1659 · Africanyear only
France builds a fort at the mouth of the Senegal
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At the mouth of the Senegal River the French put up a walled trading post and named it Saint-Louis. Its purpose was to control the commerce of the river and the loading of captives onto ships. French merchants ran it for most of its working life. Britain held the fort from 1759 to 1779, having taken it during the Seven Years War, and after France recovered it American vessels also began buying there. What matters for a Haitian timeline is the destination. People taken from this stretch of Senegambia went overwhelmingly to French America, and the heaviest single concentration went to the sugar and coffee estates of Saint-Domingue. A river fort in West Africa was in practical terms a supply depot for the colony that became Haiti. Families in the Senegal valley lost sons and daughters to a place they had never heard of, and the descendants of those sons and daughters would speak Kreyol and fight a revolution.
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