In February 1864, eight people from Bizoton, near Port-au-Prince, were tried, convicted and shot for the murder and cannibalism of a girl. Haiti in 1864 was a state seeking diplomatic recognition from powers that had spent sixty years describing it as a barbarism, and the government invited the foreign diplomatic corps to attend the trial. Among those who came was Spenser St John, the British consul general.
Twenty years later St John published Hayti, or the Black Republic, and put the case in it at length. The book was widely read and widely believed, and for a century and a half it has been the evidence anyone reaches for who wants to say that Haitian Vodou involves human sacrifice. Almost every later assertion of that claim traces back through this one book to this one trial.
St John was not naive about the proceedings. He recorded that the confessions had been obtained by beating the accused. He published the case anyway, as a demonstration of what Haiti was, which tells you what the account was for.
The Haitian state had its own use for the trial. A public conviction, watched by European diplomats, was a demonstration that the government was suppressing rural practice and was therefore a government of the kind that could be recognised. Both parties to the event had reasons to want the verdict that was reached, and that is the difficulty a reader now has to sit with.