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decreased by
    several hundred. As sugar plantations proliferated over the next decades,
    the numbers of enslaved increased dramatically; by midcentury there were
    nearly 150,000 slaves and fewer than 14,000 whites, and on the eve of the
    revolution, 90 percent of the colony’s population was enslaved.26
    The number of plantations in Saint-Domingue increased with startling
    rapidity as well. From 1700 to 1704 they jumped from 18 to 120. In 1713
    there were 138, 77 of them in the Northern Province. All of these pro-
    duced raw sugar, which contained many impurities. Bigger profits were
    available to those who could afford technology to purify sugar on-site, re-
    moving the molasses and turning it into an edible (though still brown)
    sugar, which could be sold at a higher price. The number of plantations re-
    moving molasses grew; in 1730 there were 5 in the north, but by 1751
    there were 182, compared with 124 that did not refine sugar. In 1790 there
    were 258 of the former and only 30 of the latter.27
    Sugarcane production required good land, irrigation, a large labor force,
    and expensive equipment. It promised major profits, but it required an ini-
    tial investment far greater than tobacco or indigo. Once the sugar boom hit
    Saint-Domingue, there was a rush to purchase the best land and a vertigi-
    nous rise in prices. The governor wrote in 1700 that a plantation that had
    sold for 70 écus eighteen months earlier could now not be purchased for
    2,000, even when nothing was being cultivated there.28
    As the fertile land in the colony was bought up for sugar plantations,
    some whites were left behind. Many retreated to the interior, scraping by
    farming small plots of land. Others turned to crime: throughout the eigh-
    s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e
    19
    teenth century, the colony’s mountains were home to armed bands of
    whites who preoccupied administrators. Along the coasts, other small com-
    munities existed outside the world of the plantations. Moreau described
    a group in the south as “amphibious beings” whose lives as farmers and
    sailors recalled those of the colony’s early settlers. At the estuary of the
    Artibonite River there was a “kind of Republic” composed of men who
    worked as saltmakers and had renounced marriage, and whose property
    could not be inherited by their offspring but must instead be returned to
    the community. In the late eighteenth century local plantation owners, dis-
    gruntled by the presence of a community that “was a source of problems
    for the discipline of their negroes,” managed to expel the saltmakers from
    their land, to which they had no official title. A governor, however, inter-
    vened when the saltmakers threatened to leave the island forever.29
    Such holdouts were a small minority. Most whites on the island, many of
    them recent arrivals from Europe, wanted a plantation and the profits that
    came with it. But even with good land still available, such a goal was hard
    to achieve. Most plantation owners took out loans from merchant houses in
    France to get started. If all went well, these loans could be paid off over
    time and the planter could grow wealthy. But in many cases the planters
    failed, and the merchant houses acquired the plantations that had been the
    collateral for their loans. By the end of the eighteenth century, many mer-
    chant houses in France’s major port towns of Bordeaux, Nantes, and La
    Rochelle owned plantations in Saint-Domingue. These were managed by
    salaried administrators and overseers. Many young men came to the col-
    ony seeking such positions, but despite the booming economy there were
    not enough of them, and those who failed swelled the ranks of poor and
    unemployed whites. In 1776 one observer noted the “great misery” of
    many whites on the island and opined that those who came to the colony
    with no useful skills were likely to end up dead on the side of the road. This was the fate of one “unknown white man,