Jacmel Cape

The waters off Jacmel served a port on the southern coast of Hispaniola. In 1698, the French Compagnie de Saint-Domingue established a trading settlement on the site of an earlier Indigenous village. The colonial town developed around export commerce, with a street plan adapted to the slopes behind the shore. Fortifications, including the Petite Batterie and Fort Béliot, guarded the entrance to its roadstead.

The port connected the coast with the coffee-producing hinterland of French Saint-Domingue, whose plantation economy depended on enslaved labour. Revolutionary warfare disrupted those connections. Jacmel endured repeated sieges during the struggles of 1791–1803, and its harbour remained important after Haitian independence. The wider story of these coastal waters therefore includes both the movement of plantation exports and the armed contests that transformed the colony. Ships approaching Jacmel entered a roadstead defended from the shore, where the commercial routes of the eighteenth century became entangled with the creation of an independent Haitian state.