French Colonial Writing and the Early French Caribbean

French settlement of the Caribbean began on Saint Kitts (the island was shared with the English), and extended to the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe from 1635. The later settlement on the western side of the island of Hispaniola would become Saint-Domingue, the most prosperous of the French colonies. A variety of individuals and groups came to inhabit the Caribbean during the seventeenth century, some of whom left manuscript or printed accounts of their experiences. However, writing about the colonies was a practice that tended to be reserved, because of certain factors. The Caribbean colonies were marginal zones in social, cultural, and even legal terms, and this marginality profoundly shaped early modern ‘colonial’ writing.

Of those who crossed the Atlantic, only a small minority were concerned with writing about their activities; there were many who could barely write, if they could write at all. Archival records testify to the preoccupations of colonial administrators, religious orders, and planters; isolated manuscripts can tell us about the minutiae of life in the colonies, and their internal and external conflicts. Other manuscripts have no doubt been lost over time. Printing was intended to circulate texts on a much wider scale than in manuscript form, and often to publicize courses of action or colonial initiatives to contemporaries. Rather than colonial ‘literature’, what the early colonial era has bequeathed is a body of texts diverse in their form and aims. 

Many such texts focus on the natural environment or the spiritual life of the colonies. The seventeenth century saw the publication in French of a number of descriptions of the environment of the Caribbean, some in the form of the ‘natural history’. The most thorough is undoubtedly that of the Dominican Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre (1610-1687) who was himself a missionary in the Antilles in the early years of French settlement. His Histoire générale des isles was published in 1654, and it was greatly expanded in a second edition published between 1667 and 1671 as the Histoire générale des Antilles. Du Tertre’s works recount the events of the early French settlement of the region, and also extensively describe the flora and fauna of the Caribbean (in a separate volume entitled the Histoire Naturelle [Natural History] in the edition of 1667). There was a functional side to this description of nature, with Du Tertre positioning himself as a specialist with extensive knowledge of the diet and the healing techniques of the islands. The second edition of Du Tertre’s Histoire is also notable for its account of the lives of the slaves of the Antilles, which is exceptional amongst seventeenth-century printed texts for its detail. 

Du Tertre claimed that his work was greatly appreciated by Parisian intellectual circles of the time; he also claimed that the first edition had been plagiarized by a certain Charles de Rochefort (1604?-1683), the Protestant author of another Histoire of the islands. Another extensive account of the Caribbean region, entitled the Nouveau Voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (first edition in 1722), was left by Du Tertre’s fellow Dominican, Jean-Baptiste Labat (1663-1738). Like Du Tertre’s Histoire, Labat’s account draws much of its interest from the author’s first-hand experience of the colonial world, although Labat focuses far more extensively on the techniques of colonial agriculture (Labat was also a merciless observer of the foibles of his fellow colonists). Certain texts are illustrated with detailed engravings: Du Tertre’s second edition contains some remarkable illustrations by Sébastien Le Clerc which give insight into how the colonial world was imagined by those (like Le Clerc) who had never witnessed the practices of slavery first-hand.

Many of the descriptions of colonial life were inspired by the spiritual concerns of religious orders. Amongst missionaries were Capuchins, Carmelites, and Dominicans like Du Tertre and Labat.  The Jesuits, in large part thanks to their epistolary practices, are a significant source of information about spiritual life in the earlier French Caribbean colonies. Amongst Jesuit printed accounts figures the 1640 Relation written by a Fr Jacques Bouton early in the colonization of Martinique. At Bouton’s time, African slaves were already labouring on the island.

Further to accounts of the natural environment or of missionary initiatives is a limited body of texts, somewhat difficult to classify. Alexandre Exquemelin’s Histoire des Aventuriers is the best-known of the texts describing the lives of flibustiers, or freebooters. Another marginal author was a certain ‘M. de N***’ who left a Voyage aux côtes de Guinée et en Amérique (1719), one of several accounts written by Frenchmen who had actually embarked on slave ships. An anonymous collection entitled the Nouvelles de l’Amérique printed in Rouen in 1678 is one of the rare texts in French in which the slave societies of the Americas are the site of fiction. The interest of such a disparate body of texts derives in part from their dramatic plots; they depict reversals of fortune, tell of danger and death, and describe characters with exceptional traits (in the case of Exquemelin’s Histoire, these were violent freebooters for the most part).

However, colonial texts also derived their interest from the societies they depicted. The histories and relations of the colonial world informed readers not only about the flora and fauna of the Americas, but about the novel societies that were being constructed on the other side of the Atlantic. The early colonies had a poor reputation in France; one generally had to be in some necessity to make the hazardous Atlantic crossing in the first place, and commentators noted the questionable social origins of some settlers. Some commentators chose to instead depict the colonies in a more flattering light, extolling their fertility, their potential to enrich planters, or even the ‘peaceful and easy life’ that planters led, as Charles de Rochefort put it in a mid-1660s text entitled Le Tableau de l’isle de Tabago and intended to attract settlers to the island of Tobago (a Dutch colony at the time). It was recognized that some Europeans could radically change their fortunes in the colonies, perhaps even when they had embarked as indentured labourers. Reading about the rewards the colonies could bring such Europeans may well have been one further attraction of certain colonial texts.

Yet these new agricultural settlements were also the site of labour practices that had been a feature of the colonies since their earliest years, but that were of varying interest to those who took up the quill to describe the Caribbean. The settlements of the region would be increasingly reliant on the labour of African slaves, who would make up an increasingly large proportion of the colonial population as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries progressed. Texts which mention the lives of enslaved people testify to the preoccupations of those Europeans who encountered them, whether on the West African coast or in the Caribbean. For missionaries, they were principally souls to be saved and flocks to be ministered to, but for planters they were a source of labour, and their governance was a matter of concern. Questions about slavery, when they were asked, tended to concern the treatment of enslaved people, or the legitimacy of West African forms of slavery – whether or not slaves had been ‘justly’ enslaved – rather than the principle of slavery itself.

As such, what we know about the lives of enslaved people in the Caribbean is partial, and is always mediated through the voices of European actors. Early colonial texts were written by free Europeans, rather than enslaved people, and in these texts individual slaves were rarely considered of interest, and they are rarely even named. On the exceptional occasions their voices were transcribed at all, these voices are heavily mediated through translation or narrative techniques (such techniques could assimilate them to edifying spiritual models, in the case of certain missionary texts, for example). This is perhaps the most significant absence that is faced when considering ‘colonial’ writing from the Caribbean. For one to ‘speak’ in the narrative – for one to have a narrative voice – then one needed to have status, and in the cultural, as well as the social and legal spheres. Enslaved people, however, inhabited a marginal social zone that was maintained by cultural practices, and enshrined in legal documentation, especially the Code noir (1685); in terms of status they did not fully exist, or exist at all, as such.  In consequence, reading about slave societies before the later abolition era involves reflecting on what has been omitted from the text, as well as interpreting what figures within.

I wish to thank Cécile Vidal for her review of this text and her comments.

Published in december 2024