Guadeloupe was discovered by Christopher Columbus during his second voyage in 1493.  It is an archipelago of nine island of which six are inhabited; Basse-Terre, Grande-Terre, Marie-Galante, La Désirade and two Îles des Saintes. Though the Spaniards settled the island, they had little interest in it, so in June 1635 Charles Liénard De l’Olive lieutenant of Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc in St Cristophe and Jean Du Plessis d’Ossonville joined forces with merchants from Dieppe to colonize Guadeloupe and settled the island on behalf of France. The two did not get along well, so they settled a short distance apart. After Du Plessis death in December 1635, just a few months after arrival, Liénard De l'Olive left the initial northern settlement where famine and disease had decimated the new settlers for a new one in southern Basse-Terre where he built Fort Olive on the site that would become Vieux-Fort.

In 1639 Daniel Trezel (1576-1641), a Dutch Protestant from Amsterdam established as a merchant in Rouen and head of one of the first sugar refineries there, was granted by the Compagnie des îles d'Amérique the exclusive right to sell sugar in Martinique for fifteen years by a notarial deed dated April 6th, with authorization to also establish himself in Guadeloupe, but without exclusivity. He commissioned a Rouen merchant, Daniel Rozée, to purchase one hundred slaves at two hundred livres each and settled his two sons, Samuel and François in Martinique where they would establish the first sugar mill with an animal-powered mill. François remained in Martinique and Samuel negotiated with Charles Liénard de l'Olive to acquire for thirty five thousand livres of petun a plantation in Guadeloupe at Grande Anse de Capesterre. Unable to finance it alone, he sought assistance from the Compagnie des îles d'Amérique and the following year established the first sugar mill in Guadeloupe, the future Trois-Rivières.

On April 4th, 1640 Jean Aubert was appointed governor of Guadeloupe by the Compagnie des Isles d'Amérique for a three-year term replacing Charles Liénard De l'Olive, taking possession on November 25th. He abandoned the site of Fort Olive to settle on the left bank of the Galion River, the site of the present day Riviere Sens Marina in Gourbeyre. Aubert was the former surgeon of St. Christophe and lieutenant of the King, who had married the widow of Jean Du Plessis d’Ossonville. In 1642 Charles Houël du Petit Pré was sent to Guadeloupe by the Compagnie des Isles d'Amérique to conduct a general inquiry. Upon his arrival at the end of the year, Aubert outlined his grand plans for sugarcane and sugar production. According to Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre (1610–1687), a French Dominican missionary, botanist, and historian:

“Aubert showed him, with great frankness and simplicity, the most beautiful sights on the island, and confidently communicated to him the grand plan to produce sugar there, the execution of which the gentlemen of the Company had promised him. Houël was going to return to France, determined to take his place: he was going to negotiate with the Company to obtain the governorship of Guadeloupe… On December 16, the Company decided to invest in sugar production in Guadeloupe: it committed to sending sixty slaves and forty artisans and prepared to invest 60,000 livres.”

In 1643 Charles Houël was appointed seneschal or governor for three years, and Aubert became his subordinate as lieutenant general. Houël was also charged by the Compagnie des Isles d'Amérique with supervising sugar production to be compensated with 10% of the sugar produced under his direction. Houël ordered about one hundred slaves, brought in about one hundred workers and livestock from France and began the construction of the buildings. The sugar project progressed well, but Houël invested lavishly, spending all of the company's revenues in the islands on the sugar project. In 1864 political instability began when Houël returned to France and Samuel and François Trezel formed a company to establish sugar mills in Guadeloupe and Houël accused Aubert of having tried to foment a Carib revolt against him that required Aubert to leave for St. Kitts.

Constant d'Aubigné (1628-1646) sailed from La Rochelle for Guadeloupe in 1644 on the Isabelle de La Tremblade and upon arrival decided to settle on Marie Galante with his valet Tesseron, some passengers from the Isabelle including Merry Rolle, Jean Fris de Bonnefon, Michel de Jacquières and his wife Sara Martin, and a few slaves. They cleared land, built a wooden house and planted food crops and tobacco, d'Aubigné’s wife, children and an indentured servant joined them a few weeks later. In 1645 Constant d'Aubigné left for France leaving his small settlement under the care of his wife and Merry Rolle. He intended to request a governorship of the island of Marigalande from the Compagnie des Isles de l'Amérique, which he obtained on March 31st marking the foundation of Marie Galante, but d'Aubigné would not return to Marie Galante.

In 1645 Charles Houël returned to Guadeloupe and established two or three animal powered sugar factories where the inhabitants brought their sugarcane. The Trézel family was called upon to advise Houël and the Compagnie des Isles d'Amérique authorized them to operate a mill for five years exempted from the duties on all the sugars they have previously produced and would produce until the last day of December 1647. However, in 1648 unable to compete with sugar from Brazil due to his lack of knowledge of the sugar bleaching technique, Houël ceased operations at his sugar factories. In 1649, the Compagnie des Isles d'Amérique went bankrupt in partly due to Houël expenditures and could no longer support him. As a result all the islands were to be sold off so on September 4, 1649 the island of Gudeloupe and adjacent islands of La Désirade, Marigalande and Xaintes were purchased by Charles Houël du Petit Pré and his brother-in-law Jean de Boisseret d’Herblay ( -1654) for 60,000 livres.

In January 1654, the Dutch finally lost control of Recife and Pernambuco provinces that the Dutch West India Company had conquered in 1630 and renamed New Holland or Dutch Brazil, leaving to the Portuguese their colony of Brazil.  Driven out by the uprising, some of these Dutch refugees consisting of Protestants andJews who had fled to Holland and then Brazil following the Inquisition, fled to the Caribbean islands bringing with them sugar making techniques from the Canary Islands. Some found refuge in Barbados, where the English, needing their skills, offered them assistance in settling. Some though, sought refuge in Martinique where they were not welcome by Jacques Dyel Du Parquet, who on the advice of the Jesuits did not want heretics on his island.

Charles Houël had just returned to Guadeloupe from France, and on February 1654 against the wishes of the Jesuits, welcomed the refugees turned back in Martinique. In total, there were about nine hundred refugees, including three hundred soldiers and three hundred slaves who landed in Guadeloupe with Houël's agreement. He granted them sixteen hectares of land at Baie des Flamands near Sainte Marie in Capesterre. The newcomers, after carefully examining the land, assured him that it was ideal for sugarcane and promised to grow even better than in Brazil. In exchange, Houël asked for two-fifths of the sugar produced. These Dutchmen brought a modern sugar-making technique, contributing to the true beginning of the sugar industry in Guadeloupe, where they introduced the secret of bleaching, a technique Houël had lacked. This traditional method of sugar production in the West Indies would remain virtually unchanged for almost two centuries.

By Royal Edict of May 28, 1664, followed by a Royal Declaration of August 27, two companies headquartered in Le Havre were created: the East India Company and the West India Company. The west India Company received for forty years, a monopoly on trade in the Islands and mainlands of America. The new West India Company was to buy back the islands from their lords. The island of Guadeloupe and all of Marigot and La Désirade was purchased on July 10th from Jean Bochart, knight and lord of Champigny, Noroy, and his wife, Dame Magdelaine Houël, widow of De Boisseret for 120,000 livres tournois, of which 20,000 was in cash, the rest by drafts. In December 1674, the West India Company was dissolved after accumulating debts of 3,523,000 livres tournois. The same Edict thatt dissolved the Company, attached the Islands to the Royal Domain, becoming the Royal Domain of the West Indies.

By the early 18th Century, Guadeloupe and the other French Colonies in the Caribbean of Saint Domingue and Martinique, accounted for the majority of the France’s overseas profits.  Guadeloupe was the first of the French colonies to make the shift to a sugar monoculture. During that time the sugar industry in Guadeloupe benefited from the influence of Jean-Baptiste Labat aka Père Labat (1663-1738), a Dominican missionary monk, botanist, explorer, ethnographer and strong leader who played a significant role in the early French colonization and influence in the Caribbean. He is known for recounting his 17th Century Antillean adventures in two books titled Nouveau Voyage aux iles de l'Amerique and Voyage du Chevalier Demarchais en Guinee, iles voisines, et a Cayenne, fait en 1725, 1726, et 1727.  Père Labat lived in Guadeloupe between 1694 and 1705 and is known for his writings about the islands, including food and cultural practices. He is also associated with the rum industry, having been recognized as an early distiller who established the first sugar refinery in Guadeloupe, thereby laying the foundation for the economic prosperity that followed.  In 1703 he organized the island’s African slaves to fight against the English Siege of Guadeloupe when he supposedly and personally fired several cannon shots.

The British briefly occupied the island between 1759 and 1763 when it was recaptured by the French. During the Invasion of Guadeloupe in April 1794, the British captured Guadeloupe but could hold it for only until December of that year when the French regained control. Great Britain again captured Guadeloupe from France in 1810 but in 1813 Britain ceded the island to Swedish Crown Prince Charles XIV John, also known as Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte to compensate him for lost lands in France and to secure Sweden's military alliance against Napoleon. Following the defeat of Napoleon and the Second Treaty of Paris and the Congress of Vienna, Sweden ceded Guadeloupe back to France in 1815 permanently.

To this day, in Marie-Galante sugarcane was and is the most widespread crop and the major source of income and employment. It is known as the “Island of the 100 Mills” as the story goes there were once one hundred six windmills on the island. The history of Guadeloupe’s sugar industry is rich for such a small territory, and is also extensive dating back to the 18th Century. Today only two sugar factories are in operation in all of Guadeloupe, Grand-Anse in Marie Galante and Gardel in Grande-Terre to which a page for each is dedicated. However, in addition to Gardel and Grand Anse, the following now closed four sugar factories also highlight the history of sugar production in Guadeloupe.

• Roussel-Trianon Plantation - From 1720s to the 1740s the Trianon plantation was owned by Nicolas Bonhomme, Nicolas and his wife passed away prematurely, leaving minor children as only heirs so their legally appointed guardians were forced to sell the estate. In 1747 the plantation which then comprised two hundred eighteen plots of land with fifty nine cultivated with sugarcane, was purchased by Jean Joseph Lacavé Fossecave.  In 1785, the property passed to one of his daughters who had married Paul Botreau-Roussel giving rise to the Roussel-Trianon name.   The plantation prospered in and around the revolutionary period and moved progressively from wind to steam power from 1845 onward.  In 1860, Victor Roussel, the owner of Trianon Plantation, became the first man in Guadeloupe to introduce Derosne & Cail triple-effect machinery for boiling operations.  In 1873 Victor Botreau-Roussel sold the Roussel-Trianon factory to Hyppolite De Retz who then merged it into the Grand Anse sugar mill they also owned.  The Roussel-Trianon Plantation is part of the Slave Route-Traces of Memory organized by the Conseil Général of Guadeloupe. As it was customary then, the Roussel-Trianon Plantation used wind power to move its mill, its windmill is one of the most impressive of its kind on the island. Remains of the plantation are located at the site where the Trianon sugar factory was established in 1669 with an animal-powered mill. The Manor House built at the end of the 18th century by its then owner Paul Botreau Roussel has been demolished but ruins of the sugar factory, the chimney and the stone masonry windmill still stand today.

• Beauport Sugar Factory - In 1732 when only a sugar plantation and not yet named Beauport, was owned by Simon Babin. In 1813 then consisting of ninety six hectares and seventy slaves, it was bought by the Ruillier-Beauport family. Towards the end of the 18th Century, the French Revolution and the collapse of the slave system in 1794 (it was not permanently abolished until 1848), contributed to the decline of the Ruillier family, as well as that of most large landowners in Guadeloupe. More than twenty sugar plantations belonging to the family were subsequently confiscated. In 1836, a French immigrant from the Hautes-Pyrénées who arrived in Guadeloupe in the 1820 named Dr. Armand Souques, already the owner of several estates, acquired the plantation. By 1843 he had installed a steam mill but by the mid 1850s, Dr. Souques envisioned a technological shift from archaic sugar making methods known as "Father Labat's method” to a modern, central sugar factory. He then sent his son Ernest Souques (1831-1908) to Paris to learn mechanics and industrial sugar technology and complete an internship in the factory of the famous French industrialist Jean François Cail. While in France, Dr. Souques tasked Ernest to secured financing from the recently established Crédit Colonial founded in 1860 and to negotiate with Cail for the construction of the Usine de Beauport which officially opened in February 1863 by far the largest factory in the French West Indies.  At the end of 1864 burdened with excessive debt for the construction of the sugar mill, Ernest negotiated with Cail who agreed to convert part of his debt into equity creating the Société de la Sucrerie Beauport (Souques, Cail & Cie) of which Ernest was the manager.  The death of Jean François Cail on May 22, 1871 ushered in a period of difficulty for Ernest Souques. Although he was not able to keep all his other sugar properties he was able to keep Beauport but only until 1901 when the Bank of Guadeloupe and Crédit Foncier foreclosed on their loan and sold the sugar mill to Martinican Creole factory owner Fernand Clerc. On August 4, 1908, the factory and the properties were sold by Clerc to the Société Anonyme des Usines de Beauport (SAUB) headquartered in Bordeaux.  In 1970 (SAUB) filed for judicial administration and in 1981 then part of the Grands Moulins de Paris, announced the cessation of its operations in Guadeloupe and filed for bankruptcy and a court-appointed administrator was assigned. Public authorities then asked Huygues-Despointes, a private group with local capital to manage the finances for one year and Beauport S.A. was organized to replace SAUB and entrusted with the assets of SAUB's business through a lease-management agreement for a period of twenty-one months and the understanding that Beauport S.A. would subsequently be transformed into a semi-public company. But after losses of 2 million francs in 1982, Beauport S.A. withdrew and ceased its activities. Then in 1982 the General Council of Guadeloupe decided to replace Beauport S.A. with SOSUMAG in the management of the sugar refinery which was old and in very poor condition. Thus SOSUMAG became responsible for managing two sugar mills: one owned outright (Grand'Anse) and the other leased (Beauport). In 1989 the Beauport Sugar Factory suffered devastating damage caused by the path of Hurricane Hugo. Unable to financially recover or rebuild from the hurricane's destruction, the factory officially capitulated and permanently shut down in July 1990. The local government purchased the abandoned site in 1991 and transformed it into the cultural heritage museum, Beauport-Pays de la Canne, which opened to the public in 2004.

• Usine Darboussier - On October 16, 1771 a gentleman named Dulubre sold land to Jean Darboussier ( -1803), a French merchant and smuggler who came from an old family from Montbazin, France and settled in Guadeloupe during the 18th Century and made a fortune in trade.  By 1772 Darboussier had established there a “vinegary”, or an alcohol distillery and in 1781 acquired additional adjoining lands. On February 18, 1805 Darboussier's son and only heir, after an agreement with his step-mother, sold the distillery to Silvestre Lombard (1748-1808), born in Séméac, France to a wealthy family who arrived in Pointe-à-Pitre sometime between 1767 and 1776 and soon became a very successful merchant.  On August 27, 1807 Lombard acquired the property previously called Bellevue also owned by Darboussier from Léonard Tabanon, comprised of approximately seven hectares and several houses and buildings by the sea in Pointe-à-Pitre. In 1784 at the age of thirty six, Lombard married sixteen year old Magdalaine Cleaveau (1769-1834) who also belonged to a wealthy family from Berry, France.  Upon Silvestre’s death, Magdalaine and two daughters, Marie Anne Adélaide Lombard (1784-1824) and Louise Adélaide Lombard (1789-1871) inherited the properties in Pointe-à-Pitre which were kept in the family until 1867. Having been in the sugar business together and wanting to expand, on September 17, 1867 Jean François Cail and Ernest Souques (1831-1908) acquired the Lombard family property for 200,000 francs and established the Compagnie Sucrière de la Pointe-à-Pitre (E. Souques & Cie), tasked with the construction and operation a brand new sugar mill. Between 1867 and 1869 they built the sugar factory and warehouse on the docks.  When Cail died in 1871, Souques lost all the support financial and otherwise he had received and entered a period of financial difficult times. Finally in 1906 the inevitable happened, Ernest Souques, already seventy five years old burdened with heavy debts, had all his personal resources exhausted and no guarantees to offer creditors. Jean Micard, the president of the Banque de Consignation, decided that the only way to recover its outstanding debt was to create a new company that would take over Darboussier after clearing its liabilities. After a series of negotiations, the Société Industrielle et Agricole de la Pointe-à-Pitre (SIAPAP) was established in Paris in April 1907. It was a public limited company (SA) whose controlling shareholders were all from mainland France, Jean Micard was elected president. The Compagnie Sucrière de la Pointe-à-Pitre (E. Souques & Cie) contributed the factory and its estate and received in return 2,600 shares of the new company worth 650,000 francs, which Ernest Souques managed to have allocated in full by his shareholders in repayment of their advances and SIAPAP took over the liabilities of the former company, amounting to 3,000,000 francs. Thus, the story of the Usine Darboussier during its ownership by Ernest Souques and the Compagnie Sucrière de la Pointe-à-Pitre ended miserably in near bankruptcy. Despite the size of his stake in SIAPAP which made him the principal shareholder and despite the title of managing director in Guadeloupe Ernest Souques had lost control of Darboussier and no longer exerted any influence over the management of the new company. He died in Pointe-à-Pitre a few months later on January 21, 1908. Darboussier was the biggest sugar factory in the West Indies and with a thousand workers was the largest employer in Guadeloupe, in the 1880s it became one of the first central sugar mills in the West Indies. For more than one hundred years, from 1870 to 1980, it was the economic heart of Guadeloupe and Marie-Galante. Ca. 1880 the sugar factory’s director's residence later known as Villa Souques-Pagès pictured below, was built at 9 Rue Nozières in Pointe-à-Pitre. It has housed the Saint-John-Perse Museum since its inauguration in 1987.  The property where the Darboussier sugar factory operated was for several years abandoned and partially destroyed.  Today, a cultural center on the memory of slavery, the Memorial ACTe is built on the site.

• Usine Sucrière Grosse-Montagne - In 1918, in the verdant countryside of Lamentin, Edouard Reimonenq established a sugar mill where, from 1925 to 1927, five thousand tons of sugarcane were crushed annually. On January 28, 1928, the Martinican entrepreneur Charles Simonnet purchased the property but in September of that same year the estate was destroyed by the Okeechobee Hurricane which caused widespread damage to the island. Simonnet rebuilt his estate and in 1934 built a distillery to produce both rhum agricole from sugarcane juice and industrial rum from molasses. In 1937, Grosse-Montagne produced 823,163 kilos of sugar and 1,779.86 hectoliters of rum. By 1939 the area under cultivation had increased to almost thirteen hundred acres from around three hundred acres in 1928. In 1952, Grosse-Montagne absorbed the Jaula factory and its plantation, which became the home of the Simonnet family. It then acquired the Sainte-Rose County Estate in 1973 and the Blanchet sugar factory in 1979. In 1983 Grosse Montagne was experiencing serious financial difficulties and submitted its case to the Interministerial Committee for Industrial Restructuring (CIRI) which concluded that with insufficient sugarcane production and despite the government's efforts, it was necessary to consolidate the industrial facilities. The factory closed in 1994.

Today there are ten rum distilleries in the Guadeloupe Islands and centuries-old traditions in distillation are still used to produce multi-awarded labels.  The two sugar factories in operation today, Grand Anse in Marie-Galante and the Gardel Sugar Factory in Grande-Terre, supply the sugarcane juice and molasses needed in the production of rum by these distilleries.

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[1] Rhum Vieux Agricole is aged an aged agricultural rum aged in oak barrels for several years giving it an amber color and a rich, complex flavor. Major brands are Montebello, Damoiseau, Bologne, Bielle and Père Labat.