Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2006 - (Page 35) by John H. Lawrence and Alfred E. Lemmon rom European contact through the present day, St. Domingue and Louisiana have been bound together by shared economies, cultural enterprises, and peoples. Despite the multifaceted nature of their common history, one story line — the arrival of St. Domingue émigrés in Louisiana in the wake of the Haitian Revolution — has received the lion’s share of attention. A new exhibit at The Historic New Orleans Collection, Common Routes: St. Domingue and Louisiana, seeks to expand upon (and complicate) the story of the émigrés, while shining new light on lesser-known aspects of the history linking Louisiana to the island of Hispañola, the colony of St. Domingue, and the nation of Haiti. The historian Thomas Fiehrer has referred to St. Domingue as “the parent colony” that nurtured and sustained French Louisiana through “trade, communication and migration.” The bond is clearly visible in Route pour le voyage de la Louisiane (see page 17), a map from the remarkable Voyage de la Louisiane (1728) of Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Antoine Laval (1664-1728). St. Domingue’s location made it a perfect base for French exploration and settlement. In 1698, Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d'Iberville, departed St. Domingue to establish a colony near present-day Ocean Springs, Mississippi. The survival of Iberville’s settlement, and others that followed, depended on the regular passage of provisions across the Atlantic, through the Caribbean and St. Domingue, and on to Louisiana via the Gulf of Mexico. Ships routinely stopped in St. Domingue en route to Louisiana, turning early travelers into agents of cultural cross-pollination. When the young bon vivant Pierre Caillot traveled from France to Louisiana in 1729, his ship, La Durance, stopped in Les Cayes — an experience memorably captured in Caillot’s hand-drawn view of the southern port city (see below). Land surveyor Jean-Pierre Lassus (16941758) traveled to Louisiana in 1724, producing in 1726 perhaps the earliest significant non-cartographic view of New Orleans (see page 16). Lassus next settled in St. Domingue, working there for several years and marrying before ultimately returning to France. Caillot, Lassus, and others spotlighted in the exhibit illustrate a curatorial goal of Common Routes — the revelation of broad cultural patterns through the examination of individual lives. One story at a time, one layer at a time, a more nuanced view of a shared history emerges. Consider Étienne Périer (1690?-1755?), a colonial administrator. LEFT: The revolution on St. Domingue produced no figure more compelling than François-Dominigue Toussaint (17431803), depicted here on an 1802 color engraving by Jean. Born into slavery in St. Domingue, Toussaint was educated and later emancipated. His personal charisma and military skills made him a natural leader when the revolution began. Self-christened Toussaint Louverture (“The Opening”), he was known for his ability to exploit the smallest defensive weakness in his opponent. courtesy of Dr. Fritz Daguillard RIGHT: Pierre Caillot, a young Frenchman who traveled to Louisiana in 1729, documented his shipʼs stop in Les Cayes with a watercolor view showing the port just three years after its founding. courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection Spring 2006/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 35
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