The Night the Militia Lost at Porto Marie
On the evening of 19 August 1795, a Dutch colonial militia sailed out of Willemstad to crush a rebel encampment near this bay. It lost — driven off after the rebels captured roughly eighty of its rifles — the sharpest tactical defeat the Curaçao government suffered during the largest slave revolt in the island's history. The bay that hosted Tula's camp and the failed surrender talks that same evening is now a private beach charging Nafl. 5.00 at the gate.
A plantation before it was a battlefield
Porto Marie was working land long before 1795. Dutch authorities granted permission for cattle farming at the bay in 1684, and by 1704 a formal 593-hectare plantation ran between Rif St. Marie and Lelienberg, producing milk, buttermilk, and cheese delivered daily to Willemstad. Roughly seventy dwellings on the property housed enslaved and free laborers; ruins of the stables survive today. In 1738 the Dutch West India Company built a coral-stone storehouse with an attached threshing floor on Seru Basora, the hill above the bay, and topped it with a belpaal — a watch-and-signal tower. Because the bay was strategically valuable, sheltered, defensible, and close enough to Willemstad to matter, the Dutch fortified it too, rebuilding the position in stone in 1742 as Fort Porto Marie.
Tula's revolt reaches the bay
On 17 August 1795, an enslaved plantation worker named Tula walked off Knip plantation with forty to fifty followers and refused to work. He argued that the French occupation of the Netherlands, and the abolition of slavery already underway in French colonies, meant the Dutch had no legal ground left to hold anyone in bondage. The column grew as it moved: plantation to plantation, freeing enslaved workers and jailed prisoners, it swelled to roughly two thousand people within days, a substantial share of Curaçao's entire enslaved population rising within a single week.
On the evening of 19 August, Franciscan priest Jacobus Schinck met Tula at Porto Marie at 8:30 p.m. to negotiate a surrender. It failed. Tula held his position.
The battle
That same day, the colonial government sent a militia force of 67 men under Lieutenant R. G. Plegher by boat from Willemstad, landing near Boca San Michiel, to attack the rebel camp at Porto Marie directly. It was the government's first serious attempt to end the revolt by force. The rebels routed them, driving the militia off and capturing roughly eighty rifles from the defeated force. Dutch-language accounts (Curaçaose slavenopstand van 1795) place Plegher's actual defeat at the neighboring Oud St. Marie plantation, before the column ever reached Porto Mari; the English-language account puts the defeat at Porto Mari itself. For a matter of hours, the colonial government did not control a plantation twenty-five kilometers from its own capital.
The military defeat didn't end the revolt, and it didn't save Tula. Baron van Westerholt later mobilized 93 armed horsemen and renewed negotiations through Father Schinck; when those talks failed too, Westerholt's force attacked and this time defeated the rebels — nine were killed, twelve taken prisoner, and the rest escaped. Tula was betrayed by a fellow enslaved man, Caspar Lodewijk, and captured on 19 September. He was publicly tortured to death at Rif, in Otrabanda, on 3 October 1795, along with fellow rebels Louis Mercier, Bastian Karpata, and Pedro Wakao.
What came after: a fort that didn't last either
Fort Porto Marie outlived the rebellion it failed to prevent by only ten years. English forces attacked the bay in 1805, plundered it, and destroyed the fort outright — the same ground that had beaten off a colonial militia proved unable to hold against a foreign navy. The plantation itself kept operating through the nineteenth century at diminishing scale. An 1867 letter in the colonial record already documents Porto Marie in financial difficulty. Dr. Nicolaas Rojer took over the estate in 1874 and ran it until his death in 1885, by which point Curaçao's economy had largely moved on from plantation agriculture toward trade and, eventually, oil refining.
The 1738 storehouse and belpaal on Seru Basora survived, barely. By the early 2010s the watchtower had lost nearly its entire western face and looked close to collapse. In 2014 François van der Hoeven and the archaeology working group of the NAAM foundation restored it, arguing publicly that the structure was disappearing from memory along with the physical stone: "when you talk about it and publish, people become interested again."
No marker at the gate
None of this is signposted where a visitor actually enters today. Porto Marie now operates as a fee-gated private beach — Nafl. 5.00 (about $3) per person, plus $3.50 for a chair, open 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. — built around a restaurant ranked #8 of 211 in Curaçao on TripAdvisor and a shore-accessible dive site, "the Valley," known for a double reef and visibility that regularly tops 30 meters. Curaçao's annual commemoration of the revolt, Dia di Lucha pa Libertat (Tula Day), is held on 17 August at Museo Tula on Knip plantation, not here, even though this bay is where the rebels won their clearest fight.
Curaçao law states that the island's beaches must remain accessible to the public. Porto Marie, like several other private beaches on the island, charges admission anyway, under a government contract that lawmakers themselves have called for more transparency about. It is a different mechanism than a fort wall or a militia landing party, but it answers the same question the plantation's owners and Tula's rebels were fighting over in August 1795: who gets to stand on this stretch of coast, and on what terms. That question has never been closed at Porto Marie. It has only changed hands.
Back to the full Playa Porto Marie guide.