The New World was well-known to French sailors. In the wake of Christopher Columbus, French privateers had led the way to Caribbean waters to plunder the wealth of the Indies. The French long understood the importance of attacking Spanish lines of communication between Spain and America and built a navy during the second half of the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century, the French royal navy had shrunk; it had become a thing of the past. Its re-creation began during the 1620s and, following a brief decline at mid–century, increased in intensity during the 1660s. Warship construction increased to a new level of intensity under Louis XIV. The French fleet quickly grew to a magnificent force of 200 or more warships. The investment in warships and sweeping organisational changes were part of a major effort to foster maritime trade, to acquire colonies, and to make France a commercial trading society of first rank. Yet, the main thrust of this naval development was part of a policy of prestige – la gloire – and remained focused on the traditional Hapsburg threat to the Bourbons rather than on the growing menace from the new maritime powers emerging to the north, England, and the United Provinces of the Netherlands.

During the six decades after 1670, indeed, beginning during the brief war between France and England in 1666 and 1667, French colonies in the Windward Islands became caught up in war with the Maritime Powers.