A telling detail of the Jesuits’ ministry was to make sure that their baptismal ceremony included plenty of cool drinkable water; the desperate and grateful slave would be more receptive to the Christian message. In its context, this pastoral work was bravely countercultural, arousing real disapproval among the settler population, but the Jesuits’ efforts to instil first a sense of sin (particularly sexual sin) and then repentance in their wretched penitents now seem oddly placed amid one of the greatest communal sins perpetrated by Western Christian culture.44
