]
Everything else of such nature, however, was eclipsed by the prodigious
upheaval in San Domingo consequent upon the French Revolution. Under the
flag of France the western end of that island had been converted in the
course of the eighteenth century from a nest of buccaneers into the most
thriving of plantation colonies. By 1788 it contained some 28,000 white
settlers, 22,000 free negroes and mulattoes, and 405,000 slaves. It had
nearly eight hundred sugar estates, many of them on a huge scale. The
soil was so fertile and the climate so favorable that on many fields the
sugar-cane would grow perennially from the same roots almost without end.
Exports of coffee and cotton were considerable, of sugar and molasses
enormous; and the volume was still rapidly swelling by reason of the great
annual importations of African slaves. The colony was by far the most
valued of the French overseas possessions.
Some of the whites were descendants of the original freebooters, and
retained the temperament of their forbears; others were immigrant fortune
seekers. The white women were less than half as numerous as the men, and
black or yellow concubines were common substitutes for wives.
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