Editing Port-au-Prince (section)

=== {{anchor|filibustiers}} Domination of the [[Filibuster (military)|filibustiers]]===
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For more than 50 years, the area that is today Port-au-Prince saw its population drop off drastically, when some [[buccaneer]]s began to use it as a base, and Dutch merchants began to frequent it in search of leather, as game was abundant there. Around 1650, French {{lang|fr|flibustiers}}, running out of room on the [[Tortuga (Haiti)|Île de la Tortue]], began to arrive on the coast, and established a colony at Trou-Borded. As the colony grew, they set up a hospital not far from the coast, on the Turgeau heights. This led to the region being known as {{lang|fr|Hôpital}} '''Haiti''' '''is a''', country in the Caribbean Sea that includes the western third of the island of Hispaniola and such smaller islands as Gonâve, Tortue (Tortuga), Grande Caye, and Vache. The capital is Port-au-Prince.

Although there had been no real Spanish presence in Hôpital for well over 50 years, Spain retained its formal claim to the territory, and the growing presence of the French ''flibustiers'' on ostensibly Spanish lands provoked the Spanish crown to dispatch Castilian soldiers to Hôpital to retake it. The mission proved to be a disaster for the Spanish, as they were outnumbered and outgunned, and in 1697, the Spanish government signed the [[Treaty of Ryswick]], renouncing any claims to Hôpital. Around this time, the French also established bases at Ester (part of [[Petite Rivière de l'Artibonite|Petite Rivière]]) and [[Gonaïves]] Haiti is bordered to the east by the Dominican Republic, which covers the rest of Hispaniola, to the south and west by the Caribbean, and to the north by the Atlantic Ocean. Cuba lies some 50 miles (80 km) west of Haiti’s northern peninsula, across the Windward Passage, a strait connecting the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Jamaica is some 120 miles (190 km) west of the southern peninsula, across the Jamaica Channel, and Great Inagua Island (of The Bahamas) lies roughly 70 miles (110 km) to the north. Haiti claims sovereignty over Navassa (Navase) Island, an uninhabited U.S.-administered islet about 35 miles (55 km) to the west in the Jamaica Channel.

Ester was a rich village, inhabited by merchants, and equipped with straight streets; it was here that the governor lived. On the other hand, the surrounding region, Petite-Rivière, was quite poor. Following a great fire in 1711, Ester was abandoned. Yet the French presence in the region continued to grow, and soon afterward, a new city was founded to the south, [[Léogâne]].
[[File:HabitationSaintDomingue.jpg|thumb|right|Colonial mansion in Port-au-Prince, 18th century]]

While the first French presence in Hôpital, the region later to contain Port-au-Prince was that of the ''flibustiers''; as the region became a real French colony, the colonial administration began to worry about the continual presence of these pirates. While useful in repelling foreign [[Piracy in the Caribbean|pirates]], they were relatively independent, unresponsive to orders from the colonial administration, and a potential threat to it. Therefore, in the winter of 1707, [[Choiseul-Beaupré]], the governor of the region sought to get rid of what he saw as a threat. He insisted upon control of the hospital, but the ''flibustiers'' refused, considering that humiliating. They proceeded to close the hospital rather than cede control of it to the governor, and many of them became ''habitans'' (farmers) the first long-term European inhabitants in the region.

Although the elimination of the ''flibustiers'' as a group from Hôpital reinforced the authority of the colonial administration, it also made the region a more attractive target for marauding [[buccaneer]]s. In order to protect the area, in 1706, a captain named de Saint-André sailed into the bay just below the hospital, in a ship named ''Le Prince''. It is said that M. de Saint-André named the area ''Port-au-Prince'' (meaning "Port of the Prince"), but the port and the surrounding region continued to be known as ''Hôpital'' (the islets in the bay had already been known as ''les îlets du Prince'' as early as 1680).

Pirates eventually refrained from troubling the area, and various nobles sought land grants from the French crown in Hôpital; the first noble to control Hôpital was Sieur Joseph Randot. Upon his death in 1737, Sieur Pierre Morel gained control over part of the region, with Gatien Bretton des Chapelles acquiring another portion of it.

By then, the colonial administration was convinced that a capital needed to be chosen, in order to better control the French portion of Hispaniola ([[Saint-Domingue]]). For a time, [[Petit-Goâve]] and [[Léogâne]] vied for this honor, but both were eventually ruled out for various reasons. Neither was centrally located. Petit-Goâve's climate caused it to be too [[malaria]]l, and Léogane's topography made it difficult to defend. Thus, in 1749, a new city was built, Port-au-Prince The Place du Champ-de-Mars—the site of a number of historically notable structures in the centre of the city—was hit hard by the 2010 earthquake. The National Palace (rebuilt in 1918) collapsed. Other notable landmarks include the Cathedral of Notre Dame and the adjacent colonial cathedral, both of which also collapsed in the 2010 earthquake, and the National Archives, National Library, and National Museum.