1 December 1799 · Haitian
Toussaint Louverture has a navy and somebody counts it
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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.
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