A woman taken at twelve describes ten years in Petit-Goave

Juana Tomasa, a mestiza from Maracaibo in Venezuela, was kidnapped when she was barely twelve and spent a decade at Petit-Goave. Questioned at Veracruz in December 1688 by the judge Fernando Lopez Ursino, she described a port that took enslaved people, linen goods, liquor and wine and paid in tobacco. That matches what the French slave trader La Courbe recorded in 1687, when he received three thousand pounds of tobacco for each person he sold. Sugarcane was still fifteen years away from dominating the colony. Tomasa said the ships entering Petit-Goave were all French, which conveniently gave the judge nothing on Dutch contraband. She said an undisclosed number of women paid six pesos each to board a French sloop that carried them to Baracoa, and that she begged the ship owner there to take them on to Havana so the pirates could not seize them again. She called herself a foreigner in Veracruz.