A magistrate of the colonial courts, Moreau de Saint-Mery spent years assembling material for a parish-by-parish account of the French half of Hispaniola, printed at Philadelphia in 1797 during his exile. No other French colony, and few provinces of the kingdom, received anything comparable.

The survey takes in terrain, population, history, farming, manufacture and craft, social and intellectual life, entertainments and meeting places, and the administrative, judicial and charitable institutions of the colony. Its accounts of the towns and settlements are a first-rate source for colonial urbanism, and the pages on hospitals are unusually full.

It also documents its author's mind. Moreau sorts the colony's inhabitants into an elaborate ladder of complexions between white and black, treats those gradations as fixed by nature, and hangs on them judgements about character, idleness, courage and fitness for particular kinds of work. The line he draws between white ancestry and every other, he writes, runs on to infinity.