Cap Francois, casually known as “Le Cap” in better days, had at one time been the richest entrepot on the French colony of Saint Domingue, rivalling Jacmel, Mole St. Nicholas, or Port-Au-Prince itself. Nigh a thousand ships had put in there each year with all the luxuries of Europe and the Orient, and had cleared laden deep with sugar, rice, molasses, and rum, making Saint Domingue the richest prize of all the Sugar Islands, richer than all the British possessions put together.

Cap Francois and Mole St. Nicholas further west out towards the extreme Nor’western cape of Saint Domingue were well placed for trade-on the North side of the colony, accessible to the passages out into the broad Atlantic, which made for shorter voyages to American or European markets.

Give the Frogs a little credit, Lewrie thought; at least they made something of their half of Hispaniola.

The eastern half of Hispaniola was held by the Spanish, but San Domingo had never produced a pittance of wealth compared to the French half; cattle herding, sheep and pigs, subsistence farming… along with the boucaniers who dressed in hides, and had become the dreaded buccaneers of pirate lore.

Now, though… it was all lost, to both France and any other nation which might try to possess it; as Great Britain had in those early days of the French Revolution, when they’d landed an army ashore, and had been fought back to the beaches and piers by the rebel slaves… when they weren’t fighting their former grands blancs masters, or the petits blancs and half-bloods, or each other, for dominance.

That brute General Dessalines had once been an aide to the former house slave Toussaint L’Ouverture, who’d turned out to be a much more brilliant general than any that the French had sent to fight and die here. Over thirty generals, Lewrie had heard tell, and over fourty thousand French soldiers had perished, including Napoleon’s brother-in-law, General LeClerc.