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These agents delivered their victims to the fearsome slave castles where the transatlantic slave trade, dominated by the British, French and Dutch, was intensifying. It is currently estimated that 6,494,619 slaves were traded across the Atlantic in the period 1701–1800, over half the total of the entire Atlantic slave trade between 1492 and 1866. British ships transported over three million persons between 1618 and 1807, mostly during the eighteenth century. The French transported over two million between 1625 and 1848. It was a well-tried coercive system, but there was resistance.

Out of 36,000 voyages, there were 500 rebellions. The story of the Dutch slaver Neptunus demonstrates why they so rarely succeeded: on 17 October 1785, off the west African coast, 200 enslaved prisoners were delivered via canoes by African slave traders to Neptunus. The prisoners rebelled and seized the ship, but African slave hunters – paid to recapture escapees – surrounded it, aided by British slavers. Faced with recapture, the courageous rebels lit the gunpowder in the hold and committed mass suicide.

The diabolic cruelties of the British plantations were so much part of settler life that a planter on Jamaica, Thomas Thistlewood, recorded his atrocities cheerfully in his diary. Younger son of a Lincolnshire farmer, he arrived aged twenty to become overseer of a large plantation in Jamaica named Egypt. The island was still recovering from a prolonged revolt by runaway slaves led by two armed Maroon communities under Queen Nanny and Colonel Cudjoe, both Akan from Gold Coast, who worsted the British enough to win their freedom – in return for their aid in crushing future slave revolts. Like many planters, Thistlewood hired the Maroons to hunt down runaways, describing Cudjoe’s ‘majestic look’ with ‘a feather’d hat, Sword at his Side, gun upon his Shoulder … Bare foot and Bare legg’d’. Nine years after he arrived, Thistlewood witnessed another slave revolt led by Tacky and Queen Akua, both of whom were hunted down by soldiers, settlers’ militiamen and Cudjoe’s Maroons.

The revolts shocked the British – the first of the rebellions that, as much as the abolitionist campaign, gradually discredited slavery. Buying his own estate, Breadnut, Thistlewood lived the genteel life of a gentleman of the Enlightenment, ordering scientific books from London and living with and having children with a female slave, Phibbah – while simultaneously ruling his slaves with demented sadism, punishing them with whippings, shacklings, picklings (when the escapees would beaten, with salt pickle and pepper rubbed into their wounds) and a penalty he proudly invented for a slave called Derby who had eaten sugar cane. He called it ‘Derby’s Dose’, and in January 1756 recorded: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt [a fellow slave] shit in his mouth.’ When another slave, Port Royal, ran away, Thistlewood ‘Gave him a moderate whipping, pickled him well, made Hector shit in his mouth, immediately put a gag whilst his mouth was full & made him wear it 4 or 5 hours.’ Thistlewood recorded 3,852 of his own rapes (including gang rapes) of 138 women, many underage, carelessly spreading VD.