Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [3]
Though the Spaniards opened the channel to the New World for the African slave trade, they never really made full use of it. The conquistadors were much more interested in pure gold than in the riches that could be wrung from a labor-intensive plantation economy. Sugar production in Hispaniola did begin under Spanish rule, but by the end of the sixteenth century most of the conquistadors had moved on to the looting of gold-rich Indian empires on the South American continent. The plantation economy of Hispaniola (by this time more commonly called Santo Domingo, after its capital city in the southeast) was stagnant, and even the importation of slaves had slowed to a trickle. The continuous hard labor of growing cane and processing sugar was mostly abandoned in favor of cattle ranching.
The early Spanish voyagers in the New World had the habit of releasing a few domestic animals—goats, pigs, or cattle—on every island where they made landfall. The practice was an investment in the future: when they next visited one of these islands, months or years later, meat would be available on the hoof. In the seventeenth century there was enough wild livestock in the western third of Hispaniola (an area only sparsely settled by the Spanish) to support a group of European hunters called “buccaneers” after the fire pit, or boucan, over which they smoked their meat. At the same time, the island of Tortuga, just off Hispaniola, had become a permanent base for the flibustiers, who during Europe's frequent wars were licensed by the French government to capture enemy ships as prizes, and during peacetime captured any ships they could, as pure piracy. Despite frequent attempts, the Spaniards were unable to uproot either of these two groups.
In the Windward Islands, to Hispaniola's southeast, the French had had colonies at Martinique and Guadeloupe since 1635. In 1697 a French commander appeared in western Hispaniola, by then a de facto French colony, though unrecognized by law or treaty, to recruit from the buccaneer and flibustier communities for a raid on Cartagena, a prosperous Spanish port on the coast of present-day Colombia. The smashing success of this expedition was an important factor in the cession of western Hispaniola by the Spanish in the Treaty of Ryswick later the same year. The colony of French Saint Domingue now officially existed.
Once legally sanctioned, the French colonists began to turn from buccaneering and piracy toward a plantation economy, reviving the sugar production which the Spanish had let drift into dereliction. About one hundred new sugar plantations were founded in the four-year period from 1700 to 1704, and the importation of African slaves to work them increased proportionately.
Pirate and buccaneer communities were notoriously short of women, and most of the colonists who began to immigrate to the new French Saint Domingue did not bring their families with them. Their idea was not to put down permanent roots in Saint Domingue (in contrast to the British colonies on the North American continent) but to make a quick killing in the lucrative sugar trade, then return to Paris to enjoy the money. Legend has it that, in response to the request of the colonial government for white women immigrants, a boatload of prostitutes was swept from the streets of Paris and shipped to Saint Domingue. Some of these ladies, faute de mieux, became matriarchs of the first families of the colony.
Under these conditions, cohabitation of Frenchmen with African slave women was more or less inevitable. By 1789, 30,000 persons of mixed European-African ancestry were counted in Saint Domingue, as compared with a white population of 40,000. These mixed-blood people were