Caperton arrives at a ruined town where one business is thriving

The armoured cruiser Washington was off Cape Hatteras when a signal reached her flag officer: proceed to Cap Haitien without delay. She anchored outside the harbour on 23 January 1915 with Rear Admiral William B. Caperton aboard. The American consul Livingston had cabled for a warship the day Vilbrun Guillaume announced he wanted the presidency. On 27 January Livingston reported to Washington that not one shot had been fired in the town or anywhere near it, that Metellus had brought a thousand men in on the sixteenth and stayed to escort Guillaume south, and that the whole business had the look of a public holiday. Caperton's chief of staff, Captain E. L. Beach, had last seen the Cap in 1891. He found business at a standstill, cobblestones the French had laid a hundred and fifty years earlier still unrepaired, walls cracked and crumbling, and one activity in good health, which was revolution. Caperton called on Guillaume on the twenty fifth and recognised the general as the servant who had shown him in.

Hogsbjerg dates James's first work in theatre to a teaching post at a private school in Port of Spain. A schoolfriend recalled being told that James intended to stage The Merchant of Venice in a cinema in the town, and that he went on to mount a full public version of Othello which drew an enthusiastic response. James then wrote a drama about local life, now lost, and produced it with his students for the public. The editor treats this as the practical root of the later play rather than a curiosity, since it shows James working with amateur casts and public audiences a decade before London. He connects it to James's parallel effort to introduce West Indian history into a school curriculum that did not contain it, and to his reading on the Haitian Revolution.

Nobody settled how many were killed in the Port-au-Prince prison. The American chargé Davis said nearly two hundred, the French minister Girard reported 160, the British minister Kohan said 168, and H. P. Davis gave 167. Charles Oscar Etienne and his men fired a last volley into the yard, pretending to be rescuers so that the wounded would move, and then left for the Dominican legation. When the crowd marched to the jail to free the prisoners, which was a normal stage of a Haitian revolution, it found the yard full of bodies. Almost no family in the elite was untouched. Survivors walked the town behind pairs of men carrying a corpse on a plank. Edmond Polynice went to see what had been done to his three sons, then put on a morning coat and gloves, called at the Dominican legation, sent in his card to Etienne, and shot him three times when he appeared at the door. The crowd took the body apart and burned what was left of it in the gutter the next morning.

Nine days after leaving Port-au-Prince, Paul Fuller told Robert Lansing what he had found. Any concession a Haitian government made to the United States would be read at home as selling the country, and the men who made it would be killed for it. At the same time the government and a large part of every class wanted a convention with the United States, and would accept indirect control of the customs and the transfer of the Mole Saint Nicolas. The president and the foreign minister had told him they were willing to sign on the Mole and to find a legal route by which the Americans could take it. Fear of personal violence was the obstacle. Fuller concluded that negotiation had no future and recommended landing marines and imposing a treaty on the model of the Platt Amendment, which had governed Cuba since 1901. Wilson read the report on 2 July 1915 and noted that action was evidently necessary and that postponing it long would be a mistake. The marines landed twenty six days later.