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pottery, porcelain, jewels, shoes, hats, parrots, mon-
    keys. Efforts by the administration to stop this practice failed, and the market was very popular with townspeople. “It is fashionable,” wrote Moreau,
    “to take a turn in the marché des blancs, even if one has nothing to buy there.” The trading of the ship’s actual cargo occurred along the Rue du
    Gouvernement, where merchants and naval captains had shops. In front of
    each store was a board, usually decorated with a drawing of the ship whose
    cargo it advertised. In a matter of a few steps, one could “journey through
    the whole of France,” hearing Gascon, Normand, and Provençal accents.
    Slaves constantly brought goods back and forth from the port.34
    Ships brought something else of great value: news. Residents gathered
    in houses near the port to speak to new arrivals or to pass along what they
    had heard to one another. Arriving news found its way into a newspaper
    called Affiches Américaines . Starting in 1788, where the wealthier residents of Le Cap could gather in a cabinet littéraire, a club whose members paid annual dues for access to an “elegantly furnished” room with a
    library containing “all the interesting newspapers” along with a billiard
    room. The same building was home to the Cercle des Philadelphes, the
    scientific society that supported Moreau’s work on his Description. Its members pursued a wide variety of intellectual pursuits, from botanical experiments to the ill-fated attempt by one plantation owner to introduce
    camels from Africa.35
    Le Cap was the size of Boston. It had a population of 18,850, though
    several thousand of these were soldiers and the majority of the rest were
    slaves. Its fifty-six streets were organized in a grid, marked with signs and street numbers, and in the wealthiest part of town close to the port were
    partially paved. There were imposing buildings scattered throughout Le
    Cap: Le Gouvernement—the house of the administration—which had
    been the home of the Jesuits until their expulsion from the colony in 1763;
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    av e n g e r s o f t h e n e w w o r l d
    [To view this image, refer to
    the print version of this title.]

    “Plan de la ville du Cap François,” 1789. By 1789 Le Cap was a thriving town, its well-ordered pattern of streets a contrast to the surrounding mountains. The map is drawn with North to the right. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
    the military barracks behind it, which could house more than a thousand
    soldiers; a convent; a large church with an imposing facade; a prison that
    held (separately) both black prisoners, often runaway slaves, and white
    criminals and debtors; and several hospitals. There were twenty-five baker-
    ies and, on the outskirts of town, a slaughterhouse. An elaborate municipal
    water system fed several fountains that provided “fresh and limpid water”
    from the “neighboring mountains” in public squares. To the south, in a
    neighborhood called “Petite Guinée,” free people of color were concen-
    trated, although others lived elsewhere in the town. In contrast to the
    other cities of the colony, notably Port-au-Prince, most of Le Cap’s 1,400
    houses were built of stone. They had “gardens or thick trellises shading
    them from the sun,” and many were inhabited by exotic birds from Sene-
    s p e c t e r s o f s a i n t - d o m i n g u e
    23
    gal, Guiana, and the Mississippi. Those from Senegal had the striking abil-
    ity to “change in color without changing their feathers.”36
    Le Cap, which one resident called “the Paris of our island,” was a lively
    cultural center, one of the most important in the eighteenth-century Amer-
    icas. It boasted a theater with a 1,500-person capacity, where Molière’s Le Misanthrope was performed in the 1760s. In 1784 Le Mariage de Figaro opened there soon after its premiere in Paris. A local play, Monday at the Cap, or Payday, was also performed. Racial segregation was strictly