Toussaint Louverture has a navy and somebody counts it

On the first of December 1799 somebody sat down and inventoried Toussaint Louverture's fleet. The list runs to dozens of vessels, armed barges, schooners and privateers taken from their previous owners, crewed by men who had been slaves a few years earlier. Foreign observers watching the Caribbean recorded what this force could do. It could stop merchant shipping in the waters around Hispaniola and it could put armed men ashore on other islands. Naval power in the Caribbean had belonged to European states as a matter of course, and the sea was the thing that made their colonies governable at all. A general in Saint-Domingue with a fleet of his own inverted that arrangement in the one place it mattered. The document exists because the fact alarmed people enough to be worth writing down. The revolution that began with a rising on the northern plain in 1791 had, by the end of the decade, acquired ships.

Girard narrates the arrest from an eyewitness account. Officers took both men at a Kingston inn, stripped them and slit open their clothing in search of concealed papers, searched their lodgings, and moved them under guard first to a Kingston cell and then to the seat of government at Spanish Town for interrogation by the governor's council. It was Sasportas's third detention in six months, after the capture of his ship by a British cruiser in the spring and his deportation from Curacao in the autumn, and Girard suggests he expected to talk his way out again. He refused to confess. A Kingston Jew who had known him since childhood then confirmed that he had been in contact with the Blue Mountain Maroons, which broke the story he was trying to hold. Balcarres had moved only after Louverture's warnings reached him.

An arrangement with the American consul Edward Stevens was worthless while the Royal Navy dominated the sea lanes, so Louverture also needed British consent. Girard describes the appearance of HMS Camilla at Cap-Francais as a piece of luck, since Maitland was aboard and empowered to negotiate on behalf of the United States as well as Britain. Maitland had left England in January and stopped in America to agree a joint line. By 20 April he and Pickering had settled on provisions for the security of both nations' commerce and the tranquillity of the southern states and the British West Indies. Trade would resume as Washington wanted, but it would be confined to one or two ports and to vessels carrying passports naming ship and cargo, so that no fleet could be assembled against Jamaica.

Jeanne Mathusine Droibillan Volunbrun had left Saint Domingue five years earlier for New York. In August 1801 she prepared to move the people she held to Norfolk, sell them there and use the money to return to the island, where she still had a plantation. Black Saint Domingans living in New York gathered outside her house, and the police seized a number of them. The Manumission Society had writs served on her, resting the claim on the French decree of 5 February 1794 that had abolished slavery in all French territory; she posted bond of 5,390 dollars, and on 14 August the society's lawyers obtained the freedom of everyone she held. The men who had gathered waited in jail until October because the court sat quarterly. All the defendants in the resulting case were black and many were Haitian. They were given sixty days in the county prison.