Louis established his family in Recife, in the Atlantic sugar trade, and there they prospered until the city fell to Portuguese forces in late January 1654. By March, Louis was once again a refugee, but this time along with his family and a multiconfessional, multi-ethnic group of other refugees, including enslaved people of African descent. Led by Nicolas Jacob Classen, lieutenant colonel of the infantry at Recife, a large vessel carrying refugees first sailed to Martinique where, at the behest of zealot Jesuit priests, the party of 'Jews and other heretics' were denied entry. The Governor of the new French colony of Guadeloupe, Charles Houël, however, was keen to expand the sugar business, and he welcomed them. The immigration of this diversity of refugees from Pernambuco to Guadeloupe sparked a critical advance in the French sugar business, and the latter was on the verge of global dominance by the time of Saint-Georges's birth in 1745. Four additional ships carrying refugees arrived in the days following the arrival of Louis and his family. The motley crew of migrants numbered, roughly, nine hundred people, three hundred of whom were soldiers. The other six hundred civilians comprised one hundred babitants (planters), two hundred women and three hundred 'Brazilians'. Many of the latter group were described as free and practised their various faiths, but it also included a good many enslaved people of non-Catholic Judeo-Christian faiths, who were specifically skilled in the cultivation of sugar cane and the production of sugar. In 1647, Houël had written to the King, complaining about the exorbitant prices that Dutch traders charged for slaves and asking for some means of augmenting the slave workforce. The refugees, who were wealthy in slaves, were thus quite the windfall. In early accounts, special mention was made of two nègres, especially skilled in the manufacturing of sugar moulds, while the others had been brought along specifically to prepare the new land for the cultivation of sugar cane.