and sustained winds of up to 215 km/h, much higher gusts in Marie-Galante and Les Saintes. Since the passage of Hurricane Maria on September 18 in the Lesser Antilles, particularly in Dominica, where the eye of the cyclone passed, the archipelago of Guadeloupe, including "mainland Guadeloupe" and Marie-Galante saw the arrival of a mass exodus from Dominica, Dominiquais coming to take refuge on neighboring islands of their own, destroyed and almost unlivable. The archipelago also suffered the same phenomenon, this time coming from St. Martin, after the passage, from September 6 to 10, of Hurricane Irma, category 5, considered the most powerful hurricane in the North Atlantic since 1980. Some of the most notable hurricanes to have hit Guadeloupe and the islands of the archipelago in the 20th and 21st centuries include September 12, 1928: hurricane Okeechobee; August 11, 1956: hurricane Betsy; October 26, 1963: tropical storm Helena; August 22, 1964: hurricane Cleo, category 3, strong (14 deaths); September 27, 1966: hurricane Inez; September 16–17, 1989: hurricane Hugo; September 14–15, 1995: hurricane Marilyn, September 6, 2017: hurricane Irma; September 18 and 19, 2017: hurricane Maria. Economy The colonial economy was based on the cultivation of tobacco, indigo, coffee and cotton. But from the 17th century, sugar cane became an important source of income. This continued into the 19th and 20th centuries, adapting to the abolition of the enslavement of Africans and the great sugar crisis. During the dominance of the sugar cane industry, Marie-Galante acquired the nickname "the island with a hundred mills". In 1818 there were over one hundred mills to process sugar cane. The cane juice was transformed into sugar or rum. The mills were originally powered by oxen, replaced by windmills from 1780, in turn replaced by steam powered mills from 1883. The 19th century brought the disappearance of the former economic model. Gradually the small-scale sugar refining was processed in larger factories, by 1885 the five sites controlled the industry. In 1931, eighteen sugar distilleries and four factories were in production. In the 20th century, the large enslaved African plantations were forcibly abolished and gave place to small farms, organized into co-operatives. But agriculture in the French West Indies is subject to global competition and by the beginning of the 21st century, one sugar refinery () and three distilleries (Bellevue, Bielle, and Poisson) remained on Marie-Galante. The white rum they produced is subject to an .