Tortuga Island- Isle de la Tortue

These men were known for the meat that they barbecued (French for smoked meat is viande boucanee), and so eventually were named... Buccaneers. When these hunters learned that piracy was more profitable than selling meat, they were soon making regular raids on the Spanish ships sailing the local trade routes.

An early French governor named Jean le Vasseur used his training as an engineer to build a 24-gun fort by the harbor which helped to repel Spanish attacks. French governors preferred to use the buccaneers for local defense, as the British governors were later to do at Port Royal, and Tortuga Island became well-known for those men calling themselves the Brethren of the Coast.

The most notorious among the pirates of Tortuga was Francois L'Ollonais, a psychopath whose method of choice was often horrible tortures and murder. Sir Henry Morgan started his career of piracy from this very island.

Beginning in the early 1670's, Tortuga Island entered a period of decline after a series of Spanish and French raids, when some buccaneers went south to the better market in French Saint Dominique and some were drawn east to expand the defenses of Port Royal, Jamaica.

http://www.thepiratesrealm.com/Isle%20of%20Tortuga.html

Sir Francis Drake

The city soon fell on hard times. With the conquest of the Aztecs and Inca complete, many of the new settlers preferred to go to Mexico or South America and the city stagnated. In January of 1586, notorious pirate Sir Francis Drake was able to easily capture the city with less than 700 men: most of the inhabitants of the city had fled when they heard Drake was coming. Drake stayed for a month, until he had received a ransom of 25,000 ducats for the city, and when he left he and his men carried off everything they could, including the church bells. Santo Domingo was a smoldering ruin by the time he left.

http://latinamericanhistory.about.com/od/historyofthecaribbean/p/santodomingo.htm

Pirates and the founding of Saint-Domingue, Bob Corbett 1995

Most of you know a bit about the pirates on the island of LaTortue. It is my contention that the pirates contributed very little to the future history of Haiti, but, on the other hand, it was their de facto rule of the western part of the island that strongly encouraged the French to sue for the cession of that portion of Hispaniola in 1697. Below is the story in brief form as I understand it.

About pirates. In the early 16th century Spain was, of course, dominant in the so-called "New World." But, France, Great Britain and Holland joined to hire tough sailors called privateers to disrupt the Spanish shipping, steal the gold and silver and other precious items and give the largest share back to the supporting governments.

One of the central places for these privateers to hang out was the island of La Tortue, just off Haiti's north coast. If you look at a map you will see that this is the route of one path back to Europe from Central and South America. The other path, to the south of Puerto Rico, was too shallow and dangerous. Thus La Tortue, a rocky island with caves, was an excellent vantagepoint for the early privateers.

Later, by the 17th century when the privateers gave way to non-governmental groups of free lance criminals, the pirates were born. By this point La Torture was mainly the province of French pirates. The British pirates (Henry Morgan being the most famous of them) moved to
Jamaica. The Dutch sort of dropped out.

Now, back to an interesting complication. The island of Hispaniola was Columbus' second landfall in 1492, after San Salvador. He claimed the island for Spain, but it had very little gold, thus it was not too important at that time. As the Spanish moved into Central and South America Hispaniola was at first the breadbasket, where Indian and African slaves raised food for the conquistadors. Later, after the Spanish settled some areas of Central and South America, and the settlers started raising their own food, Hispaniola was virtually abandoned.

But there were Spanish on the eastern portion of the island where they raised some cattle, but the western portion (today's Haiti) was virtually abandoned. However, since this land was wildly fertile and formerly a place where animal farming went on, there were lots of wild cattle and pigs.

When the pirates weren't pirating, some of them began to cross the 16 km. over to Haiti to hunt meat. Since they cooked it over open fires they were called boukanier (the open fire men). But the British couldn't say that and that was the origin of the English term buccaneers. They weren't really pirates, but off-duty pirates, enjoying a barbarque!

Little by little these people settled in this area and built a French settlement in Spanish property. Disputes arose about this French infringement of Spanish land and these disputes were finally settled in 1697 when the Treaty of Rystwik, which settled a European war, granted the western portion of the island to France, which named it the colony of San Domingue. This French colony is basically the same boundaries as modern day Haiti.

The native Arawak/Taino Indians were completely wiped out by this time. But, by the early part of the 16th century the Spanish and then the French were importing African slaves to work the land.

The African slaves revolted many times, but the revolt of 1791 "stuck" and grew into a revolution that finally succeeded in late 1803. Jan. 1, 1804 the country of Haiti began, the only Republic ever formed by slaves after a victorious revolution.

Back to the pirates. They ultimately didn't make much of a contribution to the growth of either Saint-Domingue or Haiti, but they were the origins, the first French who settled there and began to farm. Most of them eventually tired of this sedentary life and drifted back to the sea and to pirating. But, other less adventuresome French came to settle this fertile land and to build settlements.

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/pirates/piratesandom.htm

Excerpt from, "Haitian Creole: A Review Of Slavery And Creation"

Christopher Columbus claimed Haiti when he landed there in 1492. Arawak Indians were the original inhabitants of this island when Columbus arrived. Later, the island became a colony of England. Haiti remained virtually unsettled until the mid-17th century, when French colonists, importing African slaves, developed sugar plantations in the north. Under French rule from 1697, Haiti (then called Saint-Domingue) became one of the world's richest sugar and coffee producers. Soon, Haiti became a land of wealth with the vast use of slavery as their method of production. The rising demand for sugar, coffee, cotton, and tobacco created a greater demand for slaves by other slave trading countries. Spain, France, the Dutch, and English were in competition for the cheap labor needed to work their colonial plantation system producing those lucrative goods. The slave trade was so profitable that, by 1672, the Royal African Company chartered by Charles II of England superseded the other traders and became the richest shipper of human slaves to the mainland of the Americas. The slaves were so valuable to the open market - they were eventually called Black Gold. Plantation owners began to be represented in the colony either by their agents or plantation managers, who kept them, informed of production levels, profits, expenses, and the general operations of the plantation. The arrogance and conceit of these agents, or procurers, was that they were surrounded by a multitude of domestic slaves to satisfy every want or need of their own. The greater number of domestic slaves one may have entails a great amount of prestige for these people in their time of the early 1700's and no though was given to the immoral ways and acts taken by their race because they though it not an issue. Plantation owners and those of the like continued to be heavily involved in social aspects of culture and the French way of life. Commuting from their authoritatively constructed world of pleasure in France with wealth and prestige combined with the occasional visits to the plantation for business. The life of a plantation owner and those that surround him is of luxury and negative profusion. The Haitians are almost wholly black, with a culture that is a unique mixture of African and French influences. Haiti was a French colony until 1791 when, fired by the example of the French Revolution, the black slaves revolted, massacred the French landowners and proclaimed the world's first black republic. As noted, this is the first revolution of slaves against their owners and their success did not go unnoticed...

http://www.freeessays.cc/db/22/fmy38.shtml