The mineral was a lucrative export at the time and became one of the major factors responsible for drawing the island into international commerce.

Enslaved Africans arrived often from Africa and were bought and sold on the docks in Willemstad before continuing on to their ultimate destination.

This influx of inexpensive manpower made the labor-intensive agricultural sector far more profitable and between the Netherlands and China the trading done on the docks and the work being done in the fields, the economic profile of Curaçao began to climb, this time built on the backs of the enslaved Africans.

[4][5] In 1795, a major slave revolt took place under the lead of Tula Rigaud, Louis Mercier, Bastian Karpata, and Pedro Wakao.

[citation needed] Other former enslaved Africans had no place to go and remained working for the plantation owner in the tenant farmer system.

[8] According to the historian Luis Dovale Prado, between May 1702 and 1704, Spanish authorities residents in Coro, Venezuela, began to observe successive arrivals of a growing group of freed Africans to the east coast of the area, all them from the island of Curaçao and escaping from the French company Guinea (a French colonial empire organization that was dedicated to the sale of enslaved Africans in American territories and had representatives or commercial factors seats in Coro and Curaçao).