Saint-Pierre, Martinique

What was Saint-Pierre like around 1715?

Saint-Pierre began in 1635, when Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc landed French settlers at the mouth of the Roxelane river and built a fort. It was the first French settlement on Martinique. The Kalinago, the Indigenous people of the island, were killed or driven out as the French spread across Martinique, and by about 1660 they had lost almost all of it.

By the game’s years Saint-Pierre had grown into a long town along the beach, with a quarter called Le Fort near the old fort and another called Le Mouillage, “the anchorage”, each with its own church. Ships did not tie up at quays. They anchored in the open roadstead, a stretch of sea off the beach, and boats carried cargo to and from the shore.

Was Saint-Pierre the capital of Martinique?

Not in the game’s era. Saint-Pierre was the seat of the governor-general of the French islands at first, but in 1692 the Comte de Blénac made Fort-Royal, today’s Fort-de-France, the seat of government. Fort-Royal had a deep bay that sheltered ships from hurricanes and was easier to defend, while Saint-Pierre’s anchorage lay open to wind and to enemy ships.

Merchants still preferred Saint-Pierre, the island’s business centre until 1902. Many websites say the capital moved only after that year’s eruption, but the government had been at Fort-Royal for over two centuries.

Who did Saint-Pierre trade with, and what was the Exclusif?

France ran its colonies under a system called the Exclusif: the islands were supposed to buy only from France and sell only to France, in French ships. From 1669 governors enforced it, and in 1680 the king ordered that foreign ships be sent away or seized. Ships from French ports brought French goods, and carried home sugar and cacao.

But the plantations grew cane rather than food, and France was far away. The English colonies of North America were close and had what Martinique needed. French records from 1717 describe the English ship Chrestien, seized at night in the bay of Fort-Royal with bread and flour on board, English horses and boards found on the island soon after, another vessel leaving with raw sugar and cocoa, and a trade reaching as far as New York. Islanders caught dealing with such ships were fined.

There was another reason for the trade. In 1713 France banned spirits not made from wine, to protect its own brandy makers, so French island rum could not be sold in France. Martinique’s molasses went cheaply to New England traders instead. Historians now see this foreign trade less as simple smuggling and more as one of the things that kept the plantation colonies running.

What happened in the Martinique revolt of 1717?

In January 1717 a new governor-general, the Marquis de La Varenne, and a new intendant, the official in charge of money and trade, named Ricouart, arrived to enforce the rules. They cracked down on foreign ships, and on 1 March they banned building new sugar works without permission. Fewer merchants came, and food grew short.

On 17 May 1717 armed planters seized the two officials while they were dining at an estate at Le Diamant. Six days later they were put aboard a ship at Saint-Pierre and sent back to France. The rising later became known in Martinique as the Gaoulé. A new governor arrived that October, and a pardon in 1718 left out the leaders. The revolt was a protest by wealthy colonists for their own freedom to trade, not a rising of the enslaved people who did the work.

Who did the work on Martinique’s plantations?

Enslaved Africans did almost all of it. Slave ships landed captives at Saint-Pierre to be sold to planters, who set them to work in the cane fields, the boiling houses and the cacao groves.

France’s Code Noir of 1685, a royal law on slavery, said owners must give each enslaved adult a weekly ration of manioc flour with salt beef or salt fish. It was rarely enforced. Enslaved people grew much of their own food on small plots in what little time they had, and sold some of it at local markets. Even so, hunger was common and death rates were high. The imported salt cod the planters bought to feed them was often fish that European buyers had rejected.

Jean-Baptiste Labat, a Dominican priest on Martinique from 1694 to 1706, ran a sugar estate worked by enslaved people. His 1722 travel book describes the islands in detail, but through a slaveholder’s eyes.

How did coffee come to Martinique?

Before the late 1720s cacao, the bean used for chocolate, was one of Martinique’s great crops alongside sugar. Around 1727 storms, and by some accounts an earthquake, destroyed many of the cacao trees, and planters looked for something new.

They found it in coffee. Gabriel de Clieu, a French naval officer, carried a young coffee plant from the royal garden in Paris to Martinique. Sources disagree on the year: some say 1720, others 1723, and he may have made the trip twice. In his own account, published in 1774, he said water ran so short on the voyage that he shared his drinking ration with the plant. From Martinique, seeds went to Guadeloupe, Santo Domingo and other islands.

De Clieu was not the first to bring coffee to the Americas, though. The Dutch were growing it in Suriname by 1718, and the French colony of Saint-Domingue probably had some by about 1715.

Did pirates attack Martinique?

Yes. In early 1720 Martinique sent armed ships to hunt Black Bart Roberts, and he became its bitter enemy. English governors reported in 1720 and 1721 that pirates had wrecked a large group of French sloops sailing from Martinique and captured a French warship with the island’s governor aboard.

The 1724 General History of the Pyrates by “Captain Charles Johnson” adds that Roberts hanged the governor and flew a flag showing himself standing on two heads marked for Barbados and Martinique. French records suggest the officials he took were frightened with mock hangings and then released, and that the governor himself was not among them. No eyewitness from the time described that flag.

What happened to Saint-Pierre later?

On 8 May 1902 the volcano Mont Pelée erupted, and a fast cloud of burning gas and ash swept over the town in minutes. About 28,000 to 30,000 people died. Only a very few survived, among them a prisoner, protected by the thick walls of his underground cell. Today the ruins of the old town still stand among the new houses.