PLANTER AND MERCHANT 39 
fabrics, wines and every luxury known to the colonists 
of that day, returned to Les Cayes, as well as to Saint 
Louis, an important port a little farther to the east, 
where these merchants also possessed warehouses and 
stores. 
In a short time Jean Audubon had acquired an in- 
dependent business of his own, both as a planter and 
merchant. He made his home at Les Cayes, but ex- 
tended his enterprises to Saint Louis and possibly to 
other points. From this time onward he commonly 
described himself as négociant,? or merchant, and his 
son, when writing to his father from America, addressed 
him in this way. His business letters and other docu- 
ments of the period refer to his house at Les Cayes, his 
plantations of cane and his sugar refinery, his exporta- 
tion of colonial wares, his purchases of French goods, 
particularly at Nantes, and to his trade in black slaves 
which eventually assumed large proportions. How im- 
portant his sugar plantations may have been is not 
known, but a tax-receipt shows that at one time he pos- 
sessed forty-two slaves.*| The naturalist said that his 
father acquired a plantation on the Ile a Vaches, an 
island of considerable importance at the southern bound 
of the roadstead of Les Cayes and nine miles from the 
town, but we have found no other reference to it. 
Great numbers of negroes must have passed through 
Jean Audubon’s hands, as shown by his bills of sale, 
which strangely reflect the customs of a much later and 
sadder day on the North American continent (see Ap- 
pendix I, Documents Nos. 4-6). In one of these bills, 
2? And sometime as marchand, more strictly a retailer. 
* Since a colonist’s wealth was estimated upon the number of slaves 
he could afford, and since a slave was regarded as equivalent to a return 
of 1,500 francs a year, Jean Audubon’s income on this basis would have 
been 63,000 francs. 
