Caribbean Settlers

In the last decades of the seventeenth century, maritime transport bordermen gradually migrated from Jeremy Feschamps ' informal "colony" in Tortuga to the neighboring country around Port-de-Paix in the Spanish-controlled northwest of Hispaniola since the Caribbean infringement gave way to commercial agriculture and stock-raising.

It was not until the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 that the area became a formal French possession. Still, from that date until the disintegration of colonial rule in 1804, population growth was steady, especially in slaves.

Enslaved Africans in antebellum( before the war )Louisiana's southeastern congregations retained significant Africanism in their medical universe - the sustained pursuit of holistic healing.

Enslaved Africans functioned as operatives of their medical care, not as dependent recipients of slave owners ' attention, as the literature suggests.

Africans participated as diviners and dispensers of medical care (in the Babalawo and Onishegun context, constituent of the West African Yoruba tradition).

Antebellum historians and contemporary scholars, however, characterized the African materia medica in the U.S. institution of enslavement as "superstitious" traditions from Africa.

Through the need to respond immediately to healthcare matters, diaspora Africans revealed the ingenuity of the traditional African ideology on holistic well-being.

By the time La Nouvelle Orleans (New Orleans) was founded in 1718, about 172 Africans were enslaved. As the Louisiana Territory changed rulers, the city itself oversaw colossal changes.

First, as a French colony in the "new world," then as a Spanish holding from 1763, then temporarily back to French rule in 1802, when it was finally sold in 1803 to the USA.

The French court spurred settlement by advertising the West Indies as hospitable and biodiverse.

By the early eighteenth century, migration to the lesser French Antilles and Guyana diminished as Europeans and other Western Indians drove toward the magnet of generating ports, markets, and raucous new settlements that sprang up across the island in more significant numbers.

Even though the French had occupied the Caribbean for nearly a century before colonizing Louisiana, and while acquainted with hurricanes from that part of the New World, they encountered an unknown landscape and climate on the Gulf of Mexico's North American coast, which they could not yet topographically and meteorologically connect it with the Caribbean Islands.

The diverse mix of increasingly arriving colonists confronted with the danger of hurricanes and their effects on the low-lying local environment.

Although settlers in the Spanish, French, and British Antilles gained local knowledge of hurricanes by studying with the native population, as Fernandez de Oviedo, du Tertre, and Captain Langford's accounts suggest, there was no such documentation for the French in Louisiana.

Local knowledge transmission from indigenous populations living in the Mississippi Delta is reported to have been much more focused on the annual floods and settlements of the river.