Haiti - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 156

men in search of colonial estates. During the eighteenth century, over a million slaves were imported
from Africa. Estates prospered, towns and country houses sprang up, and les Grands Seigneurs de Sainte
Domingue , at Versailles, outshone even the Martinicans in affluence and splendour. (At the beginning of
this colonial period, Père Labat strides for a month or two through the dull territory of the chroniclers;
captious, pragmatical, humorous and greedy; dining with the governor, commenting on crops and mor-
als, noting down recipes for roasting cochon marron , and sailing away again to be captured by Spanish
freebooters; soon, of course, to escape. But out of these pages, alas, for good.)
The outbreak of the French Revolution found Sainte Domingue in a condition of suppressed ferment.
This was mainly due to the freedmen (of whom there were a large number, mostly Mulattoes) to whom
the French refused the full recognition of their privileges. When the Revolution broke out, the Mulattoes
pressed their claims, and friends in Paris began a serious agitation for the emancipation of the slaves. In
1791, the tension was suddenly broken by direct action. Boukman, a Jamaican Negro of colossal size and
a Houngan of the Voodoo rites, assembled a large number of slaves in the forests, and, after the sacri-
fice of a pig and the sacramental drinking of its blood, launched a wholesale massacre of the whites. The
movement spread to all the slaves of the north, and for eight days a merciless and wholesale slaughter
continued. Extraordinary tortures, such as sawing the colonists in half, were practised, and the burning of
houses and crops was on so large a scale that the British colonists in the far Bermudas were bewildered
and alarmed by the red glow in the sky. The slaves carried their destruction from plantation to planta-
tion, and contemporary documents record that bloodshed reached such a pitch that the revolted Negroes
appeared to be wearing gloves and stockings of scarlet. Then for days and nights 'an oppressive silence
hung over the north, broken only by the distant crackling of burning forests and the mournful winding of
the conch-shells.' It has also been set down that in many cases the slaves of humane masters, although
wholehearted supporters of rebellion, rescued them from the indiscriminate fury of the mob, and guided
them to places of safety until this first orgiastic violence should have consumed itself.
The commissions dispatched to the colony by the National Assembly all proved abortive, and the
French of the island were compelled, in 1794, to decree the abolition of slavery. Spanish forces under
Toussaint L'Ouverture were driving the French back in the north, and the English had landed in the south
and west.
The Negroes, under brilliant leadership by generals of their own race, by skilful exploitation of the
contentions of the European powers, and above all by prolonged and bitter fighting, succeeded in throw-
ing off the yoke of the whites. The struggle was characterized by extraordinary bravery, by massacres and
by minor civil wars between the Blacks and Mulattoes, and by acts of cruelty and treachery on both sides.
From this long flux of events, several figures emerge, and of these the most notable by far is Toussaint
L'Ouverture.
Toussaint was a pure Negro whose family had only been a generation in the colony. An old tradition
in the island makes him the grandson of Gaou-Guinou, King of Allada (Rada or Arada) on the Guinea
Coast. In the campaigns which followed the Boukman putsch , he quickly reached the summit of com-
mand. He compelled the French governor to leave the colony for France, defeated the refractory Mulat-
toes of the south, and made himself ruler of Sainte Domingue. He next invaded the neighbouring Spanish
colony and carried through a swift and successful campaign that culminated in his reception at the gates
of Santo Domingo by the Spanish governor, offering him the keys of the capital on a cushion. All the
Negroes of Hispaniola, at that particular moment, were free.