Popkin reads the small body of first-person accounts left by whites held prisoner during the Saint-Domingue insurrection, chiefly the colonist Gros, who served as secretary to Jean-Francois in 1791, and the naturalist Descourtilz, held by Dessalines's forces a decade later. Both wrote to defend slavery, and both, while explaining why they had worked for their captors, recorded things that undercut the case they meant to make. Gros praised the judgement of Jean-Francois, Biassou and the young Toussaint, described a functioning insurgent administration, and drafted documents so competent that legislators in Paris concluded whites must have written them. Descourtilz kept black soldiers alive using remedies he learned partly from them. Setting these texts beside North American and Barbary captivity narratives, which assumed eventual white victory, Popkin argues that the Saint-Domingue accounts carried a harsher lesson about European vulnerability, and that they belong to the wider growth of first-person writing around 1800.