French filibusters, driven from Tortuga Island by…
1665 CE
French filibusters, driven from Tortuga Island by the British occupiers, establish Port-de-Paix in 1665 on the northwest coast of the Hispaniolan mainland, opposite Tortuga.
The French West Indies Corporation had taken taken control of the area in 1664.
The following year, the energetic Bertrand d'Ogeron is appointed Governor of Tortuga and ordered to make the island a center from which to extend influence on Hispaniola.
One of his first acts is to make a census of Tortuga's settled population.
He finds that the colony contains four hundred and fifty free whites, sixty slaves and a few indentured servants.
He reports in 1665, to Colbert, Louis XIV's minister of commerce, that there are “seven or eight hundred Frenchmen scattered along the coasts of the Island of Española in inaccessible places surrounded by mountains or by great rocks...So it is necessary for his majesty to give an order to cause these people to leave the said island of Española and betake themselves in two months into Tortuga which they would do without doubt if it were fortified and that would bring in a great revenue to the King if all captains of merchant ships and others were forbidden to buy or sell anything to the Frenchmen called buccaneers along the coast of Española.”