1670 to 1802 · Pre-Revolutionaryspan
Le Havre sold most of its captives into Saint-Domingue
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Le Havre was the first French port to send slave ships in significant numbers, and it was still sending them close to the end of the legal trade. The chronology is lopsided. Almost 40 percent of everything the port ever carried was carried between 1784 and 1792, a window of eight years. Le Havre merchants had built an unusually tight relationship with Malembo on the northern coast of West Central Africa, and more than half of the people their ships carried were sold in Saint-Domingue. Those dates repay attention. The heaviest concentration of arrivals came immediately before the insurrection of August 1791. Many of the men and women who rose in the northern plain had been in the colony only a few years, and many had come from the same stretch of the Kongo coast, which is one reason a rising of that size could be organised at all. A trade running at full speed built the conditions that ended it.
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