Previously published in Examiner
Few people know the legend of how Montreal was burned to the ground in 1734. The legend has it that a black slave woman by the name of Angelique started the fire. She was a very willful woman and burnt down the city for spite. How much of this story is true, will not be known due to the torture she had to endure before she confessed under duress.
Angelique was a Portuguese Black slave woman in New France later to be known as Quebec. The full slave name given to her by her owners was Marie-Josephe Angelique. Angelique was born in Portugal around 1710 and transported to the New World during the Atlantic Slave Trade era. However, Cooper does not believe that Angelique was born a slave. He believes she was kidnapped and the transported to the New World in 1725 by Nicholaas Bleecker, a dutchman where she was then sold to a French fur trading family in 1725.
Because of her strong willed personality, she was not liked by the community she lived in. However, the major reason for scapegoating was because she challenged her master.
According to one prominent scholar, “I don’t know if Angélique set the fire, but I believe she did,” says internationally acclaimed Canadian scholar Afua Cooper, whose just-published, critically hailed bestseller The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal (HarperCollins) retells the oldest slave narrative in the Americas, one which even predates the 1760 autobiography of African-American slave Briton Hammon.
According to Cooper, Canada was a slave trading center at the time. However slavery was different, Canadian slaves were mostly domestics. Quebec city had about 1,200 slaves. In contrast, there was about 150 African slaves in Montreal at the time Angelique allegedly torched her master’s house and burn down the city because of it.
Angelique refused to breed with the other black slaves and took a white lover, a servant by the name of Claude Thibault who was also a member of the household. Thibault was according to Cooper, an exiled French convict and indentured labourer.
Source:
http://www.examiner.com/women-s-issues-in-montreal/slave-woman-burns-down-city