“Procureur fondé du quartier Morin”.

Copie d’une lettre écrite à Monsieur le Chevalier Davane par son procureur fondé du quartier Morin, île de Saint-Domingue, le 30 octobre 1780.
Morin district, Saint-Domingue, 30 October 1780.

4°, 4 pp, manuscript in ink on laid paper.

Important plantation manuscript from colonial Saint-Domingue, being a contemporary copy of a long letter written by the attorney of a sugar estate to the Chevalier Davane. The writer gives a remarkably detailed account of a disastrous flood which, beginning in August 1780, altered the course of the main river, buried extensive cane fields in sand, ruined roads and levees, collapsed furnaces and boiling works, damaged the great house and outbuildings, and destroyed large quantities of sugar. He records the loss of enslaved people, livestock, and equipment, and describes the estate as rendered incapable of production for many months. Few surviving manuscripts convey with such technical precision the physical vulnerability of plantation infrastructure in late-eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue.

Of exceptional interest is the second part of the letter, which denounces the conduct of the colonial authorities. Instead of relief, the most heavily damaged plantations are subjected to forced public works, compelled to open a new road across their lands. The writer speaks of new corvées imposed “by the law of the strongest, supported by the bayonet,” and of threats of imprisonment, deportation to France, and confiscation of enslaved labourers for any refusal to obey. This striking testimony to the coercive machinery of colonial government, written more than a decade before the Haitian Revolution, offers rare insight into the tensions, abuses, and fragilities of the plantation system on the eve of its collapse.

In good condition.