San Domingo’s slave population exploded from pirates to a majority in a century

Evidence

Modern Haiti constituted the western third of the island that sixteenth-century Spaniards had known as Hispaniola. Its early history during this Spanish occupation has already been rehearsed here. Having largely eliminated its native inhabitants and leached its sources of precious metals, the conquistadors quickly moved on. With the depopulation of Hispaniola and the complete domination of Spain’s New World economy by the mines and plantations of Nueva Espana and Colombia after the mid-sixteenth century, the island retreated to the more remote pages of history. Only the eastern regions retained any substantial remnant of its colonial population while, as T. O. Ott, in slight imitation of the poetic form lilts, “the only inhabitants on the western part of the island were the roving herds of cattle and swine, which had escaped the Spanish.” In the seventeenth century, the western regions of what the French called Saint-Domingue acquired some settlements based on the activities of renegade seamen and pirates from Tortue (Tortuga). Attracted initially by the supply of meat in that region, and then subsequently encouraged by French colonial authorities (one of which, Bertrand d’Ogeron, imported women from Paris in the 1660s), the boucaniers (named for their diet of almost-burnt meat) gradually transformed into planters. Just as gradually, their French settlements in western Hispaniola reintroduced a slave system. The census of 1681 recorded a slave population of 2,000 and that of 1687, one of 3,400. But after the Treaty of Ryswick (1697) in which Spain officially recognized French Saint-Domingue, and Louis XIV restricted the boucaniers plunder to slaves, the Black population increased rather rapidly. By 1701, an official memoir destined for the Ministers of Marine estimated the slave population at 20,000, and in 1754 a similar document put the figure then at 230,000.162 On the eve of the Revolution, the slave population was estimated to be between 450,000 and 509,000, the white population, 30,000 and the mulatto population (“French colonies being what they are,” as Norman Stone has observed) roughly equalling the whites. It was all quite understandable. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 724

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the origin of ‘boucanier’ — named for their diet of almost-burnt meat — and how pirates became planters.