A soldier drafts a Haiti trade treaty from a Fleet Street coffee house

Writing from the Globe Coffee House on Fleet Street, Downie laid out for William Augustus Fawkener, assistant to Britain's War and Colonies secretary, his plan to negotiate a trade treaty with a country nobody recognised. He claimed Haitians were more attached to the English than to any other nation, tracing this to British conduct during the occupation of the previous war, to more liberal trading terms, and above all to the repose the population enjoyed under British maritime superiority. Pierre points out that the first of these silences the fact that Britain restored slavery in the areas it controlled. Downie described Christophe as a man of ability and policy and Pétion as a man of the first talents and a fine host, and argued that merely recognising Haiti and extending civility would secure the trade almost exclusively for Britain.

After the French defeat in 1803 most of the remaining white colonists of Saint-Domingue left, and the largest single movement went a short distance east across the Windward Passage. By 1808 more than twenty five thousand people had settled at Baracoa and Santiago de Cuba, in the eastern province of Oriente. They arrived with skills rather than land. They introduced smaller units of production than Cuban planters had been using and greatly extended the growing of coffee, tobacco, cacao and cotton. The later expansion of Cuban sugar owed a good deal to their technical knowledge. Cuban officials welcomed the wealthier arrivals for the capital and the expertise they brought, while ordinary Cubans suspected them of sympathy with the revolution they had run from. Many of the men had spent years in one or another of the armies that fought over Saint-Domingue. In 1809 the Spanish authorities expelled almost all of them, and most sailed for New Orleans.

In 1806 a thirty five year old enslaved woman named Emilie was burned at the stake in Martinique for planning to poison her mistress. The mistress was Madame de La Pagerie, mother of the Empress Josephine. She had been served a ragout whose texture she thought wrong, suspected crushed glass, ate none of it and took her suspicions straight to Captain General Villaret-Joyeuse. He authorised his special tribunal to arrest and interrogate Emilie, and she was burned the day after her conviction. Nobody was harmed by the dish. The charge as recorded was forming a design to poison and kill her mistress, which under the rules of that tribunal was enough on its own. The case became one of the best known in the French Caribbean, and it shows what a lowered standard of proof meant in practice: an untasted meal, a household suspicion, and a woman dead within days.

With the white population abandoning the sick and the army's own remedies useless, women of Saint-Domingue nursed the French through the yellow fever epidemic using what they knew themselves. They climbed into the mountains to gather the herbs they thought would check the disease and brewed them as infusions. One of them, known as the widow Cotin, did so much that she was called the benefactress of the human race. Her treatment was three glasses of red wine holding a nutmeg and an egg yolk, both baked under ashes and powdered, which brought on heavy sweating. When patients died anyway the women paid for proper funerals and walked behind the coffins, in a season when bodies were being thrown into the sea. The army lost seven hundred of its own doctors. General Leclerc was obliged to thank these women publicly and to print his admiration in the official gazette of Saint-Domingue. Most of them had been enslaved a year or two earlier.