Black Indians For Sale

Again, perusing the colonial newspaper of Saint Domingue can reveal some surprises. For instance, in 1786, when the Chevalier de Valmont announced he was departing for Europe, several "Black Indians" were put up for sale. Since other cases of "Black Indians" turned out to be Asian Indians, we suspect these domestics were similarly from India.

Madras, India Connection

One must be careful when interpreting the "nations" reported of runaway slaves in Saint-Domingue. This is also true for cases of "Negro Indians" or "Black Indians," who may have usually been people from India or South Asia. Although undoubtedly only a very tiny part of the slave population in Saint-Domingue, they occasionally appeared in the colony's press as runaway slaves. Sometimes they are assigned very specific regions of India, such as Bengale, Coromandel, Malabar, or the Mascarenes (where the French enslaved many Indians). In this case, however, we have encountered, for the first time, an Indian from Madras. This specific Indian runaway, Jean-François, was probably the subject of a runaway ad posted in May 1790. Without this additional description of him in the newspaper, we would not have figured out he was from Madras, or supposedly from Madras (a Tamil, then?).