Le plan qui est ci dessous de la ville de San Domingo ou de St. Dominique…

Title

Le plan qui est ci dessous de la ville de San Domingo ou de St. Dominique…

Description

Map shows the city of St. Domingo as bird´s eye view

ca. 1683

Artist

Mallet (1630-1706)

Alain Manesson Mallet (1630- 1706 ) was a French cartographer and engineer. He started his career as a soldier in the army of Louis XIV, became a Sergeant-Major in the artillery and an Inspector of Fortifications. He also served under the King of Portugal, before returning to France, and his appointment to the court of Louis XIV. His military engineering and mathematical background led to his position teaching mathematics at court. His major publications were Description de L'Univers (1683) in 5 volumes, and Les Travaux de Mars ou l'Art de la Guerre (1684) in 3 volumes. His Description de L'Universe contains a wide variety of information, including star maps, maps of the ancient and modern world, and a synopsis of the customs, religion and government of the many nations included in his text. It has been suggested that his background as a teacher led to his being concerned with entertaining his readers. This concern manifested itself in the charming harbor scenes and rural landscapes that he included beneath his description of astronomical concepts and diagrams. Mallet himself drew most of the figures that were engraved for this book.

Historical Description

Until 1492, the Indian peoples of the Arawak, Ciboney and the Caribs lived on Hispaniola. In 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered Hispaniola. Searching for gold deposits, Columbus discovered the ports of Valparaiso (today Port-de-Paix), Punta Santa and, before returning to Europe, built a small fort near the latter with the help of the Arawak from the rubble of the stranded ship Santa Maria. La Navidad, in which he left a crew of 40 men. La Navidad was the first Spanish colony in America. When Columbus started his journey home in 1496, his brother Bartolomeo founded a new city in the south, at the mouth of the Ozama River, Santo Domingo, which became the capital of the island and later gave its name to it (or the eastern part). Since La Isabela was abandoned, Santo Domingo is the oldest surviving European-founded settlement in America. In 1498 Columbus reached the city of Santo Domingo again. He tried to settle disputes between the settlers and his brother and intensified Christianization and the search for gold. In 1517 Pedro d’Atenza brought sugar cane from the Canary Islands to Haiti, and Gonzalez gave the impetus to plantations and sugar mills. [2] To operate it, Ovando brought 40,000 Tainos from the Bahamas, as many of the native Indians had already perished. But even these soon died as a result of the epidemics, whereupon (from 1503 or 1505) people were brought from Africa and imported as slaves. In 1509 Diego Colón, the son of Christopher Columbus, became governor and later viceroy of Hispaniola. In 1512 the inauguration of the University of Santo Domingo, the first university in the New World, took place. From 1625 onwards, French and English pirates (called buccaneers or flibustiers) settled on the nearby island of Île de la Tortue in the north. They were later expelled, but a remnant of them, consisting mainly of French, settled as planters on the deserted north coast of Hispaniola and asked France to support them against the Spaniards. Louis XIV then sent Bertrand d'Ogeron as governor to Hispaniola in 1661 and founded a French colony in the western part of the island in 1665, which was destroyed by the Spanish in 1686. As early as 1691, however, a new French colony was founded by Jean Baptiste du Casse. In the Treaty of Rijswijk in 1697, Spain renounced the western part ("Saint Domingue") of the island in favor of France. The French and the remaining Spanish part of Hispaniola developed very differently. In 1776 the border between the two parts of the country was regulated, which roughly corresponds to today's.