Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution Read Online Free PDF

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    ernors saw that it was in their interest to support piracy against their
    enemies. By weakening the Spanish hold on the seas and establishing unof-
    ficial settlements elsewhere in the Caribbean, the pirates opened the way
    for more permanent, colonial settlement supported by European royal
    governments.19
    Spanish explorers had found the Carib inhabitants of the eastern Carib-
    bean quick to resist encroachment, and had left these islands for the most
    part untouched. It was here that British and French settlements initially
    took root. The first was a colony on the tiny island of St. Christopher,
    where English and French lived side by side. From there the English
    founded Barbados, the most important of the early Caribbean slave colo-
    nies. It developed so rapidly that within a few decades settlers left a
    crowded Barbados and established a colony on the mainland—South
    Carolina. In 1635, meanwhile, the French founded colonies in Martinique
    and Guadeloupe. Throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centu-
    ries the Caribs managed to survive by playing off the French and the Brit-
    ish against each other. Gradually, however, they were isolated on certain is-
    lands, and by the end of the eighteenth century even those were colonized
    by the British. Only a few small indigenous communities remained.20
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    av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
    As the colonies of the eastern Caribbean grew, a motley crew of pi-
    rates and settlers from St. Christopher, both French and English, settled
    on the island of Tortuga, northwest of Saint-Domingue. The pirates—
    called flibustiers by the French—were joined by another group, called boucaniers, who lived on mainland Hispaniola. The Spanish had introduced new species there—not only dogs, many of whom escaped into the
    wild, but also pigs and cattle—which, without human or animal predators,
    had thrived in the intervening century. The boucaniers hunted the wild cattle, smoked the meat using an indigenous method called the boucan,
    and sold it to sailors on passing ships. Gradually settlers on both Tortuga
    and the mainland began to grow provisions and tobacco.21
    The Spanish repeatedly tried to dislodge these interlopers in Tortuga
    and the northern coast of Saint-Domingue, but the French settlement sur-
    vived and continued to grow. The French named a royal governor to over-
    see Tortuga and the coast of Saint-Domingue in 1664, and he personally
    recruited settlers for the colony from his native region of Anjou. A popula-
    tion of 400 Europeans there when he first arrived grew to 4,000 by 1680.
    The flibustiers and boucaniers were joined, and ultimately outnumbered, by colonists who founded small plantations.22
    In 1697 a French commander arrived in the growing colony of Saint-
    Domingue. Preparing to attack the Spanish port of Cartagena, he nailed
    an invitation on the church of the settlement at Petit-Goâve calling on
    flibustiers and inhabitants of the “coast of St. Domingue,” including “negroes,” to join him. The recruits from Saint-Domingue participated in the
    siege, capture, and brutal pillage of Cartagena. One of the officers taking
    part in the raid, Joseph d’Honor de Gallifet, who later served briefly as
    governor of the colony, invested his portion of the loot in land, establishing plantations that were to become some of the most successful in the colony.
    The defeat suffered by the Spanish in Cartagena contributed to their deci-
    sion to cede the western portion of the colony of Hispaniola to the French
    with the 1697 Treaty of Rhyswick. A century later the siege of Cartagena
    was still remembered for other blessings it had brought to the French col-
    ony. There was a roadside statue of the Virgin Mary looted from the Span-
    ish port town in 1697 in the Southern Province; under it a candle usually
    burned. The most famous of the stolen relics was a cross revered in the
    church of Petit-Goâve. Moreau described the powerful devotions of