Port-de-Paix Nord-Ouest Haiti

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.”

Betrand d'Ogeron de la Bouere, the French governor of Tortuga, requests in a report to France the immigration of at least twelve thousand men, women and children to develop a French population in the colony.

He brings out many new settlers from France, occasionally at his own expense and that of his friends.

In one such instance, d'Ogeron arranges for a supply galley, the hull of which is packed with hundreds of women from the streets of Paris. (A later historian, François Alexandre de Stanislas, Baron Wimpffen, in his “A voyage to Saint Domingo, in the years 1788, 1789, and 1790”, will dismiss them as “prostitutes from the hospitals, abandoned wretches raked up from the mud of the capital”).

The growth of buccaneering on Tortuga had been augmented by the English capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655.

The early English governors of Jamaica freely grant letters of marque to Tortuga buccaneers and to their own countrymen, while the growth of Jamaica’s Port Royal -- the “richest and wickedest city in the New World” -- provides these raiders with a far more profitable and enjoyable place to sell their booty.

Beginning in the late 1660s, the new French governor of Tortuga, Bertrand d'Ogeron, similarly provides privateering commissions both to his own colonists and to English cutthroats from Port Royal.

These conditions bring Caribbean buccaneering to its zenith.

Discontented planters join d'Ogeron from the other French islands, and within two or three years there are two thousand French colonists in Western Hispaniola leading settled lives as planters and employing a growing number of enslaved Africans.

Although d'Ogeron will never succeed in attracting anything like his hoped-for twelve thousand annual colonists to St. Domingue, he has opened a genuine immigration movement toward the colony from France.

He has also attracted all the French rovers from the pirate stronghold of Port Royal and has concentrated them in his own stronghold of Tortuga.

D'Ogeron has by 1675 established his colony, which he calls Saint-Domingue (as opposed to the Spanish name for their side of the island, Santo Domingo) and, with war imminent, d'Ogeron now has a ready-made force of privateers.

Jacques Nepreu de Pouançay succeeds d'Ogeron as governor during 1675.

Saint-Domingue's total population by 1681 is estimated to be six thousand six hundred and fifty-eight.

Landowners in western Hispaniola import increasing numbers of enslaved Africans, which in the late seventeenth century total about five thousand.

The Treaty of Rijswijk, which in 1697 formally ends the War of the Grand Alliance against France, formally cedes the western third of the island from Spain to France, which officially renames it Saint-Domingue.

Unrest among the enslaved population is observed throughout the north and the west as news of the French Revolution in some form or other circulates through the Voudou congregations.

Small armed rebellions flare up in the west and are suppressed by the maréchaussée.

Laveaux, walled up with a small garrison at Port-de-Paix, is being encroached upon by the Spanish from the east and the English from Le Môle, with his forces crippled by illness and fewer than seven hundred men fit for service.

On October 4, he writes to complain to Sonthonax of insubordination by the black troops.

Toussaint breaks the siege of Port-de-Paix, where his officer Maurepas has been under attack from the Rigaudins, on July 2.

Moïse, in many ways Toussaint’s right-hand man in the field, is executed for insubordination on November 24 at Port-de-Paix.