Britain takes Port-au-Prince by invitation of planters and royalists

British forces completed their occupation of Port-au-Prince, which Woodward calls the capital, with naval support and the help of royalist troops already on the ground. What he underlines is the invitation. Wealthy free men of colour and white planters had asked England into the colony rather than accept the revolutionary settlement coming from Paris, so the occupation began as a bargain among propertied colonists rather than as a straightforward conquest. The British then held the port town while Spanish forces pressed from the east, leaving the republic with almost nothing in the west. Woodward links this moment forward to the alliances Toussaint would later be accused of betraying, since the same men who invited England in were the ones who complained loudest when the black generals negotiated with foreign powers. British troops would remain in parts of the colony for another four years.

On 12 March 1795 Joseph Chatoyer circulated a proclamation in French among the planters living on St Vincent. It opens with a question. Is there a Frenchman who would hold back at the hour when liberty is being spoken aloud? It asks its readers to gather as citizens and brothers under the colours already flying on the island. The second half sets out what refusal costs. Anyone not assembled with the Caribs by the end of the day would be treated as a traitor to the country, their estates burned and their families killed. The document ends with Chatoyer's own mark in place of a signature, a figure that appears to draw on the rock carvings of St Vincent rather than on any European convention. It survives in the British colonial records. Within days plantations were burning, and the Caribs had allies among French settlers, enslaved people and troops sent from Guadeloupe by Victor Hugues.

The British expedition in the Caribbean began as a success, taking most French possessions early in 1793 with strong support from local white planters. Pierrot marks the turn at the abolition decree of February 1794, which freed the enslaved across the French colonies. Word of it reached the island around June, and Toussaint went over to the French and reopened the fighting against the British, who by that point had all but defeated the French. The mechanism is straightforward and Pierrot does not disguise it: Britain fought the Haitian Revolution and lost. That defeat is what makes the later cultural appropriation legible, since presenting Toussaint as a virtual British ally allowed a military reverse to be recast as a strategic move, with Britain benefiting whatever happened next in Saint Domingue. Everything Pierrot examines afterwards is a British answer to a war Britain had already lost.

On his expedition along the Niger river in 1793 and 1794, Mungo Park reported Mande speakers using amulets made from animal horns filled with saphoes, papers carrying passages from the Koran. In Senegambia, Muslims and others alike had long gone to itinerant scholars for pieces of Arabic writing to put inside protective pouches, and the Portuguese called these bolsas de mandinga. John Matthews, a Royal Navy lieutenant in Sierra Leone in the 1780s, found the same practice further south, powders and scraps of Koranic text in small bags, and recorded that people wore several at once, each against a separate misfortune: one to preserve the wearer from shot, one from poison, one from fire, one from drowning. The bags crossed the Atlantic with the people who wore them. In Bahia the Lisbon Inquisition prosecuted their possession, and men wore them into battle in Jamaica in 1760 and in Bahia in 1835.