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Concerned about increasing French prosperity and inroads into the eastern section of Hispaniola, Spain paid renewed attention to its colony. In 1737, the Spanish imported Canary Islanders (off the west coast of Africa) to resettle Puerto Plata on the north coast, and did the same when establishing the northeastern settlement of Santa Bárbara de Samaná in 1756. Within another few decades, the north coast had become a center for the mahogany trade, exporting valuable tropical woods to Europe that had been harvested from the rainforests to the south. By the 1780s, about 150,000 settlers occupied the colony, with Spanish-ancestry settlers outnumbered nearly three to one by African slaves and mixed-race or black freemen.
Touissaint L’Ouverture
In 1791, with imported Africans facing torturous conditions on the sugar plantations, a slave uprising broke out in French Saint-Domingue, led by Tous-saint L’Ouverture. With the plantations burning and fearing for their colony, France abolished slavery there in 1794. L’Ouverture consolidated his base and prepared to declare an independent state called Haiti.
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