Christophe burns Cap-Francais and leaves Leclerc seventy houses

Leclerc could not enter the harbour against contrary winds and sent an envoy ashore with an appeal from the First Consul and a promise that freedom and the black formations would be respected. Christophe, acting on Toussaint's orders, refused to surrender the city and warned that he would burn it. Leclerc ordered Rochambeau against Fort Liberte forty kilometres east, which fell after a hard defence and whose garrison was then massacred, and attacked the capital from the west. Christophe fired the town starting with his own residence and moved the population up to Haut du Cap. The American consul Tobias Lear counted about seventy houses left when the French marched in. The scorched capital set the pattern for the whole campaign, since a colony whose ports and estates were being destroyed could not pay for its own reconquest. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Wilson dates the burning of the Cap to 7 February 1802; most accounts place it a day or two earlier.

A few days before the battle of Crete-a-Pierrot, Dessalines was at Petite-Riviere de l'Artibonite where French residents were being killed in reprisal. Two young Frenchmen ran to Claire Heureuse and begged for their lives. She told them to hide under a bed and went to receive her husband, who came in from the field with Bazelais, Laurette, Lamartiniere and Lafortune. A sneeze from the next room gave the men away. One was cut down at once. Claire Heureuse went on her knees, called on the other officers to help her, and told her husband that the survivor was a doctor who might be useful to him one day. She held on to his tunic and let herself be dragged the length of the room until he gave way. The man was Michel Etienne Descourtilz, who later published his Voyage d'un naturaliste and an eight volume flora of the Antilles, and who admitted in print that he owed his life to her.

The rest of the Guadeloupe flotilla carried on north and reached New York in August 1802 with twelve hundred and eighty four prisoners spread across its ships. The French naval officers described their errand in official language. The mayor of the city was not persuaded, wrote about the great number of black men held aboard the frigate Consolante, and refused permission to land. What happened next was never recorded in one place. Some of the captives died of dysentery in the harbour. Some got ashore and vanished. Some were sold in the United States in defiance of the law. The Consolante had arrived with three hundred people aboard and sailed for Guadeloupe with one hundred and eighty. Four other ships went on to Brest and delivered eight hundred prisoners nobody had managed to sell. Asked why so many names were missing from the rolls, the officers told the minister of the navy that many had died during the crossing.

In 1805, a few months after Dessalines was crowned emperor, free black and mixed race militiamen in Bahia were found wearing medallion portraits of him. Geggus makes the status of these men the point of the story. They were freemen, not enslaved, and he cites Stuart Schwartz to the effect that nothing connects the long cycle of Bahian slave revolts between 1807 and 1835 to either the French or the Haitian revolution, while such external influences are clearly visible among free men, as in the Tailors' conspiracy of 1798. The same holds for the largely African risings in nineteenth century Cuba. Free people of colour had more literacy and more mobility, so foreign news reached them first, which is why Geggus consistently finds Haitian traces in the free coloured layer of these societies rather than in the enslaved population. Corroborated by 2 works in the library. Where this account departs from the standard one: Geggus corrects Kenneth Maxwell, who dates to a visitor in Rio de Janeiro in 1792 a remark about the spell of white power being dissolved; the quotation in fact comes from 1806 and referred to the whole of the Americas.