to even a successful planter. Yet beyond the ‘unease’ (‘inquiétudes’) they caused was the central problem of affection itself. It was natural for human beings as it was for God Himself, to ‘count for nothing what is done for us through fear, if the heart has no part within’.76 In the plantation-era Saint-Domingue described 220

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in Charlevoix’s Histoire, slaves could be a source of prestige as well as monetary profit to their owner. Yet the bond of slave and master differed from the paternalistic relationship to which it was sometimes assimilated, in that it could never be purely affective. There were limits to the bond founded on force. It was this that further belied the capacity to ‘know’ the slave consciousness. Secrecy and sorcery The questions about slave fidelity reflect wider interrogations about the transparency of communication between slaves and French settlers. Planters and missionaries were preoccupied to various extents with the degree to which they understood the intentions of slaves. In an optimistic testimony, Du Tertre claimed that one could see ‘certain marks of the satisfaction of their esprit’ on the faces and ‘in the actions’ of slaves when they were well treated, and quickly perceive their ‘melancholy’ otherwise.77 However, other reflections about slave consciousness were more uncertain. There were concerns with slave morality, and there were also temporal concerns about the mastery of natural resources and of privileged technologies. While they demonstrate how important the restriction of certain types of knowledge was in the colonies, they also hint at colonists’ own restricted access to the knowledge of slaves. There were questions surrounding the distinction between appearance, or declaration, and intention, as shown in accounts of the conversion of slaves. Mongin relates two telling exempla from Saint Kitts. The first concerns a female domestic slave who was considered particularly devoted by both her ‘astute’ (‘très spirituelle’) mistress and a missionary who was ‘reputed to be very knowledgeable [‘grand connaisseur’] about the tricks [‘fourberies’] of slaves’. Mongin thought the slave was excessively attentive to her appearance, and that she received his moral counsel with ‘intolerable arrogance’. His reserves were justified when it was discovered that she was having an illicit love affair (‘mauvais commerce’), at which point she absconded with her galant. Mongin’s second exemplum concerned a young male slave who had himself repeatedly dispensed from work by evoking moral reasons (such as the need to be near a ‘certain man’ for prayer, or to avoid being ‘solicited’ by female slaves), and who was ultimately exposed, the Jesuit wrote, as a ‘scoundrel’ (‘scélérat’).78 221

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Mongin seems to have been particularly troubled by this dupery which, he says, alerted him to the need for caution when it came to distinguishing ‘appearances from a strong foundation [in faith]’. Despite encountering many pious slaves on Saint Kitts, he thought that hypocrisy (‘fine hypocrisie’) was widespread amongst the slave population. His mention of a priest who had acquired a reputation for being knowledgeable about their ‘tricks’ is telling; it demonstrates that there was some preoccupation in wider circles (and not just about spiritual matters). Naturally, this deceit contradicts much of what was affirmed in the accounts of esprit discussed at the beginning of this chapter. In the first exemplum, the female slave deceived a mistress who was herself ‘très spirituelle’ (being spirituel referred to intellectual as well as spiritual capacities). In the second, a male slave could manipulate his owners, ‘good people and easy to fool’ (‘bonnes gens et faciles à tromper’), for whom he invented an excuse which suited their esprit (‘propre pour l’esprit de ceux dont il dépendait’). The deceit of slaves was clearly thought to be subversive in spiritual terms, and there were social, and even economic consequences. The illicit affair led to the flight of at least one slave and, presuming the galant was a slave, probably two (Mongin relates that the galant was to die), and the deceit of the male slave was very disruptive to the organisation of labour.79 Slaves were also thought to possess certain types of privileged knowledge. Less problematically, this might simply concern the flora and fauna of the islands. In 1694 Labat, who had recently arrived on Martinique, crossed the island on horseback accompanied by an ecclesiastic named Martelli and the two slaves who carried their baggage. While resting during the journey, Labat had to renounce his ‘intense desire’ to question the two slaves about the unfamiliar environment, as they were recently arrived slaves who ‘only spoke a corrupted language’.80 In this instance the linguistic barrier was, at worst, an irritation. However, the concern with knowledge also illustrates more conflictual aspects of slavery. One early governor of Saint-Domingue warned that the black population knew the landscape of the colony ‘better than any white’ and that they would facilitate enemy attacks if they were captured, upon ‘the promise of freedom or very little money’.81 What this illustrates is that slaves’ knowledge was of itself, significant. The degree to which it actually became dangerous depended on other contingencies, such as the intervention of third parties. 222

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In the colonial economy, the possession of certain applied knowledges and techniques gave distinct advantages. Du Tertre described the opportunities available to artisans who possessed a skill set that was lacking (like locksmiths), or of particular value to the production of cash crops (carters and coopers).82 Although, he writes, many artisans had gone to the Antilles, they had found that it was more profitable to buy a plantation (to ‘be a master rather than a valet’), and this in turn had led to inflation in salaries. A less valued skill, like that of torqueur (which could be learned in situ), could be taught to slaves; although this was ‘not very profitable’, Du Tertre notes, ‘it [was] a great convenience, because the masters have them at their disposal’.83 However, access to ‘complex tools’ (to use Tabet’s term) or the transfer of more complex skill sets was more problematic. In practice, slaveowners did give access to tools and transfer skills for their own profit or self-interest. In early Guadeloupe, the governor Hoüel, according to Du Tertre, had even intended to dispense with the services of French artisans by giving them young slave apprentices. Although, Du Tertre wrote, some slaves ‘were as incompetent after two or three years as on the first day of their arrival in the islands’, Hoüel had created for himself a workforce of slaves which included ‘artful’ masons, locksmiths, and even cutlers.84 However, there were questions about giving more adept slaves access to certain resources. Du Tertre also noted, regarding the cutler’s two slave apprentices, that at the time it had been ‘thought a bad policy to allow slaves to work iron, because in a revolt, they could be very dangerous’.85 The Dominican saw the practice of allowing slaves to carry swords, at the time of the early colony in Martinique, as an ‘intolerable abuse’.86 He explicitly distinguished his order from those ‘many planters’ who maintained that keeping their slaves in a ‘crass ignorance’ of everything that was not related to their work was a ‘good maxim to keep the slaves in their duty’, and claimed that the Dominicans were happy that their slaves ‘learn to read and serve at Mass’. He criticised such planters for instead teaching slaves even more dangerous skills, such as using arms, forging [metal] and hunting, which could be used to ‘support their revolts, were one to suppose that they had such a desire’.87 The importance of the ‘control of the forge and its products’ to coercion in the preindustrial economy has been demonstrated by John Landers, and it could be particularly fraught in this environment.88 In practice, 223

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nonetheless (as some archival sources indicate), planters continued to give slaves access to firearms (for hunting, for example), despite the opposition of colonial authorities.89 The concern about what slaves knew jars, once more, with the idea that their esprit was limited. There could, as Charlevoix’s Histoire illustrates, be some significant ironies in this kind of assertion. As has been seen, the Histoire characterised West African slaves as thinking little, and lacking memory and foresight. Yet it also noted that this jarred with what was ‘assured by everyone’, and that it was instead thought in certain quarters that slaves might make ‘dupes’ of their masters, were ‘inventive in their jeering’ (‘raillent assez spirituellement’) and had a particular talent for ‘exposing what was ridiculous’ (‘attraper le ridicule’) about others. What soon becomes apparent in this analysis is just how difficult it was to know slaves. The Histoire notes that it was commonly thought that slaves were ‘skilful in the art of dissimulation’, and that even ‘the most stupid’ slave remained an ‘impenetrable mystery’ for his master. The one thing that one could be certain about was the immense value to slaves of what the Histoire calls their ‘secret’. Slaves would resist interrogation; it was ‘amusing’ (‘divertissant’) to observe a slave’s face while attempting to find this ‘secret’, and much experience was needed so as not to be fooled by insincere laughter which would ‘throw off the most certain’. For all this, the Histoire sums up the character of slaves as fundamentally non-threatening (‘doux’); it qualifies them as ‘docile, simple but credulous’ (‘dociles, simples, mais crédules’) and ‘incapable of bearing a grudge’.90 The description in Charlevoix’s Histoire of the ability of slaves to ‘dissimulate’ is an uneasy mix of the comical and the sinister. The narrative approach is telling; it is a portrait of the slave from the point of view of a master, trying in vain to read a secret from the ‘countenance’ of the slave. It manifests anxieties about how the corporeal reflected the consciousness. This testimony might be considered a further strand in the dissimulation that has been the object of research on early modern culture. However, this was a context far-removed from those often high-ranking commentators preoccupied with dissimulation studied by Jon R. Snyder, and who, he writes, lived at a time of ‘ever-increasing circulation’ of information, and the development of ‘increasingly complex urban societies’ within Europe.91 Accounts of Caribbean slavery reflected a radically different social environment. The language of deference or respect 224

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that was employed in the societies of Europe was motivated by goals which included the obtainment of mutual advantage. This sort of language – or even body language – was no longer legible in the colonial environment. Charlevoix’s Histoire indicates more than the consciousness of being unable to ‘know’ the non-corporeal. It also illustrates the awareness that the physical domination of slaves was unsatisfactory and incomplete. Striking them, it notes, would never make them confess to a misdeed. It is perhaps this knowledge of the limits to physical coercion that makes the mention of the ‘secret’ that slaves ‘would die rather than reveal’, so telling. It is a discreet, but lingering, interrogation in the text; all that can be done is to state that there is a secret. It testifies to a residual conflict between masters and slaves. It also illustrates the limits to a textual portrait; the attempt to ‘expose’ the slave in text is ultimately frustrated, while this ‘impenetrable’ character is constantly looking back at a master he can ‘see through [‘perce à jour’] with surprising ease’.92 The ‘secrets’ or inaccessible knowledge of slaves was particularly troubling when it encroached on forms of ‘magic’, sorcery or poisoning. This is a subject that has been the object of several significant analyses since that of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall (1971).93 Garraway stresses colonial ‘anxiety over African occultism’ and about slaves’ ‘knowledge of the spirit world’ which was manifested in fears about sedition or poisoning (she characterises as ‘credulity’ Labat’s ambiguous response to a ‘sorcerer’ he had punished in a frequently quoted extract).94 Pluchon proposes that colonial ideas about sorcery originally took root amongst an early French colonial population which was ‘largely rural’ in origin and ‘immersed in popular culture’.95 Sue Peabody describes an evolution from late seventeenth-century missionaries’ understanding of African spiritualities ‘infused with European notions of maleficium (black magic) and diabolism’ (or ‘credulity’, in the case of Labat), into the ‘dismiss[al] as mere superstition’ in France and then the colonies over the following century.96 These forms of spirituality were, unsurprisingly, troubling because of their religious unorthodoxy. It was a realm of knowledge to which missionaries were aware of having very limited access. This knowledge was built on linguistic forms, and on understandings of cause and effect, and even of matter, that were radically unfamiliar to European Christianity. Yet as Mongin demonstrates 225

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in his 1682 letter from Saint Kitts, some Europeans attempted to understand African spiritualities.97 According to the Jesuit, there was a widely shared belief that ‘sorcerers’ (‘sorciers’) had prophetic powers, and could, for example, remove ‘stones, or shells’ from the bodies of the sick and could ‘induce a gourd to speak, making it give an answer like the voice of a man’. Mongin had read about sorcery in travel narratives, particularly those describing Africa. His sources were not only slaves, and included ‘many people worthy of faith’ who had claimed to have witnessed sorcery.98 These sources also qualified as ‘sorciers’ the ‘true poisoners’ who could cause mortal illnesses through the use of ‘certain herbs’. He himself administered the sacraments to slaves who appeared to have been struck down by afflictions caused by ‘sorciers’, and even learned that slaves were afraid of being bewitched were they to be distinguished as particularly pious. In response, Mongin embarked on an ‘exact survey’, interrogating twenty-six supposed ‘sorciers’. He noted that some healers simply used ‘natural remedies, without any semblance of spells’, but that others did indeed carry out ‘true poisonings’; these, he wrote, deserved capital punishment (even if their proprietors, having no wish to lose a slave in this way, rarely had recourse to the judicial system). There were also ‘marabouts’, who healed through ‘true spells’, and soothsayers (‘devins’) who were consulted to establish the author of a crime.99 Mongin devoted considerable time to his investigations, ‘examining’ each of the twenty-six supposed sorcerers at length, and engaging in extended and ‘difficult’ discussions in an attempt to understand the nature of slave ‘sorcery’. He accepted some aspects, such as the capacity of sorcerers to injure other slaves. What appears to have been one defining trait (whether in injuring or in healing) was the use of a verbal formula; it was hearing that one healer would ‘grimace and murmur certain words over his remedies’ that motivated Mongin to deny him the sacraments.100 The use of an incantation to change the nature of a substance could only have troubled an ecclesiastic. There were consequences to such sorcery which prefigure the concerns of the following chapter of this book. Mongin and the colonial population were preoccupied by the ‘enchanted belts’ (‘ceintures enchantées’) that the sorcerers were rumoured to give to slaves, and which were said to prevent them from feeling physical punishment; a slave who had bought one was ‘generously whipped’ 226

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publicly so as to ‘test the strength of the charm’ in front of the other slaves (the Jesuit claims the spectators were greatly amused). Another slave was so fearful after Mongin had uncovered such ‘charms’ in his cabin that he went on the run.101 The ‘belts’ were disruptive in temporal terms, because they seemed to subvert corporal punishment (even the mere belief that they could diminish suffering could be subversive). However, even if Mongin assumed that they had no special powers, they can only have been spiritually problematic as well. As Mongin’s own correspondence demonstrates, there was great importance in Catholicism to the signification attached to material objects. That slaves attached spiritual signification to objects, whatever they were, could never be indifferent. These forms of slave knowledge resisted European understandings of the most fundamental nature. They were incompatible with how the corporal integrity of human beings was understood (in the removal of ‘stones’ and ‘shells’ from the body). They were also unmastered forms of knowledge of botanical resources (and as European natural histories from the same era demonstrate, categorising such resources was of great importance to early modern savants). In chasing away the sick from the shacks where they were being treated by slave healers, and sending them to ‘French surgeons’ (who, as slaves themselves knew, practised bloodletting), Mongin appears to have been concerned by motives that went beyond the spiritual.102 He seems instead to testify to the way distinct epistemologies determined understanding of domains of human existence ranging from the botanical and the corporeal to the spiritual. Knowledge that could not be integrated within the rationalising order of the plantation, or the spiritual orthodoxy of missionary initiatives, was rejected. There remained other forms that were received with more ambiguity; Mongin reserves enough doubt to make of this ‘sorcery’ a form of knowledge which seemed to resist European understanding. The gap between missionary and slave knowledge can be seen in the challenges surrounding cause and effect in cases of slave ‘sorcery’ (it may in part be this that accounts for the ‘credulity’ Garraway and Peabody attribute to Labat). Mongin is notably ambivalent about the causes of an adolescent girl’s affliction (‘she continually assured me that her affliction came upon her after she was threatened by a slave’). After being warned by another missionary not to publicly praise the piety of slaves to avoid them falling 227

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victim to a spell (‘sortilège’), two male slaves whom he had praised fell sick; he calls this an ‘astonishing’ (‘étonnant’) circumstance. The challenges such circumstances posed can be seen in Mongin’s assertion that cases of suspected poisoning were ‘very difficult to prove legally [‘juridiquement’]’.103 Such cases escaped a recognisable chain of cause and effect – the narrative apprehension, of sorts – that would allow them to be sanctioned as recognisably criminal. As Mongin’s testimony demonstrates, the question of ‘sorcery’ was religious, epistemological and social. Nearly fifty years later on Saint-Domingue, Mongin’s fellow Jesuit Bréban testified to another side to the knowledge of slaves. He wrote that there were ‘charlatans’ and ‘fortune-tellers’ amongst the slaves, ‘few sorcerers’ (‘sorciers’) but ‘many poisoners’. While he criticised the ‘credulity’ of those, planters included, who sought the answers to a ‘thousand secrets’ (‘mille choses cachées’) from the charlatans, he had more faith in the abilities of poisoners. He relates that they could dispatch ‘twenty or thirty slaves on a plantation’ with ‘poisonous herbs’ (‘herbes vénéneuses’), and that a ‘rich planter’, the previous year, had lost ‘more than sixty’ slaves before the perpetrator was discovered. He left it to his correspondent to ‘consider the diabolical malice’ of slaves with an account of one, who had been accused by a master of poisoning two of his ‘best’ slaves. The poisoner, according to Bréban, agreed to heal his victims if they would go into the woods alone with him, tricked them into letting themselves be tied up, murdered them, and then commited suicide; they were supposedly discovered three days later.104 There is little of the supernatural in Bréban’s account, but it does tell us something significant about knowledge and information in SaintDomingue. It tells us that planters were thought to have recourse to slaves for access to knowledge. What is more, this report of remarkable numbers of casualties, and even a narrative reconstitution of a crime, also seems to hint at the unverifiable, uncertain knowledge within the plantation environment. Anxieties about secret knowledge may well have dovetailed with the scattered nature of communication in this context. The dynamic can be compared to Bréban’s transmission of the account of a slave seen by a passer-by at night, through the flimsy walls of a cabin, drinking stolen wine. The coexistence of populations, fragmented into plantations, appear to have been ideal conditions for rumour. One colonial correspondence from late-1720s Saint-Domingue 228

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hints that sorcery was of concern at the level of the colonial administration. It is a response to the report that some planters on SaintDomingue had taken the ‘liberty’ (‘licence’) of putting to death the ‘nègres sorciers’ among their slaves, without ‘procuring baptism, or any other sacrament’ for them. The administrators had carried out an investigation on Saint-Domingue after this report, and had ‘not heard it said that any planter had gone to such extremes of cruelty’. However, they had ‘learned that some planters, who had lost many slaves who they could not doubt, had been poisoned’ had themselves executed those who they had been ‘assured’ were responsible. They had done this precisely because ‘they could not get sufficient proof to have them legally convicted’. This letter attributes such poisoning to the knowledge of herbs (‘simples’) rather than sorcery, and illustrates once more how thorny was the question of ‘proof’. It would have been impossible to formulate such questions as cause and effect in such crimes in a recognisable, legally sound narrative. There were other reasons behind the interest of the administration in the planters’ actions. They showed disregard for spiritual concerns in refusing the sacraments to slaves, and for the temporal authorities in taking the ‘liberty’ to execute slaves themselves. The letter illustrates a further stratum in which slave knowledge continued to be marked by rumour and uncertainty in the 1700s.105 These were alternative forms of knowledge which, for different reasons, were problematic to planters and to the temporal and spiritual authorities. The concern they inspired testifies, once more, to anxiety about exchanges in the cabins and unmastered spaces of the colony. * There was, ultimately, an acknowledgement in the texts of the colonial era that the slave was unknowable. There was remarkable diversity in approaches to locating the slave consciousness. There was an awareness that slaves used new forms of language. The slave’s sensibility was ambiguous; it could appear completely unrecognisable or it might, under certain conditions, be loved. Planters and missionaries were preoccupied with restricting certain forms of knowledge, while mastering still other forms was constantly frustrated. There are some parallels with the ‘orality’ to which Europeans relegated non-European peoples, to paraphrase de Certeau. While there were exceptions (such as Labat’s account of his a­ dolescent slave), 229

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most commentators depicted slaves as non-textual, ­non-numerate and ultimately irrational. Plantation servitude excluded slaves from access to the script. The accounts of the early colonies were written with an awareness that they would never be read by the very ‘savages’ and slaves they described. There are further implications to the control of the script. There is a recurring preoccupation with what escaped this medium of transmission of knowledge, and with the forms of knowledge that could not be ‘read’, that could not be mastered. In the plantation environment, accounts of such unknowable slaves testify to their socio-cultural marginalisation. They demonstrate how individuals who were excluded from rights to property, to labour and even to their own corporeality were construed as fundamentally different. Yet French commentators demonstrate some reluctance to situate these forms of difference in an unchangeable, essential realm. There were situational factors behind this which included the constant contact of missionaries with slave populations, in which they might be confronted with the acerbic humour of slaves. Accounts of slaves were based on constructed understandings of human relationships within the colonial environment. It is such understandings that make the concept of slave fidelity, for example, seem so improbable centuries later. Here, certain such relationships were circumscribed by a proprietary link with a master, and with a ‘household’. Such accounts also acknowledge that there were limits to monopolising narrative production. They reflect the awareness of other narratives which were remarkably difficult to decipher. These were fundamentally unlike the historicising narratives through which Europeans constructed their understanding of the Caribbean. They might be thought of in the light of the ‘hidden transcripts’ described by James C. Scott. For Scott, these are made up of the ‘offstage speeches, gestures and practices’ that the subservient use amongst themselves, and are quite unlike the ‘public transcript’ presented to the dominant.106 We can never have access to them in all but the vaguest of reflections left by Europeans. Yet in the four domains explored in this chapter (esprit, language, sensibility, secrecy), there are repeated indications within colonial narratives of the awareness of an ‘offstage’. From this ‘offstage’, marginal site, there is a sense that the colonial narrative is somehow haunted by the whispers of the slave. This is far-removed from a transcription of his or her voice. Yet it 230

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can be seen that narratives which seem to describe the mastery of space and peoples also acknowledge resistances. As the humour of plantation slaves demonstrates, it could be remarkably difficult to master the slave voice. There were, as the next chapter will show, many challenges to controlling them. Notes 1 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 500. 2 ‘Dieu ôte la moitié du jugement aux esclaves’, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1654, p. 476; ‘Dieu ôte la moitié de l’esprit aux esclaves’, 1667, vol. 2, p. 526. See also David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, p. 203. Du Tertre’s reference is to Homer (see François René de Chateaubriand, Génie du Christianisme, 2 vols [Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966], vol. 2, p. 163), The Odyssey: ‘Zeus … takes away half the worth from a man, when the day of slavery comes upon him’, The Odyssey, bilingual Greek–English edition trans. by A. T. Murray (rev. by George E. Dimock), 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), vol. 2, Book 17, lines 322–23, pp. 176–79. On slaves’ reflection on their condition, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 526. 3 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 500. On Du Tertre’s view of the ‘malleable’ nature of ‘African deficiencies’, see Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, p. 109. 4 Jean Nicot, Thresor de la langue françoise (Paris: David Douceur, 1606), entry esprit, pp. 256–57. 5 ‘La nature donne une partie de l’esprit, et le commerce du monde l’autre. Le Ch. De M.’ Furetière, Dictionnaire, vol. 2, entry esprit, nonpaginated. 6 ‘Il y a des esprits si grossiers, qu’on ne leur peut rien faire apprendre.’ Furetière, Dictionnaire, vol. 2, entry grossier, non-paginated; ‘C’est un homme tout hébété, qui n’est plus capable de rien.’ Entry hébété, nonpaginated. See also hébéter. 7 Bouton, Relation, pp. 99–100. 8 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 56. 9 ‘des gens sans religion et sans raison’, Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 80r; L’Évangélisation, p. 73; ‘des gens qui n’ont point de raison’, MdC, MS 73, fol. 90r; L’Évangélisation, p. 84. 10 ‘leur extrême étourdissement’, Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 91v; Alternative copy of 1682 letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 15v; L’Évangélisation, p. 86; ‘leur étourdissement, quand leur ignorance vient plus de défaut d’esprit que de leur faute, je me contente qu’ils sachent le mystère de la Trinité et de l’Incarnation’, MdC, MS

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73, fol. 93r; AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 17r; L’Évangélisation, pp. 87–88. 11 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 116r; Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 43r; L’Évangélisation, p. 118. 12 Charlevoix, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 499. 13 Charlevoix, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 499. 14 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 81v; L’Évangélisation, p. 75; Alternative copy of 1682 letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 4v; L’Évangélisation, p. 130. On the ‘stupidity’ of black Africans, but their considerable capacity for work, see Coppier, Histoire, p. 20. 15 Chevillard, Les Desseins, p. 193. On how this extract nuances thinking about ‘race’, see Peabody, ‘A nation born to slavery’, p. 20. 16 Chevillard, Les Desseins, pp. 144–45. 17 Loyer, Relation, p. 141. 18 Chevillard, Les Desseins, p. 131. 19 Margat, Letter of 27 February 1725, pp. 109–12. 20 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 58. 21 For a favourable comparison of the religious instruction of Creole slaves with French peasants, see Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 116r; L’Évangélisation, p. 118. 22 Guillaume Moreau [presumed], Mémoires concernants la mission des Pères de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les Isles françoises de l’Amérique (1709), BM, Fonds Chatillon, Ant MS 9, fols 1r–22v (fols 4r, 6r–6v). 23 Chevillard, Les Desseins, pp. 156–65. 24 Chevillard, Les Desseins, pp. 158–59. 25 Chevillard, Les Desseins, pp. 162–64. 26 Martin Poinsset, Rapport à la Propagation de la Foi (Martinique, 1682), ARSI, Asst. Gall. 106, fols 328–33 (fols 330r–330v), trans. from Latin by Robert Lapierre, in Bernard David, ‘L’Histoire religieuse de la Martinique’, 61–65 (p. 61). 27 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, pp. 58–59. 28 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, pp. 59–60. 29 ‘plus [l’âme] est dans la matière, comme est celle des nègres, plus aussi elle a besoin de ce secours’, Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fols 97r–97v. 30 Mongin, Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 42v–43r; L’Évangélisation, p. 117. 31 Mongin, Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 42v; L’Évangélisation, p. 117. 32 I have explored this in Harrigan, ‘Mobility and language in the early modern Antilles’, pp. 125–31.

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33 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 53. 34 ‘la langue … française … celle des maîtres’, Mongin, Letter of 10 May 1679, BM, Fonds Chatillon, Ant MS 9, fol. 27v, in L’Évangélisation, p. 55; ‘pour de très bonnes raisons [il] leur [est] défendu de parler leur langue naturelle’, Alternative copy of 1682 letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 7r–7v; L’Évangélisation, p. 134. The comparative ‘advantage’ (‘avantage’) of the use of French is mentioned at this point in both letters. 35 ‘leur façon de parler’, Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 53; See also Alternative copy of Mongin, 1682 letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 8r; L’Évangélisation, p. 134. 36 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 54. 37 ‘Ils n’ont pas tant de mots ni de circonlocutions que nous’; ‘Ils appellent le procureur du roi, Perroquet du Roi’, Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fols 17v–18r; 1997, p. 124. 38 On the ‘génie grossier du nègre’, Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 19v; 1997, p. 125. 39 Margat, Letter of 27 February 1725, p. 128. 40 Margat, Letter of 20 July 1743, p. 241. 41 Margat, Letter of 20 July 1743, p. 241. 42 For an account of the exactness of slaves in confession, see Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 20r; 1997, p. 125. 43 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 56. 44 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, pp. 63–64. 45 Chevillard, Les Desseins, pp. 145–46. 46 ‘Il faut pourtant convenir qu’ils s’expriment quelquefois d’une manière fort pathétique, et qu’ils font des images d’après nature’; ‘Moi voir une bête faite comme monde (pour dire faite comme un homme) qui ganguer barbe à cabri, sac à manioc, licol à bourrique pour serrer ventre à li. Cela s’appelle peindre naturellement les choses.’ Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fols 18r–18v; 1997, p. 124. 47 ‘je ne crois pas qu’aucun de ces messieurs puisse jamais avoir l’honneur d’être admis à l’Académie française. Ce n’est qu’après bien du temps et des peines que j’ai pu enfin trouver la clé du dictionnaire nègre’, Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 17v; 1997, p. 124. 48 See Du Tertre, Histoire, 1654, p. 476. 49 Bouton, Relation, p. 100. 50 ‘Ce que vous auriez peut-être de la peine à croire, ils ont des poètes qui se mêlent de faire des chansons sur le tiers et le quart; les blancs comme les nègres, et plus encore que les nègres, font le sujet de leurs satires. Surtout nos Françaises qui n’ont pas leur honneur en recommandation … l’on ne saurait disconvenir qu’ils attrapent assez bien le ridicule des gens.’ Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 13r; 1997, p. 120.

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51 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 94v; Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 18v–19r; L’Évangélisation, pp. 89–90. See also Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 497. 52 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 498. 53 ‘Dixit illi servus, infelix sum nimis domina mea quod nihil ad gustum tuum possim facere’, Letter entitled Crudeltà dei Francesi [Latin] (1732), ASPF, Scritte Riferite nei Congressi America-Antille, vol. 1 (1634–1760), fols 431r–432v; ‘Madame, je suis bien malheureux de ne pouvoir rien faire à votre goût’, Relation de quelques meurtres (1732), fols 439r–440v. 54 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1654, pp. 479–80. 55 Du Mariage des nègres, et de la tendresse qu’ils ont pour leurs enfants, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 504–11; ‘une chose assez particulière’, p. 509. 56 For instances of effusion of tears by witnesses to abjuration of heresy see Chevillard, Les Desseins, pp. 159, 161. 57 Alexis de Saint-Lô, Relation, p. 164. 58 Barbot, Journal, p. 327. 59 ‘Rencontre toute singulière, et qui nous fit bien de la pitié.’ Barbot, Journal, p. 327. The editors of the printed edition note that the marginal notes were not written at the same time as the journal, Debien et al. in Barbot, Journal, p. 239. 60 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 6, pp. 487–88. 61 Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, p. 19. 62 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, p. 306; vol. 2, p. 498. 63 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 498. See also p. 517 in relation to the Siècles d’Or. On Seneca’s use of the term contubernales, see William Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 4. 64 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 6, p. 168. 65 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 443. 66 Melon, Essai, pp. 68–70. 67 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 5, pp. 43–44. 68 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 6, p. 159. 69 Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fols 11r–12r. 70 Nouvelles de l’Amérique, pp. 59–60. 71 Nouvelles de l’Amérique, pp. 98–100. 72 Nouvelles de l’Amérique, p. 229. 73 Nouvelles de l’Amérique, pp. 14–15, 18–23. 74 Nouvelles de l’Amérique, p. 39. 75 For a later conception of slave self-sacrifice motivated principally by

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‘interest’ but occasionally by ‘truly filial tenderness’ (‘une tendresse vraiment filiale’), see Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, pp. v–vi. 76 Charlevoix, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 497–98. 77 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 497. 78 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fols. 105v–106v; Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 29v–30v; L’Évangélisation, pp. 102–03. 79 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fols 105v–106v; Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 29v–30v; L’Évangélisation, pp. 102–03. 80 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 98. 81 ‘les nègres connaissent mieux qu’aucun blanc tous les rivages de nos quartiers où ils vont fréquemment à la pêche et à la chasse …, il n’y en a pas un qui sous la promesse de la liberté ou très peu d’argent, ne se charge de conduire les ennemis dans les descentes qu’ils pourraient entreprendre’, Galiffet, from Petit Goave, Saint-Domingue, 24 January 1703 (Duplicata), ANOM, C9A 6, fols 348r–383v (fol. 358v). 82 Des Artisans, in Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 468–71. 83 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 468–69. 84 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 500. 85 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 470. 86 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 522. 87 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 511. 88 John Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-industrial West (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 7. 89 Amongst the problems associated with employing slaves as hunters on Saint-Domingue, the governor warned in 1700 that in the case of a revolt they would ‘know how to use arms and are more audacious’ (‘ils savent se servir des armes et sont plus audacieux’). Galiffet (governor), from Le Cap, Saint-Domingue, 10 October 1700, ANOM, C9A 5, fols 137–152v (fols 142r–142v). 90 Charlevoix, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 499. 91 Jon R. Snyder, Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 4; p. 45. 92 Charlevoix, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 499. 93 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies (Baltimore, MD; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 32–51. 94 Creolization and the Spirit World: Demons, Violence and the Body, in Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 146–93 (pp. 166–67); on Labat and sorcery see pp. 166–70; see also Curran, Anatomy of Blackness,

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p. 60; Pluchon, Vaudou, pp. 24–26. On Blessebois’s focus on ‘sorcerers and zombis’ as a reflection of ‘moral outrage … and panic’, see Garraway, pp. 172–90 (p. 190), referring to Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, Le Zombi du Grand Pérou, ou la Comtesse de Cocagne (n.pl., n.pub., 1697). 95 Pluchon, Vaudou, p. 33. 96 Peabody, ‘“A dangerous zeal”’, pp. 76–77. 97 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 115v; Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 39v–42r; L’Évangélisation, pp. 114–16. On this extract see also Pluchon, Vaudou, pp. 13–15. 98 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 115v; Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185; fols 39v–40r; L’Évangélisation, p. 114. 99 Mongin, Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 39v–41v; L’Évangélisation, pp. 114–16. 100 Mongin, Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fol. 41v; L’Évangélisation, p. 116. 101 Mongin, Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 40r, 41v–42r; L’Évangélisation, pp. 114, 116. 102 Mongin, Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 41r, 42r; L’Évangélisation, pp. 115–16. 103 Mongin, Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols. 40v–41r; L’Évangélisation, pp. 114–15. 104 Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fols 24r–25r. 105 ‘des habitants à Saint-Domingue qui sur des soupçons qui leur viennent qu’ils ont des nègres sorciers se donnent la licence de les faire mourir de leur propre autorité, les uns par le feu, et les autres en leur brisant les os à coup de bâton ou de marteau sans leur procurer le baptême ni autre sacrement. Nous … n’avons point ouï dire qu’aucun habitant ait passé à cet excès de cruauté; Nous avons bien appris que quelques habitants après avoir perdu beaucoup de nègres qu’ils ne pouvaient douter avoir été empoisonnés, se sont donné la licence de faire mourir de leur chef ceux des leurs qu’ils ont été assurés être l’auteur de cette mortalité; et cela parce qu’ils ne pouvaient pas en avoir des preuves suffisantes pour les faire condamner par la Justice’, Rochalart (governor) and Duclos (ordonnateur), 14 April 1728, from Petit Goave, Saint-Domingue, ANOM, C9A 28, non-paginated [pages 1–5/14]. 106 Scott, Domination, pp. 4–5.

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5  Tensions, order, and the body

The constructions of consciousness discussed in the previous chapter were, as with so many aspects of thinking about slaves, both transtextual and contextual. They drew on familiar European discourses, but they were also constructed within the distinct social conditions of the developing colonies. Slaves were encountered by mariners during ocean voyages, by ecclesiastics in domestic and didactic contexts, or by the settlers who forced them to labour in the plantation. These were interactions that were linguistic, but that also enveloped such fundamental understandings as space or gesture. These encounters were structured by such aspects of human interactions as the limits placed on the body of another, or in what ways one human being could ‘possess’ another. Colonial-era narratives were built from a multiplicity of such interactions that took place in ever-changing physical and social environments. French observers of slavery were, like other Europeans, preoccupied with diverse areas of slave existence. Some witnesses used slave labour with enthusiasm; others were concerned by the ­exactions made on slaves. All had some interest in ensuring that particular types of slave behaviour were perpetuated. Aware of the impossibility of dominating a consciousness, they testify to what might be thought of as auxiliary strategies, or the strategies that were intended to circumscribe the slave in place and time. One of these consisted in ensuring that the slave was always within sight. The further strategies of discipline, and of the violence which suppressed dissent, are also extensively reflected in texts and images. These 237

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attempts to master the body depended on the delegation of power, either to human beings acting as intermediaries, or to signs and scripts. These were powerful strategies which caused great suffering to significant populations in the colonies. However, they were not deployed unequivocally or homogenously. There were resistances to those exactions that exceeded moral boundaries. Factors such as geographical conditions might determine what types of strategies were used. The strategies of mastering slaves were not unidirectional either. They were intended to determine the behaviours of the subservient, but they also influenced those of the dominant. Surveillance Early French colonial narratives reflect concerns about locating the body in the colonial environment and within processes of production, and strategies of surveillance are frequently described.1 These strategies were essential to ensuring intensive plantation labour, but they are also reflective of other areas in which mastering the slave was a concern. There are some hints within early modern colonial texts of a preoccupation with the visual sign or gesture. It has already been seen in the account of the frustrated attempt to discover the slave’s ‘secret’ in the Histoire edited by the Jesuit Charlevoix. In the spiritual domain, clerics may well have been influenced by what Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia calls the Counter-Reformation preoccupation with ‘discipline and surveillance’.2 Poinsset, in his 1682 report from Martinique, related that an annual communion which was reserved for slaves was attended by ‘five or six thousand’ communicants. Here, he wrote, a cleric should ‘attentively look at the faces of [the members of] his flock, study them and judge with care’ their moral progress.3 It is a telling contrast to the ways of engaging with recalcitrant Calvinists described in the same document, and indicates how visual strategies might compensate linguistic (and perhaps, given the great number of slaves, logistical) challenges. In the secular context, the importance of surveillance illustrates concerns with control in the plantation. Here, there was little place for supposing the fidelity of slaves, as might be done in certain domestic contexts. The intendant Robert, the author of a 1696 manuscript description of Martinique, described slaves as the 238

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‘primum mobile of the interests of the planters, whose goods depend absolutely on the movements of their slaves’. Running a plantation demanded constant attention, he wrote, but the ‘principal concern’ was ‘the continual attention that must be devoted to the behaviour of the slaves, whose character [‘naturel’] is very nasty, very libertine and very lazy, and they are above all great robbers’.4 Robert’s concerns centred on sexual morality, on productivity and on property, and it has been seen how infringements in these areas were thought to impact on precisely such intensive processes as sugar production. There was thought to be deceit in all levels of interactions with slaves. It was ‘loyal and diligent’ slaves, Labat writes, who were usually employed as rat-catchers on the plantation, and they could be motivated by a small pecuniary reward. Yet even these ‘loyal’ slaves had to be carefully monitored, as they had developed stratagems which included claiming credit for more of the pests than they had actually trapped.5 Intensive labour processes were accompanied by monitoring as well as violence from the earliest days of colonisation (Bouton, it will be remembered, had asserted in 1640 that slaves needed to be ‘watched over and pushed’).6 The testimonies of Du Tertre and Labat about concentrated labour at different stages of the plantation environment are particularly informative about such visual and spatial apprehension of the body. The concern with the surveillance of the body means that reflections of space in the plantation could be very charged. As Du Tertre noted, strategies were put in place from early colonisation to control where slaves lived. The position of the shacks they inhabited was decided through a compromise between the desire to distance them (as their proximity was thought distasteful) and the need to keep them close to the master’s residence, ‘so as to observe them’.7 Being able to visually apprehend slaves was fundamental to power, and this has two important implications. It shows how spatial relationships between individuals on the plantation were inflected with considerations of authority; who could see or who had to be seen, for example, denoted power. However, it also entailed a constant relative proximity between master and slaves; individuals were by necessity positioned strategically, and this can only have been fraught. This calls for attention to how space was configured in textual and graphic representations of the plantation. Comparing space in two graphic representations of the plantation environment will clarify this. In Rochefort’s previously d ­ iscussed 239

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5.1 Ménagerie in Du Tertre, Histoire, vol. 2, pp. 418–19.

textual depiction of the Ville d’Angole in Saint Kitts, there is a large slave community in close proximity to the domus. The engraving (Figure 1.1), as has been seen, is characterised by its relative serenity and, notably, seems to exclude human interaction. The illustrations in Du Tertre’s 1667 Histoire, however, focus more extensively on labour processes than Figure 1.1, and are more telling about the ways surveillance was imagined. The engraving of the ménagerie (Figure 5.1) is perhaps the most charged depiction of the monitoring of labour. Here, the foreground is dominated by slaves engaged in various forms of manual labour, primarily the steps involved in preparing manioc or tobacco. At the back a supervisor stands, barely visible. He is only recognisable through his clothing, the barest hint of his skin tone, and his position; he is immobile.8 The slaves, for the most part, seem to labour indifferently, at a point between the reader’s own gaze and that of the supervisor. The supervisor’s gaze is noticeably indistinct and uncertain (it even gives the impression of penetrating beyond the plantation, enveloping the reader). Le Clerc’s engraving is much more discreet about the use of force than were his illustrations of sugar and indigo production; in the ménagerie, there is no baton visible. Yet it may well be this discretion that makes it the most intense depiction of power among Le Clerc’s engravings. Here, a multitude of domestic and profit240

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producing tasks appear to have been set in motion by a mere glance, and to be maintained through the domination of the visual field. It is perhaps Labat who illustrates most directly how fraught the question of surveillance could be. In his prescriptive account of the steps to take in sugar production, he adopts the voice of an experienced, wily ex-planter counselling a potential settler. He is preoccupied with observation because of the pressing concerns of time that weigh on the planter. ‘A planter’, he writes, ‘who wants to make the profit that he should, must be constantly aware that he must see everything himself, without having faith in his foremen or overseers.’9 He advises how to organise plantation space from the initial planting of the land, so as to ensure that as much as possible would be visible to the planter. When planting sugar cane, he counsels dividing the land up into small plots. Not only would this prevent hazards like the propagation of fire or damage by carts, but it would enable a master to ‘more easily inspect the work of his people, and see if the foremen and slaves are not deceiving him, as they never fail to do, when they have the chance’.10 He also advises a precise (and somewhat more time-consuming) organisation by planting the crop in straight, carefully measured lines. This would allow slaves, if they were ‘positioned between the rows’, to have better sight of weeds and dangerous snakes. The overseer would also draw significant benefit from this: ‘The master or his foreman sees what there is to do from one end of a plot of sugar cane to the other, how the slaves are working, and if they have left their work to sleep.’11 For Labat, all stages of the production process were marked by the need to constantly survey all those involved in it. The planter should ‘watch over [his workers’] conduct and always have an eye on those who command them’. He could do so by constructing buildings like ‘large hangars’ where all his workers would be installed and where, from the sugar plant, the planter could ‘easily see if his workers are at work’.12 Even the position of the planter’s own house should be determined by his field of vision; from his house, he should be ‘able to easily see’ what was happening in both the sugar plant and the mill, but should be sufficiently far from them so as not to be ‘inconvenienced by the noise’.13 This might seem to be the pinnacle of confidence in the ability to order land and people. One might even consider that there is a contemplative element in it; as Le Clerc’s engraving allowed a spectator 241

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to visually experience the domination of a slave force, Labat seems to furnish a textual representation of a subservient workforce. Yet there is also disquietude in this constant, obsessive observation. The planter had to examine, monitor and be constantly alert. Alone, he had to ‘see everything himself’. Obliged to endlessly scrutinise his slaves, he was bound to them as they were to him. Labat testifies to a side to plantation power that is quite unlike the authority of the overseers in Le Clerc’s iconography. He seems to recognise a fundamental solitude in the master’s existence, and allows us to glimpse the flaws at the heart of plantation slavery. He recognises that the master could not, in fact, survey everything, and that he was as such obliged to delegate his authority. In the plantation environment, this meant transferring power into the hands of foremen, exposing the workings of power to another sort of visibility. It was, according to Labat’s description, the foreman (commandeur) who would, instead of the master, ‘always be with the slaves’. He would ‘prevent disorder’ and ‘appease quarrels’ (especially, Labat says, amongst women). He would ensure the work continued, maintain the slaves’ religious duties and stop other slaves from outside the plantation from entering the shacks. He would ‘inform the master of everything that [was] happening, receive and comprehend his orders, and execute them precisely’.14 Labat noted that choosing a black rather than a white foreman was a common practice amongst the planters, and one that he had always found satisfactory. He describes this sort of foreman as follows: One should choose for this post a nègre who is faithful, wise, who understands the work well, who is dedicated [‘affectionné’], who knows how to make himself obeyed, and to execute correctly the orders that he receives; this last trait is easy to find, because there are no people on earth who command with more authority and who make themselves better obeyed, than the nègres. It is for the master to keep an eye on his other qualities.15

This extract is very telling about the ways planters understood the governance of a slave population. It assumes, once more, that one might find ‘fidelity’ in a slave. It seems to situate the force of authority in the most immediate contact with slaves; it is the foreman who ‘makes himself obeyed’ or who is most directly responsible for physical coercion. It also recognises, more problematically, that 242

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slaves could relish authority as much as their own masters (perhaps even that they had an exacerbated desire for power). There were further issues. Delegating authority to overseers and foremen was untrustworthy. The foreman might, like the master, survey, but he might also very well deceive the master along with the slaves.16 The slave foreman was also vulnerable on certain fronts. Labat warned that one should ‘never reprimand, and still less strike [a foreman] in front of the other slaves’ as it would earn him the ‘scorn’ of the other slaves and he would ‘lose all his credit [‘crédit’]’.17 There are three aspects of Labat’s discussion of the foreman that reflect on the nature of slavery. First, he considered the foreman to be subject to frailties and desires which, if exacerbated, were nonetheless shared by both planters and slaves. He acknowledged a certain commonality with slaves, precisely in the desire for power. He also, secondly, reflects in an interesting manner how very fragile coercive power was thought to be. Delegated power required complicity (the credit), and this could be instantaneously – and even accidentally – undermined. By extension Labat also, thirdly, illustrates the importance of visibility in the plantation. There is a clear contrast between his account of the foreman, and Le Clerc’s sedate depiction of slaves submitting to the gaze of a powerful white overseer. Labat hints at an environment in which masters were exposed to the gaze of their own slaves. As with the depiction of the colonist who found his ‘impenetrable’ slave looking back at him in Charlevoix’s Histoire, surveillance in a slave society was not necessarily unidirectional. This hints at the awareness not just of how difficult it was to master the visible, but that visibility itself was exacerbated. Labat implies that slaves understood the flaws in power as well as their masters. Rigour and the body French commentators considered physical violence upon slaves with some ambiguity, which can be attributed to moral, proprietary and disciplinary considerations. This sort of violence was understood in quite distinct ways to that between, for example, European colonists. Slaves were subject to discipline, were a marginal social stratum and were ultimately thought of as distinct to Europeans in their very corporeality. This is reflected in depictions of the physical 243

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aggression of slaves, which could have very evident proscriptive or prescriptive tones. The use of violence was subject to certain injunctions in principle, however brutal the colonial environment remained in practice. There were moral injunctions against violence against fellow Christians. As Du Tertre reminded the planters of the Antilles in his 1667 Histoire, the Patristics had urged humane treatment of slaves, precisely because they were one’s ‘brothers in grace’.18 There were further conditions that limited certain types of violence upon slaves. The governor of Saint-Domingue, in 1700, writes that he had one of his own slaves mutilated for marronage; this was an exemplary punishment which he carried out so that the ‘planters would have nothing to say if this punishment is continued against their own slaves’.19 There was, in other words, private resistance to outside interference with the proprietary relationship; the same governor was forced to abandon the practice because of planter resistance to the ‘reduction in the price’ such a punishment would entail.20 There was also a significant scriptural, patristic and classical tradition which furnished precedents for the conditions of corporeal punishment, and explicitly that of slaves. A Portuguese Jesuit who equated ‘disciplina’ with ‘castigatio’ in 1700 reminded his reader of the prophet Isaiah’s words; the evildoer treated with mercy ‘would not learn to be good’.21 The same Jesuit could find precepts in Solomon concerning the necessity for punishment, in Augustine concerning the punishment of the guilty, and in Seneca, for the mitigation of harsh treatment for minor indiscretions.22 Physical punishment, under certain conditions, was considered a moral duty for the correction of behaviour. In the plantation, it was thought necessary for the maintenance of order. It was in turn limited by other conditions specific to the social and physical environment. The printed works of Rochefort, Du Tertre and Charlevoix contain depictions of the violence committed on slaves which reached a wide readership in French. Rochefort’s mid-seventeenthcentury texts are notable precisely for their prescriptive approach. In his Relation de l’Isle de Tabago, he cautioned against the kind of excessive ‘rigour and severity’ with which some Christians used their slaves (although he did not warn against the use of physical punishment per se). This might inspire ‘great hatred and aversion’ amongst slaves, and might even lead to them ‘precipitating themselves [into] the greatest extremities’.23 In his more extensive 244

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Histoire, however, Rochefort gave explicit advice about the punishment of slaves: They are extremely strong and robust, but so timid and unskilled in handling firearms, that they are easily dominated. … They must be put into line by threats and by blows, because if one is a little too familiar with them they will immediately take liberties. But if they are punished with moderation, when they have not done something correctly, they become better, more flexible, obedient, and praise their masters, but if one is excessively rigorous with them, they flee to the mountains … . In directing them, one must strike a balance between extreme severity and excessive indulgence.24

This punishment regime contrasted with that reserved for the Amerindians, who instead of ‘threats and blows’ had to be treated with ‘gentleness’ (‘douceur’) so that they would not die of ‘melancholy’ (‘tristesse’).25 Rochefort seems at first to testify to the most absolute confidence in the use of force. He describes how the possession of technology (firearms) could control multiple slaves, and how physical violence could train their behaviour. He even implies that one might shape the will of slaves to correspond to their master’s, to the extent that they would express gratitude for the treatment they received. Nonetheless, Rochefort also implies that the use of force had its limits. It demanded self-mastery and constancy; it needed to be measured. Lewis has pointed out that Rochefort’s testimony is representative of the awareness amongst planters of the need for ‘prudence’ in the treatment of the slaves who were such a valuable source of labour.26 There are further fundamental implications. This was, first, force that had to acknowledge contextual limits, and which had to be tailored according to the peculiar circumstances of the colonies. One such contextual factor was that of their distinct spatial contours, which meant that the slave could ultimately flee. It is, secondly, striking that Rochefort was preoccupied with temporal rather than moral concerns. He testifies to an appreciation of the power to dominate slaves, but acknowledges that this power was ultimately circumscribed. His is as much a prescription for limiting force as for employing it. It is the Dominican Du Tertre who reflected most extensively on the ‘punishment’ of slaves, in a six-page chapter adding to the portrait of the ‘miserable condition [‘condition misérable’] of these poor slaves’. Slaves, according to Du Tertre, could be won over by 245

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‘mildness’ (‘douceur’), when they ‘faithfully carried out their duty’. However, the relationship between a master and his slaves was built on an essential violence. Because of slaves’ ‘arrogant character’ (‘humeur arrogante et superbe’), planters were ‘obliged’ to punish every misdeed without exception, without which there would be ‘dangerous consequences’. The master or commandeur was obliged to ‘make [slaves] fear him’. The punishment of slaves, Du Tertre writes, was for the most part ‘arbitrary, and at the discretion of their masters’.27 He identified five principal motives, namely ‘sloth, theft, disobedience, flight and rebellion’, and vividly described the corporal violence with which each infraction was punished. A lazy slave, for example, would be punished with several strokes of a rod, but participating in rebellion was instead a very serious public matter that merited capital punishment. There are many indications within Du Tertre’s graphic testimony that he was troubled by the violence exacted on slaves. He mitigates none of its sheer physical brutality, as with the runaway slaves who would be whipped and afterwards ‘have their wounds rubbed down with pepper, salt and lemon juice, which causes them incredible suffering’. There are other indications of the moral difficulties it caused. Of the five motives for punishing slaves Du Tertre enumerated, a number were vices and interdicts in the Christian tradition. However, others, such as flight, consisted only in the refusal of slavery. In theoretical terms, Christian and plantation morality could not be exactly assimilated to one another. That Du Tertre contrasted the comparative ‘moderation’ of the French with the ‘rigour’ of the Portuguese or Spanish is further telling. It is clearly a negative reflection on the colonial powers competing with France, but it is based on the assumption that the readership was concerned, at least to some degree, with the treatment of slaves.28 However, Du Tertre illustrates other concerns about slavery in what he depicts as widely shared approaches to discipline. As with Rochefort, he noted that African and Amerindian slaves were subject to distinct punishment regimes. There was, he claims, a proverb on the islands about the treatment each should receive: ‘To look askance at a savage is to beat him, to beat him is to kill him; to beat a black slave is to feed him’ (‘regarder un sauvage de travers, c’est le battre; le battre c’est le tuer; battre un nègre, c’est le nourrir’). It reflects the quite distinct types of ‘slavery’ reserved for Amerindians, whom Du Tertre saw as unresponsive to coercion. 246

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It was also a response to what he saw as black slaves’ ‘arrogant humour which must be dealt with with authority’.29 There was even, Du Tertre writes, a ‘fundamental maxim’ shared by all the European peoples involved in slavery in the Americas, whatever their confession, which was ‘never to strike without cause, and never to pardon any fault’ (‘de ne les frapper jamais sans sujet, mais aussi de ne leur pardonner jamais aucune faute’). Both the proverb and the ‘fundamental maxim’ are telling about the place of discipline in the new social structures of the colonies. They are notable for being strategic approaches to manage situations which were inherently conflictual. Yet they also imply self-control, and regulating one’s own behaviour; they are responses which show how power bound masters as well as slaves.30 In the maturing plantation environment, the threat of violence was essential to the control of a highly concentrated labour force. As Bréban (a correspondent who vigorously criticised the excesses of the planters) put it, the slaves of Saint-Domingue always had behind them ‘a black slave foreman [‘nègre commandeur’] armed with a great whip, and who has no other task but to firmly wake up any of them who are lazy’.31 This rigorous discipline inspired interrogations which, once more, centred on the question of measure. From early eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, the explicitly prescriptive account of the ‘Manner to treat slaves’ in Charlevoix’s Histoire focuses essentially on the extent of using violence. It notes that the whip might ‘correct a good number of their faults’ when used appropriately, but the disadvantage was that it had to be repeatedly used. It also notes that although ‘severity, or at least a certain air of severity [‘un certain air sévère’], should predominate in [one’s] conduct’, this could be tempered with ‘mildness’ (the French treatment of their slaves is favourably compared to the ‘cruelty’ of the punishments the English inflicted on their own).32 Charlevoix’s text is also interesting in envisaging situations in which colonists would be faced directly with the consequences of appropriate discipline. It illustrates the warning against ‘counting too much on the fidelity, and [the] blind attachment’ of slave to master, by describing the consequences if both were forced to fight side-by-side in military combat. In such a case, it notes, only a slave who had ‘not been mistreated without reason’ would carry out his duty. It adds that the slave ‘distinguishes perfectly if he is being dealt with by passion [‘passion’], and by hardness of character [‘dureté de 247

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caractère’], or if he is being punished with necessary severity’. It also describes the steps to be adopted were one to find oneself faced with a ‘troop of rebellious slaves’. They should be ‘immediately dispersed by baton and pizzle blows’, for were one to ‘put off’ this corporal punishment, then they would be liable to ‘put up a good defence’.33 These are imagined situations, but they illustrate the kind of exacerbated tensions that were thought to lie beneath plantation interactions. A planter might pay for maltreating his slave in the event of social upheaval, but he also had to be prepared for a confrontation with slaves and had to know how to act with immediacy. Once more, one had to control not just one’s own slaves, but also oneself. As the Histoire acknowledges, a master could act with passion. He might lose that control of his emotions that was so essential to dominating slaves, through a passion born from fear, or perhaps even from pleasure. This illustrates once more that limits were imagined to the power of masters to inflict violence upon slaves. These were also limits that determined the behaviour of masters as well as their slaves. That ‘mildness’ should feature among a master’s behaviours is a counsel based less on compassion than on the consciousness that force generated reciprocal violence (however long its victims might wait to reciprocate). Yet force was also essential to controlling slaves; if it was held off its potential would weaken. This was the bind in which the planter was imagined, and which belies the idea that one might absolutely master the slave.34 With maxims or prescriptive accounts, Rochefort, Du Tertre and Charlevoix’s texts described strategies for the governance of slaves. These were rules that acknowledged how multilayered were the contexts of human interaction in the colonies. They were influenced by ecological, demographic and other conditions. Within this wide range of contexts, slaves were subject to differing proprietary regimes and their bodies were apprehended and punished in distinct manners. Most interactions with slaves were the concern of the private sphere, although as the punishment for sedition illustrates, there was a point at which they became the concern of the public domain.35 Public forms of violence against slaves are also instructive about how distinct their existence was. To some extent, the violence to which they were subject reflects the hold of early modern collectivities over the human body. Some of the ways slaves were punished 248

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can be compared to practices in metropolitan France. They were subject to public, or exemplary punishments for serious transgressions. In 1707 on Saint-Domingue a slave named Gaspard, who had murdered his master by striking him with a hoe, was sentenced to have his hand severed and to be broken at the wheel; the sentence was to be carried out in front of the property of his master after a public reparation (‘amende honorable’) before the church.36 Du Tertre gives a detailed description of the procedure in the early colonies: Two things are typically observed in the exemplary punishments [‘punitions exemplaires’] of runaway slaves; first the planters [‘maîtres de case’] of the area where the execution takes place are obliged to send all their nègres, men, women, boys and girls and even [little] children, to be present at the punishment of these rebels, so that they are dissuaded from similar offences by the sentence they see inflicted for this sort of crimes.

That this was intended to be a public punishment was reinforced in other ways. Each of the slave spectators would be forced to ‘carry a piece of wood to make up the fire’ when the corpse of an executed slave was to be burned. When the body was ‘exempt’ from burning, it would be quartered, the limbs displayed in public spaces, and the head ‘given to the master to put on a post in the middle of his plantation, so as to instil more fear in his slaves’.37 The mutilation and public display of the bodies of the condemned in the colonies reflected, to some degree, what were established practices and even a familiar sight in early modern France.38 These are reminiscent of what Michel Foucault characterises as ‘spectacular’ forms of punishment, of the public torture he qualifies as a ‘scene of terror’ (‘scène de terreur’) demanding the presence of the ‘people’ (‘peuple’) as ‘guarantors’ (‘garants’) and even as participants.39 Foucault qualifies this as ‘exemplary’ punishment (an ‘exemple’), which can be compared with Du Tertre’s qualification of the execution of slaves as ‘punitions exemplaires’.40 As in metropolitan France, the body was the focus of the punitive act in the colonies. It could be destroyed by fire, or if it was ‘spared’, what remained of it would be made a constantly visible physical sign of punitive force. There were, however, important distinctions between punishment in France and its colonies. In the punishment described by 249

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Du Tertre, how slaves were required to physically participate, as opposed to simply witnessing the ‘spectacle’, is significant. The slave community lived in a separate social sphere from those who punished them for their infractions.41 Even in Ancien Régime France, the peuple, however lowly their socio-economic position, were part of the commonwealth; they owned labour and they owned their bodies. As such, they might participate collectively in the public execution. While the punishment and execution of the slave must surely have generated great fear among the enslaved witnesses, it was not a collective act in the manner of metropolitan executions. Comparisons can be drawn with other slave societies; of the early Jamaican context, Diane Paton has underlined the distinct ‘meaning[s] of a ritual of power’ for voluntary attendees and slaves who ‘may not have chosen to attend’ them.42 Vincent Brown has described executions of slaves in colonial Jamaica as ‘sporadic, localized dramas’ which were ‘used more to dramatize the power of masters than to construct a community governed by recognizably just laws and punishments’.43 Collective executions in the contexts of the French (and potentially, the English) colonies could not inspire a shared, even cathartic, experience. Violence itself may even, to use Paton’s term, have ‘meant’ something different to French subjects unfamiliar with the colonial environment. A late seventeenth-century naval officer, Gautier du Tronchoy, was horrified by the flogging of slaves. He writes: The blood streams from all over, and then they [the overseers] cut [the slaves’] flesh and apply salt and vinegar to it to prevent gangrene. At first I felt such pity that I could not stop myself from rebuking them for their cruelty, but they replied that if they treated [slaves] less harshly they would certainly revolt as they had already intended to do, and that this is all the more to be feared because there are ten times more blacks in the islands than there are whites.44

This is a vivid depiction of sensibility when faced with the most extreme forms of violence, and Gautier’s shock may well tell us something about the distance of metropolitan French subjects from the colonies. This pity that was felt ‘at first’ may also hint at how the plantation environment ultimately dulled or suppressed such sensibility. The officer also indicates that the violence that planters exacted on slaves was motivated by fear: that it was understood within an extremely charged historical and demographic context. 250

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This bind in which slaveholders were thought to be caught with their slaves is a very uneasy manifestation of power. These missionaries, ministers and officers reflect questions of control and of knowledge in their accounts of the punishment of slaves. There is a clear suggestion amongst French commentators that such violence was ultimately limited in what it could achieve. Their noticeably temporal focus demonstrates how aware they were of the void at the heart of the proprietary relationship, and of how questionable slave fidelity could be. There is, once more, another implication in the very act of writing. It was only free Europeans who could, in text, reflect on the significance of strategies of discipline, and they did so to other Europeans. The silence of slaves within these texts is clear to us, centuries later. One might well ask how early modern readers received this silence, and how aware they were of only hearing the voices of colonists, and never those of their slaves. Subversion, compromise and illusion There were limits to the visual and bodily mastery of slaves, and there were further areas in which they were marginal to colonial knowledge. Contextual factors such as the ecological and demographic conditions of the colony influenced human interactions. These, along with the socio-economic conditions concerning the control of labour, played a part in determining how communities were constructed. In the awareness of such forms of community, the tensions between slaves and masters that have been so frequently evoked in this book demanded further auxiliary strategies. These were conditions that structured forms of behaviour, and that shed light on how singular an artefact the colonial text actually was. There were anxieties surrounding the force of the enslaved population from the time of the early colonies. There were concerns that unoccupied slaves were not just unprofitable, but a source of potential subversion; this was a disciplinary preoccupation that, as Gwendolyn Hall has shown, was not limited to the early modern French Caribbean.45 Concerns about the proportions of slaves to colonists were voiced long before the high point of population disproportion in Saint-Domingue.46 Barbot, in 1679, estimated that there were 15,000 slaves on Martinique alone, a number that ‘was very great in comparison with the number of whites’. He noted 251

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that the fear of a large-scale slave rebellion occasionally manifested itself on the island, but that revolt was kept in check by the severe punishment of ‘seditious’ slaves; his formulation (‘la sévérité … les empêche apparemment de ne craindre pas tant’) implies that punishment also kept the colonists’ own fear in check.47 There were also concerns about the proportions of slave to ‘white’ settler at administrative level (according to one correspondence from 1718 Saint-Domingue, there was ‘no rule more essential to the good and the growth of the colony’ than the 1707 legislation which prescribed these proportions).48 These might be freely acknowledged in print. In his 1666 Description, Le Febvre de La Barre, counselling strategies for settling coastal South America, advised that the initial population should be made up of ‘at least one-third French people’ in proportion to slaves. He weighed up the respective value of ‘profit’ compared to ‘security’ and advised that the colony must prefer, at least in its beginnings, French settlers who ensured this security over ‘those who could produce a greater profit for you, but in whom you cannot trust’.49 It was in this context of a rapidly growing slave population that Du Tertre recognised Seneca’s equation of the number of servants one had with a similar number of enemies (‘Totidem esse hostes, quot servos’).50 Appearing to contradict his affirmation that slaves were unconcerned by their condition, the Dominican confided that slaves bore a ‘secret hatred towards those who mistreat them’. Their ‘resentment’ was held in check by their ‘powerlessness’, but it could ultimately ‘erupt’ with dreadful consequences. He saw the ‘desperation’ of Caribbean slaves reflected in the Latin proverb, and illustrated the consequences of mistreating slaves in a vivid representative account (‘un exemple effroyable’) of the slaughter of two French colonists by their slaves in 1657 Martinique.51 Froger considered that the assistance that black slaves gave to the Amerindians of Saint-Vincent in combating the English was ‘their revenge for all the bad treatment they had received from [the English] nation’.52 In different Caribbean zones, both testify to a consciousness that the violence within the slave–master relationship was fundamentally unresolved. Du Tertre’s recourse to proverbial wisdom, and his use of an exemplary, representative account can be compared to the ‘fundamental maxim’ that he said bound masters as well as slaves. The punishment of slaves required careful measure and constant 252

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application, and violence had to be curbed to avoid setting off more subversive forms of violence. His affirmation of the ‘secret hatred’ of slaves is testimony to how troubling secrecy could be. The restriction of knowledge could not only exclude, but it might also bind communities. From the earliest days of the colony it was acknowledged that forced servitude created a stratum with shared interests at odds with those of colonists, and that this restricted information between both groups. As Bouton noted, not even personal enmity between slaves could induce them to ‘report the misdeed of another slave, even if they had been enemies beforehand’.53 In this context, the depictions of alternative strategies of interacting with slaves give a sense at times of the illusory relationships within such a society, and at times of necessary compromise with force. The overtly prescriptive tone of some accounts of such interactions testifies to these illusory relationships. Auxiliary strategies acknowledged the links between slaves and attempt to create other types of alliance to offset them. One might harness the bond between parents and children so as to gain the affection of slaves. Du Tertre advises that ‘the best way to earn [slaves’] affection is to be good to their children’; this implied using the temporal family as a way to integrate slaves into the spiritual family.54 Labat counsels having ‘several loyal spies’ (‘espions fidèles’) who ‘could report everything that is going on’ in the plantation (thus countering the power of the foreman in sugar production).55 This would be, in effect, an alternative form of surveillance by slaves who were ‘fidèles’ (and it has been seen in what both surveillance and fidelity were themselves problematic). Whether establishing a bond for evangelisation or undermining an untrustworthy foreman, both authors acknowledge that impediments existed to authority over slaves. These kinds of strategies hint at further strands in what Ira Berlin has qualified as the ‘negotiation’ within slavery (slavery remained, as Berlin reminds us, a ‘negotiated relationship’ that was ‘imposed and maintained by violence’).56 In these ‘negotiations’ what was offered was affection or (as one must presume in Labat’s case) advantage. The reports of what were considered to be novel strategies of interacting with slaves can also instruct us on further aspects of these illusory relationships. Labat related that a brutal English slaveowner named ‘Crips’, on Saint Kitts, was troubled by the repeated suicides of his slaves, whose acts were in part motivated by a belief they would return to their homeland after death. Upon 253

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being told that all of them had intended to commit suicide collectively, he decided on a suitable ‘remedy’. According to Labat, the slaveowner followed his slaves into the woods and, coming upon them preparing to hang themselves, urged them on, informing them that he intended to accompany them. He had, he said, bought a ‘great plantation’ in Africa where they would be very welcome after death. There, however, he would have them work ‘night and day, without leaving them either Saturday or Sunday’ for themselves, as he would no longer be afraid of them escaping. He added that those slaves who had gone before them were already at work, but were now in chains. This, Labat reported, set the slaves talking amongst themselves, and ultimately led to them promising that there would be no more suicides; the slaveowner, he added, ‘returned home with his slaves, very happy with the success of his stratagem’.57 A less radical strategy was that employed by a planter on SaintDomingue, who according to Bréban, witnessed one of his friends’ slaves exhausting a horse, which slaves commonly did. The witness instructed his friend of the slave’s behaviour, but did so in a written message he had the slave bring his master himself. After the slave had been punished, Bréban added, he ‘looked at his master like he was a sorcerer, unable to imagine that he had learned of his misdeed without having seen it’.58 In both accounts, it was damage to or loss of property – whether slaves themselves or a horse – that was so problematic. What Labat and Bréban saw as so ingenious in each tactic was the use of forms of restricted knowledge against slaves; in the first, the English slaveowner manipulated African spiritualities to terrify his own slaves, and in the second it was the use of script on a (presumably illiterate) slave. In the plantation environment, as Labat demonstrated in his recommendation about reprimanding the slave foreman, visibility was exacerbated. Planters and their overseers were exposed to a multitude of slaves, on a multitude of fronts, in an environment in which visibility could undermine power itself. The importance of visibility can be seen in the seriousness that was attached to the ‘arrogance’ of slaves, according to Du Tertre. With slaves having ‘such a high opinion of themselves, that they thought they were worth as much, or more, than the masters they [served]’, Europeans were ‘obliged’ to treat them with ‘disdain’, and to punish their misdeeds or errors, ‘as with a people who are not feared [‘comme à gens qu’on ne craint point’]’.59 He advised, in addition, that the overseer who had to 254

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punish slaves should have recourse to dissimulation on occasion; were he to ‘irritate [the slaves] too much’ he might find himself faced with a revolt.60 Punishing manifestations of ‘arrogance’, being ‘obliged’ to punish as if one did not fear slaves and ‘dissimulating’ to avoid subversion, are all strategies of control. What they had in common was a focus on controlling, once more, the visibility of power. Yet there was one site in which Europeans could let down their guard and be explicit about the nature of power. This was the text, a medium that allowed a remarkable frankness about the vulnerability of colonial power. Du Tertre, for example, openly avowed that if slaves had ‘the slightest thought that they were feared, they would become more insolent, and more daring in forming cabals to free themselves from their captivity’.61 Bréban came to a similar conclusion in his letter from 1732 Saint-Domingue: It is due to a continuous and completely miraculous providence that so many still half-barbaric slaves, weighed down with the most terrible burdens and punished with excessive severity (if not cruelty), do not even conceive the thought of revolt, given how easy it would be, and the absolute impossibility that the whites would have of defending themselves in a general uprising.62

The plantation was a space of human interactions which demanded tight control of oneself and one’s gestures. The manuscript or the printed text was another site, but it was one that remained ‘invisible’ to the slave population. It is a telling illustration of how confident Europeans were in the closed nature of access to the text; they could freely avow the fundamental weakness of the slave system to other literate Europeans, even in widely distributed texts. From this perspective, the form of the text can even be compared to a sort of ‘hidden transcript’, to use Scott’s term, but this time, one reserved for the powerful. It is a form that is used in a setting which parallels what Scott calls the ‘offstage social sites’ where the colonist is ‘no longer on display’.63 The restriction of literacy and of access to books meant that, as far as the African slave population was concerned, even a widely read text was effectively an ‘offstage’ site. There is also a sense that, to again use Scott’s model, a ‘mask’ was worn as part of the ‘public transcript’ of the powerful, and that it might very well slip. French colonists needed to watch what they revealed through their own behaviour so that their faults did 255

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not become a source of ‘amusement’ (‘divertissement’) to slaves.64 As Charlevoix’s Histoire put it (as has been seen earlier in this chapter), planters had to maintain conduct characterised principally by ‘severity, or at least a certain air of severity’. Domination, in other words, exacted its price from masters. It demanded that they adopt a rigid set of behaviours, which ultimately limited how they too could act. These were strategies, once more, of self-control. What is remarkable about them is the way they hint at the illusion behind this sort of power. These early modern French commentators perceived a conflict at the heart of slavery. They acknowledged that there were further limits to the reach of domination, and that there was resistance to slavery. Their testimonies are a remarkably explicit contrast to the iconography that depicted tranquil forms of enslavement. Their scripts enabled the literate to confide strategies for (and anxieties about) controlling slaves, with one another. These testimonies also hint at an exacerbated consciousness of the exterior, and of the legibility of the self. In the obsessive need to ‘read’ the enslaved, the bodies of slaves were the site of further interrogations. Infringing the body French descriptions of the colonial environment testify to further moral and temporal interrogations about the extent to which the bodies of slaves could be possessed. The conditions of corporeal proprietorship were influenced by such factors as gender, or the environment (the ecology) of the slave society. Certain forms of violence might well be the object of condemnation. However, this was also a context in which the bodies of European colonists and of slaves were apprehended in distinct ways. The traces of this were visible within the human landscape of the Caribbean. Slaves were distinguished by signs and by script, and these signs and scripts might even be imposed on their very bodies. How forms of sexual coercion were thought disruptive to the plantation economy has already been noted, but it was also condemned by ecclesiastics as a moral infringement. How ecclesiastics viewed the sexual coercion of slaves is a theme that has been examined by Garraway, who criticises missionaries such as Pelleprat and Du Tertre for having ‘denounced sexually predatory behaviour in the male’ even as they ‘qualified’ the ‘innocence’ of female slaves.65 256

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However, this reading does not sufficiently stress how aware some observers were of the malevolence of proprietary coercion in moral and social terms. Mongin’s account of the sexual violence committed on slaves, in a 1679 letter from Martinique, is representative. He certainly blurred the question of the responsibility of enslaved women, but he was also vocal about the physical violence inflicted on them. He wrote: Everyone knows that these poor people depend absolutely [on their masters and commandeurs] for everything, and that their good or bad fortune is in the hands of their masters who can inflict on their slaves all the bad treatment they want, apart from death or mutilation, without anyone having anything to say about it.66

From Mongin’s perspective, female slaves still retained some agency, as they ultimately ‘consented’, or not, to the masters’ ‘desires’, and he saw the ‘natural inclination [‘pente naturelle’] of Africans for the vice of the flesh’ as another factor that made their resistance ‘heroic’. Yet it was a problematic choice. Slave women who ‘consented’ would be treated favourably by their master, and those who did not would be subjected to ‘outrages, blows and even [punishment by] fire’; it required, he wrote, a ‘great grace of God and heroic virtue’ to resist.67 The problem lay in the social bond that tied female slaves to their masters. Theoretically, the use of a slave’s corporeality was limited to the desires of her master. When that desire was immoral (as it was with the planters and overseers criticised by Du Tertre), then it was open to criticism. There were certain physical domains which were unproblematically the property of the master, and there were others to which female slaves were still morally entitled. However, any desire attributed to slaves, in a formulation such as Mongin’s, was inseparable from the desire for other forms of (relative) advantage. There was an essential ambivalence concerning the human will. These were considerations which may have made little difference to the lived experience of those who suffered such sexual coercion. The governor of Saint-Domingue, Auger, described an extreme example of what the proprietary relationship could allow in practice, in his complaint about ecclesiastical behaviour in the early 1700s. A certain Grégoire had passed himself off as a priest and had bought two slaves, a mother and her daughter (a girl of ‘ten or 257

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eleven years of age’), to serve him. Both had escaped when Grégoire had attempted to rape the girl. A Capuchin then persuaded the mother to return, telling her that he would order the proprietor to sell both slaves in the meantime; he had done so ‘thinking that he was doing well to avoid a scandal’. However, after the mother had returned, temporarily, to her proprietor, the child was to fall victim to him. This was a case that must have been considered morally objectionable by the colonial community from its beginnings, given that there was a risk of ‘scandal’. Indeed, the governor was outraged at this ‘detestable behaviour’, one of the ‘obstacles’ to a still-fragile Christianity on the settlement. In their extremes, such infringements were problematic for the very moral order of the colony.68 Forms of sexual coercion of slaves that were considered (unlike that related by Auger) to involve at least some level of consent were condemned for reasons that went beyond the moral. Bréban saw sexual exploitation as a phenomenon that had tainted nearly every plantation in Saint-Domingue in the 1730s. Some female slaves resisted and might suffer ‘terrible treatment’ (‘rudes traitements’) as a result. Most, he writes, did not resist to any degree, and instead ‘many fought among themselves for the honour of sharing the heart and the bed of Monsieur’. He saw fornication with slaves as problematic in the domestic sphere. It caused arguments between husband and wife, and a French wife would be forced to suffer the ‘offensive disdain and scorn of an insolent slave who arrogantly vaunts the preference given to her by a base master’.69 These were the subversive consequences, within the household, of the master’s untrammelled desire. It subverted the social construction of marriage, and it subverted the economic order of servitude. ‘Arrogance’ (which, it will be recalled, it was so essential to suppress in male slaves) could manifest itself freely within the domestic sphere. These were forms of exploitation that illustrate how sex determined the ways the body was apprehended. The body was also apprehended through strategies to limit the mobility of slaves, to signify to whom they belonged, and to discipline them. These three types of strategy reveal further aspects of the proprietary relationship. Strategies for limiting mobility were intended to restrict both physical displacement and other forms of mobility such as the access to certain technologies. These strategies used the signs over which Europeans had a monopoly. The script could limit movement and restricted activities in the form of the billets, which a slave was 258

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required to have in circumstances such as the bearing of arms for hunting, the sale of property in the markets, or even leaving his or her plantation.70 Physically marking the slave’s body was more troubling. This was a practice which, as comparative studies of slavery demonstrate, was widely used to indicate ownership (for Patterson, the imposition of ‘visible marks of servitude’ is a practice carried out ‘in every slave-holding society’).71 Bodin, in the sixteenth century, noted that it was practised (on the face, rather than the arms) in Spain and the Barbary States, but that in the ancient world it was reserved for slaves of the worst character, who ‘could for all that never enjoy the full fruit of their liberty’. The principal difficulty he had with this was that it made dangerously evident the numerical superiority of slaves in a slave society.72 However, this objection was based on the awareness of what Guillaumin calls the ‘sign[s] of the permanence of the power relationship’, or what she qualifies as signs that were not ‘reversible’ and that indicated ‘contractual dependence’.73 The Caribbean was quite a different context to those Bodin was referring to, not least because, in the French colonies, physical appearance already gave a strong hint of whether one was a master or a slave of somebody else. Branding slaves indicated who their proprietor was. Forms of branding – some very basic – were, Debien writes, carried out on slaves before they left Africa.74 In 1730s Saint-Domingue, the étampe indicated possession, as Bréban explained. He noted that ‘all black slaves, like all the beasts of the colony, are branded with a hot iron with their master’s mark’, and that presenting the étampe and the head of a runaway slave was what enabled those who had killed them to claim a reward.75 Bréban hints at the familiar resistance towards assimilating slaves to beasts and perhaps, with the reference to the ‘hot iron’ used, towards the suffering entailed in branding. He also illustrates how even basic forms of sign – the étampe – could signify possession even far away from the physical reach of a proprietor. Labat furnishes a particularly vivid account of the tools and techniques of branding on Saint-Domingue. He writes that planters applied a metal brand in the form of a specific ‘figure’ to their slaves, favouring the same site on their slaves’ bodies (one slaveowner would brand on the stomach, another on the arm, and so on). They did this to avoid the confusion that might arise from the resemblance of the brands themselves to one another. He continued 259

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with an account of the ‘Way to brand slaves’ (‘Manière d’étamper les nègres’). ‘When one wants [‘on veut’] to brand a slave,’ he began, ‘one heats up [‘on fait chauffer’] the brand, without letting it become red-hot, one rubs [‘on frotte’] the place where it is to be applied with some soot, or fat, one puts [‘on met’] waxed or oiled paper over this, and one applies [‘on applique’] the brand, as lightly as possible’. He notes that this left a permanent mark, and that slaves who had been bought and sold numerous times would be ‘as covered with characters as the Egyptian obelisks’.76 Amongst the French colonies, it was, he says, only used on Saint-Domingue; it was unnecessary on the smaller islands, but ‘absolutely’ so on the ‘vast’ colony of Saint-Domingue, with the possibilities it afforded for slaves to hide away in ‘faraway mountains’. Referring to the slaves of the other French colonies, Labat observed that ‘our nègres, especially the Creoles’, would be ‘thrown into despair if they were marked as is done with oxen and horses’. 77 This is a testimony that Debien has nuanced somewhat; he writes that even on SaintDomingue there were slaves (domestic slaves, for example) who were not branded.78 What is so telling in Labat’s testimony about these practices is his ambivalence. In his observation about the ‘despair’ of slaves, he acknowledged that branding was experienced as a dehumanising practice, but without criticising it himself. He understood the practice contextually, as a ‘necessity’ in the wide space of SaintDomingue, in which physically apprehending a slave – having him or her in view, ultimately – was impossible. His description of the ‘Way to brand slaves’ is an account of a technique, and the tone he uses is very telling. He consistently uses the personal pronoun ‘on’, which I have translated into English here as ‘one’.79 However, this translation lends a distance to Labat’s description that it does not have in the French. The original account of how to brand human flesh is remarkable for its immediacy, its lack of hesitation in describing how to go about the most definite marking of the human body. Being able to display the ownership of another human being in the flesh might appear to be the pinnacle of domination, and there is little doubt (as even Labat demonstrates) of the suffering it caused. However, using this sort of sign was essentially ambiguous. On one hand, it was a powerful means to assure social control and indicate proprietorship. Its force could, furthermore, be intensified through 260

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other media, such as printing. It would ultimately be an important element in the descriptions of runaway slaves in the Affiches américaines, a colonial gazette that would be published from 1766. The first edition features descriptions such as that of ‘Valentin, fifty years of age, branded with an ‘A’ and another blurred letter, five and a half feet tall, fat [with] small eyes’ (‘un nègre congo, nommé Valentin, âgé de 50 ans, étampé A et d’une autre lettre effacée, de la taille de 5 pieds et demi, gros, petits yeux’).80 This kind of brief description demonstrates the importance of literacy in magnifying the power of what was, in effect, a primary sign, the brand. Through the printed text, the marks that indicated the possession of a human being could be made known to an entire readership. Yet on the other hand, the very nature of signs was that they were used in the place of something else. They denoted absence as well as presence. The very explicitness of branding was an avowal, of sorts, of a flaw in social control. If Labat’s account is representative, branding was reserved for environments where slaves could escape from immediate interaction with their proprietors. It was an extreme intrusion on the body, but it also testified to the limits of surveillance. The use of violent disciplinary tactics to mark the bodies of slaves was also considered with some ambiguity. Early modern accounts of the colonies did not shy away from describing the exactions made on slaves. Du Tertre graphically relates what happened on Martinique when a ‘very decent planter’ he knew, who had ‘pardoned a slave’s thieving many times’ concluded that he ‘was abusing of [the planter’s] kindness’; the slave had his ears severed and was ordered to bring them, wrapped up in leaves, to his own master.81 Certain forms of violence were, evidently, far more visible in the colonies than in metropolitan France. Labat, upon his first sight of slaves off Saint-Pierre, noted that many of his fellow passengers were moved to ‘compassion’ at the sight of slaves whose backs were scarred by whippings. He added, nonchalantly, that ‘one soon got used to it’.82 On the English colony of Barbados, the cleric Biet was ‘horrified’ by the sight of a female slave who was covered with burn wounds her master had inflicted. A male slave who had stolen a pig was, Biet wrote, beaten for ‘seven or eight days’ before his overseer ‘cut off one of his ears, had it roasted, and made him eat it by force’; Biet claimed to have interceded before the slave could be mutilated even more severely.83 261

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These are diverse responses to what were forms of extreme violence. Du Tertre was ambivalent; he did not mitigate the arbitrary violence of the planter on Martinique, but he considered it to be the punishment for a repeated infraction; there may be an implication that the planter was somehow justified. Labat, however, was unapologetic and little concerned by what he saw. It is, no doubt, not indifferent that Biet was describing the way slaves were mistreated by the English, who were a colonial power competing with the French. Biet also makes a point that reflects on the question of rigour that was discussed earlier in this chapter. While he acknowledged the need for keeping slaves ‘in submission’ on Barbados, he protested that there was ‘inhumanity in treating them so rigorously’, and to a point where ‘these poor unfortunates are shaking when they speak’.84 Violence, or the traces of it, could well be considered by some with near-indifference. For others, it was instead a fraught subject. When a slaveowner went beyond what was thought of as necessity, this could inspire some unease. These accounts date from an era in which the hold of different types of authority over the human body may appear radically unfamiliar. The resistances to certain forms of violence illustrate that the idea of owning another human being in the fullest of senses could be problematic. This ownership could be problematic on moral grounds, but also for its political implications. In theory, at least, there were limits to the proprietorship of a slave’s body. Violence could ultimately become problematic when it blurred the reach of the king’s authority over the bodies of those inhabiting the realm. In a compelling study of the struggles over the punishment and torture of slaves in Saint-Domingue, Ghachem notes that the ‘most serious forms of corporal punishment and discipline … were the prerogative of the monarch rather than of his subjects’, a division he traces back to the ‘metropolitan distinction between haute and basse justice’. The same critic characterises the measures taken by the colonial authorities in the 1700s to enforce the Code Noir as both a ‘struggle over sovereignty’ (private or royal) and part of a ‘broader pattern of preemptive administrative practice’ intended to secure the ‘long-term interests’ of planters and the wider colony.85 These are the kinds of struggles that lie behind the late seventeenth-century memoir that forbids ‘any mutilation whatsoever’ of the slave ‘without judicial authority’, and the article in the Code Noir that allowed masters to beat their slaves, but forbade 262

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‘mutilation’.86 In 1740s Grenada, French colonists protested against the requirement to obtain legal permission before ‘mutilating or exposing the bodies of dead slaves without legal authority’. They complained that it was necessary to decapitate escaped slaves who had been killed far from human settlements so that their heads could be exposed on the highways, and be ‘recognised by their masters’.87 These tensions between private and public domains were part of much wider interrogations about the extent to which slaves could be owned. Anthropological approaches shed some light on how they illustrate the condition of the slave. The sexual coercion of slave women was a type of violence which, to echo Meillassoux, targeted women who were essentially ‘kinless’. Branding or marking slaves, when it was used, crystallised forms of social distinction. Slaves suffered such violence because they were socially distinct, and certain forms of violence were even thought necessary to maintain their distinctness. However, they also remained within the social fabric, or to use the terminology of Miers and Kopytoff, they were necessarily ‘included’ even as they were ‘excluded’.88 One reason that Bréban saw sexual coercion as so subversive to the homestead was that it created new forms of alliance, or of inclusion. These were diverse ways of infringing the bodies of slaves, in very different social and ecological contexts. Understanding of the secular limits to the body appears to have been influenced in large part by these contexts. Moral limits appear to have been more clearly defined for sexual infringements, but could be ambivalent when the will was thought to be complicit (according to ecclesiastics at least). The response to non-sexual violence seems, once more, to have been determined by contextual factors. Slaves were bound within a proprietary relationship to their masters, who were in turn full members of a commonwealth. The bodies of slaves ‘belonged’ to their masters under certain conditions and in certain contexts, but as colonial-era narratives demonstrate, this was not a total proprietorship. * Early modern French colonial narratives demonstrate a preoccupation with corporeal strategies to order and control slaves. They reflect tactics with which to survey plantation slaves, to measure punishment, to maintain the appearance of power, and to ­monopolise the 263

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signs of power. These techniques were codified in scripts which were inaccessible to slaves, and which could be distributed over a vast geographical space. There is another side to their descriptions of the control of slaves, for they illustrate the moral and social discourses through which slavery was understood. Moral discourses might well counsel the discipline of slaves, but they also explain how uneasy some colonial observers were about certain types of corporeal infringement. New social discourses were also developing in what Joseph C. Miller calls the ‘radical novelty’ of the plantation environment.89 One source of concern was the awareness that there were boundaries beyond which violence on slaves was in itself dangerous. These are the kind of ironies that characterise early descriptions of plantation labour. These were texts that were reserved for the few, and that testify to the power of the masses of slaves. They testify to the fragility of surveillance, the void at the heart of discipline, and how illusory power itself might be. Despite the tranquil representations of sedate slaves they might convey, colonial portraits are also remarkably charged. What they ultimately imply is that there were only strategies to control, but never master, the slave. Accounts of the colonies also reflect the ways human beings coexisted with one another and with their environment. These accounts were created for reading communities, who were linked by shared understandings of such fundamental concepts as family and faith. They also illustrate an awareness of the fragility of the developing colonies, and of the existence of other bonds from which European settlers were excluded. It is what composed the colonial community, and what lay beyond it, that is the focus of the next chapter. Notes   1 Rushforth suggests that it was precisely the use of slaves in the Atlantic for ‘productive and perpetual labour’ that entailed a heightened preoccupation with ‘policing the boundaries of slave status’. Bonds of Alliance, p. 65.   2 Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 223.   3 ‘Ibi enim pecoris sui vultum diligentius pastor inspicit, et agnoscit … ’, Poinsset, Rapport, ARSI, Asst. Gall. 106, fol. 332r; see also Poinsset, trans. Lapierre, in David, ‘L’Histoire religieuse de la Martinique’, p. 63.

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  4 ‘Les soins qu’il faut avoir dans une habitation pour la bien gouverner sont fort grands, et ne cessent point. Ils roulent principalement sur l’attention continuelle qu’il faut avoir à la conduite des nègres, qui sont d’un naturel très méchant, très libertins et très paresseux et surtout grands voleurs. Cependant ils sont le premier mobile de toutes les affaires des habitants dont les biens dépendent absolument des mouvements de leurs nègres.’ François-Roger Robert (intendant), Mémoire de l’état présent de l’île de la Martinique, 21 April 1696, ANOM, C8A 9, fols 266r–313v (fol. 280v).   5 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 157.   6 Bouton, Relation, pp. 100–01. See chapter 3 of the present book.   7 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 517.   8 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 418–19.   9 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 458. 10 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 143. 11 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 146. 12 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 424. 13 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 452. 14 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 436. 15 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 435. 16 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 143, 146. 17 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 436. 18 ‘Etsi servus est conditione, gratia tamen frater est?’ Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 534. Du Tertre attributes this citation incorrectly to Saint Ambrose; it is from Augustine [354–430], Sermon 146, in Œuvres complètes, bilingual Latin-French edn, trans. by J.-M. Peronne et al., vol. 20, Sermons (Paris: Louis Vivès, 1873), p. 224. 19 ‘j’ai eu l’occasion de commencer l’exemple sur un de mes propres nègres, je lui ai fait couper un jarret … afin que les habitants n’aient rien à dire si on continue ce châtiment sur les leurs’, Galiffet, from Le Cap, Saint-Domingue, 4 March 1700 (Duplicata), ANOM, C9A 5, fols 63r–68v (fols 68r–68v). 20 ‘la diminution de leur prix’, Galiffet, from Le Cap, Saint-Domingue, 10 October 1700, ANOM, C9A 5, fols 137r–152v (fol. 143r). 21 Jorge Benci, Economia cristã dos senhores no governo dos escravos (1700); ed. by Pedro de Alcântara Figueira and Claudinei M. M. Mendes (São Paolo: Grijalbo, 1977), Discorso III, pp. 125–70; ‘Disciplina, ... vale o mesmo (como notam os intérpretes) que castigatio’, p. 125; ‘usar de misericórdia com os maus era querer que não aprendam a ser bons’, p. 127, quoting Isaiah 26:10. 22 On Solomon 26:3, see Benci, Economia Cristã, p. 126; on Augustine, p. 128; on Seneca, Epistle 47, p. 142. 23 Rochefort, Relation de l’Isle de Tabago, p. 120.

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24 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 341–42. 25 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 342. 26 Lewis, Main Currents, p. 165. 27 Des châtiments dont on punit les fautes des nègres, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 529–34 (pp. 529–30). 28 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 530–32. 29 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 490. 30 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 529–30. 31 Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 12v; 1997, pp. 119–20. On the excesses of the habitants see AdC, 2F 788, fols 25r–27v; 1997, pp. 127–28. 32 De quelle manière il les faut traiter, Charlevoix, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 500 and marginal note. 33 Charlevoix, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 500. 34 Charlevoix, Histoire, vol. 2, p. 500. 35 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 532. 36 On Gaspard, see Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, vol. 2, p. 103. 37 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 533. 38 See d’Évreux’s familiar comparison of the ‘great birds’ who eat the bodies of the dead slaves of Tupinambas with the ‘crows who eat those who have been hung or broken on the wheel’ (‘nos corbeaux qui mangent les pendus et roués’), d’Évreux, p. 54. 39 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), pp. 19, 61. 40 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, p. 61; Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 533. 41 See La Courbe, Premier Voyage, p. 290, for an instance of the dismembered body as a source of humour amongst the French. 42 Diana Paton, ‘Punishment, crime, and the bodies of slaves in eighteenth-century Jamaica’, Journal of Social History, 34:4 (summer 2001), 923–54 (pp. 943–44). 43 Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 140. 44 Gautier du Tronchoy, Journal, pp. 47–48. 45 On Cuban planters’ ‘keeping […] slaves constantly occupied […] as a means of keeping them out of trouble’ in the nineteenth century, see Hall, Social Control, p. 18. 46 ‘leur nombre … excède de beaucoup celui de nos Français’, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 483. 47 Barbot, Journal, p. 373. 48 ‘Aucun règlement n’est plus essentiel au bien et à l’accroissement de la

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colonie que celui qui ordonne les habitants d’avoir chez eux un certain nombre d’engagés et de domestiques blancs qui peuplent l’île et servent à la défendre dans l’occasion.’ Letter from Chateaumont (governor) and Mithon (intendant), Saint-Domingue, 11 April 1718, ANOM, C9A 15, fols 65r–84v (fols 67r–67v). See the royal ordonnance of 3 August 1707, in Moreau de Saint-Méry, Loix et constitutions, vol. 2, p. 106. 49 Le Febvre de La Barre, Description, pp. 44–52 (p. 50). 50 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 499. 51 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 499. 52 Froger, Relation, p. 196. 53 Bouton, Relation, p. 101. 54 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 510. 55 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, p. 437. 56 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA; London: Belknap Press, 1998), pp. 2–3; on the ‘recognition’ of negotiation in master-slave ‘interactions’, see p. 3. 57 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, pp. 447–49. 58 ‘il regarda son maître comme un sorcier, ne pouvant pas concevoir qu’il eut eu connaissance de sa faute, sans l’avoir vue’, Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 10v. 59 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 497. 60 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 500. 61 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 497; also p. 529. 62 ‘C’est l’effet d’une providence continuelle et tout à fait miraculeuse que tant d’esclaves toujours demi-barbares, accablés des plus épouvantables fardeaux et châtiés avec une sévérité, pour ne pas dire avec une cruauté excessive, ne conçoivent pas seulement la pensée de se révolter, vu la facilité qu’ils en ont, et l’impossibilité absolue qu’il y aurait aux blancs de se défendre d’une conjuration générale.’ Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 3r; 1997, p. 113. 63 Scott, Domination, pp. 4, 12. 64 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 497. On this extract as an example of ‘institutionalized release’, see Hall, Social Control, p. 35. 65 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 199–207 (p. 199). 66 Mongin, Letter of 10 May 1679, BM, Fonds Chatillon, Ant MS 9, fol. 25r; L’Évangélisation, p. 52. 67 Mongin, Letter of 10 May 1679, BM, Fonds Chatillon, Ant MS 9, fol. 25r; L’Évangélisation, p. 52. 68 ‘le P. de la Charité croyant bien faire pour éviter le scandale détermina la mère à y retourner pour un mois seulement pendant lequel il obligerait le P. Grégoire à la vendre et sa fille’; ‘Ces conduites détestables étant des obstacles fâcheux au culte régulier de la religion dans un lieu

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comme Saint-Domingue où il n’est encore qu’ébauché’, Mémoire des affaires des Capucins du Cap, Auger, 15 September 1704, ANOM, C9A 7, fols 48r–52v (fols 49v–50r). 69 ‘Plusieurs mêmes se disputent entre elles l’honneur de partager le cœur et le lit de monsieur. … Combien de Françaises sont obligées d’essuyer les hauteurs et les mépris insultants d’une insolente esclave qui se prévaut arrogamment de la préférence que lui donne son infâme maître.’ Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 22r; 1997, p. 126. 70 On the bearing of arms, see Code Noir, article 15, p. 5; on the need for written permission to sell property, article 19, p. 6. On the penalty for a slave found outside the plantation without a billet see Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 5, p. 258. 71 On tattooing and branding, and the universal imposition of ‘visible marks of servitude’, see Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 58–59. For an exploration of the disfigurement and marking of new slaves within the Amerindian societies of the Pays d’en Haut see Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, pp. 42–44. 72 Bodin, Six Books, p. 38. 73 On ‘[le] signe de permanence du rapport de pouvoir’, Guillaumin, L’Idéologie raciste, 2002, p. 335. 74 Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles françaises, p. 70. 75 ‘tous les nègres esclaves, ainsi que toutes les bêtes de la colonie, sont marqués sur la peau avec un fer chaud de la marque de leurs maîtres’, Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 28r; 1997, p. 128. 76 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 5, pp. 255–56. 77 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 5, p. 256. 78 Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles françaises, p. 70. 79 On the implications of Labat’s use of the pronoun ‘on’ in cash crop production, see Dobie, Trading Places, p. 142. 80 Affiches américaines, 1 January 1766, p. 8. 81 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 530. 82 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 65. 83 Biet, Voyage, p. 291. 84 Biet, Voyage, p. 291. 85 Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, pp. 127–28. 86 ‘Il ne sera fait aux esclaves aucune mutilation quelle qu’elle puisse être sans autorité de justice, à peine de perdre l’esclave qui aura été mutilé’, Mémoire au Roi sur ce qui regarde la conservation, la police, le jugement et le châtiment des esclaves de ses sujets en l’Amérique, 20 March 1682, ANOM, F3 90, fol. 5r-5v. The Code Noir forbids ‘aucune mutilation de membre’, article 42, p. 9. On the question of proprietorship and the elaboration of the Code Noir, see also Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History, pp. 148–49.

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87 ‘de mutiler ni d’exposer les corps morts dans autorité de justice. Ils allèguent pour raison que leurs nègres marrons se retirant dans des lieux inaccessibles on ne peut souvent les arrêter qu’en les tuant et qu’alors on est obligé de leur couper la tête pour pouvoir les exposer sur les grands chemins afin qu’ils puissent être reconnus de leurs maîtres’, Letter from Ministre to de Champigny and de la Croix, 30 October 1741, ANOM, F3 17, fol. 229r-229v (fol. 229r). 88 On the question of ‘inclusion’ of the slave, see Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, p. 15. 89 Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History, p. 149.

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6  Society and slaves

By the mid-1630s, the English colony on Saint Kitts had received so much immigration that it extended beyond the agreed boundaries with the French settlement. The English governor had rejected the protests of a French delegation, and the governor d’Esnambuc ordered the population to take up arms. According to Du Tertre’s account, French planters were ordered to send their slaves, each armed with a cutlass and a burning torch, to lay waste to the English plantations when the confrontation began. Capuchin friars accompanied the military force and exhorted the ‘common people’ (‘le peuple’) to fight the English ‘heretics’. There were ‘five or six hundred’ slaves, ‘led by French officers’, dispatched to threaten the English forces. The massed slaves, Du Tertre wrote, looked ‘as terrifying as demons with their shining billhooks and their burning torches’. They had been promised that those who fought well might gain their liberty. They had a spectacular effect on the conflict. The English were forced to yield, Du Tertre wrote, because of the ‘terror’ that the slaves – their ‘appearance’ (‘abord’) apparently playing a role – inspired amongst the ‘commoners [‘petit peuple’] and [the] women’ whose ‘cries and lamentations’ were all that could be heard in their colony.1 Du Tertre furnishes a remarkably vivid reconstitution of an event that he had not personally witnessed, and he also hints at how fragile colonial society actually was, under certain conditions. French settlers were motivated by their own interests, and they were further inspired by confessional unity. The slave population, however, was motivated by the promise of the 270

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most fundamental change in their social position. This was the kind of promise that could only be made during an open conflict between colonial powers. It demonstrates that slave and settler populations were thought to imagine their place in the colony in fundamentally distinct, even opposed, ways. Du Tertre’s is one of a number of early colonial accounts that invite a reflection on the concept of the slave society. Some texts make an immediate claim to be representations of the colonies, in titles such as Description de la France Equinoctiale (Le Febvre de La Barre) or Relation de l’Isle de Tabago (Rochefort). Yet there are many other reflections of how human communities were conceptualised at this time. The novelty of a colonial narrative might lie in its depiction of alternative social practices, and of unfamiliar configurations of society. As previous chapters have demonstrated, even those accounts that are discreet about the subject of slavery can be instructive about how society was imagined. The narratives discussed in this book are part of a long series of representations of alternative social practices which were available to readers in metropolitan France. The French utopies of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries radically reimagined socioeconomic organisation.2 However, accounts of the Caribbean were intended to be received in quite distinct manners from the utopies (what Lewis identifies as the utopian element in French Caribbean accounts relates to idealised depictions of Carib society).3 They were claimed to be authoritative reflections of a socio-economic structure, and it is attested that contemporary readers did consider them, to varying degrees, to be sources of knowledge. This makes their representations of ‘society’, their narrative constructions of human coexistence, significant. One must be alert to such aspects of these constructions as, for example, their proscriptive or prescriptive function. They might caution colonial actors, and/or they might be intended to change individual or collective practices. They might also reflect authorial or collective desires or fears in the face of transforming cultural practices, and an unfamiliar environment. The society described in colonial narratives was a Creole society, and it was characterised by its mobility. French subjects, like other Europeans, attempted to reproduce cultural and religious practices in settlements many thousands of miles from Europe, and from the time of the earliest Atlantic voyages. However, many of these practices were transformed in new environments, and because of 271

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contacts with new populations. The encounter with Creole culture exposed French observers to transforming configurations of society, and transformed cultural practices. Alternative forms of society might be a source of some anxiety. Colonial administrators lamented the lack of ecclesiastics to administer the sacraments, which gave rise to ‘all sorts of disorders’.4 The texts dating from the earliest Caribbean colonial initiatives testify to concerns about the cohesion of a Christian society in the new spaces of the islands. The Dominican Du Puis lamented his own ‘travails’ in assuring the ‘spiritual needs’ of the colony on mid-seventeenthcentury Guadeloupe; this was particularly difficult because of the ‘distances that separate the French from each other’ and ‘the difficulty of uneven, mountainous and irregular paths’.5 In his 1640 description of Martinique, Bouton attributed the ‘excessive licentiousness, liberty and impunity’ of the inhabitants to the lack of ‘spiritual assistance’; they had ‘no Mass, no priests, no preachers [and] no sacraments’. Although he defended them (somewhat half-heartedly) from the poor reputation they had acquired in France he accepted that there were ‘heretics, and some libertines and atheists’, who were ‘stupid and brutal’.6 What was problematic for Bouton would later be distinguished into ‘social’ and ‘religious’ forms of cohesion. There was a further cause for concern, which related to the environment; the evergrowing population of French settlers lived in a ‘state of abandonment’ equivalent to that of the sauvages. There was a risk of Christians ‘becoming savage’ as much as vice versa, which, he implied, stemmed not just from how distanced French settlers were from metropolitan practices. He also attributed it to their immersion in uncultivated, wild spaces in which ‘barbarism’ proliferated.7 The early colonies were a space in which the social and religious practices which would ensure the cohesion of the community were threatened, and the unmastered environment was one essential factor in this threat. Those practices that developed over time, and that became recognisably ‘colonial’, illustrated how culture was destined to adapt to new environments. The French colonies were less an ‘independent cultural world’ as they have been described, than a zone characterised by marginal socio-cultural, linguistic and associated practices: a distinctive, rather than an ‘independent’ locus.8 Some practices, such as speech patterns, might be the object of humour or even ridicule, while forms of consumption could be admired for their ingenuity.9 272

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It was the role of missionaries to combat the religious (and social) unorthodoxy of the colonies. The Jesuit Mongin had a range of oral strategies at his disposal for these ends; he recounted devotional tales to his fellow passengers during the Atlantic crossing, and even to hostile colonists at a cabaret in Martinique. The piety of illiterate colonists was a source of great joy to him.10 Mongin also demonstrates that the text could have considerable power in this environment. From 1679 Martinique, he praised the piety of a girl who noted her thoughts in a manner which reminded him of Saint Teresa of Ávila, and the devotion of a family who transcribed the lengthy biography of the Jesuit Father Régis.11 The book had great importance for popular piety, but this was a milieu far removed from that of metropolitan readers avid for scientific data. Labat, in a typically ironic portrait of European colonists, considered their learning and their mondain culture to be dubious.12 In this culturally marginal environment, there was also a market for material that was considered by those in authority to be more unsavoury. A bookseller who had managed to secure exclusive rights to the market on Saint-Domingue in the mid-1720s found himself subjected to the scrutiny of the political and religious authorities; he managed to sell a ‘great number of bad books contrary to religion, bonnes mœurs and discipline’ before his activities were curtailed.13 The colonies were also politically marginalised, and in one very important area. There was a distinct legislation concerning slavery in metropolitan France and in its colonies; with this, colonial socioeconomic organisation was radically unlike that of metropolitan France.14 The colonies had been integrated within the possessions of the monarchy through political acts. Yet as the 1685 Code Noir demonstrates, they remained distinct in certain spheres.15 This edict demonstrated to the monarch’s subjects that he ‘was ever present’ in the faraway colonies.16 It also crystallised the specificity of colonial legal, and by extension, social, practices (the ‘respect’ a freed slave owed a former master, for example).17 In political terms, this was and was not France. The accounts of human interactions within this environment reflect what was thought to unite the members of a society, what made one a full member of this society, and what distinguished those who were not. They also reflect what was thought to lie beyond the collectivity. They testify to the existence of alternative social practices and forms of community, and could illustrate the 273

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consciousness of how fragile colonial settlement could be. They also grapple with the evolving circumstances of the Caribbean colonies and their growing population of ‘free coloureds’. Society and interest Colonial-era accounts reflect how the cohesion of a society made up of European settler populations and their slaves was imagined. Social cohesion relied both on shared ideologies and beliefs, and on communal practices and rites. French narratives reflect the exchanges that were considered to unite communities which were adapting to new environments. They also reflect the consciousness that society was motivated by the self-interest of individuals. Forms of self-interest could motivate accumulation, but might also be at odds with the shared interests of the members of a community. As early modern observers also acknowledged, the many slaves in the colonies were themselves susceptible to self-interest. In its early forms, the ‘colony’ may well have been understood as a collectivity of (potentially mobile) individuals, rather than a collectivity settled on a geographical site (Chevillard, for instance, refers to the ‘embarkation of the colony’ [‘embarquement de la colonie’]’ in France and its descent in Martinique).18 Bouton saw the terrain of early Martinique as a hindrance to religious – and therefore social – cohesion; a church could only have influence for a radius of ‘two or three leagues’ around. He relates that lodgings for profit (‘inns and taverns’) were non-existent, and that settlers were reliant on hospitality during their displacements.19 In his 1654 Histoire, Du Tertre depicted a non-monetary colonial economy, also without ‘taverns or inns’; it was characterised by its hospitality to such an extent that one would ‘pay one’s hosts with a thank-you’.20 His second edition expanded significantly on colonial hospitality, within a salutary ‘portrait’ (‘peinture’) of the ‘Manners of the inhabitants of the colonies’.21 With the social instability of its beginnings now behind it, the colony had been stabilised by marriages and the birth of a second generation, and an ‘agreeable’ society had come into being. Over a quarter of a century after Bouton’s depiction of colonial ‘licentiousness’, Du Tertre depicted religious ceremonies that were performed piously by French settlers, and with their slaves reciting prayers in French. Colonists showed great charity towards, for example, indentured labourers who had 274

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finished their contracts; Du Tertre was edified by a Frenchwoman of status who, he wrote, ‘washed the feet of the poor and assisted them with all manner of charity and tenderness’. Hospitality meant that a voyager could be welcomed into a settler’s home with ‘civility’ (‘civilité’), and given tobacco, alcohol, and even a bed for the night if he so wished.22 Colonial society, in Du Tertre’s depiction, was notably lacking in the social hierarchy that characterised Ancien Régime France. There was, he wrote, ‘no difference between noble and commoner’, and one’s status depended simply on how much one possessed; the owners of property could publicly wear the sword.23 Du Tertre was struck by the leisure practices of colonists, who dressed, and received guests, magnificently. On a salutary note, he added that they had toned down the prodigious ‘excesses’ of the early colony; they now drank Madeira wine, for example, instead of the strong spirits they would consume in the past. This was a leisure class in which a proprietor would have ‘no other care but to amuse himself’.24 In a perceptive analysis of Du Tertre’s account of colonial society, Doris Garraway characterises it as ‘founded almost entirely through the commoditization of persons’, notably within the marriage contract. She also sees in Du Tertre’s testimony the traces of ‘anxiety’ about the ‘breakdown of Old Regime social hierarchies’ because of social mobility (particularly that of women).25 What I wish to stress are rather the implications of the many non-commercial interactions within the Dominican’s vision of the colonies. He considered colonists to be bound by strong affective links (‘amitié’) which were manifested in their ‘frequent visits’ to one another.26 The hospitality and charity he praised were virtues, based, respectively, on social and religious prescriptions. Even if mutual visits and hospitality were practices that might well imply some reciprocal obligation, charity did not. In other words, all these forms of social interaction lay outside the circuits of explicit ‘commoditization’. However, all such non-commercial interactions were reserved for certain strata of colonial society. Mutual visiting was for landed colonists; hospitality (and also, it appears, charity) was reserved for Europeans or their descendants. The great distinction between the inhabitants of the colonies in Du Tertre’s account lay in who could possess either property or labour in the first place. He noted that indentured labourers were 275

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forced to labour intensively in order to accumulate capital, and that they were badly treated.27 He thought that the indentured labourers, the Europeans who were worst off on arrival, were precisely those who would prosper upon being ‘freed’ from their contracts. They could benefit from social mobility, ‘amass’ property and accede to a new class of proprietors.28 They could, to use Garraway’s term, ‘commoditise’ themselves for a term before regaining the right to commoditise others. The ‘charitable’ mutual assistance between planters stretched to ‘lend[ing] their slaves to one another’ when necessary, a remarkable illustration of how virtuous actions were reserved for certain strata of the population.29 The new planter could progressively distance himself from manual labour. He would buy slaves and delegate the running of the plantation to an overseer, and no longer have to ‘put his hand to work’. The only thing that would keep him from complete leisure would be his surveillance of labour; he would still ‘keep an eye on the work of his people’.30 The chapter in Rochefort’s Histoire entitled ‘The most honourable occupations of the foreign planters of the Antilles’ describes a colonial hierarchy that more closely resembles the aristocratic.31 The ‘less considerable’ inhabitants of the Antilles had to ‘work with their hands’, in ‘occupations’ such as indigo and sugar production. High-ranking colonists could instead hire men to direct their servants and slaves. These high-ranking colonists were people of condition, who spent their time in visits and ‘pastimes’ (‘divertissements’) such as hunting and fishing; they received their guests with ‘splendour’ and with a profusion of game and prepared foods. They received with a uniquely obliging and ‘frank’ colonial ‘civility’ (‘civilité’). The ‘courtesies’ (‘courtoisies’) of those at the top of the social pyramid were imitated by the ‘lowliest’ members (‘les moindres habitants’); the latter were the planters with the least means, but who were still remarkably generous to their guests.32 Rochefort’s account of the colonial planters is followed by descriptions of their indentured labourers, and of their African slaves (and with a distinct hint that these two groups were unworthy subject matter).33 What is so interesting about Rochefort’s description of colonial society are the basic assumptions that lie behind it. The depiction of the ‘civility’ and ‘courtesies’ of colonial life is quite clearly a gratifying portrait, and this has two fundamental implications. First, it gratifies because it is a representation of a stratum which 276

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is distanced from manual labour, a class who spend their time in non-productive pursuits and engage in conspicuous consumption. Its members are able to do so because they harness the labour of others. This illustrates, once more, both the attraction of freedom from labour, and the ‘contempt’ (after Arendt) in which labour was held. Secondly, and perhaps even more fundamentally, it assumes that the reader will recognise the attraction of this portrait. It invites the reader to situate him or herself in relation to it. It is aimed at free Europeans who could accumulate, and it tells us about their aspirations for respectability as well as riches. Du Tertre and Rochefort depict the kind of exchanges that were thought to unite European colonial settlers and ensure social cohesion. However, the social structure of the colonies was far removed from metropolitan French society under Louis XIV. Both accounts also acknowledge the existence of a slave underclass which was excluded from colonial social exchanges (for the ‘charitable’ neighbouring planters described by Du Tertre, slaves might even be the currency of colonial exchanges). Both describe societies which were made up of people who belonged, but acknowledge that there were others who did not. These portraits illustrate the attraction of consumption, leisure and power to early modern readers. One might well ask if they were also marred by the lingering presence of those who were excluded, and who were exploited. Questions about the cohesion of a slave society can be illuminated by early modern views about how individual self-interest could be reconciled with the collectivity. Conceptions of the res publica admitted that societies might be founded on, and maintained through, interest. It could even be thought essential to the cohesion of the temporal society. For Montchrestien in 1615, men (‘hommes’) were united by mutual ‘assistance’ (‘secours’), but each was ‘guided by his own profit’ (‘porté de son profit particulier’).34 In a 1670 (published) letter describing the economic systems of India, François Bernier saw private property as essential to a just society. For Bernier, the hope of working towards ‘permanent property’ (‘un bien’) which could be passed to one’s descendants was ‘the principal foundation of what is fine [‘beau’] and good in the world’. Infringing property rights would lead to what Bernier saw as the injustices of the Asian absolute monarchies, with their ‘tyranny, slavery, injustice, indigence, barbarity’.35 Bernier addressed this letter to Colbert, the minister who would be instrumental in the 277

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formulation of the Code Noir. It was this edict which assimilated slaves themselves to ‘property’ (‘meubles’) in the domain of inheritance rights.36 Despite appearances, there may have been little irony in these circumstances, at least from an early modern perspective. It was infringing the rights of those who were entitled to accumulate that was unjust, rather than holding such extensive rights over others that they were ‘property’ under certain conditions. However, the 1727 edition of Furetière’s Dictionnaire demonstrates that there were also resistances to the idea of a society based on interest. It defines society (‘société’), less problematically, as an assembly of men (‘assemblage de plusieurs hommes’) who ‘assist one another in their needs’ (this is, incidentally, followed by the observation that ‘savages [‘sauvages’] do not live in society’; the Americas appears to have been an immediate anti-social point of reference). It also refers to two further sources who saw interest as somewhat more problematic for society, Thomas Hobbes and the seventeenth-century moralist Pierre Nicole. The Dictionnaire rejects Hobbes’s view of society, which it qualifies as ‘[established] on fear and interest’ and failing to ‘recognise in men any natural love [‘amour naturel’] for one another’. It paraphrases Nicole’s view of society as a ‘herd of people [‘troupe de gens’] who are dissatisfied with one another, and who are only united by their interest’.37 This refers to a chapter in Nicole on the duty of civility, which considers the ‘infinite number of needs’ that link men (Nicole writes ‘les hommes’) to one another, but adds that love and respect are required for the continuing existence of society. For Nicole, a society without this mutual love, respect and civility would be no more than a ‘herd’ linked by a fragile union.38 Hobbes and Nicole were from radically different intellectual and religious traditions, but they were used in the Dictionnaire to illustrate how unsatisfactory a society based on interest could be, in the lack of some other unifying principle. These are diverse perspectives on self-interest and society, and they are revealing about how the dynamics of the slave society were understood. It has been seen, in Eltis’s analysis of European concepts of slavery, how fundamental were concepts of property to both the identity of master and to the exclusion of the slave.39 The concerns of colonial administrators illustrate how slaveowners could be concerned with their own private property to the detriment of the cohesion, or even the security, of the colonies. On 278

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Saint-Domingue in 1718, colonial administrators lamented planters’ disregard for the royal legislation that required them to have one European for every ten slaves, and they attributed this to colonists’ preference for their ‘present interest’ over the ‘public good’.40 In the 1720s, also on Saint-Domingue, it was feared they would act against the ‘public interest’ (‘intérêt public’) in their ‘indifference’ to the thefts or violence committed by their slaves. As the legislation would ensure that slaveowners would receive a good price for disorderly slaves if they were punished, they were thought to have little motivation for ‘vigilance’.41 The self-interest of slaves was even more ambiguous. It has been seen that affective bonds (fidelity, for example) between slave and master were thought to be ambivalent and vulnerable to self-­ interest. Recognising slave interest meant acknowledging a community whose desires were at odds with those of their owners. Yet their desires were recognised, and in three areas in particular: in how slaves were thought to be disruptive to property, in the practical compromises to slave interest, and in the strategic attempts to harness and channel forms of interest. The desires of slaves, as Labat’s account of the production process showed, might be very disruptive to property and to accumulation. Self-interest also implied a dilemma concerning the question of property. Bréban explored both the lived consequences and the moral implications on Saint-Domingue. He writes that slaves would exhaust horses once ‘they were out of their masters’ sight’ (very often because they would take the opportunity to visit their mistresses when given an errand to do). In the domestic sphere, he warned, ‘one could not watch them too carefully’. They would ‘take everything that is within reach’; no market swindler in France was ‘more adept than a slave at swiping a bottle of wine from a table’, and the slave would ‘drink it down at once without using a glass’. He blamed some aspects of slaves’ morality, such as their ‘penchant for the pleasures of the flesh’ (‘penchant presque insupportable à la volupté’), that led them to exhaust horses visiting mistresses, or the ‘licentiousness’ that made them steal to keep such mistresses. Yet Bréban was nuanced about the thefts committed by slaves. He saw the behaviour of their masters as the principal cause, in their refusal to give slaves ‘the things that are most necessary to life’, and even ‘what would cover their nakedness’. He questioned if theft could be considered ‘criminal’ in such circumstances, and 279

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he even suspected that in a similar situation his reader(s) ‘would do as [the slaves] did, and maybe more’.42 In these circumstances, he exposes a moral dilemma, one which resulted from the proprietary relationship. Rather than interrogating the morality of owning a slave’s labour, his concern was with other limits of ownership, with masters taking even what was ‘necessary’ from slaves. In so doing, he also illustrates how property within the slave–master relationship was fundamentally problematic. The valet consuming wine on his own was a near-comical scene, but it was also telling about how property could mean different things to different strata. Wine, it will be remembered, was for Du Tertre an important part of colonial civility, but it had no such signification for the domestic slaves depicted by Bréban. In theoretical terms, if one could be treated as property and could own nothing, then nothing had value. In practice, however, slaveowners might cede property or labour to slaves to some limited extent. Du Tertre describes a number of situations in which this might occur. Allowing slaves to raise and sell poultry was, Du Tertre writes, a ‘little commerce’ that allowed slaves a relative ‘abundance’; their masters appreciated it as they were no longer obliged to provide for them.43 Dutch planters who had been chased from Brazil and had settled on the French islands allowed slaves the ‘freedom to work for themselves’ on a Saturday instead of giving them ‘food, clothing, or anything else’.44 Du Tertre claims that slaves could ‘feed and keep themselves well’ with the tobacco they earned on Saturdays working in this way, but the practice was suspected of giving ‘too much freedom’ to slaves and of leading those who were less ‘industrious’ into starvation, theft or even flight.45 Allowing one’s slaves to work for themselves one day a week, and so relinquishing responsibility for their ‘food and subsistence’, was expressly forbidden by the Code Noir, primarily because of concerns about slave malnourishment.46 In 1730s SaintDomingue, Bréban noted, there were ‘greedy’ or ‘impious’ masters who ‘barely gave [slaves] a few hours in the whole month to till their garden’ (he also claimed that slaves who served the Jesuits could live like ‘prosperous French country folk’ [‘riches paysans de France’] thanks to their own ‘industry’ and their masters’ ‘indulgence’).47 Relinquishing to slaves a portion of their own labour, in this way, was a practice that also had theoretical implications. It meant, in effect, a slaveowner allowing a slave the chance to produce above subsistence level but, in return, absolving himself of the responsibil280

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ity of sustaining the slave’s life. In this it betrays the ironies behind the theoretical ownership of another human being’s labour. As was frequent in slavery, practice could be quite different to theory. Lucien Peytreaud has noted another divergence of practice from theory, which concerned the property that slaves were allowed to have. Peytreaud points out that the Code Noir declared slaves to be incapable of owning property, but that it nonetheless admitted that they might be allowed limited possession (the peculium, or pécule) if permitted by their masters. He writes that this instance of ‘custom modifying the rigours of the law’ reflects practices existing in Antiquity, and he qualifies it as ‘a sort of usufruct based on a benevolent concession’.48 This was a form of possession that was essentially limited, and that may even have had to be limited for practical and theoretical reasons. There were practical strategies in place to redress any ambivalence about who actually owned property. One manifestation concerned the trade that slaves, as article 19 of the Code Noir illustrates, carried out both in markets and at private houses. The article forbids not this sort of trade, but rather slaves trading without express permission (written or otherwise signified) from their masters.49 This must surely have been a response to commercial practices, and intended to safeguard the property of slaveowners. However, it also had theoretical implications. For Jean-François Niort, for example, the article illustrates that the Code Noir, like the Roman law that inspired it, recognised the ‘humanity’ of the slave, or that he or she was not a ‘thing’ (‘res’).50 It also illustrates that there was a certain point beyond which ownership of even minor forms of property was not innocent; the capacity of owning property was essential to defining free subjects, and it had to be safeguarded. It is in the use of strategies and compromises with slaves that their self-interest was further recognised. Du Tertre writes that in the early colony, slaves had been allowed to raise their own pigs for a time. Colonists had been ‘forced’ to put a stop to this, as, he noted, slaves took care of their own pigs in preference to their masters’, which they ‘left to die of hunger’. A particularly ‘wellloved’ slave master found a solution for this. He would occasionally give his slaves five piglets to raise, on the understanding that when they were raised he would take three of them, and he kept the right to choose which ones. The result, Du Tertre writes, was 281

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that as all the slaves ‘would benefit [were ‘intéressés’]’ from feeding the pigs, they ‘outdid each other’ in doing so.51 ‘Well-loved’ as the master was, this was a solution that was based on manipulating self-interest. It gave slaves a stake in common property, but in the awareness that they would always receive a lesser share, in terms of quantity and quality. There are even more explicit reflections of how the self-interest of slaves could be appreciated when it was circumscribed in ‘local’, limited economies. The description, in the Relation of 1671, of slaves working their own land, in ‘little plots’, and establishing long-standing links with their masters, has a paternalistic tone that has already been noted. However, it also imagined the slave settlement as an economy, as well as a family. Slaves held their own ‘little markets’ (‘petits marchés’) in public spaces on a Sunday. Their labour was profitable, generating a surplus in ‘many little things [which were] useful to colonists’ as well as ‘allowing slaves to add to the conveniences of life and of clothing’.52 There were also strategies to harness forms of what might be thought of as ‘relative’ interest. Labat suggested that one should motivate skilled slave workers through ‘distinguishing’ them from one another through gifts of food or some other ‘gratification’. The advantage of teaching slaves a trade was that ‘the profits they make attach them to their masters and give them the means to maintain their families with some distinction [‘éclat’]’; they would also experience ‘the pleasure of being above the others’, which would flatter what he thought of as their great ‘vanity’.53 Monnereau would later write that the work of a slave foreman would be best guaranteed by treating him with comparative favour; this, along with the ‘despotic authority’ he had over other slaves, was the ‘interest’ that he would have in respecting the master’s wishes (even if there were limits to his ‘supposed fidelity’).54 The three texts are all telling about the limitations that could be placed on slaves with regard to property. The Relation of 1671 acknowledged limited economic circuits (the ‘little markets’), but reserved enthusiasm for a subtle economic domination. Here, slaves were imagined working beyond subsistence level, both for themselves and for their masters. Labat and Monnereau imply that a planter might motivate and favour a slave through giving him property, and comparative social advancement. However, the property was either the product of the slave’s own labour (a ‘gratification’), 282

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or a proportionally greater share of the labour of his fellow slaves (but not of their master). The social advancement was also circumscribed. It was favourable treatment, but only in comparison with other slaves. The ‘éclat’ Labat mentions would have no value outside the plantation environment. It is, in other words, another form of illusion, a form of manipulation, and he suggests it without any apparent trace of irony. What these accounts ultimately reflect is what Patterson has characterised as the essential parasitism within slavery.55 In diverse contexts of servitude, they all depict processes through which collective labour was monopolised for the profit of European settlers. They describe, or even advise, strategic approaches to better monopolise slave labour. Nonetheless, they also recognise that slaves continued to possess self-interest (which, it will be recalled, Bernier saw as the foundation of human society). These were accounts that were based on different social contexts, and on different types of exposure to the plantation environment. It would be reductive to consider them simply as visions of a dichotomous relationship, of what was unchanging between ‘the master’ and ‘the slave’. They do, nonetheless, have a tendency to focus on what appeared to be constant in such relationships (in Bréban’s case, what ‘a slave’ would do if a bottle of wine was to hand). They seem to illustrate that at the heart of the relationship between slave and master were two opposed, irreconcilable desires. It is a sort of latent conflict, which is somewhat reminiscent of a formulation used by David Brion Davis, who sums up Locke’s vision of slavery’s ‘continuing and essential character’ as ‘the elemental struggle between two enemies’.56 French commentators were writing within a quite distinct religious and intellectual tradition to Locke, but they do testify to the consciousness of a ‘struggle’, one taking place underneath the daily interactions between slave and master. There were also reflections in narrative of what would happen when social links were dissolved or when the boundaries of colonial space were transgressed. The limits of society Early colonial narratives reflect the preoccupations of human collectivities faced with new physical and social frontiers. There were very evident external, environmental frontiers. Outside the ­plantation 283

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space, the ecology was very much unmastered and even more hazardous than the (already insalubrious) colonies. European cultural practices could be challenged by new environments, or could be adapted through contact with unfamiliar populations. There were also internal frontiers in colonial society. Slaves established social links beyond the surveillance of planters, and took part in social exchanges outside the circuits mastered by Europeans. A number of dramatic narratives reflect how early colonists responded to the unmastered environment of the Caribbean. Pelleprat describes the fate of a large group of Irish Catholics who had been taken from Saint Kitts, and deliberately marooned on Crab Island, which he qualified as ‘a place that nobody inhabits, and that is destitute of all things’. He writes that they were to ‘pass many days in extreme need on Crab Island, only living off a little grasses [‘herbes’] and some shellfish’, before some were picked up by a passing vessel. Those who were rescued were in turn to undergo further hardship at sea, and were even reduced to contemplating cannibalism for a time; the fate of those who had remained on the island was uncertain, but the ‘common belief’ (‘commune créance’) was that they had tried to escape and had perished at sea.57 This is an edifying narrative of Catholic piety, but it also reflects thinking about the ecology and culture of the early Caribbean. There were places that were uninhabited, and on which there was in consequence thought to be ‘nothing’. There were alimentary frontiers; destitution meant being forced to consume uncultivated grasses, and shellfish, not to mention the flirtation with the more obvious proscription of cannibalism. This was also an environment in which information was uncertain. In its absence, one might have recourse to ‘common belief’, or in other words, a shared consensus. There are also portraits of the west of the island of Hispaniola, or what would become French-occupied Saint-Domingue. Sparsely inhabited during the latter part of the seventeenth century, this may have been the most extensive frontier in the early French colonies. In the Nouvelles de l’Amérique and in Oexmelin’s Histoire, SaintDomingue becomes a space in which society could be reimagined, in accounts of the boucaniers, the hunters of oxen or of wild boar. In the Nouvelles the character named Bartelemi (a character previously discussed in relation to slave fidelity) arrives on the island, after a series of marine adventures, and decides to enter the service of the boucaniers. Oexmelin’s description of boucanier society is 284

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more developed. He depicts a masculine society that had none of the restrictions of organised human settlement, with the boucaniers mastering large numbers of animals (herds of twenty-five to thirty dogs) and using modified technologies (high-quality arms specially made in France).58 This was a society that had adopted both new practices adapted to the environment, and more familiar European practices. New practices included forms of communal living between men such as matelotage.59 Possessions were shared (either within ‘pairs’ or, in the case of ammunition, amongst the wider community).60 If necessary, risk was also shared.61 Disputes were resolved by peers (at least before the arrival of colonial governors), but if this proved impossible, by a form of duelling.62 This was a society that also imported European labour; the boucaniers maintained forms of indentured servitude and would bring what Oexmelin calls ‘valets’ from France to serve them for three years.63 These ‘valets’ had to undertake onerous labour, which might consist in transporting a heavy ox-skin for ‘three or four leagues’ through thick woods. Unfavoured servants could be subjected to physical violence. In contrast, their ‘masters’ engaged in leisure pursuits, ‘strolling’ after meals, smoking tobacco and ‘amusing themselves’ through shooting.64 Both Oexmelin and the author of the Nouvelles de l’Amérique described a community in which social mobility was possible. Bartelemi, in the Nouvelles, enters the ‘service’ of the boucaniers and ultimately becomes a full member of this society, with an equal share in its profits.65 Oexmelin writes that favoured valets might be allowed to participate in non-profitable shooting (that is to say, leisure activities) along with their masters.66 They might become a camarade, or full member of the society, and might even procure their own valets in France, whom they would treat as they had been treated.67 There were more destabilising aspects to this community in terms of society, ecology and culture. The frontier society was a space of liberty for some, as Garraway demonstrates in her analysis of the pirate societies depicted by Oexmelin; it is a liberty she considers to be reminiscent of aristocratic values, offering readers ‘an imaginary ground of transgression … onto which they could project their own desires for savagery and aggression’.68 However, the frontier was also a space of oppression for others. Oexmelin’s 285

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account of b ­ oucanier society was recognisable, from one angle; it perpetuated the social distinctions of master and valet, for example. From another angle, it was radically unfamiliar. The relationships between its members were based on force, in a context from which law and external authority appeared to be absent. It was also a society in which human relations were determined by the environment. Vicious discipline had to be ‘endured’ by valets because there was no other option; encountering the hostile Spanish was one risk of flight, but there was in any case, ‘nowhere to escape to, as there [were] only woods and mountains’, as Oexmelin put it.69 This was an uncultivated space, and it was also a space which lacked culture. There is a telling digression within Oexmelin’s account which illustrates how this lack of culture was imagined. He relates the fate of a recently arrived valet who becomes lost in the environment of Saint-Domingue, after having been knocked out by his master. Upon regaining consciousness, the servant finds himself alone in the woods, except for one of his master’s dogs. He is unarmed, without the capacity to make fire, lost, ‘in despair’ and without the ‘skills [‘industrie’] that those accustomed to the country might have had’. He wanders about in the woods, surviving on the meat of piglets caught with his dog, and which both eat raw. Over time, he encounters wild dogs and trains them to hunt; he becomes ‘accustomed to [this] life’, and is ‘no longer bothered’ by his solitude. When he does eventually encounter a group of boucaniers, he is a ‘pitiful’ sight. There is only a rag ‘hiding his nakedness’, he has ‘a piece of raw flesh hanging at his side’, and he is ‘followed by two boars and three dogs’. He is freed from service after this chance encounter. He is given weapons, and goes on to ‘become one of the most famous boucaniers that there has been on this coast’. However, one important trait remained with him; he ‘found it difficult to get used to cooked meat’ and ‘could not stop himself’, on occasion, from eating it raw.70 What is interesting in this digression is how fragile are the frontiers it depicts. The valet wakes up disorientated, alone and lost in the wilderness, without the artefacts and knowledge of the environment that would enable a ‘civil’ existence. He is completely separated from human society. He rapidly degenerates from being a civil being, to one with a distinctly animal side; this is manifest in the scene of man and dog consuming raw meat side by side. It is the paroxysm of the boucaniers’ ‘savage life’ (‘vie sauvage’) as Laon 286

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qualified their existence in 1654.71 In eventually resurging from the woods, nearly naked and adorned with raw meat, Oexmelin’s valet is a very short step from the image of the ‘savage’ which so intrigued early modern readers, and which was immediately recognisable by the late seventeenth century. In continuing to prefer raw meat, his immersion in the non-civil environment has led to a lingering contamination. There are aspects of this portrait that may have inspired diverse reactions from readers; the consumption of raw meat may perhaps have been thought horrifying or comical. What is clear is the ease with which the valet steps, involuntarily, outside the space of civility. In this form of early settlement, Europeans lived in vertiginous proximity to what was uncultivated, to what had not been mastered by human culture. As such accounts demonstrate, French servants, whether indentured labourers or ‘valets’, could ultimately be integrated into colonial communities. Colonial-era narratives also illustrate the awareness of internal frontiers within the space of the colonies. Settlers of European origin had distinct social practices, and these made of them a community. It was also recognised that slaves of African origin had their own social practices. Some of their social exchanges appeared to be limited in their reach, but there were also practices that seemed more difficult to circumscribe. Certain social practices amongst slaves were immediately recognisable. Du Tertre identified forms of hospitality which were at least as generous as those amongst French colonists. He was struck by the ‘courtesy’ and liberality of slaves who received visitors. He even chided the ‘prodigality’ of one slave who offered a considerable amount of poultry and alcohol to his visitors (who were slaves from the same region of Africa). This slave, according to Du Tertre, was motivated not just by ‘affection’, but also by the desire to show that he was not poor, in material terms (‘misérable’). This sort of hospitality was recognisable because it was a distribution of a similar currency to that used in European social exchanges. It also implied some relative excess beyond subsistence, and that the slave could accumulate in a limited fashion. For slaves, the ‘liberty that was given’ to meet in this manner was a source of great ‘satisfaction’, Du Tertre claimed.72 These were exchanges that were comprehensible in material and in social terms. Yet in a slave society, as has been seen, both property and society had different meanings depending on whether one 287

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was free or a slave. Social links within a slave colony were circumscribed; the communities of free settlers and of slaves exchanged social ‘capital’ (such as hospitality) within their own communities. Both groups lived in distinct socio-economic circuits. One implication of this can be glimpsed by thinking about credit, or what Clare Haru Crowston considers to be a ‘crucial form of nonmaterial capital’ governing power relations in Ancien Régime France.73 The colonies are not Crowston’s principal focus, but in a section describing the role of credit for ‘working people’ she highlights two extracts in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s late eighteenth-century Description which, in her view, hint at ‘the dynamics of credit encompassing communities of enslaved people’. The first concerns a female slave who ‘had great credit over the others’ and could dictate the order of mourning ceremonies, and the second that of unruly slaves who benefited from ‘impunity through the credit of their masters’.74 What Crowston fails to emphasise is what distinguishes the ‘credit’ of the slaves she mentions from those French subjects ‘working’ in metropolitan France. The ‘credit’ of the slave who could influence other slaves was of value within a sphere that was distinct to that in which French subjects or colonists lived; the credit which prevented the punishment of a master’s slaves was actually accorded to the master rather than his slaves. Slaves lived in economies of ‘credit’ that were quite distinct to those in which French subjects lived, because they were circumscribed within proprietary relationships. This has already been seen in Labat’s warning to take care not to make one’s foreman ‘lose all his credit’. Such ‘credit’ was a currency limited to the local economy of the plantation, and might be dissolved according to the will of a proprietor. How social practices maintained the internal frontiers of the colony can be seen in the manner alcohol was distributed and consumed by colonists and by slaves. Offering alcohol, as Du Tertre had indicated, was part of the hospitality that French colonists showed to one another. He thought of it as an act of civility; it was not motivated by self-interest, and it reinforced social binds. The consumption of alcohol by slaves obeyed a distinct dynamic. Colonists might distribute alcohol to slaves (although French commentators regularly insisted that slaves consumed it to excess).75 It might be given to slaves to motivate intensive labour, or labour in poor weather conditions (although there was a risk the commandeur might keep it for himself and his friends).76 It might also 288

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be given to groups of slaves before religious feasts, as Pelleprat writes.77 That the Code Noir forbade planters giving it to slaves ‘in place of [their] subsistence’ demonstrates how it could be abused.78 These were uses and abuses of alcohol, but giving it to slaves was in itself socially charged. Alcohol reinforced forms of sociability, and it also maintained the internal frontiers of the colony. It created forms of inclusion or exclusion. Slaves, Du Tertre writes, held feasts for the baptisms and marriages of their children, with masters paying for the expenses of the marriage feast, strong alcohol included. For a baptism, he noted, the godparents (who were usually French) would contribute to the feast; however French settlers avoided consuming the alcohol that was so essential to it.79 It might be said that in these feasts, colonists furnished a sort of catalyst of sociability. They allowed, and even facilitated, the sociability of their slaves, but they made sure that they did not participate in the social exchange itself. The distinct social conditions implied in the consumption of alcohol can be seen, for example, in a correspondence from 1715 Saint-Domingue, where colonial authorities defended the consumption of guildive by slaves as a harmless practice within urban centres. Here ‘slaves [were] not allowed to sit around a table or even enter the inns, but [could] only drink it standing up and at the door’.80 Even where it was considered to be relatively benign, the consumption of alcohol was acknowledged as an act that created social links. Physically distancing slaves from the company in a tavern, ensuring they were in a (literally) liminal position, also distanced the drinking of alcohol from its social setting. It reduced it to mere consumption. However, forms of slave sociability implied that there was a space from which European settlers were excluded. There was some diversity of perspectives about this sociability. Rochefort depicted a comparatively unthreatening bond between slaves who had originated in different countries willing to ‘support’ and ‘help each other out, as if they were all brothers’. He paints a vivid picture of their own social activities and mutual visits (‘games, dances … and even little feasts’) which might take place without impacting negatively on their masters’ work.81 Du Tertre considered slaves to be united by ‘love’, with those from the same African lands maintaining ‘great links’ with each other, and slaves ‘no less joyous in their servitude than if they were completely free, as they sing, dance and amuse themselves often more than their masters and those who command 289

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them’.82 These are benign portraits of slave assemblies, but they also acknowledge bonds between slaves that could be subversive to the paternalistic slave–master relationship. As Rochefort recognised in the mutual, ‘brotherly’ help between slaves, they were a fraternity. Du Tertre also directly acknowledged that sentimental links between slaves could be subversive, in the verbal protests that slaves might make if one of their number were punished.83 In practice, the conditions of plantation sociability were influenced by such factors as individual relationships, the relationships of proprietors to public authorities, or even moral perspectives. Niort has suggested that masters might turn a blind eye to slave festivities, given that ‘the interest of masters did not always coincide with colonial public order’.84 Monnereau, by the mid-eighteenth century, advised économes to forbid social assemblies which included slaves from outside their plantation, given that they had a tendency to end in social disorder (‘querelles’).85 The different concerns of the political and religious authorities can be seen in the interrogations of two colonial administrators in 1719 Saint-Domingue concerning the superior of the Dominican mission, Dumay. Dumay had broken with the tradition of his predecessors and had reinstated a number of feasts intended for slaves. The concern of the administrators was with the ‘abuse’ slaves made of these feasts when there were ‘two or three in a row’; they passed the time in ‘thefts, prostitution, assemblies, marronage, brawling and sometimes in plots of which the consequences are to be feared’.86 These were mainly moral and economic infractions, but this kind of assembly, at this stage of plantation society, was also a concern for social order. Concerns about the external and the internal frontiers of the colony were manifested in such depictions of lost settlers on the frontiers of culture, and portraits that acknowledged the exchanges that bound, and that excluded, in a society. These are also constructions of unmastered space which, as the Code Noir demonstrates, was a very real preoccupation. Article 16 forbade the assembly of slaves ‘belonging to different masters’ at any time, even where the ‘pretext’ of a marriage was offered. Assembly on the highways and in ‘remote places’ (‘lieux écartés’) was an aggravating factor and increased its subversive potential.87 However, as Rochefort and Du Tertre demonstrate, the descriptions of slave social practices were accounts written from, at best, the perspective of an excluded observer. Naturally, Europeans were 290

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excluded, to a considerable degree, from these practices in empirical terms; the conditions in which they observed the festivities of slaves may have been quite unreliable. There was, in addition, a more essential sort of exclusion. The narrative strategies that implied belonging, that assumed that the narrator and his readers were part of the same community, also acknowledged that there were practices from which they were excluded. They acknowledge the limits to colonial surveillance, to mastering the social links between slaves. This was far from indifferent, as can be seen in the very real concerns with other forms of society, this time on the physical margins of the colonies.These were the societies composed of maroons, or renegade slaves. The maroon slaves Critics have stressed that forms of marronage around the Caribbean were very diverse. Silvia W. de Groot et al. have characterised the phenomenon as ‘part of a spectrum of forms of resistance to slavery’ throughout the Caribbean.88 Their study of communities of runaway slaves stresses the challenges of ‘autonomy on the colonial frontier’, but also observes that the location of such communities in ‘remote and defensible destination[s]’ was tempered by a certain ‘symbiosis with settled communities’.89 In the context of the Antilles, Gabriel Debien distinguishes ‘definitive’, sometimes collective absences (‘grand marronage’) from more localised, temporary absences of slaves which, if a nuisance, were viewed far less seriously (‘petit marronage’).90 Régent has also characterised the phenomenon as extremely diverse in what motivated it, and in what circumstances it took place; he also notes that it was considered by colonists with a certain ‘ambiguity’.91 Archival evidence hints that planters might tolerate, and perhaps even facilitate the marronage of certain slaves, presumably to profit from it themselves. The account of the ‘sédition’ against the colonial population in 1710 Martinique reproaches the ‘complicity’ of a planter named de Loré in providing a refuge for a wanted maroon named Michault; a prosecution was not undertaken because of the ‘consequences of implicating a white in such a case’.92 There are a number of testimonies (most notably, those of Du Tertre and Labat) dating from the era of early French colonisation that are instructive about the marrons. They illustrate anxieties 291

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about the subversive potential of slave communities, and also, more discreetly, about cultural practices in the wider frontier context. There is a third strand to accounts of maroon communities that is revealing about the early colonial environment; they testify to the strategies by which information, and even rumour, was received in the colonies and in France. The subversive side of marronage is detailed in Du Tertre’s account of the significant slave revolts of the early plantation. In 1639, more than sixty slaves escaped into the woods of Guadeloupe with their wives and children, and took to committing daily acts of violence on the settlers. This revolt was vigorously suppressed, those captives who were taken were quartered, and their ‘limbs were exposed … so as to terrorise the other slaves and prevent them becoming maroons’.93 Du Tertre writes that the rebellious slaves in 1656 Guadeloupe had intended to ‘massacre all the planters, keep their wives and crown two of their own the kings of the island’. He saw them as particularly dangerous, because they had been taught ‘to use arms’, were numerically superior to the planters, and were ‘fighting for their freedom’; they suffered punishments that included quartering, hanging, flogging and mutilation. On Martinique in the same year increasing numbers of slaves began to escape from the plantations; Du Tertre compared the movement to ‘a chancre that attacked the healthiest parts [of the body]’, referring to even ‘faithful’ slaves who were absconding. The slaves, allied to the Caribs, began a series of attacks on French settlers, and the violence was only brought to an end by a tentative French–Amerindian peace.94 These were explosive circumstances in which the very order of the colony appeared to be in jeopardy. However, Du Tertre saw even the more banal forms of marronage as subversive; he wrote that once slaves had ‘tasted this miserable and mischievous way of life’ it was difficult to ‘tame’ them, and their disobedience could be contagious. He even claimed that on Martinique, the fear of marronage had so conditioned planters that they ‘would not dare to admonish a slave’ for fear of him fleeing into the woods.95 Accounts of marronage also illustrate the exacerbated importance of culture and cultivation in the early settlements. Escaping from the world of the plantation meant stepping outside the ecological frontiers of the colony. What this implied can be seen in Du Tertre’s description of the marronage of slaves who had recently been transported to the colonies. These recent arrivals would flee, 292

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he wrote, because they found slave labour intolerably harsh, and ‘hoped to find the way back home’. They would suffer greatly, living off ‘wild fruit, frogs, crabs and tourlourous [terrestrial crabs] that they are forced to eat raw’. Many chose to return to their owners, if they could ‘find the way’ back, and the rest would die of hunger or of sickness.96 Rochefort pitied those slaves who escaped to the mountains and were condemned to ‘live, like beasts, an unhappy and savage existence’, as Froger pitied Christianised slaves who preferred ‘going into the woods to die amongst the Indians’ to staying with their cruel masters.97 These are vivid illustrations of thinking about ecology during the development of the colony. The fate of renegade slaves will be reminiscent of some aspects of the separation from culture which were discussed earlier in this chapter. Outside society, one would have to eat undomesticated foods (wild fruit, for Du Tertre, and uncultivated grasses for Pelleprat), or infringe alimentary proscriptions. Worse, one would be reduced to consuming the raw (unsavoury animals for Du Tertre, and pigmeat for Oexmelin). For Rochefort, it was when slaves left civil society that they would live ‘like beasts’. In this environment, slaves (like Oexmelin’s valet, although with no happy ending) might be unable to ‘find the way’ back. What is among the most telling aspects of this environment is the sort of absolute vertigo that it implies. One might end up as a fundamentally non-civil being, not just in what one consumed, but in finding oneself essentially nowhere. This is a striking contrast to Du Tertre’s depiction of what happened when slaves who ‘knew the land’ decided to flee. They had the capacity to foresee (the ability that would be so important in the plantation according to Labat) and to stock. They would ‘put their affairs in order’, taking along iron tools like ‘billhooks, axes and knives’. They would stock food and, in the mountains, would create a ‘garden’ of manioc and yams. Waiting for these to ripen, they would ‘come at night to the edge of the wood’ where they would be assisted by other slaves. If no help was forthcoming, they would steal from the habitations, and they might ‘even steal their master’s sword or rifle’. Such fugitives would live admirably well, and they would ‘lack nothing’; husbands would come back for their wives and children, and the others would encourage other slaves to join them for ‘companionship’ (‘compagnie’).98 This account is extremely telling about how culture was imagined 293

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in the colonial environment. The success of the ‘adapted’ maroon slaves was due both to imported forms of knowledge and technology, and more localised forms of knowledge. They planted crops that were familiar within the plantation ecology, but they did so with European, iron-based tools. They used tools and root-based foodstuffs to put in place a system of agriculture that, although it was non-capitalist, rivalled with the plantation. With their gardens, these slaves could master the very space in which their inexperienced, disorientated brethren would instead lose themselves. In taking other slaves – especially female slaves – away from the plantations, they set up not just a parallel economy, but a parallel society. Yet in the meantime, the maroon slaves remained ‘on the edge of the wood’. In a vivid prefiguration of the ‘marginality’ proposed by anthropological models, these slaves were thought to haunt the edges of the plantation. Socially, they had left; they had escaped from the sight of the master. Yet from outside the plantation, they maintained the fraternity between slaves. What is more, in a reversal of the model of slavery proposed by Patterson, they had themselves become parasites; they would drain the resources of the planter and they might even steal the weaponry that was, ultimately, his force. This was a form of parasitism that Labat acknowledged on Martinique at the turn of the eighteenth century. He saw the maroons as ‘fugitives’ who had fled labour or punishment and who inhabited the woods, cliffs and ‘other little-frequented places’ of Martinique. He had a more optimistic view of their existence than Du Tertre. Labat wrote that they might live in the wilderness for years, given the abundance of food (in fact, he seems to have been far more open to the consumption of crabs and tourlourous than his predecessor). At night, they would come to the plantations and steal subsistence crops, livestock and poultry; one settler Labat knew on Martinique had a herd of ‘excellent’ goats which would have ‘multiplied famously’ were it not for the the traps runaway slaves set for them.99 There was a third feature of renegade communities that is very telling about colonial representations. The way slaves actually lived in these communities could not be observed first-hand by Europeans. They were deliberately isolated communities which, if they were disturbed, could quickly become mobile. Du Tertre relates that a maroon’s encampment was discovered by slave-hunters in 1657 294

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Martinique, but all that was left behind were enigmatic traces such as gourds ‘filled with salted snakes’ and burning embers. Maroons might also be a source of rumour; as Du Tertre put it in his 1667 edition, it was ‘believed’ (‘l’on croit’) that there were ‘still some on Martinique who are multiplying, with their wives’.100 On one hand, there was a paucity of information about maroons, and on the other, a need to know about their existence.101 These were fraught conditions, and they appear to have preoccupied those concerned with the colonies, although for somewhat diverse reasons. When he visited Saint-Domingue in 1701, Labat heard of a community of maroon slaves living in circumstances quite unlike those on Martinique. He learned that there was a large organised community which had withdrawn to a mountainous zone. ‘It was said’, he wrote, ‘that there were six or seven hundred of them, men and women, and that all the men were armed’; they were also said to have created extensive defence works, and keep a watchful eye out for hostile colonists. Colonists ‘talked about’ sending a force to dislodge them, but there was little enthusiasm; the only force capable of doing so was the boucaniers, but they had no interest given that they maintained a ‘secret trade’ with the maroons. Secret as it was, Labat had learned about this trade, as had the population who ‘griped openly about it’ (‘on en murmurait hautement’).102 What is notable here is how the image of the maroon community was constructed in a climate in which information was, at best, uncertain. It was an environment in which ‘settler’ society proper was distanced from both a marginal maroon community, and from the socially marginalised boucaniers. Naturally, maroons and boucaniers were marginalised in radically different ways, in social and legal terms, but both communities seem to have engaged in exchanges which were mutually satisfying to some degree. Their ‘secret’ commercial exchanges also implied restricted exchanges of information. Excluded from these, the settler community, fearful for its interests and its security, seems to have been particularly open to forms of rumour. It was from this that Labat constructed the image of a community of runaway slaves. The interest in the maroon slaves stretched beyond the inhabitants of the colonies. Margat, in 1729, replied to a letter sent to him by another Jesuit, named Neuville. In this, Neuville had related that he knew of a cleric in France who ‘had been told’ (‘on lui a dit’) that the maroons had been ‘abandoned’, and who had tried to obtain 295

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his being ‘sent to them as missionary’.103 Margat, acknowledging the charity of the would-be missionary, quickly disabused his correspondent. He qualified the maroons as discontented or undisciplined slaves who, having fled, would ‘hide [in the woods and mountains] during the day, and at night enter the neighbouring plantations, … taking everything they could get their hands on’. If they could get arms, he added, they would ambush passers-by; in other words, a missionary to the maroons would be comparable to a priest administering to the needs of highwaymen.104 There are two aspects to this testimony that are of particular interest. The first concerns the compassion of the would-be missionary, who was so moved by the ‘abandonment’ of the maroons. What so affected him might be compared with the concerns of earlier missionaries faced with the impiety of French settlers. Among the ways in which populations in the colony were marginalised, being spiritually ‘abandoned’ may well have been thought the most serious of all. It illustrates, once more, what the priorities were in thinking about slaves, even in metropolitan France. The second aspect concerns the sources which inspired the potential missionary. Little can be ascertained about them except that they were primarily oral (the ecclesiastic had been ‘told’ about the maroons), but however discreetly, they illustrate once more how oral information also contributed to creating representations of slavery. It may well be thought of as another form of rumour, which circulated depictions of slaves that were unlike those of Du Tertre and (recently by 1729) Labat. The marrons, then, illustrate different facets of what ‘knowing’ slave communities meant. This was knowledge that was unverifiable and difficult to qualify as authoritative; as a result, it could also be very troubling. There is a Jesuit letter from the 1720s that appears to illustrate just how troubling it might be. Sent from India by a Jesuit named Ducros, it includes an account of his passage on Mauritius (then a French colony) where he encountered the soldiers of a French detachment. Ducros was ‘greatly moved’ by the account of one of them, who had been ‘maimed’ (‘estropié’) and narrowly escaped death at the hands of the island’s maroons. The soldier, Ducros wrote, had been terribly wounded in an attack, had been forced to pass the night outdoors, and ‘in the light of a great fire’, had ‘seen two of his comrades roasted’ while ‘this herd of barbarians [‘troupe barbare’] danced around them, shrieking and crying out horribly’.105 It was the testimony of a witness who 296

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claimed to have witnessed the depths of savagery while powerless to intervene, and who even bore the physical scars which seemed to testify to its veracity. It had all the ingredients of a fascinating tale, and it clearly fascinated the Jesuit. It was, of course, a tale shared on a colony in the Indian Ocean, far removed from the contexts described by Labat and Margat. However, it may shed some light on what was common to thinking about unmastered slave communities. Mauritius was an insular environment, as was the Caribbean. In these environments, slaves might well flee, but they never fully escaped. They were condemned to lurk, somewhere, on the edge of the colony, and settlers and soldiers were forced to live alongside them. These may well have been the ideal conditions – both fraught and fascinating – for exchanging imaginative tales. The contexts in which slaves in the French Caribbean absconded were multiple and changing. They were as varied as were the relationships, and the labour and environmental conditions, of each of the colonies. Narrative accounts of their existence were constructions based on understandings of what made culture and society, but they appear to have been in large part the domain of rumour and hearsay. They are in part responses to the fundamental absence of knowledge about such societies. What these constructions also acknowledge are alternative social bonds that were quite unlike the paternal, fidelity-based models of slavery that have been discussed in this book. Instead, they acknowledged that slaves were united not just by familial bonds, but also by affection. In this context, as in others, a reductive approach to thinking about these communities must be avoided. It is, nonetheless, striking that such accounts all manifest interest that is essentially opposed to that of the plantation. They acknowledged not only desires that were irreconcilable with those of planters, but also the most developed of the forms of community between slaves. The tension within the slave society There were further tensions within the slave society which stemmed from disruptive forms of desire. There could be some diversity in the relationships between masters and slaves, and the social and ecological environments of Caribbean plantations were ever-changing. Nonetheless, one common thread in these contexts was the tension concerning forms of social bonds. The proprietory ­ relationship 297

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placed limitations on the kind of bonds slaves could enter into. European colonists, in turn, infringed moral proscriptions in ways that would have significant consequences on the social cohesion of the colonies. These new relationships gave rise to questions surrounding marriage, métissage and manumission. These were intertwined questions, and they further hint that the relationship of a ‘master’ and ‘slave’ in practice could be quite distinct from theory in the multiple contexts of the Caribbean. It has been seen how the sacrament of baptism made slaves members of a spiritual community, but left their temporal belonging uncertain. Another sacrament, marriage, had significant temporal consequences. The marriage of slaves could be understood as integrated within a harmonious paternal relationship with the slaveowner (as the Relation of 1671 demonstrated). It could also be seen as problematic. That the ‘unfortunate children’ born to married slaves became the property of their masters epitomised, for Du Tertre, the ‘absolute’ nature of slavery. He wrote that proprietors sought to have their slaves married young, so as to have child slaves who would replace their parents in time. He praised French planters for trying to have male slaves marry the women from their own lands whom they preferred, and he noted that if two slaves belonging to different masters wished to marry one another, then one master would usually transfer his property rights to the other; this meant that both slaves would then belong to the same master. However, Du Tertre also noted that planters had a stake in the marriages of slaves; if a master wanted to keep a useful slave he might instead force him into an undesired marriage.106 Mongin, in 1682, wrote that both the slaves and the masters of Saint Kitts were opposed to marriage; the former because it would impede their promiscuity, and the latter because it would prevent them from being able to sell slaves separately. He thought that the principal difficulty was the ‘custom’ of Saint Kitts (‘la coutume du pays’) that ‘[did] not allow the slaves of different masters to marry’, and which did not take into account the ‘ancient laws’ (‘lois anciennes’), which made slaves ‘independent of their masters concerning marriage’. Ensuring that slaves in illicit sexual relationships were married was a priority for the Jesuit. He encountered serious difficulties in obtaining the consent of their masters, and even claimed that he was obliged to have recourse to judicial measures to secure the consent of some.107 In fact, the Code Noir would forbid clerics from 298

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officiating over the marriages of slaves without the consent of their masters, although it also forbade slaveowners from forcing slaves to marry ‘against their will’.108 The marriage of slaves was an issue around which a number of interests crystallised. It was a moral imperative for clerics such as Mongin (and the Code Noir acknowledges that ecclesiastics might well act against the will of proprietors because of this). It was a concern for proprietors who wanted to keep the freedom to buy and sell labour rights individually. The priorities of slaves can only be hinted at, in missionaries’ concerns about their promiscuity, or in the instances where they did agree to marry (and some did, as Mongin relates).109 The marriage of slaves was also an arrangement in which the typical advantages of matrimony, what it could bring to the free, were limited. Although Mongin requested the agreement of slaves’ parents before going to their masters, parental accord was unnecessary according to the Code Noir.110 There was no dowry, and slaves brought only the most rudimentary forms of property to the marriage.111 In other words, the marriage of slaves was a union in which the extension of familial networks, and the transfer of property, were extremely circumscribed. Yet even within this union there were two wills, which might be in opposition to one another; that of slaves, when they desired this (limited) union, and that of masters, who might seek to conserve as absolute a proprietorship as was possible. A second source of social instability was métissage, a phenomenon that, as Debbasch has illustrated, evolved along with the development of the colonies. Debbasch observes that the principle of partus sequitur ventrem was rejected in the early decades of settlement, and that mulâtre children were considered free, but that over time, métissage became an issue of morality and security. The same critic identifies a transformation around 1680, theorising that from this point those who had inherited black pigmentation could no longer benefit from ‘natural’ liberty, but at best liberty that was ‘acquired’ (‘liberté acquise’).112 Garraway has also noted the instability of early responses to métissage, and she identifies the ‘proper use of the slave woman’s body’ (such as how the ‘reproduction of labor’ could be channelled for the colony) as the ultimate source of concerns about the phenomenon.113 Concerns about the ways the bodies of slaves were used were certainly behind some condemnation of fornication between slaves and 299

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masters, as has been seen in earlier discussions of labour. However, colonial narratives show that there were diverse responses to métissage. Métissage on the islands was troubling because it was acknowledged to be the result of both fornication and coercion. These were abuses of female slaves which were condemned by ecclesiastics. Alternatively, the silence about métissage in some testimonies is so noticeable that it hints at a response to how unedifying it was thought to be; Chevillard, for example, makes no mention at all of the mulâtres in his account of the colonies dating from 1659. The evolution of Du Tertre’s work may well be symptomatic of how the mulâtres came, progressively, to be recognised as a distinct group. He makes no mention of them in his short 1654 account of the slave population, whereas the second edition contains an entire chapter about ‘The shameful birth of the mulâtres, and of their condition’.114 There is sporadic focus on the physical specificity of mulâtres (at the risk of anachronism, what approximates with their ‘racial’ difference) in early texts. The physical difference of the métis was less frequently an object of speculation than that of Africans (which, as has been seen, was understood through recourse to a rich range of discourses). There may have been a range of responses based on aesthetic appreciation, for example. Du Tertre remarked that some of the free mulâtres on the islands were ‘quite well-made’ in 1667.115 From his first (1686) edition onwards, Oexmelin instead characterised the mulâtres of both the French and Spanish colonies on Hispaniola as ‘with the whites of their eyes a yellow colour, hideous to look at, bad-humoured, treacherous and capable of the worst crimes’.116 Oexmelin’s formulation placed a distinct physiognomy and distinct character traits side by side, and it might seem somewhat reflective of the ‘contexture’ to which Bernier attributed the physical difference of Africans. However, as a number of accounts from the 1730s indicate, the understanding of physiognomy in the colonies was inseparable from the social context. By the 1730s, the mulâtres had become a sizeable, very visible segment of the population of Saint-Domingue. Their physiognomy had a social signification. It could indicate their origins in transgressive sexual relationships, for example. Bréban’s 1732 criticism of sex between masters and slaves has been noted; one further aspect to it was that it led to an ‘abominable mixture of different blood’ (‘abominable mélange de sang différent’), from which came ‘the 300

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mulâtre children of which the colony is full’.117 The metropolitan theorist, Melon, considered the creation of a ‘new bloodline [‘sang’] of mulâtres’ as the inevitable consequence of the use of black slaves. It was this that led him to counsel the avoidance of such slaves, as the appearance of mulâtres would be ‘all the more dangerous, in that it would invite a continuous comparison with the whites’.118 The reference to ‘blood’ by both might seem to hint at an early aversion to miscegenation, especially if it was conceived of as an ‘abominable mixture’ (Bréban). Yet neither thought of the body in isolation. For Bréban, métissage was a strand in his condemnation of the exactions of masters upon slaves. It was a corporeal issue for Melon to the extent that ‘blood’ was a visible reflection of something else: essentially, of socio-economic status. The diversity of perspectives can be seen in a third source from the 1730s, Le Pers’s manuscript Histoire of Saint-Domingue. In a discussion of the advantages to the French colony of relaxing the impediments to manumission, the Jesuit made the following reflection about pigmentation: It is said that our aim is to conserve our white colour for longer, although sooner or later it is the fate of all peoples between the two tropics to be brown or dark-skinned, in other words to be of a colour midway between the white and the black. The Spanish are nearly all like this already and we ourselves are starting to experience this amongst our population. I am at this moment in a parish in the mountains called Sainte Rose where there are about twenty mulâtresses of marriageable age, seven or eight free black girls and only three or four white girls.119

It is unclear from Le Pers’s account what the source of the rumour about the French wishing to ‘conserve’ their colour was, or the degree to which it was actually a question of colour at all. To judge from the extract, Le Pers was not particularly perturbed by the idea of the French becoming a métissé people, or not, at least, by the importance of colour. He was not entirely indifferent to the phenomenon either; he recognised a destiny that the French would do well to acknowledge, so that they could tailor their policies accordingly. Le Pers is unusual in imagining a future that would be métissé, but he also shows how colour could not be reduced to a corporeal trait. He discusses another facet of métissage beyond those discussed by Bréban and Melon, but he has in common with 301

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them his contextual approach (this will be all the more apparent in his consideration of manumission, which will be returned to in the following pages). Manumission was another evolving phenomenon within the slave society.120 The ‘power [of the master] to free slaves or to keep them as slaves’ was acknowledged from the early decades of the colonies by Chevillard.121 Manumission gave to slaves not just the rights over their own labour, but also integration (of a certain kind) into colonial society. The ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’ noted in the early 1640s that there were ‘Moorish [‘mauresque’] or black women and girls converted to our religion or married to Frenchmen’ who ‘were freed and considered as women who belonged to decent society [‘tenues en honnête société de femmes’]’.122 However, this was ultimately a specific form of ‘belonging’. The terms of manumission in the French colonies were set out in the Code Noir, and their ‘basic import’, as Watson writes, was inspired by Roman law (indeed, Watson suggests that questions such as the status of, or restrictions on, freed slaves make manumission the ‘central issue in the social institution of slavery’).123 According to the Code Noir, manumission gave an ‘acquired liberty’ with the ‘same rights, privileges and immunities’ as the freeborn had (article 59), and being freed on the islands would grant the same legal status to slaves born outside the royal domains as to the monarch’s ‘natural subjects’ (article 57). Yet the Code Noir also laid down terms which distinguished freed slaves from the freeborn; it specified the fines they would receive were they to hide runaways (article 39), and it ordered them to have a ‘singular respect’ for their former masters and their families (article 58).124 The studies of Garrigus and of Ghachem are amongst those which have shed light on the shifting contexts of manumission in the French colonies. Garrigus, referring to article 59 of the Code Noir, writes that ‘in formal terms’, the edict ‘defined slavery as a legal, not a racial, condition’, and that the distinct status of freedmen was itself legal rather than ‘racial’.125 Garrigus also stresses the ‘complex social realities’ in which manumission was bound up in Saint-Domingue; he sees ‘sexuality’ as fundamental to it, and notes the conflicting interests of the representatives of the monarchy who wanted to limit ‘masters’ powers’ of manumission, and of the planters who opposed their attempts to do so.126 Ghachem characterises manumission as a significant ‘strategic dilemma’ in 302

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the plantation environment of Saint-Domingue. Like Garrigus, he notes that manumission was the site of continued tensions between royal authority and the slaveowners, whose ‘grip on the institution of slavery was weakened’ by acts requiring them to seek administrative approval for granting freedom to slaves. Ghachem also illustrates how administrators progressively attempted to restrict the phenomenon during the eighteenth century with what he calls a ‘politics of risk management’, until a ‘shift’ after the Seven Years’ War made them see it instead as a militarily useful ‘bulwark’ against the slave population.127 Manumission was not simply motivated by sexual or paternal relationships, as Labat illustrates. He arrived on Danish-held SaintThomas in 1705 on a ship which carried two English ladies and their slaves amongst its passengers. One of the slaves was a married female Creole who had been taken from Guadeloupe by the English two years previously, and who had been left on board to look after the baggage. She refused to disembark, protesting that she was Catholic, and that she ‘wanted to die amongst Catholics’. Labat then went to her owner and offered her the price of the slave, claiming that he wanted her to be reunited with her family and to live once more amongst Catholics. The lady, according to Labat, agreed with his motives but replied that she ‘did not want [her slave] to serve others, as she had served her’ and that she would instead free the slave, if her freedom could be guaranteed. A notary was called for, the act of manumission was drawn up, and it was then signed by the governor (who had arrived to visit the ladies), an administrator and a minister. After all this, it took considerable persuasion from Labat before the slave would believe that she had been freed. When she eventually did, Labat was witness to what he called an extremely ‘touching scene’; the slave threw herself before her mistress, repeatedly kissing her feet, all the while ‘shedding tears without speaking’, and with the mistress herself shedding tears.128 This is not the first time that vivid manifestations of sensibility have been encountered in early accounts of slavery. The scene might be compared to the collective response of Jean Barbot’s crew to the slave family they had purchased on the African coast (see Chapter 4), except that here this great emotional release was inspired by a slave being freed from slavery. In this case, the manumission appears to have been motivated by a concern with the slave’s family and faith, on Labat’s side, and by affective links on the mistress’s; it 303

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took place in circumstances which were quite unlike those prevalent in later Saint-Domingue. It also illustrates what is declared in article 57 of the Code Noir; manumission was a rebirth, and in legal terms, quite literally so. What distinguished freedmen from slaves was a fundamental transformation in condition. It has been seen throughout this book how the term, in French, had an even wider range than, to paraphrase Garrigus, the legal or the (proto-)racial. In 1667, Du Tertre understood the distinction between slave and libre as being based on the condition of each, and he noted that (at this stage of the colonies) that of the mother was not inherited.129 When the principle of partus sequitur ventrem was adopted subsequently, the Code Noir crystallised it as the inheritance by slaves of ‘la condition de leur mère’.130 On Saint Kitts in 1682, Mongin observed that freed slaves might be poorer than slaves; he claimed to have been told by a female slave, who was apparently better-off in material terms than her freed mother and two sisters, that ‘she would not wish to swap her condition’ with them.131 Du Tertre and Mongin both indicate the degree to which condition encompassed aspects of the slave’s life that cannot be reduced to the ‘formal’ (to again employ a term used by Garrigus). The conditions of the slave and the emancipated were, of course, distinct, were immediately recognisable to contemporaries and would ultimately be enshrined in law. It can at least be seen, in Labat’s description of the slave who was freed before his eyes, how fundamentally life-changing was a change in condition. Mongin illustrates a further aspect of testimony about the coexistence of a population distinguished into slave, freeborn, and freed conditions. Naturally, he illustrates the widespread desirability of the free condition; he saw the female slave on Saint Kitts as exceptional precisely because she claimed not to desire it. His testimony also hints at the world of subtle distinctions and interactions lived by individuals who inhabited these conditions, and which might be opaque to a free observer. Once more, Bréban and Le Pers’s accounts of Saint-Domingue in the early 1730s are instructive about these conditions. For Bréban, the manumission of slaves was the only usage through which Caribbean slavery reflected that of Ancient Rome (and which was by implication the only redeeming feature of the French form). His discussion of enfranchised slaves appears to be restricted to freed black slaves, as he uses the terms ‘nègres affranchis’ and ‘nègres et 304

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négresses libres’ to describe them (rather than mulâtres, the existence of whom he acknowledged elsewhere). He writes that these freed slaves would ‘profit peacefully’ from the ‘same privileges’ (‘privilèges’) as the French colonials, with one exception: ‘they, no more than slaves, are not allowed to raise a hand to a white’ (‘lever la main sur un blanc’). Other characteristics distinguished freed slaves; they wore shoes, the men bore arms and the women wore their hair in French style. He noted that they were ‘even stricter’ to their slaves than the ‘white’ population; one of them, the priest reports, told him that he ‘knew the black people [‘nation nègre’] better than us’ and recommended that one ‘should excuse them nothing’.132 Le Pers, in his manuscripts, considered the French approach to freeing slaves as a missed opportunity. He contrasted French restrictions on manumission with the comparatively generous approach on the neighbouring Spanish colony. What concerned Le Pers was that opportunities were lost to benefit from the freeing of black slaves, who would be ‘good soldiers’ with valuable intimate knowledge of the land. However, he continued, restrictive French policies would instead lead to them sympathising with the Spanish, amongst whom there were already many freed slaves ‘of French origin’. Le Pers considered the restrictions on the mulâtres in a similar light; the policies might be of use were they capable of stopping the ‘furious promiscuity’ (‘furieux libertinage’) of white men with female slaves, but it seemed to him that nothing could do this. The result was that the mulâtres passed over to the Spanish who regarded them as ‘men who are like themselves and whose colour seems to guarantee their freedom’ (‘des hommes qui leur sont semblables et à qui leur couleur semble assurer la liberté’).133 Both Bréban and Le Pers illustrate that manumission, like métissage, was understood in contextual, transforming contexts. As Debbasch points out, the peculiarities of both phenomena (even in the area of legal rights) depended on such factors as the relative power of freed slaves, and varied in each of the French islands; he emphasises the unique ‘impressive demographic progression [and] remarkable economic growth’ of the libres de couleur in eighteenthcentury Saint-Domingue (this has been further explored by King and Garrigus).134 Although this is a theme that has received attention elsewhere, one aspect of the society it would ultimately lead to in Saint-Domingue should be signposted. In one f­ormulation, 305

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Garraway qualifies the progressive implementation of laws excluding ‘free coloureds’ from social mobility in late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue as part of ‘the establishment of a three-tiered caste society’.135 Yet historical studies hint at other dynamics which blurred the distinctness of social groups, and nuance the idea that there could be strict ‘castes’. King has stressed the importance of the ‘family relationship between master and slave’ for manumission in late eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue (as the ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’ showed, this was a motive from the beginning of colonisation).136 He depicts a complex range of relationships between white planter and ‘free coloured’ slaveowners and their female slaves (in which concerns such as ‘respectability’ might play a part), and a context in which ‘slaves of mixed heritage were extremely uncommon’ because of the ‘social pressure’ on masters to free children.137 King’s study focuses on a later context beyond the chronological limits of this book, but it hints at the many forms of interaction which made up slave society. Ultimately, however power relationships transformed in different colonies throughout the era of slavery, one stratum was always to have coercive power, and the conditions of the free of European descent, slaves and ‘free coloureds’ were always thought of as quite distinct. Nonetheless, throughout the same era, there were circumstances (such as the creation of families) which led to complex contexts of social interaction. If the kinds of situations King has described in later SaintDomingue are representative, one can see how limited a picture many early colonial narratives give of the interactions beyond the dichotomies of slave and master. The other side to this was, of course, the question of how much freed slaves could ultimately ‘belong’ to early colonial ‘society’ itself. It has been noted above, for example, that the Code Noir reserved specific punishments for their infractions, and commanded them to have a ‘singular respect’ for their former masters.138 This may reflect how manumission was, as Ghachem perceptively characterises it, ‘not simply the negation of a master’s property rights over his slaves, but rather a continued exercise of those rights’.139 It was also a form of continuing marginalisation; as Bréban illustrated, slaves and former slaves were both subject to similar proscriptions in at least certain areas. These proscriptions were intended, most evidently, to ensure that power remained in the same stratum. They also ensured that liberated slaves were distinguished from the free306

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born, in contexts from the judicial down to what were ultimately the most discreet social interactions. As Bréban also demonstrates, freed black slaves, in turn, distinguished themselves from slaves, most obviously in their vestimentary habits. This discussion of marriage, métissage and manumission has examined nearly a century of textual productions across diverse geographical and demographic contexts. A tentative thread can be established between them by returning to the question of desire. What is shared by observers of these different contexts is the assumption that slaves had a desire for agency and, most often, for freedom. Even Mongin’s account of a female slave content with her lot on Saint Kitts is based on the assumption that liberty was a widely shared desire. For Garrigus, manumission was ‘the most powerful tool slave owners had’, besides violence.140 That manumission was a lure to slaves was a basic assumption shared by metropolitan commentators such as Melon, for whom it would encourage a slave, ‘flattering his imagination with a happier future’.141 Rather less comfortingly, such an assumption also acknowledged that the present condition of the slave was ­fundamentally unsatisfactory. How closely this corresponded to the experience of slaves is beyond the reach of a study which is limited to European narratives. What can be recognised is how very tense this must have made the act of writing about the slave. Writing about themes such as métissage meant acknowledging the existence of coercive desires and practices within one’s own community. Writing about the condition of slaves meant acknowledging the suppression of the agency, of the desires, of an entire stratum on the edges of society. It also reflected on the cohesion of this community; it acknowledged that the slave society was inherently unstable. * Textual and graphic representations of early Caribbean societies are the reflections of communities that were in constant transformation. What they consistently illustrate is the consciousness that the margins of the colonial environment were unmastered. The shared practices through which culture was constructed were confronted with considerable instability in the Caribbean. Settlers were forced to adapt to new realities, not least, those of the ecology. They were also exposed to alternative forms of culture, p ­ erpetuated 307

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on the margins of the colonies, as long as these settlements existed. Narratives from this era demonstrate that French settlers were acutely aware of how inaccessible certain practices were to them. These are narratives that also acknowledge the limits of society. They were produced in a socio-economic and political context in which swathes of the population were excluded from the social compact, and were confined within a proprietary relationship to a master. They acknowledge that there remained forms of sociability, and with them social links, which European colonists did not (and perhaps could not) master. This sociability is reflected from the most banal of practices, such as African slaves sharing alcohol on early plantations, up to the rumours of the bands of maroons. These were, in other words, frontier narratives in cultural and social, as well as geographical, terms. Their depictions of the limits to colonial power may well reflect the kinds of anxieties that accompanied the settlement of the Caribbean. One might, furthermore, question how early modern readers responded to accounts of slave societies. We must be wary, as readers conscious of the later revolts of Saint-Domingue and the ultimate transformation of slave societies, of teleological interpretations. It has been advanced in this book that authors assumed that reading about ordered, productive environments would inspire a gratifying response. However, this response may have been mitigated by the recognition, in even the most gratifying depictions of settler societies, that they relied on unrewarded, exploited labour. The reading experience may well have been marked by unresolved tension. If it can be said that there was a ‘core’ response to slave society within narratives spanning more than a century, it may well lie in the realm of human relationships. These accounts focus on diverse areas of colonial life, and depict interactions from the most intimate of encounters to the most impersonal forms of violence. They describe slaves complying with relationships of servitude for their own interest, or rejecting servitude and fleeing, or even, through manumission, becoming inflexible masters themselves. Within this range of responses, the desire of the slave appears to lead to one recurrent implication. There are some instances in which this desire was thought to have been domesticated, but it was far more frequently seen as a source of disorder. It was thought to undermine the order of the household, the plantation or even the colony itself. 308

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It is such factors that taint the depictions of slave society; the slave was considered to be fundamentally anti-social. Notes 1 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 61–62. 2 See the reproductions of five early modern French utopies in Frédéric Lachèvre, Les Successeurs de Cyrano de Bergerac (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1922). 3 Lewis, Main Currents, pp. 83–90. 4 ‘la moitié des paroisses de ces quartiers qui sont d’une très grande étendue manquent de curés, … le conseil peut penser qu’il en naît de plus en plus toutes sortes de désordres’, De Sorel (governor) and de Montholon (intendant), from Petit Goave, Saint-Domingue, 12 May 1723, ANOM, C9A 21, fols 121r–126v (fol. 122r). 5 Du Puis, Relation, p. 158. 6 Bouton, Relation, pp. 96–97. 7 ‘ces bois et retraites de la barbarie et sauvagine’, Bouton, Relation, pp. 131–32. 8 Pagden, Lords of All the World, p. 147. 9 On planters’ French and their ‘habitude d’estropier la langue française’ see Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 280. 10 For an example in Mongin’s Journal of the telling of devotional tales on board (Mongin, Journal, MdC, MS 73, fol. 2v; Annales des Antilles, 10, pp. 38–39), see Harrigan, ‘A need to narrate’, p. 31. On the cabaret, and the devotion of illiterate colonists, see Mongin, Letter of 10 May 1679, BM, Fonds Chatillon, Ant MS 9, fols 29r, 30v; L’Évangélisation, pp. 56–57, 59. 11 Mongin, Letter of 10 May 1679, BM, Fonds Chatillon, Ant MS 9, fols 30v, 39v; L’Évangélisation, pp. 59, 72. 12 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 521–24. 13 ‘il débita une si grande quantité de mauvais livres contre la religion, les bonnes mœurs et la discipline que j’en eus différentes plaintes’, Rochalart (governor), from Petit Goave, Saint-Domingue, 28 May 1725, ANOM, C9A 24, non-paginated [pages 6–12/15]. 14 On the distinctions between colonial and metropolitan legislation on slavery, see Peabody, ‘There are no Slaves in France’. 15 See also Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, pp. 73–75. 16 ‘Nous leur sommes toujours présent’, Code Noir, p. 3. On the significance of problems of ‘public policy’ in the Code Noir see Joseph C. Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History, p. 149. 17 See Code Noir, article 58, p. 11. 18 Chevillard, Les Desseins, pp. 23, 24. Colonie is defined as, ­successively,

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a ‘canton, lieu, ville où l’on a transporté des habitants’ and ‘les habitants mêmes que l’on transplante dans un lieu’ in Furetière, Dictionnaire, vol. 1, entry colonie, non-paginated. 19 Bouton, Relation, p. 98. 20 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1654, pp. 469–70. 21 Des mœurs des habitants des colonies, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 471–77. 22 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 472–73. 23 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 474. 24 On dress, consumption patterns and leisure, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 474–75. On drunkenness, compare with Du Tertre, Histoire, 1654, p. 470. 25 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 119–30 (pp. 128–29). 26 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 476. 27 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 474, 477. 28 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 474. 29 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 476. 30 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 474. 31 Des emplois les plus honorables des habitants étrangers des Antilles: de leurs esclaves et de leur gouvernement, Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, pp. 338–44. 32 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 338. 33 ‘il sera bon que nous en disions ici quelque chose’, Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 339. 34 Montchrestien, Traicté, 1889, p. 39. 35 François Bernier, Lettre à Monseigneur Colbert [1670], repr. in Un Libertin dans l’Inde Moghole: les voyages de François Bernier (1656– 1669), ed. by Frédéric Tinguely et al. (Paris: Chandeigne, 2008), pp. 197–232 (pp. 231–32). 36 ‘Déclarons les esclaves être meubles’, Code Noir, article 44, p. 9. 37 Furetière, Dictionnaire, vol. 4, entry société, non-paginated. 38 Pierre Nicole, Raisons fondamentales du devoir de la civilité in Essais de Morale, 4 vols (Paris: Guillaume Desprez, 1733–71), vol 1 (1733), pp. 261–63 (p. 262). 39 Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery, p. 22. 40 ‘l’intérêt présent ayant sur le plus grand nombre plus de pouvoir que le bien public’, Letter from Chateaumont (governor) and Mithon (intendant), Saint-Domingue, 11 April 1718, ANOM, C9A 15, fols 65r–84v (fol. 68r). 41 Ordinance of de Sorel (governor) and de Montholon (intendant), Saint-Domingue, 17 August 1723, ANOM, C9A 21, fols 141r–144v (fol. 142r). 42 Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fols 10r–12r; 1997, pp. 118–19.

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43 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 519. 44 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 515. 45 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 520. 46 Code Noir, article 24, p. 7. See also Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir, pp. 138–39 for a discussion of the ‘practice’ in this regard. 47 Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fols 16v–17r; 1997, pp. 122–23. 48 Lucien Peytraud, L’Esclavage aux Antilles françaises avant 1789 (Paris: Hachette, 1897), pp. 265–69 (p. 266). Peytraud suggests a link between the impossibility of accumulating and slave consumption patterns on p. 269. 49 Code Noir, article 19, p. 6. 50 Niort, Le Code Noir, p. 41. On the ‘fiction’ of slave as ‘object’, see Meillassoux, The Anthropology of Slavery, pp. 9–10, and discussion of Meillassoux in Niort, pp. 40–42. 51 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 519. 52 Le Febvre de La Barre (?), Relation, vol. 1, pp. 45–47. 53 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 3, pp. 430–31. 54 ‘autorité despotique’, Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, p. 100. 55 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 334–42. 56 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery, pp. 118–21. 57 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, pp. 42, 44, 47. 58 Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, pp. 103–04. 59 Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, p. 106. On matelotage in Du Tertre, see Christopher L. Miller, who sees within a ‘sexual ambiguity ... revealed by the telltale sign of jealousy’. The French Atlantic Triangle, p. 309. See also Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 110–11. 60 Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, pp. 106, 124. 61 ‘lors qu’il y du péril ils chassent tous ensemble’, Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, 106. 62 Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, p. 125. 63 Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, p. 106. 64 Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, pp. 111–12. 65 Nouvelles de l’Amérique, p. 223. 66 Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, p. 112. 67 Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, p. 124. 68 On ‘aristocratic heroism’ see Garraway, The Libertine Colony, p. 115; on ‘transgression’, p. 119. 69 Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, p. 114. 70 Oexmelin, Histoire, 1699, vol. 1, pp. 119–23. 71 Laon, Relation, p. 158. 72 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 527–28. 73 Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in

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Old Regime France (Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 21. 74 Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex, p. 52 quoting Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’Île Saint-Domingue, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Paris: Guérin and Morgand, 1875), vol. 1, p. 75 and vol. 2, p. 139 (translations Crowston). 75 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 498; Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 64. 76 On the distribution of alcohol before difficult labour, and the monopolisation by commandeurs, Du Tertre, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 514–15. On the distribution of tafia in times of intense labour, see Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles françaises, p. 149. 77 Pelleprat, Relation des Isles de l’Amérique, p. 64. 78 Code Noir, article 23, p. 6. 79 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 528. 80 ‘il n’est pas permis aux nègres de s’attabler ni même d’entrer dans les cabarets mais seulement de boire un coup debout et à la porte’, Blénac (governor) and Mithon (intendant), 20 July 1715, from Léogane, Saint-Domingue, ANOM, C9A 11, fols 108r–117v (fol. 112v). 81 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 342. 82 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 499–500, 526. 83 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 499–500. 84 Niort, Le Code Noir, p. 55. 85 Monnereau, Parfait Indigotier, p. 110. 86 ‘les nègres … destinent ces jours quand il y a deux ou trois fêtes de suite aux vols, aux prostitutions, aux assemblées, aux marronages, aux batteries et quelquefois aux complots dont les conséquences sont à craindre’, Chateaumorlant (governor) and Mithon (intendant), 4  January 1719, from Léogane, Saint-Domingue, ANOM, C9A 16, fols 3r–17v (fol. 7r–7v). 87 Code Noir, article 16, pp. 5–6. On slave religious assemblies, see Hall, Social Control, pp. 39–41. 88 Silvia W. de Groot, Catherine A. Christen and Franklin W. Knight, ‘Maroon communities in the circum-Caribbean’, in Franklin W. Knight et al., eds, General History of the Caribbean (London; Basingstoke: UNESCO Publishing, 1997–2011), vol. 3: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (1997), pp. 169–93 (p. 169). For an account of the conflicts between Spanish, followed by British, settlers and substantial maroon bands in seventeenth-century Jamaica, see Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal (Granby, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), pp. 14–43.

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89 De Groot et al., ‘Maroon communities’, pp. 170, 189; See also Hall, Social Control, pp. 61–66. On slave communities as ‘permanent pockets of slave military power’, see Hall, p. 66. 90 Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles françaises, pp. 412, 422–23. 91 Régent, La France et ses esclaves, pp. 161–62, 169–70, 175. 92 ‘la conséquence qu’il y aurait eû à impliquer un Blanc dans un cas pareil’, ANOM, F3 26, fol. 383r–383v. 93 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 153–54. 94 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 500–02. See also Thornton, Africa and Africans, p. 303. 95 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 537. 96 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 535–36. 97 Rochefort, Histoire, 1665, p. 342; Froger, Relation, p. 149. 98 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 536. 99 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 1, p. 132. 100 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 536–37. 101 On the difficulties in assembling historical evidence of Jamaican Maroon communities, see Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, p. 5. 102 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 5, p. 256–57. 103 Margat, Letter of 2 February 1729, p. 149. 104 Margat, Letter of 2 February 1729, pp. 150–51. 105 Ducros, le Père, Letter, 17 October 1725 (‘d’Ariancoupan près de Pondichéry), Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, vol. 18 (Paris: Nicolas Le Clerc, 1728), pp. 1–32 (pp. 13–14). 106 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 504–05. 107 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fols 94r–95v; Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, MS 185, fols 18r–19v; L’Évangélisation, pp. 89–91. 108 Code Noir, article 11, p. 5. 109 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fols 94v–95r; Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier MS 185, fols 19r–19v; L’Évangélisation, p. 90. 110 Code Noir, article 10, p. 5. 111 On the (lack of a) dowry see Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 95r; Alternative copy of 1682 Letter, AJPF, Fonds Brotier, fol. 19r; L’Évangélisation, p. 90. 112 Debbasch, Couleur et liberté, pp. 23, 26, 27. 113 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 199, 204, 207. 114 De la naissance honteuse des mulâtres, et de leur condition, Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 511–13. 115 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, p. 513. 116 ‘Ils ont le fond des yeux jaune, sont hideux à voir, de mauvaise humeur,

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traîtres, et capables des plus grands crimes.’ Oexmelin, Histoire, 1686, vol. 1, p. 77; 1699, vol. 1, p. 93. 117 Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fol. 22r; 1997, p. 126. 118 Melon, Essai, pp. 71–72. 119 ‘notre but dit-on, est de conserver plus longtemps la couleur blanche parmi nous, quoique un peu plus tôt, un peu plus tard, le sort des peuples entre les deux Tropiques sera d’être bruns ou basanés, c’està-dire de tenir une espèce de milieu pour la couleur entre le blanc et le noir. Les Espagnols en sont déjà presque tous là et nous commençons nous-mêmes à l’éprouver parmi notre populace. Je suis actuellement dans une paroisse des montagnes, nommée Sainte Rose, où il y a une vingtaine de filles mulâtresses à marier, sept ou huit négresses libres et trois ou quatres filles blanches seulement.’ Le Pers, Histoire, BnF, MS Fr 8992, fol. 126r. 120 For an extensive analysis of manumission, see Peytraud, L’Esclavage, pp. 400–34. 121 Chevillard, Les Desseins, p. 194. 122 ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’, Relation, p. 121. 123 On the influence of Roman law on manumission, Watson, Slave Law in the Americas, pp. 86–88. Watson suggests manumission is the ‘central issue’, adding ‘after perhaps that of who are the slaves’, p. 23. 124 Code Noir, article 39, pp. 8–9; articles 57, 58, 59, p. 11. 125 Garrigus, Before Haiti, pp. 41–42. 126 Garrigus, Before Haiti, pp. 40–42. On the expectation in later SaintDomingue that men would ‘manumit and provide support for’ their children with slaves, see p. 40. 127 On the ‘strategic dilemma’, see Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, p. 30; on administrative interference, p. 83; on ‘risk management’ and manumission as a ‘bulwark’, pp. 80–81; on the military usefulness of manumission, p. 111. 128 Labat, Nouveau Voyage, 1722, vol. 6, pp. 433–35. 129 Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 2, pp. 512–13. 130 Code Noir, article 13, p. 5. 131 Mongin, Letter of May 1682, MdC, MS 73, fol. 83v; L’Évangélisation, p. 77. 132 Bréban, Letter, AdC, 2F 788, fols 29r–30r; 1997, pp. 129–30. 133 Le Pers, Histoire, BnF, MS Fr 8992, fol. 126r. 134 Debbasch, Couleur et liberté, pp. 78–79. 135 Garraway, The Libertine Colony, pp. 209, 213–15. 136 King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, p. 108. 137 On the importance of ‘respectability’ to ‘free coloureds’, see King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig, p. 183; on the rarity of mulâtre slaves, p. 94.

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138 On the obligation for ‘respect’ as evidence of the limits to manumission in later Saint-Domingue, see Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, pp. 98–100. 139 Ghachem, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution, p. 119. 140 Garrigus, Before Haiti, p. 40. 141 Melon, Essai, p. 69.

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Conclusion

Oral and textual accounts of the Caribbean colonies were one vector of knowledge about unfamiliar social, cultural and religious practices that reached early modern France from around the globe. What was distinctive about them was precisely that they described French possessions, or what were ultimately the margins of the kingdom. Such narratives had considerable potential to act on the  collective consciousness. They could spread knowledge about the possession of the colonies to the public, and contribute to shaping how the kingdom was imagined by its subjects.1 They could help to make socio-cultural practices (forms of consumption, for example) acceptable, in what could be, quite literally, a domestication of difference. In this way, they helped shape the very ‘margins’ of France, in cultural terms. This is a dynamic that has much in common with Pratt’s model of the ‘peripheral’ action of the colonies on the metropolis.2 They also contributed to the construction of collective representations of slaves and slavery in the society of early modern France. Knowledge about such representations can only be partial, but five aspects can be suggested that reflect on thinking about early French slavery. These concern the sites of the production of representations, as well as different forms of belonging and of ‘marginality’. These representations, first, emanated from different sites of cultural production. Narratives that relate to the existence of slaves were produced in distinct contexts and reflected various preoccupations. Making Christians of slaves was of considerable importance 316

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to those who participated in spiritual initiatives, for example, while their exploitation as sources of labour was the priority of those preoccupied with the temporal domain (and, as Labat shows, one could participate in initiatives in both realms). Texts instructed, guided behaviours, and provided organisational and disciplinary strategies for temporal interests. They might also promote spiritual initiatives and edify, and criticise the physical treatment of slaves as morally questionable. They illustrate how representations of slaves reflected the concerns of individuals and collectivities. In turn, they illustrate how diffuse early ‘colonial power’ actually was. However, these narratives also reflected (however obliquely) colonial social structures. There were certainly some representations of slaves, such as the spiritual exempla, that were conventional and that appear to reflect idealised models of behaviour. Such conventional forms must be considered to be weak reflections of slave existence (although they do illustrate under what conditions slaves were of interest in the first place). Nonetheless, colonial narratives were also conceived of as the reflection of lived human interactions, and by extension, of the socio-economic order. They were constructions – more or less elaborate, certainly, but constructions nonetheless – of such distinctions between people(s) as status, rank, or condition. This book has discussed accounts which seem to focus on slaves to different extents. Some simply enumerate them (as did Dralsé in Africa), some mention them in passing (Beaumont), some describe their interactions with missionaries in the Caribbean (Chevillard), and some their labour in the plantations (as in Du Tertre and Labat); many describe the violence of their existence.3 All these forms of narrative – from the most basic reflections of plantation slaves (the evaluations which reduced them to a source of labour in the most absolute of ways), to sustained explorations such as Du Tertre’s – were socially significant. They are diverse reflections of the existence of colonial slaves, but they are all written from the perspective of a distinct socio-economic stratum. Diffuse as colonial power was, French commentators were nonetheless united by the awareness of their fundamental belonging, which distinguished them from a subservient labouring stratum. There is a third aspect to such collective representations that reflects on the models of slave marginalisation that have been frequently discussed in this book. Early colonial society set slaves apart from Europeans through a range of social and physical 317

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­ echanisms. Authoritative narratives constructed from a well of m shared legal and social understandings might reinforce these mechanisms. Textual accounts, in turn, depicted slaves who were on the edges of society, who were said to be without history and perhaps even outside time. Yet such narratives cannot be said to have completely excluded slaves. Certain aspects of slave existence were of interest, even of considerable concern, to French authors and readers. Commentators were reticent about some areas of slaves’ existence, ambivalent about others, and acknowledged still others with apparent tranquillity. This dynamic might be compared with what Miers and Kopytoff consider to be a ‘problem’ even more significant within a slave society than that of exclusion, which they qualify as ‘that of including the stranger while continuing to treat him as a stranger’. They consider this to be a ‘problem’ which is ‘common to all slave systems’, and which governs all the interactions of slaves within such societies, or as they write, the range of specific ‘marginalities’ slaves have in relation to ‘all and every person, group, position and institution’ within.4 On some levels, early French accounts of the colonies might also be thought to struggle with ‘inclusive’ as well as exclusive processes, reflecting what such anthropological perspectives consider to be a dilemma essential to slave societies. However, as it has been repeatedly seen, early French narratives were the product of contextual encounters between people and between ‘groups’, and they also reflect strategic responses employed by individuals and collectivities for diverse ends. If they also reflected tensions concerning ‘inclusion’, they did so as actors concerned, to varying degrees, with the slave economy. They might justify practices of slavery, or decry its excesses, or counsel methods of discipline, but they did so as participants within temporal or spiritual initiatives, most often with the intention of perpetuating forms of interest. Such texts and images were the result of multiple interactions (to use Miers and Kopytoff’s model, with multiple ‘people, groups and positions’), and of a range of responses to the distinct social condition of slaves. The early French Caribbean context was radically different to the African societies studied by Miers and Kopytoff, and not least in the nature of the interactions between the groups who inhabited plantation society. A fourth aspect of collective representations stems from the fact that the colonies were ultimately politically marginal 318

Conclusion

in relation to metropolitan France, and socially and culturally marginal; their labour practices and social distinctions were acknowledged within France to be distinct, and even unacceptable. In other words, already marginalised slaves inhabited a zone that, in relation to the metropolis, was itself very much marginal. We can only speculate on how early modern French subjects experienced this. It has been seen that, even in these conditions, some took an avid interest in what was happening in the distant colonies. For others, one might well ask if it meant that the existence of slaves was thought about (to the extent that it was thought about) in much more abstract terms. This invites a final suggestion, which relates to the condition of the slave. It has been advanced that for those who did observe colonial slavery, writing about slave existence was an inherently fraught process. Yet these commentators were nonetheless implicated in forming the social distinction of slaves. Rather than simply writing what we have come to think about as ‘sources’, at a remove of centuries, their narratives once participated in a widespread process of shaping knowledge. Their accounts of colonial societies were, no doubt, absorbed in as many distinct ways as there were reading (and listening) experiences. Nonetheless, part of what they did was to form the social specificity of slaves. Through multiple reading experiences, they participated in the creation of a collective identity, a sense of belonging, even amongst those who would never see the colonies. * This account of the traces of the slave has explored a disparate group of narratives. Letters, histories and descriptions illustrate how testimony about servitude was circulated in early modern France by participants in colonial–spiritual initiatives or expeditions to coastal Africa. These narratives were part of diverse exchanges within early modern French society and its colonies. There were personal or family exchanges, and texts intended to influence political favour, investment patterns, even vocational preferences, as well as memoirs and histories. Many were more concerned with the interests of associations or individuals than with national interests. These are narratives that are telling about the instability of early modern colonisation. They testify to the fragility of the settlements which we now look back on as the ‘early’ colonies. This was an often tentative expansion, and it led to new configurations of culture and 319

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human interactions. These narratives testify to anxieties about the precarious existence of human populations, and about the proximity of alternative forms of society and behaviour. Early Atlantic accounts in French also instruct us about how Europeans saw themselves. From the testimony left by mariners and missionaries off the West African coast, to the manuals detailing the exploitation of Caribbean plantations, all testify to what it meant to be European. This was a multifaceted identity. It meant belonging to Christianity, most importantly. It also meant sharing in something approaching what is now called ethnicity, in what were numerous – very versatile – spheres of belonging. It entailed shared understanding of concepts relating to land, time and labour. It translated as a sentiment of superiority in marshalling resources and accumulating and transferring knowledge, which accompanied the distinctions in faith and in physiognomy. Such narratives are also telling about slaves. They tell us about the state of temporal ‘captivity’ to which slaves were condemned. This captivity was an often vague construction; it was partly understood through a corpus of narratives familiar to Europeans, but was also reflected, uncertainly, in European accounts of African societies. It was thought to have its roots in an original infraction, which could be paid for by one’s descendants. Early narratives also reveal how important liberation in the spiritual realm was to colonial missionaries. Being admitted to a spiritual community was the consolation for the miseries of slavery. The colonial slave was imagined in two temporalities, capable of existence on the spiritual plane, and condemned to non-existence in the temporal. In the colonies, the proprietary relationship was defined by social, moral and legal conventions. These would evolve along with social, environmental and other conditions, and they illustrate how slavery was perpetuated by shared, contextual understanding as much as by authoritative discourses. There were prescriptions about what had to be done in the event of certain behaviours. A legal framework laid out the conditions of proprietorship, and crystallised a certain number of the theoretical constraints to this. There were legal and moral proscriptions on what might be done to a male or a female slave, which tell us that in principle, many colonial actors conceived of limits to the proprietary relationship. These limits implied, by necessity, the body. One pole around which these conventional limits often condensed was the extent or 320

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the type of labour demanded of slaves. The slave could be assimilated to property in certain contexts (most obviously, financial). Nonetheless, he or she was not, and could not, be considered in the same manner as animal or inanimate property. The proprietorship of masters – in principle – enveloped certain types of labour. This translated, most obviously, as the ownership of slaves’ rights to accumulation, but it also extended, for example, to the control of certain forms of displacement. So while, naturally, such concerns as order and security motivated the control of slaves, what the master owned by right was a reserved domain, a range of conventional uses of the body. These uses dovetailed with the requirements of an early capitalist economy. Throughout the era of Caribbean colonisation, the primary use of African slaves was in plantation labour, or, for the most part, depersonalised, repetitive, intensive labour. While, as it has been seen, the planter stratum was quite aware of the importance of conserving this labour, stretching it physically to the brink appears to have lain within the limits of conventional ownership. Beyond these uses, there are also discreet reflections in the early colonial corpus of the other functions that slaves fulfilled. Although their primary function in the plantation context was in the production of cash crops, there are hints that they could have accessory functions as sources of prestige. This potential is most obvious in imaginative reflections about non-capitalist slavery, but it can also be seen in appreciative accounts of the plantation environment. Beyond the unique human capacities for labour, and the production of a surplus, there were further attractions to holding a slave. Holding another human being in a state of continuing domination had a distinct appeal. The conventional, theoretical limits to slavery were frequently transgressed in practice. Descriptions of Caribbean slave societies testify to the widespread sexual coercion to which female slaves were subjected. This could be viewed as an infringement of moral limits on the uses of the body, and as a misuse of labour. Violence that went beyond the acceptable, casual forms that were so integral to proprietorship could be criticised. Certain types of violence were wholly the domain of the master, and others were sanctioned collectively. The consciousness of the resistance of slaves is reflected in descriptions of prescriptive strategies to ensure their labour. There 321

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were further reflections of the awareness of practical limits to slave governance which were imposed by the ecological and social conditions of the colonies. Resistance was acknowledged in accounts based on both paradigmatic understanding (on the idea that there was a constant dynamic in the master-slave relationship) as well as on what was claimed to be personal experience of the plantations. Depictions of the hostile bind between master and slave belie the idea that slavery could be assimilated to a paternal relationship. Colonial-era narratives also tell us of the importance of and the limits to knowledge in Caribbean contexts. Their descriptions of the ways that slaves were enumerated, evaluated and made to labour are striking testimony to human exploitation. Yet these accounts were produced during an era in which French settlers and missionaries were constantly exposed to unstable cultural frontiers. They echo subversive responses to the power of planters, in which slaves seemed to mock, accuse or even speak an unrecognisable language. They also hint that there was one ultimately impenetrable frontier in the colonies, and it was the consciousness of the slave. This is the curious tension that marks depictions of slave populations, at times apparently sedate, and at others remarkably threatening. This body of narratives can still instruct us about the most fundamental implications of accounts of dominated peoples. They show in what the script could be a powerful tool for domination, in its capacity to distribute data and techniques across vast spaces. They also testify to the responses destined for the restricted circles who could read about colonial production. They were a forum for those who were confident of having unique access to a medium of communication. On one hand, they betray the consciousness of power, and they tell us about the sites in which it was thought to lie. On the other, they tell us what those who held power most feared. Doubtless, the consciousness of the ultimate transformation of colonial slave systems, and the violent revolt against slavery on Saint-Domingue, haunts how we now read accounts of slavery. Yet the unease of domination can be read even in these early artefacts, despite the centuries that separate us from those who produced, read and viewed them. They tell us not just of knowledge, of control and power but of their limits. They acknowledge that the slave was a desiring subject, even within the limits of captivity. In so doing, they tell us of the resistances that push against domination. 322

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Notes 1 See, for example, the acts of possession such as the contract and articles of the Compagnie in Du Tertre, Histoire, 1667, vol. 1, pp. 46–59. 2 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 6. 3 See Beaumont, Lettre, p. 7; Chevillard, Les Desseins, pp. 145–46. 4 Miers and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, pp. 15–16.

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Index

Note: ‘n’ after a page number refers to a note on that page. Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Affiches américaines 261 alcohol 114, 118–20, 219, 275, 279–80, 287–89 Alexis de Saint-Lô 92n.78, 100, 114, 216 Amerindians 29, 68, 104–05, 125–35, 137–38, 142, 165, 205–06, 245–46 animals and slaves 190–93 ‘Anonyme de Grenade’ 29 ‘Anonyme de Saint-Christophe’ 29, 51, 67, 139, 187, 302 ‘Anonyme de Saint-Vincent’ 29, 134–35 Antoine, Régis 70 Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide 213–14 Arendt, Hannah 163, 180, 277 Aristotle 10, 54–55, 119, 190, 205 Aubert, Guillaume 106 Banton, Michael 106 baptism 141–47 Barbary States 99–101

Barbot, Jean 30–31, 107–08, 122, 125, 216, 251–52, 303 Bartelemi (Nouvelles de l’Amérique) 219–20, 284–85 Beaumont, Philippe de 71, 102 Bégot, Danielle 83, 85 Benci, Jorge 265n.21 Berlin, Ira 253 Bernier, François 107, 111, 277 Biet, Antoine 31, 181, 261–62 Biondi, Carminella 61, 106 Blackburn, Robin 36n.27, 138, 191 Bodin, Jean 10–12, 55–56, 99, 117, 119, 259 Bosman, William 186 boucaniers 284–87, 295 Boucher, Philip P. 7, 8–9 Boulle, Pierre H. 107 Bouton, Jacques 28, 139, 173, 180, 182, 203, 205, 213, 253, 272, 274 Boyer, Paul 65, 193 branding 190, 259–61

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INDEX

Bréban, Claude Atlantic slavery 118, 122, 173 interacting with slaves 144, 210–13 deceit and theft 219, 228, 254, 279–80 heritage of slaves 63 letter of 1732 27, 74 manumission 304–05 plantations 77–78, 174 treatment of slaves 142, 190, 192, 247, 255, 258, 259, 280, 300–01 Breton, Raymond 29, 68, 199n.119, 207, 209 Brown, Vincent 16, 250 Brue, André 30 Bruzen de la Martinière, AntoineAugustin 122

Cohen, William B. 13, 117, 137 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 48, 72, 277–78 Columbus, Christopher 67 condition 14–17, 133–34, 185, 263, 304 Coppier, Guillaume 26, 71, 101, 114, 162, 189 corporeality 17–18, 111–12, 162, 175–80, 224, 258–63, 299–301 Corpus Iuris Civilis see jurisprudence Crassus, Marcus Licinius 97 credit 243, 288 Creole see language Crowston, Clare Haru 288 Curran, Andrew 62 Curtin, Philip D. 8, 168, 187

Caillé de Castres, Moïse 31, 130–32, 134 captivity 58–60, 100–02, 114–20, 125–35, 147–48 Capuchins 7, 9, 28, 114, 126–30, 142, 143, 212, 270 Caribs see Amerindians Cato, Marcus Porcius 97, 168–69 Chambonneau, Louis Moreau de 108–09 Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier de 28, 204, 220–21, 224–25, 238, 247–48, 256 Charron, Pierre 56, 88n.21, 99, 190 Chatillon, Marcel 27, 74 Chaudenson, Robert 8, 82 Chevillard, André 29, 142, 182, 205–07, 212, 274, 300, 302 Clodoré, Robert de 48, 70 Code Noir 9, 262, 273, 278, 280, 281, 289, 290, 298–99, 302, 304

D’Abbeville, Claude 34n.11, 93n.86, 126–31 Dampierre, Jacques de 28, 47 David, Bernard 36n.33 Davis, David Brion 12, 37n.46, 54, 56–57, 58, 105, 141, 283 Davis, Natalie Zemon 70 Davis, Robert C. 100 Debbasch, Yvan 9, 13, 106, 299, 305 Debien, Gabriel 10, 23, 50, 259, 260, 291 De Certeau, Michel 19, 72, 229 De Groot, Silvia W. et al 291 Delbée 31, 116, 119 De Paty, Jean-Joseph 161, 165 D’Esnambuc, Pierre Belain 66, 270 D’Évreux, Yves 126–30 discipline 168, 243–48, 261–63 Dobie, Madeleine 14, 25, 47, 102, 104, 133, 171, 178 Dominicans 9, 29, 70, 142, 205, 223, 290

325

INDEX

Dorlin, Elsa 106, 107 Dralsé de Grand-Pierre 104–05, 118, 121, 140 Ducros 296 Du Puis, Mathias 70, 272 Du Tertre, Jean-Baptiste Amerindians 131–33, 137–38, 144 Atlantic slavery 55, 63, 117, 138–39 colonial economy 82, 166–67, 185, 280–82, 187, 223 colonial society 100, 270–71, 274–76, 287–90, 298, 300, 304 loyalty and sensibility 213, 215–16, 218, 221, 252–53 maroon slaves 292–94 slave faculties 141, 202 surveillance and violence 179, 239, 244–47, 249, 254–55, 261 texts 29–30, 35n13, 47, 49–50, 65–69, 70–71, 73 Dyonet, Nicole 41n.102, 74

Fogel, Robert W. 46 Foster, William Henry 99 Foucault, Michel 249 ‘free coloureds’ 24, 73, 305–06 Froger, François 103, 105, 119, 121–22, 123, 124, 192, 252, 293 Fromageau, Germain 59–61, 118, 193 Furetière, Antoine 14, 98, 184, 202–03, 278

ecology 53, 67, 76, 167, 283–87, 292–94 edification 74, 75, 77 Elias, Norbert 182, 185 Eltis, David 11, 112, 188, 278 engagés see indentured labourers England, colonies 7, 145, 250, 253, 261, 270 Épiphane de Moirans 143 Ertler, Klaus-Dieter 74, 75 esprit 202–09, 217, 222 Exquemelin see Oexmelin, Alexandre Fabian, Johannes 181, 183 fidelity 218–21, 242, 247–48 flibustier (anonymous) 26, 131, 134

Galiffet, Joseph de 165 Garnsey, Peter 46 Garraway, Doris 24, 50, 106, 141–42, 161, 191, 225, 256, 275–76, 285, 299, 306 Garrigus, John D. 13, 23–24, 36n.25, 73, 302–03, 307 Gaspard 249 Gautier, Arlette 147 Gautier du Tronchoy 150n.36, 250 Ghachem, Malick W. 18, 36n.28, 262, 302–03, 306 Grégoire 257–58 Grenada 263 Grotius, Hugo 58–59, 117 Guadeloupe 7, 29, 100, 181, 187, 223, 272, 292 Guillaumin, Colette 107, 112, 259 Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo 225, 251 Ham, son of Noah 61–63, 108, 119 Harrigan, Michael 39n.75, 88n.20, 149n.7 Heers, Jacques 34n.7 Heller, Henry 149n.5, 164 history histoire 64–69 ‘historical’ and ‘literary’ readings 49–51 Hobbes, Thomas 278

326

INDEX

honour 16, 48, 127–28, 130–32, 135, 189, 276 hospitality 274–76, 287 Hoüel, Charles 66, 70, 223 Hsia, Ronnie Po-Chia 238 Hulme, Peter 133 indentured labourers 100, 112, 173, 181, 186–89, 275–76, 285 indigo 31–32, 83, 84, 85, 175–76 iron 129, 136, 223, 293–94 Isaiah 129, 244 Islam 99, 100, 113, 147 Jaca, Francisco José de 143 Jamaica 250 Jannequin, Claude 108, 115, 117 Jesuits 9–10, 73–74, 77–78, 142, 143, 206, 207, 210, 244, 280, 295–97 Jews 9, 61, 114, 145 Jordan, Winthrop D. 11, 102 jurisprudence 12, 57–61 Katsari, Constantina and Enrico Dal Lago 34n.10 Kidd, Colin 61 King, Stewart R. 23–24, 35n. 21, 147, 306 Labat, Jean-Baptiste Africans 120, 121 branding slaves 259–60 colonial society 1–3, 187, 273 conversion 145 human difference 107 manumission 303 maroon slaves 294–95 plantation labour 169–72, 175–79, 183–85, 241–43 treatment of slaves 142, 217–18, 253–54, 282–83

texts 30, 51, 70 Laborie, Jean-Claude 100 labour in Africa 121 in colonies 135–41, 162–63 and condition 102 organisation of 84–85, 169–75, 176–78 ownership of 167–68, 181–83, 185 La Courbe, Michel Jajolet de 30, 43n.121, 62–63, 112–13 La Fayole, Léonor de 71 La Mousse, Jean de 75–76 Landers, John 223 language 209–14 Laon, J. de, Sieur d’Aigremont 31, 286–87 law of nations 57–60, 117 Le Breton, Adrien 29, 62, 139 Le Clerc, Sébastien 39n.70, 82, 83, 84, 85, 240 Le Febvre de La Barre, JosephAntoine 31, 48, 70, 72, 252, 271 Le Hirbec, Daniel 87n.9 Le Maire, Jacques-Joseph 72, 115–16, 119, 120, 121, 122 Le Pers, Jean-Baptiste 28, 63, 301–02, 305 see also Charlevoix, PierreFrançois-Xavier de Léry, Jean de 19, 125, 131 Lestringant, Frank 126, 131 Lettres édifiantes et curieuses 28, 77 Lewis, Gordon K. 27, 245, 271 Ligon, Richard 145 Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van 99 Locke, John 164–65, 178, 283 Lovejoy, Paul E. 147 Loyer, Godefroy 29, 109, 119, 120, 205

327

INDEX

MacGaffey, Wyatt 121 manumission 302–07 Maranhão 7, 126–30 Margat de Tilly, Jean-Baptiste 8, 51, 76–77, 110, 142, 206, 211, 295–96 Marmol y Carvajal, Luis del 61, 107 marriage 145, 213, 215, 258, 275, 289, 298–99 marronage 290, 291–97 Martinique 1–2, 7, 8, 9, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 48, 116, 133, 134, 139, 216, 238–39, 251, 252, 272, 274, 291, 292, 294–95 Matthew 93n.86, 143 Maurile de Saint Michel 28, 62, 119, 136, 143, 151n.43 Mauritius 296–97 Meillassoux, Claude 15–16, 150n.23, 192, 263, 311n.50 Melon, Jean-François 113, 218–19, 301, 307 Mercator, Gerard 136 Mercure françois 71 métissage 101, 113, 179, 299–302 Miers, Suzanne and Igor Kopytoff 14–15, 217, 263, 318 Miller, Christopher L. 21, 22, 39n.78, 46, 122 Miller, Joseph C. 16, 34n.10, 112, 174, 264 Mongin, Jean on African traditions 62 capacities of slaves 203–05 deceit 221–22 language 210 manuscripts 26–27, 37n.47, 41n.100, 41n.101 marriage 213, 298–99 religion 11–12, 75, 111, 146, 208, 225–28, 273

sexual coercion 257 slave trade 117–18, 190 Monnereau, Élie 31, 167, 169, 180, 183, 184, 282, 290 Montaigne, Michel de 19, 125–26, 131 Montchrestien, Antoine de 19, 97, 194, 277 Moreau, Guillaume 207 Moreau, Jean-Pierre 7, 26 Moreau de Saint-Méry, Louis-Élie 159n.225, 288 Muir, Edward 181 mulâtres see métissage N***, Mr de 32, 83, 190–93 natural law 10, 12, 57–58, 117 Nicole, Pierre 278 Niort, Jean-François 112, 281, 290 Nouvelles de l’Amérique 32, 49–50, 188–89, 219–20, 284–85 numeracy 114, 130, 166–67, 172, 176, 204 Nyquist, Mary 58 Oexmelin (Exquemelin), Alexandre 32, 188–89, 284–87, 293, 300 Pacifique de Provins 28 Pagden, Anthony 38n.50, 309n.8 Paton, Diane 250 Patterson, Orlando 12, 15–16, 48, 56, 127–28, 135, 189, 259, 283, 294 Peabody, Sue 10, 11, 34n.1, 36n.24, 79, 110–11, 141–42, 143, 146, 225 Pelleprat, Pierre 27, 28, 42n.106, 110, 117, 144, 166, 190, 203, 206, 208, 210, 211, 284, 289 Petitjean-Roget, Jacques 82 Peytreaud, Lucien 281

328

INDEX

Phérotée de La Croix, A. 99–100 Phillips, William D. 102 Pluchon, Pierre 10, 225 Plutarch 55 Poincy, Philippe de Longvilliers de 66, 79, 80, 85, 165, 166, 173–74 Poinsset, Martin 207–09, 238 polemics 52, 64, 70 portraits of slave societies graphic 80–86, 121–24 textual 75–79 Portugal and Portuguese 59, 60, 101, 103, 117–18, 166, 192, 244, 246 ‘possessive individualism’ (Eltis) 112, 166 postcolonial criticism 22 Pratt, Mary Louise 24, 316 Pritchard, James 7, 35n.16 property and accumulation 164–68, 172–73, 184–85, 275–78, 280–81 Protestants 11, 12, 30–31, 78, 111, 145, 207–08 punishment 248–49, 261–62, 306 race 23–24, 61–63, 106–13, 300–01 Raveneau de Lussan, Jacques 72 Régent, Frédéric 6, 14, 291 Regourd, François 51, 73 Relation of 1671 31, 70, 118–19, 139, 282 religion and human difference 110–12 Scripture and slavery 54, 59, 61–63, 129, 244 sin 56–57, 63 and slaves’ capacities 203–04, 206–07 and social cohesion 272–73 Robert, François-Roger 238–39

Rochefort, Charles de 30, 78–79, 80–82, 84, 111, 131, 165–67, 173–74, 240, 244–45, 271, 275–77, 289, 293 rumour 228–29, 284, 295–96 Rushforth, Brett 6, 24, 55, 117–19, 264n.1 Saint-Domingue 7, 8, 21, 23–24, 76–78, 106, 142, 161, 168, 228–29, 244, 247, 255, 257–58, 260, 273, 279, 284–87, 295, 300–01, 304–06 Saint Kitts 7, 11, 26, 62, 66, 71, 75, 79, 111, 143, 146, 208, 210, 213, 219, 221–22, 270, 298, 304 Saint-Vincent 29, 134–35, 252 Sala-Molins, Louis 62 Savary, Jacques 137 Scott, James C. 24, 230, 255 script 19–20, 69, 71–73, 172, 230, 255, 258–59, 261, 273, 322 secrecy 221–25, 253 Seed, Patricia 161 self-interest 277–83 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus 55–56, 190, 218, 244, 252 Senegal 62–63, 72, 108–09, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121, 216 sensibility 214–18, 303–04 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 39n.77, 55 sexual coercion 147, 179, 191, 256–58, 300 Shelford, April G. 34n.1 Snyder, Jon R. 224 sorcery 225–29 space in the colonies 75–77, 169, 239–41 Spain, colonies 12, 55, 143, 168, 286, 300, 301, 305

329

INDEX

strategies ceding property 280–83 devotional 207–09, 211–12, 273 of discipline and violence 243–48 for evaluating slaves 190–91 organising labour 169–73, 175–78, 182–84 range of 18–19 surveillance and control 237–43, 253–55 sugar 81–85, 140, 166, 169–72, 174, 177–79, 183, 241 superstition 176, 226–29 Swaminathan, Srividhya and Adam R. Beach 16

Tabet, Paola 172 Thomas, Keith 76, 164 Thornton, John 131, 136 time chronologies 66–68, 180–82 in plantations 176, 182–86 Tomlins, Christopher 99, 148 Trinitarians 100, 146 Varro, Marcus Terentius 168, 200n.129 Watson, Alan 57, 302 Weiss, Gillian 101–02, 149n.9 Welch, Ellen 188–89 Williams, Caroline A. 4

330