White Haitians
The presence of whites in Haiti dates back to the founding of La Navidad, the first European settlement in the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492.
The capital of the colony was moved to Santo Domingo in 1496, on the south east coast of the island also in the territory of the present-day Dominican Republic.
A second settlement was established on the north coast in 1504 called Puerto Real near modern Fort-Liberté – which in 1578 was relocated to a nearby site and renamed Bayaha.
[10] In 1595, the Spanish, frustrated by the twenty-year rebellion of their Dutch subjects, closed their home ports to rebel shipping from the Netherlands, cutting them off from the critical salt supplies necessary for their herring industry.
In 1605, Spain was infuriated that Spanish settlements on the northern and western coasts of the island persisted in carrying out large scale and illegal trade with the Dutch, who were at that time fighting a war of independence against Spain in Europe and the English, a very recent enemy state, and so decided to forcibly resettle their inhabitants closer to the city of Santo Domingo.
[11] This action, known as the Devastaciones de Osorio, proved disastrous; more than half of the resettled colonists died of starvation or disease, over 100,000 cattle were abandoned and many slaves escaped.
In the early seventeenth century, the Spanish government ordered the evacuation of the northern and western coasts of the islands and forced the relocation of areas close to the city of Santo Domingo, to prevent the pirates from other European nations.
This ended up being counterproductive to Spain, because in 1625 the pirates and French buccaneers began to establish settlements on the island of Tortuga and in a strip north of Hispaniola surrounding Port-de-Paix and were soon joined by like-minded English and Dutch privateers and pirates, who formed a lawless international community that survived by preying on Spanish ships and hunting wild cattle.
By that time, planters outnumbered buccaneers and, with the encouragement of Louis XIV, they had begun to grow tobacco, indigo, cotton and cacao on the fertile northern plain, thus prompting the importation of African slaves.
In 1777, France and Spain signed a border treaty, in which the western and northwestern coast of Hispaniola would be French and the rest of the island would be Spanish.
The French established an economy based on the production and export of sugar sustained on the forced labor of black slaves imported from West and Central Africa.
The wealthy grand-blancs returned to France or went to French Louisiana, but the petit-blancs who did not have many resources were compelled to move to the eastern side of Hispaniola, Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Most French colonists died or fled Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution and the surviving remainder were either killed in the 1804 Haiti massacre or were thought to be of some use to the country's development, such as doctors, teachers and engineers.
[28] The creole term nèg is derived from the French word negre (which means "black") and is used similarly to dude or guy in American English.
