The slave trade
and the peopling of Santo Domingo271A third of the negroes from Guinea die normally during the first three years after
their transplantation, and the working life of a negro acclimatized to the country
cannot be put at more than 15 years More than 800,000 negroes have been brought
into the colony since 1680: so large a nursery should have produced millions of slaves,
yet there are only 290,000 now [1776] in the colony.^1
If we accept the apparently very reasonable figure of 800,000 as the total
number of Negroes brought to Santo Domingo between 1680 and 1776, this
means an annual intake of fewer than 8,000. If we add to this the slaves imported
by most Christian Spain from 1503 on—in the year, by the way, when Leonardo
da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa—and the large consignments received during
the French period (sometimes amounting to more than 45,000 Negroes a year,
not counting the illicit trade), we should probably be not far from the truth in
estimating the total number of Negroes imported into Santo Domingo at about
2 million.
Some such number would have been needed for Santo Domingo, during
three centuries of colonization, to have become the gold mine which in turn
enriched the crown of Castille and accounted for almost two-thirds of the
general trade of the kingdom of France. At that time, the island was the most
important colony in the New World, with an economy far outstripping those of
Canada and of the embryonic Confederation of the United States of America.
Two million is a reasonable estimate, taking into account the frag-
mentary information which has come down to us either through the works of
such classic authors as Charlevoix, Moreau de Saint-Méry and d'Auberteuil,
or through the data provided by Bryan Edwards and, more recently, Pierre
de Vaissière and Gaston Martin, or through the more detailed statistics derived
from Santo Domingo's own newspapers.
The second question concerning the ethnic distribution of the African
slaves who formed the population of Santo Domingo is of the greatest interest
to us. It is indeed essential to know the exact origin of our forefathers, and
fortunately the Haiti School has recently been able to determine this thanks
to a hitherto unexploited sources : statistics on runaway slaves and their ethnic
distribution based on descriptions of 48,000 runaways, announcements of
slave-ship consignments as they arrived in the chief ports of Santo Domingo,
and the almost daily book-keeping of the slave trade as reflected in the island's
newspapers between 1764 and 1793.
The slaves imported into Santo Domingo came from a vast geographical
area and an infinite number of different 'nations' or tribes with varied and
imprecise designations difficult to connect with definite locations. The list put
forward by Moreau de Saint-Méry, the list Robert Richard drew up from the
minutes of the Santo Domingo notaries^2 and the data supplied by Descourtilz
and de Malenfant reveal this diversity. I myself have added to these lists some