A Brief History of Haiti in verse: Part II

Pirates of the Caribbean

 In the interim, before Hispañola was renowned as this most successful of colonies called Saint Domingue; before carefully, cruelly controlled African labor heaped wealth to the proud French Crown; after Columbus and his crew enacted genocide on the native Taíno population with little material profit; after Brother Montesinos witnessed the abuse and voiced outrage which Padre de las Casas echoed louder still; in between these two extremes was another period of Haiti’s fascinating history, perhaps the most romanticized era in colonial complexity.

The age of piracy.

You may have noticed the drastic shift, the distinction between the aforementioned latter and former periods. Columbus sailed under the Spanish flag, while Saint Domingue’s great success was under French domain. Like the major fault lines that run beneath the nation and can in a moment evoke such devastation, this shift of ownership was not gentle nor any less dramatic.

In fourteen-hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue and by Christmas Day laid claim to an unchartered island in the name of progress and Spain. Fewer than one hundred years later, the “new” country was all but useless to her sponsors.

Through their foreign northern diseases and careless ill-treatment, the Spanish masters quickly burned through Haiti’s native Indians. The Taínos were overpowered, overworked, malnourished, and mutilated in sugar-mills, as gruesome castigation, or by bored overseers not yet convinced by impassioned Montesinos that these indios were humans deserving of Christ’s compassion.

[Spaniards severing the limbs and noses of Arawak Indians] (I have not been able to find accurate citation for this horrible engraving, but the best guess is that it is from Theodore de Bry who produced several images of this ilk to accompany las Casas' writings)

http://cultures-of-science.weebly.com/america-according-to-christopher-columbus.html

Tragically, then, Columbus’ brilliant founding of Haiti lost the majority of a civilization. The promising new colony with its lush resources of green forests and crystal rivers glittering with gold was deemed a misfortune, mere pyrite not worth continued royal sponsorship of failing export projects. With the little available gold exploited and the few frail Indians remaining defended by incessant las Casas, Spain disdainfully withdrew from her faded first New World conquest in favor of concentrated labor in the gold mines of Mexico and Peru. There, on the mainland territory, greater area provided greater potential for mineral riches and greater numbers of unsuspecting natives to seize for these treasures’ seizure.

Columbus’ great claim to fame lapsed into disreputable wilderness in the west and unsophisticated cattle range in the east. The few dubious Spanish settlers who remained herded bovines on the flat plains beyond the rugged mountain ranges, wondering how they had come to be keeping company with cows on this godforsaken, Crown-dismissed spit of land adrift so far from the bustling success of the continental Americas.

The West, in typical mystical jungle fashion, grew back quickly, thickly over the ragged spaces the Spanish had made their slaves clear for mines and plantations. On this side of the island even fewer and less reputable residents than the eastern ranchers kept camp along the coast with clear enviable view of passing boats.

Spanish galleons floating low in the turquoise waters of the Windward Passage, heavily loaded with the plunder of Peruvian and Mexican mines, took steady course for the splendor and hero’s welcome of Royal Court. These galleons passed close to Hispañola’s shore on their crossings back-and-forth. The arching trail of islands formed a veritable valuable corral called the Caribbean Sea through which the fat Spanish ships must navigate. Then they had to squeeze through the narrow passage between Hispañola and Cuba until at last they were free on the open Atlantic Ocean.

The watchers of these cruising vessels, dwelling on the nearby beaches, were a raggedy riff-raff motley crew of European cast-offs. Some had struck out of their own accord, too poor or socially abhorrent to seek their fortune further into foreign territory, laying over in Hispañola where there was essentially no decorum or police force. Some were runaways or miscreants, deeming anywhere more appealing than where they’d been. Whoever they were, these (mostly male) rolling stones formed bands on the beaches of the near-abandoned Spanish colony, enjoying simple existence not dissimilar to the island’s original inhabitants.

They slung hammocks between the trees, carved and paddled canoes, hunted the pigs-gone-wild brought by earlier Spaniards, and cooked pork barbecue slowly over open fires. These customs ensured the survival of some native Haitian culture and introduced Europeans to the delights of barbecued meat. Gradually these slow-cookers-of-meat-on-open-fire honed their skills to profitable levels, and they began to sell their unique barbecue meat to the crews of those passing ships, desperate for fresh meat after long weeks at sea. With their new trade came a new name: “buccaneer” became delegation for these French, Dutch, and English émigrés.

A Buccaneer, His Home, Boucain and Dog, From Histoire des avanturiers flibustiers, Vol. 1 (1688) , Alexandre Exquemelin, The Buccaneers of America, 1856, Print. http://www.piratesurgeon.com/pages/surgeon_pages/tobacco2.html

With their new name and trade, too, grew awareness and understanding of the very providential locational dynamics of their new Homeland and the gold and pride-heavy Spaniards. Only fueled by the ageless feud of France and Spain (with the added rivalry of mingled Dutch and English), these cunning buccaneers expanded their culinary enterprise into what the English called “privateering,” although the Spanish recipients, or victims, would simply call it thievery. The buccaneers banded into crews to command their own vessels, cruise the Hispañola harbor and surrounding sea, and prey on Spanish galleons’ wealth.

They were incredibly successful. To Spain’s disbelief, with alarming and audacious rapidity, Pirates of the Caribbean became the 17^th century reality. Infuriated Spanish captains demanded recompense for their lost cargoes and humiliation at the hands of such barbarous outlaws. Yet gleeful French governors condoned these cooks gone rogue, turned up their aristocratic noses, and signed Lettres des Marques to legalize the seizure of Spanish properties. France approved of their tropical Robin Hoods, well-pleased that these merry men should rob their rich rivals and relieve Spain of some of her abundance. Provided that they commandeered enemies of the Realm, France approved the buccaneers in their pursuits. With their change in trade again came a change in name, and the makers of barbecue developed into fearsome highwaymen of the high seas called “corsairs.”

Thus European rivalry abided over transatlantic tides and French pirates, as we might title them, checked Spain’s gleaming success, rendered Spanish (and other unfortunate foreign) captains extremely uneasy, sailors already queasy with not unsubstantial risks of crossing the ocean through storms or those dreadful equatorial hurricanes, further wearied by the ongoing problems of colonies including yellow fever, mosquitoes, crippling heat and humidity, unfriendly natives, and the dearth of eligible women.

Tensions and tempers brewed quite the torrid tempest in the small steamy spot of the Caribbean, all centered around Hispañola, what Spain surely now considered a curse, the worst of the otherwise lucrative, golden colonies. Although Spain yet owned Hispañola, the island’s western jungles were all but overrun by these buccaneers and corsairs, who grinned smugly as they pointed their guns and flaunted royal Letters of Mark at the captains and crews they accosted.

These Jolly Rogers spread beyond even the beaches of Hispañola to a rugged rock of a tiny island just north of Columbus’ northern Fort Navidad. La Tortuga was a name incongruous to its infamy as a piratical stronghold and paradise of lawless debauchery. Here, on Tortoise Island, merely 193 kilometers square, corsairs and their clans governed themselves. Crews already brazen with raids of Spanish prizes grew more emboldened in greater numbers as the shores of La Tortuga and Hispañola spilled over with pirates who answered to no one.

Map of La Tortue/Tortuga Island from 17th century (public domain) http://www.thewayofthepirates.com/picture/picture-of-tortuga-17th-century/

Shrewd French governors were aware of the delicacy of such impropriety: these privateers were a finger away from being utterly out of hand so even their highly amusing highway robbery of France’s rivals could turn into sheer anarchy and steal from France herself! These forward-thinking, self-wealth-centered courtly minds decided to attempt some oversight of the Tortuga and Hispañola corsairs. They elected an official to cross the sea and plant himself as a commander in the very heart of the yet-Spanish owned colony. By 1640, France had thence asserted and inserted herself firmly into the Hispañola territory, further weaking Spain’s near-extinguished claim on the first of her West Indian acquisitions.

Any European swell proclaiming himself commander was a tough sell for tight-knit pirate clans accustomed to self-governance, but eventually the boldness and bluster of French-sent Bertrand d’Ogeron earned him sufficient trust among enough of the buccaneers to assume top-position on Tortuga. Buffered by rocky bluffs, the island was an excellent natural fortress that afforded the French a defendable space for settlers determined to stay.

So by 1670 French loyalty mingled heavily with gold-heady pirates as d’Ogeron held down Tortuga and pointed cannons from deadly vantage point at passing ships. Spain was harassed on her own turf by land and by sea, and the cost of these pirates’ confiscations was draining her coffers, only recently so well-stocked with profits brought in from her properly orderly colonies. At last, near the end of the century, counting the losses as considerably in her favor, Spain struck a deal with France to jettison her “colonists’” egregious behavior.

“You’ve no need to patrol the coastal waters around Hispañola anymore,” Spain conceded to gleeful France. “She’s yours, for the most part.”

In proper legal procedure Spain and France drafted an agreement, a piece in the Peace of Ryswicks, a series of treaties between multiple disagreeing nations. Kings Charles II and Louis XIV signed and ratified their accords in 1697, affording the petite western portion of Hispañola to France, while Spain retained the remaining majority of the island where her vaqueros kept cattle on the eastern plains.

Signing of the Peace of Ryswick (1697)

 Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, Public Domain. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84072532.item

The new official colonies were renamed after the same holy man: Saint Dominic of Spain, founder of the Dominican Order of Friars. The Spanish called their diminished dominion Santo Domingo, the French, Saint Domingue. Then with the paperwork filed France earnestly turned her attention to taming her legitimately-acquired side of the wayward island. Where the Spanish, led by their protégé Italian captain, had failed France was determined to succeed. Noting what grew well in the sweltering climate,  French farmers laid plans for new plantations, and prepared to import the incredible labor force required to seed and reap the harvests.

Already Africans had been cleaved from their homeland to be packed in ships that cleaved across the Atlantic to the West Indies. Appeased that the native Haitians were no longer at risk (mostly because they no longer existed), the Church voiced no objections to the importation of these Africans. At the least, enslavement under white ownership exposed these heathens to Christian beliefs. At worst, they were little more than beasts and their deaths of little consequence. This holy indifference was further confirmation to the already festering notions of racial distinctions which would flourish with the sugar cane on Saint Domingue in coming generations.

Meanwhile, the French colony was officially begun with the turn of the eighteenth century. Piracy continued but with increasingly harsher consequences as privateering was no longer profitable to the competing European superpowers in the vicinity. England, France, and Spain all held highly lucrative colonies in the West Indies, chains in the link of the Western Antilles necklace arcing from the Bahamas to the coast of Venezuela. Sugar cane was the greatest rage and maintaining cane plantations the deadliest and demanding labor, requiring constant deliveries of slaves fresh off the boat from Guinea, not yet broken by the mill, lash, or fever. Wealth poured into Europe from all over the gorgeous, exploited Caribbean, but to Spain’s utter dismay and England’s green-eyed rage, no colony proved as bountiful as Saint Domingue.

From get-rich-quick Spanish conquistadors to pirate kingdom notoriety now little Saint Domingue was famous for her success and sophistication, the beauty of her cities, European-Creole culture, and many-colored women. Hayti, Hispañola, Saint Domingue, was no longer a mere link in the necklace of the Antilles, but the lustrous pendant at the center: the Pearl of the Caribbean was born.