France plants a colony on Tortuga

France established a colony on Tortuga, the island off the northwestern coast of Hispaniola, in 1625. It was a modest thing. A rocky island a few kilometres offshore, occupied by buccaneers, adventurers and men with reasons to be a long way from Europe. What made it consequential is that the French crown claimed it. A crew of raiders becomes a settlement, a settlement becomes a possession, a possession acquires a governor, and the governor's remit reaches across the channel to the mainland coast Spain had abandoned twenty years earlier. From that beachhead France worked its way into the western third of Hispaniola, which Spain conceded formally in 1697 and which became the colony of Saint-Domingue. Within a century Saint-Domingue was producing more sugar and coffee than any other territory on earth and returning more profit than any colony in the history of European empire. All of it traces to a claim staked on an island most maps do not bother to name.

The Jesuits opened a college at Sao Salvador in 1624, and its first rector, Mattheus Cardoso, arrived in August 1625 carrying hundreds of copies of a catechism he had translated into Kikongo and had printed in Portugal in a bilingual edition. He gave twelve to the young king and handed others to chiefs who could read as he travelled. It was very likely the only printed book in the language, and no other appeared for centuries, so its authority was enormous and much of the literate elite is likely to have known it by heart. What it carried was doctrine in question and answer form with no narrative and not one gospel translated. What it enabled was a class of lay teachers, the maestri, who handed the material on from one generation to the next through long stretches when there was no priest anywhere. Without them Kongolese Christianity would not have survived at all.

Mocombe dates the French arrival to a landing on the island of La Tortue off the northern coast of what is now the Republic of Haiti. From there the newcomers began exploring and settling the mainland and eventually pushed the Spanish out of the western part of the island through warfare. He connects this directly to the diplomatic settlement that followed, in which Spain, worn down by French attacks and by the results of war in Europe, signed a treaty ceding the western portion, which the French renamed. The point of the sequence for his argument is that the colony was built on displacement twice over, first of the indigenous population and then of a rival European power, before the plantation system made it the richest colony of its day and imported the population whose descendants would take it back.

The French colony planted on Tortuga in 1625 was made of pirates, adventurers and outcasts. They raided Spanish shipping from the island, then crossed the channel to hunt and settle the coast of western Hispaniola, and French colonisation spread from there south and east until it held the western third of the island and Spain conceded the point. That territory became Saint-Domingue, the wealthiest possession in the French empire, worked by more enslaved people than any comparable place in the Caribbean. The island closes the story as well as opening it. In 1802 Napoleon sent his brother in law Charles Leclerc with an army to retake the colony and restore slavery. The campaign broke on Haitian resistance and on yellow fever, and Leclerc died of the fever on Tortuga in November of that year. The French presence began on that island and the French attempt to hold the country ended there, one hundred and seventy seven years apart. Little in Haitian history is that tidy.