Modern Haiti, whose borders somewhat exceed those of Saint-Domingue, is roughly two and a half times larger than Jamaica, with a total surface area of 10,714 square miles (27,750 square kilometers) compared to 4,213 square miles (10,911 square kilometers). Both land areas are part of a common limestone formation that makes up the Greater Antilles from Cuba into Puerto Rico. Both therefore have high and rugged interiors that were difficult for eighteenth-century cartographers to depict. In a 1763 map of Jamaica drawn by Thomas Craskell and James Simpson, the island’s chief engineer and chief surveyor created a detailed image of the colony that would not be surpassed until 1804. They depicted the island’s recently settled western highlands as far more forbidding terrain than the Blue Mountains in the long-settled eastern parishes.27 In fact the Blue Mountains are Jamaica’s only true mountain range, with elevations reaching 7,402 feet (2,256 meters). Much of the rest of the interior is a rugged and elevated limestone plateau, with peaks as high as 2,770 feet (844 meters).28
Cartographers were even less prepared to portray Saint-Domingue’s terrain. The Pic de la Selle, at 8,793 feet above sea level (2,680 meters), is 15 percent taller than Jamaica’s highest point. This mountain is only the highest of a complex collection of mountain systems, composed of many different ranges that divide the country into at least four distinctive regions.29 By the 1760s, French mapmakers were technically able to measure these heights and to depict them in two dimensions. Most published maps of Saint-Domingue, however, either relied on older symbolic depictions of mountains, or offered topographic detail only in specific regions, as in the case of a 1776 map created to accompany a memorandum by Charles d’Estaing, a former governor.30 Only in the twentieth century would Haiti’s topography be fully mapped.
Because of their mountainous interiors, in both colonies maritime transportation from one region to another was often easier than overland travel. The 1763 Craskell/Simpson map of Jamaica shows far more attention to plantations and to anchorage points than to the road network. Saint-Domingue’s maps, like one drawn in 1722 by Guillaume Delisle, show roads more clearly, but because these images contained only vague topographical detail they exaggerate the ease of overland travel.31 Only about 14 percent of Jamaica is level land, some of it in alluvial plains, the largest of which lie along the southern coast. The remainder is found in valleys enclosed by the central limestone plateaus. As late as the 1930s, geographers considered only 10 percent of the island to be arable.32 In modern Haiti, similarly, experts conclude that only one-fifth of land is appropriate for farming.33
Jamaica’s geography, despite the challenges it posed to colonists, allowed a greater commercial and administrative centralization than was possible in Saint-Domingue. By the early eighteenth century the parishes of Kingston and St. Catherine, on the island’s eastern leeward side, had emerged as the colony’s political and mercantile center. The political capital at Spanish Town, the commercial center in Kingston, and smuggling and pirate town of Port Royal were all located within a twenty-mile radius. Saint-Domingue’s size, unusual coastline, and mountainous interior prevented such coherence. The most important commercial port, Cap Français, on the Atlantic coast, was so vulnerable to attack that French administrators created a series of capitals on the western coast. In the 1750s they finally settled on Port-au-Prince. Like Jamaica’s Spanish Town, this served as the official residence of the governor-general and the meeting place of the Superior Council of Port-au-Prince. Cap Français was so far away that it had its own Superior Council, and its own provincial governor. The colony’s southern coast also had its own governor, though never a Council. In terms of communication and administration, therefore, Saint-Domingue was “three colonies in one.”34
Saint-Domingue’s dispersed and divided terrain made it more economically diverse than the English island. By the 1720s sugar was firmly established as the dominant product of Jamaican agriculture. As the 1763 Craskell/Simpson map shows, colonists there also planted cacao, ginger, cotton, and pimentos and raised livestock. No other crop, however, rivaled sugar for export earnings, capital investment, or enslaved labor. In Saint-Domingue, where sugar planting was slower to emerge, many planters produced indigo or cotton. Coffee, introduced from Martinique in the 1730s, came to rival sugar by the 1760s as a Dominguan export. It could be grown in the interior mountains, which were useless for sugar, and it required a far smaller investment in labor, animals, and machinery.
Physical and geopolitical conditions in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue meant that both territories sheltered what Franklin Knight dubbed “transfrontier” populations even before the English and French took power.35 Spanish colonists bought enslaved Africans early in the 1500s, and by the mid-seventeenth century, communities of escaped black men and women—maroons—were already living in the mountain interiors of both colonies. In Jamaica, newly imported Africans joined the former slaves of the Spanish so that by the 1730s the island had about one thousand maroons.36 They fought the British throughout the 1730s, winning treaties in 1738 and 1739 that recognized their right to exist in the interior and to govern themselves. Spanish Santo Domingo had more maroons than white settlers in 1542, and maroon villages remained in place in much of the island in the mid-1600s as the French established themselves in the western third.37 From the 1720s through to the 1740s, French colonists in Saint-Domingue fought maroon bands in the mountains. In the 1750s some observers estimated that the colony had three thousand maroons.38 Saint-Domingue, perhaps because of its larger size and the distance between its mountain regions, never had a maroon war like that of Jamaica. By 1785, Saint-Domingue had only one large maroon population, the Le Maniel maroons, who were living on the southernmost part of the French-Spanish colonial border when they signed a treaty with the French.
Although the English and French established their claims differently on the two colonies, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue started with a significant number of inhabitants who might be described as white maroons—escaped sailors and indentured servants seeking freedom. An English fleet attacked and conquered Spanish Jamaica in 1655, after failing to take Santo Domingo. The island quickly became a major center for smuggling and piracy. France claimed Saint-Domingue earlier but less forcefully. In the 1640s, French authorities in the Lesser Antilles began sending governors to the western third of Hispaniola, which the Spanish had forcibly evacuated in 1605. Officials of the royally chartered companies that administered this frontier territory in the seventeenth century gradually claimed control over the population of castaways, escapees, and deserters who lived here hunting feral cattle, farming tobacco, and attacking passing ships. Company governors brought in new colonists from the metropole as well as from the Lesser Antilles. The French navy, with fewer sailors and ships than the English, allied with these pirates in the 1680s and 1690s for raids on the Spanish mainland and even on Jamaica in 1694, carrying away many slaves. English forces out of Jamaica attacked the French colony the following year.
Even with the growth of sugar, Jamaica remained a major commercial center for illegal trade with Spanish colonies, especially the transshipment of enslaved Africans. In 1700 the prospect of placing a Bourbon monarch on the Spanish throne led French authorities to imagine that Saint-Domingue could take over Jamaica’s role as commercial gateway to Spanish American market. But over a twenty-year period a French monopoly company charged with this task failed to dislodge the English from this trade. As French colonists noted, their kingdom’s slave trade could not supply enough workers even to them, let alone to the Spanish. Throughout the eighteenth century, England’s naval superiority to France and the far greater volume of its African trade, at least until the 1780s, when slave imports to Saint-Domingue far surpassed that of Jamaica, would be two essential points of difference between Saint-Domingue and Jamaica.39
Another essential difference between the two colonies was the way in which their empires’ respective mercantile policies were configured. England’s Navigation Acts, passed in 1651, were designed to reclaim shipping and commerce among English colonies and the metropole from Dutch shippers. Both England and France initially formed joint-stock companies, which received royal monopolies on trade with certain geographical regions, like, for example, England’s Royal African Company (1660–1752), or France’s Company of the West Indies (1664–74) or the French Company of the Indies
