1820–1842: (The Long Sleep: Catastrophes, Calamities, and the Earthquake of 1842): The historian Lepelletier de Saint-Rémy characterized Boyer’s government a…

1820–1842: (The Long Sleep: Catastrophes, Calamities, and the Earthquake of 1842): The historian Lepelletier de Saint-Rémy characterized Boyer’s government as “a long sleep,” but it was a sleep intermittently interrupted by catastrophes and calamities — two fires in 1820 and 1822 burned out nearly half of Port-au-Prince, leveling over 500 houses with 25 million francs in damage, much of it due to looting by pillaging soldiers. In February 1827, a laborer in the national arsenal incautiously struck the iron hoop of a powder barrel with an iron hammer, touching off the magazine, blowing down much of the waterfront, and causing $1 million in damage — guns in the waterfront battery, which no one had unloaded since Christophe’s siege in 1812, went off at random for several days. Les Cayes was nearly wiped out on the night of August 12–13, 1831, when a hurricane scourged the South and backed a tidal wave over much of the city, killing hundreds before dawn, and Port-au-Prince was swept by still another fire in July 1832. The worst disaster of the century occurred on May 7, 1842, when an earthquake rocked Hispaniola from end to end — Santiago de los Caballeros was leveled, so were Fort Liberté and Port-de-Paix, and at Cap Haïtien alone 10,000 persons, including the poet Milscent, were buried in the ruins while peasants from the hills trooped down and looted the city as if the year were 1793.