Baquaqua was first enslaved as a teenager, having accompanied a military expedition to the Dagomba kingdom and been taken captive by an Asante army sent to restore order to the province. His elder brother bought him back and he went to work for the ruler of Soubroukou, a town near Djougou; he served as a royal messenger outside the palace and joined other royal servants in 'requisitioning' palm wine and provisions from local villagers: 'we plundered for a living' (Baquaqua and Moore, 1854, p. 32; Law and Lovejoy, 2007, p. 134). That was very likely the time that he started to drink alcohol, a difficult addiction that would follow him to Brazil and Haiti. Being in service to the king, Baquaqua had effectively left the commercial, Islamic, circles of his family. Notwithstanding his youth and slender build, he then entered the military and the implicitly nonMuslim world of the local rulers, taking on a new identity and forgetting about the Islamic prohibition of alcohol consumption. Tricked and enslaved by people close to him in Yarakeou, he was sent to Dahomey and then, after a period in the capital, Abomey, to Ouidah, one of the most important slave ports in Africa.  
After nearly two months in the hold of a slave ship, he was unloaded on to a beach 'with a natural port' in northern Pernambuco, Brazil, the largest sugarproducing province in South America; a beach in Itamaracá, perhaps, or Goiás. It was not possible for slavers to unload their cargoes in the city ports at that time, in 1845, owing to the illegality of the transatlantic slave trade in Brazil, and hence the landing had had to be executed with great caution and speed (Carvalho, 2012, pp. 223-260); as the slave trade was illegal, the traders did not have the support of the authorities and the forests between Goiás and northern Olinda were full of quilombolas - fugitives from slavery living in the Quilombo (Palenque) do Catucá settlement (Carvalho, 2010; Carvalho, 1991, pp. 5-28).  
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