History of Marie Galante : Discover

Discover Marie Galante : History

History

The Guadeloupe archipelago was discovered by Columbus on his second journey, on which he departed from Cadiz on the 25 September, 1493 with 17 ships and 1200 men. Marie Galante was the first to welcome him on the 3rd November, 1493, a couple of days before Guadeloupe and Dominica. The conquistadors claimed possession of the island by planting a cross and a flag on its ground, saying a prayer and baptising the newly acquired territory “Maria Galanda”, after the name of their captain, Christopher Columbus’s caravel. The Spanish nicknamed the island “sombrero”, due to its roundish shape, and American Indian populations for their part called it “Aulinagan”, the “cotton ground”. Cotton, referred to as “ichali” was a garden plant for these peoples, who exchanged it for pottery and polished stone hatchets with other Caribbean populations of the Lesser Antilles who had resided in the territory of Dominica, Martinique and Sainte Lucia since the 9th century. These unfortunate aboriginals were most probably far from imagining that they would welcome their exterminators in less than a century and a half to come.

In 1648, thirteen years after Guadeloupe’s colonisation, Marie Galante came under rule of Governor Charles Houel, who installed a colony of fifty men in the Vieux Fort. They cultivated tobacco, cotton, indigo and grapes. Relations with the indigenous population remained unfriendly, and riots were numerous. “Massacre Beach”, near the area of the Vieux Fort witnessed many a conflict opposing Caribs and colonists, of which the most infamous one took place in 1653, in the form of a punishment expedition. Carib rebels slaughtered the complete colonist population of the Vieux Fort, and “decorated” the beach with their unfortunate heads stuck on sticks in order to take revenge for a collective rape committed by Martinique colonists in a Dominican village. Hence the sinister appellation of this beautiful beach.

1,276 new colonists were sent to the island by Governor Jacques de Boisseret, Lord of Temerincourt in the end of the 17th century, and Marie Galante finally met a period of relative prosperity, which stirred the attention of greedy English, Spanish and Dutch conquerors. The English took hold of the island and engaged in a series of attacks against Guadeloupe in 1691, 1703, 1754 and 1805.The Dutch for their part did not go further than a total plundering of the island in 1676, seizing as much livestock and slaves as they possibly could before departing on their way. Marie Galante was briefly occupied by the English between 1805 and 1815, and became a definite French territory after these ten years. The island was to suffer great economic hardships as a result of its turbulent history, and was not to rise again until the end of the 18th- beginning of the 19th century. The year 1835 counted 106 sugarcane plantations on a territory of 157 km2 and a workforce of 11,000 slaves.

Marie Galante adopted a sugarcane monoculture at the time of the French Revolution, when less profitable crops such as coffee, cocoa or indigo were progressively abandoned. The quasi-exclusive exploitation of sugarcane brought about a significant growth in the number of windmills (counting 72 at the end of the 18th century) and livestock-powered mills, which eventually gave it the nickname of “the island of the hundred mills”. The sugarcane industry began a slow decline after the abolishment of slavery in 1848.

Former slaves and those previously referred to as their “masters” engaged in violent opposition a mere year after this grand date. The bloody events of 1849 are a black day in the collective memory of Marie Galante’s population.