Jacques Gentes

Who is Jacques Gentes?

Jacques Gentes, also recorded in some colonial accounts as Le Gendre, was the French colonist who led the first permanent European settlement on Saint Barthélemy in 1648. Acting under orders from Philippe de Longvilliers de Poincy, governor of nearby Saint-Christophe (Saint Kitts), Gentes brought a party of roughly fifty to sixty settlers, drawn largely from Normandy, Brittany, Poitou, and other western French provinces, to the small, arid island that Christopher Columbus had sighted and named more than a century earlier. The colonists attempted to grow cocoa and other tropical crops, but the island's rocky terrain, scarce fresh water, and exposed coastline made cultivation difficult from the start. In 1656, only eight years after the settlement began, Carib raiders attacked the fledgling colony in a night assault that killed or drove off most of the settlers, temporarily emptying the island before it was resettled later in the century. Gentes's 1648 landing is nonetheless treated as the founding date of continuous European habitation on Saint Barthélemy, and the western-French origin of his settlers is still audible today in the island's Corossol and Colombier patois.

Sources: St. John Source, "De Poincy Sends Settlers to Saint Barthelemy" (21 December 1999) · Cyril Jarnias, "Histoire de Saint-Barthélemy: des Amérindiens à la collectivité d'outre-mer" · The Saba Islander, "Survival of a People" (settlement and Carib-raid history of the French Lesser Antilles)