The fall of Fort Bizothon effectively sealed the fate of Port au Prince. Whyte describes subsequent events in his dispatch.
This great Point being carried, I repaired (with Lieutenant-Colonel Whitelocke, whom I ordered to take the Command of the Centre) to the opposite side of the Bay; and, having landed Major [Edward] Handfield with 200 British Troops to support the attack on the Port of Salines (the Frigate scouring the Beach and enfilading the Entrenchments) he attacked and carried the Post without loss and, continuing his March, the next Day he turned the Batteries which defended the Landings near to and on the Left of Port-au-Prince. The enemy being thus hemmed in on all sides, excepting in the Rear, and perceiving numbers moving out by a Road called the Charbonier, we determined on a general Assault, and the Fleet and Army advanced; when the enemy, perceiving our motions, struck their Flags and abandoned the place, having previously spiked their cannon on the Land Defences; and the Two Commissioners from France, Pulverele [Polveral] and Sonthonax with the Black General Monbrune (who was wounded with a Bayonet at Bizothon) escaped and I have not since been able to learn any certain Account of them…
The seizure of Port au Prince was a great British triumph and a bitter blow to the Republicans. Achieved with very few losses (13 killed and 19 wounded), enormous riches – 100 pieces of ordnance and 22 ships with cargos worth nearly half a million sterling – fell into the captors’ hands. Whyte wrote to Dundas, ‘the importance of this Conquest to Great Britain you, Sir, must know: There is more sugar now nearly ready to cut than in all Jamaica’. However, as inferred in the general’s dispatch, the military objective had not been entirely achieved. The bulk of the Republican Army of the Western Province and its leaders had escaped towards Jacmel on the south coast.11
Saint Domingue remained a hotbed of racial friction and vested interest. It was not to be pacified by a single military operation. Following the capture of Port au Prince, the ubiquitous Charmilly, described by Fortescue as ‘…a rogue [but] assuredly no fool’, had rushed to England with a letter of recommendation from Williamson. He petitioned Dundas and Pitt, apparently on behalf of the proprietors of the colony, for more British reinforcements, the strengthening of the black corps, and the raising of new colonial units. The latter included the Légion Britannique, which he would personally raise and which would require a substantial advance of funds. Ministers hesitated, but Charmilly eventually got permission to raise two corps, one of infantry and one of cavalry. Anglo-colonial relations remained cool. Whitelocke, mindful of the failings of colonial troops at Tiburon and Fort l’Acul, wrote to a fellow French officer, ‘Je ne m’attends pas à aucun changement dans leur sentiments militaires’. At the end of April, an uprising of black auxiliary troops against the Spanish garrison in Gonaives appeared a peripheral event, but it probably marked the first attachment of Toussaint Louverture to the Republican cause.12
Toussaint’s volte face potentially brought an extra 4,000 black soldiers into the fight against them, but the British were nevertheless in a strong position in early June. The consensus among historians is that a vital initiative was now lost. According to Geggus:
Recently reinforced, they had 3,500 armed men in Port au Prince, about 1,800, mostly mounted, in la Grand’ Anse, garrisons at Saint Marc, Arcahaye, and the Môle, and a strong naval squadron. The psychological advantage was theirs. Port au Prince had fallen almost without a shot and amid mutual recriminations. The Republicans were in disarray and everywhere short of food and ammunition.
He argues that the British commanders squandered opportunities, failing to immediately attack Toussaint in the Artibonite, not attacking Jacmel in the south, and not pursuing Sonthonox’s fleeing army through the mountains. The latter force was deeply divided, fighting breaking out between black and mulatto troops and dissension growing among the mulatto generals. Michael Duffy points out that the potential danger of Toussaint was not yet appreciated by many contemporaries. The failure of Rigaud’s further attack on Tiburon in June emphasised both the constant enemy threat and the impotency of Republican forces at this time. Rigaud’s men, weakened by famine, were massacred by the planter cavalry of the Grand Anse and the artillery of the fort and a navy frigate.
British ambitions were not helped by disagreement in their own camp. General Whyte, as senior military officer in Saint Domingue appointed by Grey, the Commander in Chief in the West Indies, expected to be in charge of affairs, but he discovered that he was to be held to account by Williamson at Jamaica. The two men had served together before and there may have been some antagonism between them. Whyte’s strictly military authoritarian view of matters in the colony was at odds with Williamson’s more conciliatory political approach and the Governor of Jamaica soon found fault with the general’s ‘inquisitorial’ edicts. The British Government supported Williamson and the unsavoury episode was brought to an end when Whyte departed for England to be replaced by General Charles Horneck.
A more sinister force than internal discord was at work in the British army. It was to be a recurrent theme of the Caribbean campaigns that periods of military inactivity were marked by outbreaks of disease. Held in notoriously unhealthy Port au Prince at the start of the sickly season, Whyte’s unseasoned men were horribly vulnerable to yellow fever. The flank companies of the 22nd, 23rd, and 41st – sent by Grey from windward in June to join their battalions – brought the disease with them. The death rate in some regiments soon exceeded 20% per month. Within two months, some 600 men were dead and by mid-November 1,000 British soldiers had been buried in the city. The navy was perhaps even more severely affected.13
With operations around Port au Prince brought to a halt by the ravages of disease, the military focus moved to St Marc where British hopes were invested in Captain Thomas Brisbane of the 49th Foot. This officer is eulogised by Fortescue.
With no more than eighty British soldiers, a handful of French regulars, about three hundred reluctant Spaniards, the local militia, and a black legion of his own raising – in all about twelve hundred men – he was the terror alike of Republican troops and of negro brigands over an area of one thousand square miles. He brought the negro chief, Toussaint l’Ouverture, who was later to become the master of Haiti, to submission with surrender of the territory he had conquered…
In a more sober assessment of Brisbane’s achievements, Geggus suggests that some of the concessions made to the British were a subterfuge on the part of Toussaint, who was preparing to strike at his ‘duped and unsuspecting foe’. What is more certain is that when Brisbane left a small garrison of convalescents at St Marc whilst he attacked Gonaives, a mulatto rebellion broke out. Seduced by promises made by the French commissioners, the rebels massacred many of the inhabitants and burned much of the town. Rushing back, Brisbane fought off the repeated attacks of Toussaint’s combined black and mulatto forces before the arrival of a frigate, a Spanish advance down the Artibonite, and reinforcements from Arcahaye allowed him to drive the enemy back across the Artibonite River. Whilst pursuing these operations, Brisbane was so weakened by fever as to be unable to write, instead having to dictate his military reports. Williamson commented, ‘Too much cannot be said in his praise’.14
Brisbane’s fortitude had preserved British possessions, but any alliance with the mulattoes in the area had been broken. Toussaint was able to consolidate a strong defensive position around Marchand. All towns without a British garrison or immediate naval protection were vulnerable to insurrection and attack. At Léogane, the mulattoes invited Rigaud into the town. There was little resistance, a number of blacks and whites fleeing to Port au Prince. Debilitated by disease, Horneck’s small army was on the back foot. A return for October 1794 shows 1,862 British troops in Saint Domingue of whom 1,022 were sick or convalescent. Their colonial allies (640 men) were similarly afflicted. Williamson decried the political failure to declare equality between whites and mulattoes to please the latter; he was, he complained, beset by an increasing number of enemies. Rigaud’s and Toussaint’s f
orces, driven on by the promises of emancipation and now hopeful of repelling the European invader, fought with increasing confidence.15
The loss of Léogane rendered the western approaches to Port au Prince vulnerable and Rigaud was keen to exploit the opportunity. By the night of 5 December, the mulatto leader had secretly assembled 2,000 men under the works of Fort Bizothon, which was manned by 120 British soldiers of various flank companies and battalions. Supported by a cannonade from a brig offshore, the small garrison resisted heroically for about an hour against three enemy columns launched at two parts of the defences. All three officers in the place were wounded but, dressing their own injuries, they fought on and Rigaud was forced to retreat. British losses were 22 killed and wounded and the attackers left 250 men dead, a testament to the determined nature of the assault.16
Not deterred by this setback, Rigaud was resolved to make another attempt to take Tiburon. His intentions were known, but no ship could be spared to intercept his force, which sailed from Aux Cayes on 23 December; this was made up of a naval squadron of a brig of 16 guns and three schooners of 14 guns each and a military contingent of 3,000 men described by Rainsford as being of ‘all colours and descriptions’. Arriving on Christmas Day, the mulatto general first sank a British schooner in the harbour before turning his attention to the fort. The Tiburon garrison was composed of 500 men, mostly blacks under the command of Jean Kina and also some British convalescents. Rigaud poured musketry and mortar shells into the place for four days until, on the 29th, a shell exploded in the ditch, leading to a panicky retreat by Kina’s men who were close by. Led by Lieutenant John Bradford of the 23rd, the garrison’s survivors fought their way through enemy ambuscades to Irois and finally to Jérémie. Around 300 of the defenders were killed, two-thirds of the original garrison. Little mercy was shown; many of the wounded were massacred. Lieutenant Baskerville was left behind and blew his brains out as Rigaud entered the fort.17
Baskerville’s fate was in keeping with the depressing state of British interests in Saint Domingue at the end of 1794. New insurrections erupted at Jérémie and St Marc. Williamson understood that his army was as much threatened by the ‘enemy within’ as by any external foe. The hospitals were full and reinforcements a distant prospect. In the 15 months since the British landed on the colony they had received fewer than 900 men from England. The navy was also under strain, unable to either counter enemy expeditions or to rein in the privateers, or to stop Republican supplies of ammunition and stores. Fortescue places much of the blame on Henry Dundas, who made repeated plans for extra men but did not deliver. The War Minister gave contradictory orders with respect to West Indian reinforcements, but he was fighting a near impossible battle against adverse weather, sickness among the troops, and the demands of the campaigns in the Low Countries. A further reason for the failure of the promised regiments to reach Saint Domingue was the major expedition to windward, to which we will now turn.18
Chapter 4
With Spirit and Impetuosity: The Grey Jervis Expedition of 1793–1794
Dundas’s implementation of Pitt’s military policy was focussed on Martinique and Guadeloupe, islands in a less anarchic state than Saint Domingue and apparently ripe for capture and exploitation. As we have seen, Tobago had already been taken, but an attack on Martinique had been aborted. As early as May 1793, there was a plan for an expedition to be launched by September, timed to arrive in the West Indies at the end of the sickly season with six months of operations feasible. For his army and navy commanders, the Secretary of State appointed Lieutenant General Sir Charles Grey and Vice Admiral Sir John Jervis. Grey, 64 years old, was well qualified for the responsibility having seen much hard fighting in the Seven Years War in Germany, in several mid-eighteenth-century operations, and in the American War of Independence where he was a rare British officer to emerge with credit. His previous experience of both the Caribbean and of combined operations made him a propitious choice. Jervis, six years younger than Grey, was also an intelligent appointment as, although this was his first major independent command, he had knowledge of amphibious operations and had built a reputation as a good organiser. The two men were friends.
As for other foreign expeditions of the wars, the endeavour was subject to repeated false starts and changes in both the size of the available force and the stated objectives. Initially, there was a plan for the regiments already in the Caribbean to be brought up to a strength of over 6,000 men and to reinforce them with 1,800 troops from Gibraltar, 3,000 from Ireland, and over 5,000 from England; this would give Grey a total force of over 16,000 men to conquer Guadeloupe, Martinique and Saint Domingue. The delays now started. There were serious problems in obtaining sufficient ordnance – the communication between Dundas and the Master General of Ordnance, the Duke of Richmond, left much to be desired – and there were similar glitches in obtaining adequate engineers and medical cover. Bad news on the Continent, where the Duke of York was retreating through the Low Countries, led to the diversion of manpower from the West Indies to Ostend. Grey was himself despatched to command these men in late October, although Dundas stressed to the general that this duty was temporary and was not to be interpreted as a change to the plan to send him to the West Indies.
By early November, Grey’s Caribbean force was reduced to fewer than 11,000 men assembled from Spithead and Cork, with the tentative plan now to attack the French islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe and St Lucia. If he could spare sufficient forces, he might also attack Saint Domingue. In practice, the capture of all these islands appeared unrealistic. The reduction of Fort Bourbon on Martinique would probably be impossible due to a shortage of heavy artillery. Grey would have the final say when he arrived in the region.
In mid-November the general was back in London and expecting the imminent departure of his expedition. At this late hour, reinforcements were needed for the defence of the newly acquired British naval base at Toulon and the support of Royalist forces at St Malo on the western French coast. The only solution was to further dilute Grey’s small army to just over 7,000 men drawn from Portsmouth and Cork. The expedition finally set sail from St Helen’s Road on 26 November. It was roughly half the original planned strength and 18 weeks behind schedule. Dundas had supported it and was as eager to see it depart as its commanders, but the project had, in Duffy’s words, ‘stood at the mercy of every messenger who arrived from the Continent or the Caribbean’.1
No doubt relieved at escaping the uncertainties of the expedition’s tortuous preparation, Grey and Jervis arrived at Carlisle Bay on Barbados on 6 January 1794. Here they were expecting to find the transports that had preceded them from Cork, but the bay was empty. This further anxiety was soon allayed by the arrival of the troops; by mid month all the hundred or so Portsmouth and Cork ships had arrived except three. Grey established his headquarters at Government House, a healthy situation about half a mile outside Bridgetown. General Bruce had returned home sick and the temporary command had been in the hands of Major General John Whyte. Grey found that the planned concentration of troops at Barbados had not happened. Lacking clear orders, his predecessors had only partly brought together the flank companies and had sent two regiments to St Vincent and Grenada. All necessary regiments to leeward would have to be retrieved against the trade winds. The manpower issues were worsened by outbreaks of disease, mainly scurvy and typhus, in the newly arrived men. There were soon 1,200 on the sick list, a situation exacerbated by the failure of medical supplies to reach the island.
It was typical of Grey that he used the enforced delay to his advantage. As the sickness levels gradually improved, the general made every effort to improve the morale and battle readiness of his soldiers. He ordered every officer of the light companies to attend a course of instruction given by Major General Thomas Dundas in order to acquire ‘the perfection of Light Infantry attained during the American war’. Training of the troops was undertaken between three o’ clock in the morning and sunrise to protect them from the hea
t of the day. Jervis was equally busy. Cooper Willyams, chaplain on the Boyne, saw the sailors put through their paces, ‘exercised and instructed in the use of small arms and pikes’.2
As these preparations gained momentum, Grey received an unwelcome letter from Dundas suggesting that Saint Domingue might be attacked first. British gains in the colony could be consolidated and all the West Indian targets could be achieved in a single campaign. Conscious of the immediate military imperatives and the realities of warfare in the region, Grey rejected the idea. Any change of plan would lead to even more delay; the campaigning season was already advanced and an all out assault on Saint Domingue would mean a thousand-mile voyage before having to return to Martinique against the trade winds. Any compromise, perhaps the sending of a detachment to Saint Domingue, would still undermine operations to windward. Grey was hopeful of great success in the Windward Islands. He had a high-quality force – the Cork troops were the elite of the Irish Army – and French émigrés’ reports of enemy weakness led him to believe that even Fort Bourbon and Martinique could be taken. At least some of his officers shared their commander’s optimism. Brevet Major Robert Irving of the 70th wrote home on the 11th, ‘I suppose in less than three weeks we will attack Martinico…we expect it will be an easy conquest as there are few white troops and the slaves they have armed will not stand above one fire, much less allow the bayonet to come near them’.
Having identified Martinique as the first objective, Grey formulated his plan of attack. He had the rare advantage of good intelligence. Refugee French officers fleeing Martinique informed him that the defences of Fort Bourbon were weak, the island’s governor, Rochambeau, was at odds with the mulattoes, and that the garrison and defences were of poor quality.
Death Before Glory Page 7
