Prince's Port on a bay older than the ship's name
Port-au-Prince—Haitian Creole Pòtoprens—is Haiti's capital and most populous city on the Gulf of Gonâve. The bay's natural harbor sustained economies since early civilizations. 'Prince's Port' may honor a ship Le Prince, yet îlets du Prince appear by 1680, and the area was also called Hôpital after filibuster medical posts.
Taino people, who reached Hispaniola around 2600 BC probably from eastern Venezuela, used the plain mainly for hunting; it lay in the Xaragua chiefdom, ruled from Yaguana near Leogane, with villages such as Bohoma and Guahaba. When Columbus arrived in 1492 the chief was Bohechio, succeeded by his sister Anacaona. Governor Nicolas Ovando imposed direct Spanish rule from 1503, founding short-lived settlements including Santa Maria del Puerto, burned by the French in 1535 and again in 1592. In the nearby Bahoruco mountains, Enriquillo's Taino rebellion forced a treaty from Spain.
For decades the area emptied out, visited by buccaneers and Dutch leather traders chasing abundant game, until French filibusters crowded off Tortuga began arriving around 1650 and named it Hopital after their hospital. A Spanish attempt to retake it ended in disaster. The merchant village of Ester, home of the governor, was abandoned after a 1711 fire. The islets offshore were already the Prince's islets by 1680, before Captain de Saint-Andre brought his ship Le Prince into the bay in 1706, so the source of the name remains uncertain.
The town was incorporated in 1749 and replaced Cap-Francais as capital of Saint-Domingue in 1770. It burned in November 1791 in fighting between Black revolutionaries and white planters, and commissioner Etienne Polverel renamed it Port-Republicain in 1793. British troops captured it on 4 June 1794. It became capital of independent Haiti in 1804; after Dessalines's assassination in 1806 it led Petion's southern republic while Henri Christophe, ruling the north, mockingly called it Port-aux-Crimes. The country reunited under it in 1820. During the American occupation from 1915 to 1934, caco rebels attacked twice, in 1919 and 1920, and were repelled both times.
The city climbs from waterfront commercial districts up the hills like an amphitheatre, with the elite suburb of Petionville 300 to 450 metres up to the southeast. About 1.2 million people lived there in 2022, within a metropolitan area of over 2.6 million.
Source: Port-au-Prince
