20 April 1798 · Haitian
Hedouville sets up at Le Cap and Toussaint does not come to meet him
›Read the full entryClose
Hedouville installed himself at Cap Francais on 20 April 1798, having landed a month earlier on the Spanish side of the island where Toussaint's power did not yet reach. Toussaint was not there to greet him and excused himself in a run of letters citing his campaigns on the west coast and the difficulty of the terrain. Bell finds the excuse unconvincing given how fast Toussaint habitually moved, and identifies the real business: he was running his own talks about a British evacuation with General Thomas Maitland, newly in charge of British operations three weeks before Hedouville landed. The mechanism was leverage. The British expedition had earned something over five hundred thousand pounds in exports while costing more than seven million and about twenty thousand casualties, and Maitland had 2,500 European troops against a reported twenty thousand.