mid July 1793 · Diasporamonth known
Fifty ships of refugees land at Baltimore and one man sails back
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More than fifty French ships reached Baltimore carrying thousands of destitute refugees from Cap Français, which had burned in June. The passengers came ashore with nothing. Newspapers had been reporting the revolt in Saint Domingue for two years, and readers could believe or discount those reports as they chose; a wharf crowded with ruined planters and their households was a fact standing in the street. Newport Bowers, born free and black in Massachusetts, was working on the wharves that day and watched them come ashore. Everyone around him had fled the colony. Bowers decided to go and look at it, and made his way to the Cap. Scott uses him to make a point about the direction of travel. Black North Americans were active participants in the news of the revolution, and some of them went to see it, worked in its ports, and carried what they learned back into American harbours where other black sailors and labourers were waiting to hear.
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