Cap-Français (Le Cap)

Where was Cap-Français, and what is it called today?

Cap-Français stood on a sheltered bay on the north coast of Hispaniola, the large island that Haiti and the Dominican Republic share today. French colonists usually called it simply Le Cap, “the Cape”. After Haiti won its independence, the city became Cap-Haïtien.

In the game’s years the western third of Hispaniola was the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Behind the town lay the fertile Northern Plain, then being cleared for sugar plantations.

How did Cap-Français begin?

Around 1670 the French governor Bertrand d’Ogeron sent a small group of settlers to the plain on the north coast. Their settlement by the shore grew into the town and became a parish in 1676. As mainland towns like Le Cap grew, the old buccaneer island of Tortuga mattered less and less.

In May 1695, during a war with France, an English and Spanish force landed on the north coast and ravaged the plain, burning settlements. The Treaty of Ryswick ended that war in 1697, and Spain accepted France’s hold on western Hispaniola.

Le Cap then rebuilt. Its first quay was finished in 1699, new defences followed in 1702, and in 1701 the town gained its own superior council, the high court for the north of the colony. From 1695 the governor-general preferred to live at Léogâne in the west, so sources disagree about which town counted as the capital; Le Cap was certainly the leading town of the north.

Why did Saint-Domingue grow so fast after 1700?

The answer is sugar. By about 1700 the smaller French islands of the eastern Caribbean had run short of good land, and planters turned to Saint-Domingue’s wide plains. The first sugar cane in the district near Le Cap was planted in 1699. Planters also grew indigo, a blue dye: the colony had about 1,200 indigo works by 1713 and roughly twice as many by 1730.

This wealth was produced by enslaved Africans, brought across the Atlantic against their will and forced to work under brutal conditions. The historian Jeremy Popkin gives these counts for the whole colony:

• 1687: about 3,400 enslaved people and 4,400 white colonists
• 1715: about 35,500 enslaved people and 6,700 white colonists
• 1730: about 79,500 enslaved people

So in the game’s years the number of enslaved people more than doubled, and they far outnumbered the colonists. By the middle of the century Saint-Domingue made as much sugar as all of Britain’s Caribbean islands put together.

What was the Code Noir?

The Code Noir, or “Black Code”, was a law issued by King Louis XIV in March 1685 to govern slavery in France’s Caribbean colonies. Saint-Domingue’s council registered it at Petit-Goâve in 1687.

The code treated enslaved people as property that could be bought, sold and inherited. It ordered that they be baptised Catholic, and it set harsh, escalating punishments for anyone who ran away. A few articles seemed to offer protection: masters were told to feed their workers and care for the sick and old, and a husband, wife and young children with the same master were not to be sold apart. Popkin notes that colonists and officials largely ignored these protections in practice.

What was the Exclusif, and who smuggled at Le Cap?

Under a system called the Exclusif, French colonists were supposed to buy their supplies only from French merchants and sell their crops only to France. Royal letters of October 1727 set strict rules against foreign trade.

The colony still needed food and timber, because its plantations grew crops for sale instead of food. Traders from New England and New York brought salt fish, lumber and farm produce to the French islands, often illegally. They bought molasses, the syrup left over from sugar-making. After 1713, when France banned spirits made from anything but wine to protect its brandy makers, French molasses was cheap, and northern distillers turned it into rum.

What happened at Le Cap in 1722?

In the game’s years a royal trading company, the Compagnie des Indes (Indies Company), held the right to supply enslaved Africans to Saint-Domingue. Company staff landed at Le Cap in October 1722. At the same time a new currency rule lowered the value of the Spanish silver coins that colonists used, which pushed up prices.

On 21 November 1722 about a hundred women, led by a widow named Sagona who kept a tavern, attacked the house of the company’s director in Le Cap. Troops calmed the town, but unrest spread to the planters over the next two years. The historian Malick Ghachem argues that this rebellion, which began among the town’s poorer people and spread to wealthy planters, broke the company’s monopoly.

How did enslaved people resist?

Many enslaved people escaped. The French called them marrons, “maroons”. Some formed bands in the mountains; one near the Spanish border lasted nearly a century.

Later in the century a man known as Makandal, born in Africa and maimed in a sugar mill in northern Saint-Domingue, became a maroon leader. He was accused of a poisoning plot and executed at Le Cap in January 1758. Little is known for certain about him.

On the night of 22 to 23 August 1791, enslaved people on the Northern Plain rose up, after secret gatherings remembered as Bois Caïman, though historians still debate exactly what happened there. This was the start of the Haitian Revolution. Slavery was abolished in Saint-Domingue in 1793, and Haiti declared its independence on 1 January 1804.

When did Le Cap become the “Paris of the Antilles”?

Not in 1715, but decades later. By 1789 Le Cap was the colony’s largest city, with about 18,000 people, straight streets, stone buildings, a theatre with 1,500 seats and a learned society. On a normal day its harbour could hold over a hundred trading ships, and the city became known as the “Paris of the Antilles”. Saint-Domingue was by then the most profitable colony any European country owned and made more sugar than anywhere else on earth. About half a million enslaved people did the work.

The city was razed during the war for independence in 1802. Henry Christophe, who later declared himself king, rebuilt much of it.