I've submitted this question several times before but never received an answer.
Most of us have heard of Tortuga’s infamous buccaneer history during the 17th century, but really that’s the only colonial history that has seemed to come out of it. There seems to be nothing about Tortuga’s history after its buccaneer era in the late 1600’s
Was Tortuga ever used as a strategically important area for any navies in the early 18th century? (i.e., Queen Anne's War)
What were the major settlements/ports?
What happened to the buccaneers of Tortuga?
This is kind of a hard question for me to answer because there really isn't any specific information I can find about Tortuga from the late 17th century when it stopped being a buccaneer haven until the late 18th century when it comes up again as relevant during the Haitian Revolution. What I do know is that by the 1690s the buccaneers of Hispaniola and Tortuga were very much in decline and no longer able to plunder shipping the way they had in previous decades due to a withdrawal of support by government authorities. In 1684 the French governor of Saint-Domingue Tarin De Cussy had offered pardons to buccaneers who would help hunt down their former allies and in 1697 the remaining French buccaneers were called up one last time to attack the Spanish city of Cartegena, but were then cheated by the French commander who sailed away with most of the captured loot. After this there wasn't much else the remaining buccaneers could do after looting the city one last time and they were forced to settle down in some less dangerous occupation or leave the Caribbean for better hunting grounds in the Indian Ocean as some also did in the 1690s. The successful buccaneer Laurens de Graaf is said to have owned a plantation in Port-de-Paix in Saint-Domingue (right across the channel from Tortuga) where he settled in the 1690s.
Tortuga really seems to have faded into obscurity as just another island off the coast of Hispaniola after this time, becoming like Isla Vaca off the south coast of Saint-Domingue or Ile de la Gonave off the west coast. The main ports would have remained the same as when it was described by Alexandre Exquemelin in the 1660s with the main port being Cayona where the principle planters lived and various other plantations scattered throughout the island (Exquemelin, p. 29). Tortuga was never an important port during Queen Anne's War but by the 1730s and thereafter huge numbers of African slaves were being shipped to the plantations on Saint-Domingue to increase sugarcane production and by the 1740s Saint-Domingue had becomes the world's leading producer of sugar. By the 1750s tens of thousands of escaped slaves called maroons were living in the hinterlands of Saint-Domingue and from 1791 to 1804 the Haitian Revolution would very violently bring down the entire system and bring a permanent end to French control over the island (Perry, pp. 60-65).
Sources:
The Buccaneer's Realm: Pirate Life on the Spanish Main, 1674-1688 by Bennerson Little
The Buccaneers of America by Alexandre Exquemelin and the introduction to the Dover edition by Jack Beeching
Arrogant Armies: Great Military Disasters and the Generals Behind Them by James M. Perry