Bettie buys time by offering to test her poisons with a doctor

In August 1766 the Suriname court sentenced a woman named Bettie, along with Sara and Januarij, to burn for allegedly poisoning other enslaved people. Bettie then obtained at least a delay by agreeing to work with a Dr Moedner on experiments with the various poisons and counter poisons she knew. The resolutions of the governor and council record the arrangement without saying how long the delay lasted or whether the sentence was ever lifted. The court’s attitude to such knowledge was inconsistent. In 1749 it had examined a substance another woman called Bettie gave her enslaver, concluded that it had no physical effect and was one of the things enslaved people used to put enslavers in a good humour, then ruled that such practices were evil and dangerous in themselves and deserved punishment. The same expertise counted as superstition when it soothed an enslaver and as science worth a laboratory when it might kill one.