So the frenchies started colonizing before it was established as their side by that Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. The French started moving in around 1600, for simple numbers. But I don't know how quickly they settled and developed the fully functioning sugar plantation. It wasn't until 1640 that France had some formal recognition to her side of the island. So,,forty years from the beginning of the contact with French and Africans to begin rudimentary conversation regarding labor. Then, just forty years later this young woman is writing beautifully rendered prose in a clear distinct language? If I am understanding it right, that is a remarkable achievement.
The timeline is something like this:
1629: Establishment of French and English privateers at Tortuga, fleeing from the Spanish fleet of don Fadrique de Toledo (the son of the notorious Duke of Alba), sent to crush their bases at St. Kitts.
1661: Creation of the first settlements on the Dominguan mainland by Bertrand D'Ogeron, who also managed to put the nascent colony under the French banner. Before that it was a constant jockeying of power between English, French Huguenots and French Catholics as to whom would get to dominate the colony. The Catholic folks won in the end.
The colony at the beginning consisted of a set of outposts whose inhabitants divided themselves in three classes: a. Filibusters/freebooters, whose main mode of living consisted in robbing and plundering nearby Spanish settlements and ships. The colony's value to them was a place to hide, spend the money stolen, and as a source of wood for making ships.
b. Buccaneers, whose main mode of living consisted in hunting the wild cattle that the Spaniards couldn't relocate when they ordered the destruction of the western towns (Yaguana, Guanahibes, Bayaha, Quoritori) to prevent the colonists from trading with their enemies. See the "Devastaciones de Osorio (1605)" for more details about this tragic episode in Dominican historiography.
c. Habitants, whose main mode of living was cultivating small plots of tobacco, using European indentured servants in the Virginian model. This used to be the main staple of exportation that the colony had before the sugar plantation and full blown African slavery. Of course, there were a few blacks here and there, and even a revolt from them before the plantation phase (see Padrejon's rebellion in Port-de-Paix).
1685: Establishment of the Code Noir by Louis XIV, following the directives left by Jean Baptiste Colbert before the latter's death, which was to guide the government of the French plantation colonies (at the time, Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Kitts and St. Lucia, all of them mature plantation colonies at the time). The first sugar plantation/mill in Saint-Domingue dates from this year.
1691-1697: Dominguan phase of the War of the Grand Alliance (King William's war for you, USAmerican folks). A combined Spanish-English invasion force lay waste to the colony. Governor Tarin de Cussy would be among the casualties of the war, and Jean Baptiste-Du Casse, one of the leaders of the Compagnie de Senegal, which had the monopoly of the slave trade at the time, would take control as the colony's governor, leading the colony to change its economic outlook from the small tobacco plantation (with European indentures as the main labor force) to the sugar plantation with African slaves as their workforce, following the model set by nearby Jamaica, Barbados and the French experience in the older Martinican and Guadeloupean colonies.
That's it in a nutshell.