Correspondence from the Revolutionary Atlantic 1797–1798

A selection of letters from the Trinidad Historical Society Collection, written by British naval commanders during the period of the French and British wars fought in the Caribbean Sea during the period of the French Revolution. These naval battles between France and England caused various islands in the Caribbean chain of islands to change hands and in so doing alter the destinies of millions of people. 

Sir Ralph Abercromby

Sir Thomas Picton

The 18th century Brigand War in the Caribbean

Perhaps if you have the kind of romantic imagination that is now going out of style you may feel yourself drawn towards a Caribbean experience that goes beyond being baked to a crisp while becoming charmingly incoherent after of your seventh rum-punch.  If this is at all the case you may want to learn something about a topic that just a mere two hundred or so years ago made hearts race and brave men think hard about finding a place to hide. No, I am not talking about hurricanes. I am talking about an episode in our past that was called the Brigand War and especially some of the personalities that shaped that period.

Historians have said that these Antialien islands are a product of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. What they mean is that as the 18th century came to a close disputes that had their origins in Paris, London or Madrid were settled right here on these sandy shores or upon that crystal clear horizon, that with a bit of luck, you might not only see the fabled green flash illuminate the day’s end, but actually catch it on your iphone so as to put it on face-book.

One of the more outstanding events to take place in that period was the advent of a man called Victor Hugues.  The European wars for territories in the Caribbean reached boiling point in the 1790s. The French Revolution of 1789 served to add civil war to the equation. Turbulence and violence, political upheaval and revolt reigned throughout the string of islands. From Grenada, to St. Vincent, though to St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe and among the maroons - former slaves who had taken to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica’s central range. And most violent and catastrophic of all, in Saint-Domingue now known as Haiti.

This ‘ring of fire,’ which was in fact the effect of the Age of Enlightenment upon the western world, sought to bring an end to the dominance of both altar and throne. It had commenced in North America, under George Washington, as the descendants of immigrants there battled against British control, and would continue with Simon Bolivar until the Wars of Liberation brought an end to Spanish domination in south America.

There had been fierce fighting  in the Eastern Caribbean for some years. This was characterized by battles at sea whose very names – the Battle of the Saints, the Battle of Cape St Vincent or the Battle of Grenada– conjure the choking odors of grapeshot, black powder and battle ablaze, as seventy eight gun frigates fought it out against magnificent sunsets of legendary splendor. 

In 1794, British troops took Martinique. A month or two later, they landed in Guadeloupe. There, for the first time, they came up against Victor Hugues, a former shop owner and minor merchant of Port-au-Prince on the island of Saint-Domingue, now called Haiti. It was said that he had been born at Marseilles, France, perhaps in 1760. He had a grasp on learning it was said and like so many young men he yearned to travel. He shipped aboard a merchantman as a cabin boy, sailing the trade routes on the Atlantic run. He often wintered in the Antilles, enjoying the wealthy mulatto lifestyle of the parvenus and the debaucheries of the harbour towns.

He is remembered as a raucous fellow of a huge sexual appetite, who tended to attract the young, naive and impoverished whites.  A thirst for knowledge and the pursuit of belonging made him seek the membership in an esoteric, pseudo-masonic order, called ‘Societé d’Harmonie’. He became the leader, some say even the Robespierre of the French Revolution in the Caribbean. He sailed from Marseilles armed with republican fever, gold, a handful of loyal henchmen and a guillotine.  Hugues was a daring man; people said that he was coloured and hated the ‘békés’, for being placed by them beyond the diameter of society despite his grasp of culture and his intelligence.

The squadron under his command attacked the British in 1795 in Basseterre and forced them out of Guadeloupe by the end of that year. His reign of terror took the lives of over one thousand royalists.

Victor Hugues then set to work to exterminate the monarchists and drive the British out of the Windward and Leeward islands as well as convert people of these islands  to the cause of the French republican revolution. He dispatched agents to St. Vincent to stir up the population there, then sent in Jacobin irregulars on the heels of the agents, and before long the English were hardpressed to keep the capital Kingstown, while the French, made up of black and coloured troops, and the Carib Indians overran and held the rest of the island. In Tobago, there was serious cause for alarm. Now once again in British hands, the African slaves, most of them French speaking with connections in other islands, had already been indoctrinated by the revolutionary fervour that had swept the islands, causing Scarborough to be burnt. Tobago’s planters were asking for a ‘stout frigate to be stationed in Great Courland Bay.

Hugues dispatched his agents to Jamaica, where for the third time a full-fledged war was being waged between the maroons, these were slaves who had freed themselves, and the occupying British troops. They were so heavily engaged that no reinforcements could be sent from Jamaica to relieve General Maitland’s fever-stricken English soldiers in Saint-Domingue who were attempting to take that island from the African slaves who were in revolt under a charismatic leader known to history as Toussaint Louverture. By 1798, the English were compelled to leave that island, while in Jamaica, the black maroons had to be accommodated after a truce was arranged high up in the cockpit country of the blue mountains.

Victor Hugues, undaunted, turned to Grenada, where there was tension between the English and the French speaking free colourds. He was a genius at sowing division and a brilliant manipulator! His agents promoted revolt in Grenada. They were followed by picket men, who built up cells or small cadres. Then, soldiers were brought in. A coloured Grenadian planter, Julien Fedon, was chosen as leader. An army of French and free blacks was formed, and then revolutionary troops were sent in from Guadeloupe.

The rising under Fedon broke out at midnight of 2nd March, 1795. They surrounded the town of Grenville and commenced a massacre that to this day is still remembered. After fighting off the British for more than a year Fedon withdrew to his estate Belvedere, 2000 ft above sea level on the sumit of Mt. St. Catherine. He established three camps, named them the ‘Field of Liberty’,  the ‘Field of Equality’ and the ‘Field of Death’. Soon the governor and his staff had been taken, and Fedon warned that any attempt to attack the island would mean their death.

Meanwhile, Victor Hugues was attempting to destabilise Trinidad, and to demoralise Don José Maria Chacon, the Spanish  governor. He offered to send his men to ‘help’ the governor to ‘control’ the island. Chacon in Trinidad responded by sending a few Spanish soldiers to join the British in Grenada in their planned attack on Fedon’s mountain fortress.

Terrible rainstorms lashed Grenada on the day that Fedon’s encampment was attacked. The English troops were pinned down by relentless fire from above. Fedon’s troops felled huge trees. The English commander inexplicably killed himself. Yet the attack was maintained.

At the ‘Field of Death’ a terrible massacre had taken place. The hostages were executed. The governor’s wife and daughters, his aid and accompanying officers were all killed in a hail of bullets. Some 55 persons died. There were a few survivors, among them Dr. John Hay, Fr. McMahon and a Mr. Kerr.

The British armed a contingent of loyal slaves, the ‘Corps of Loyal Black Rangers’, and pursued Fédon’s men while garrisoning St. Georges. In April, Sir Ralph Abercromby arrived in Grenada with troops and attacked the mountain stronghold. He defeated Fedon there, but not before another 20 hostages had met their deaths.

None saw Fédon die. He was last seen trying to sail away in a small boat and is said to have drowned. Thus ended the Battle Mt. Qua Qua.

Over 150 years later, in the latter part of the 20th century, Grenada again experienced revolution, overthrow and massacre of more than 100 citizens at the fort in St. Georges. Is this a case of history repeating itself? Or is this a matter of unresolved issues playing themselves out? It is said that people who do not know their past are doomed to repeat it.

Buy "Roume de St. Laurent – A Memoir" by clicking here:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble

Victor Hugues

 “They say he was a ‘red-skinned’ man of French and African descent, and he had been born at Marseilles, France, perhaps in 1760. His father was a baker, they say. He had gone to school in France and had a grasp on learning. He yearned to travel and shipped aboard a merchantman as a cabin boy, sailing the trade routes on the Atlantic run. He often wintered in the Antilles, enjoying the wealthy mulatto lifestyle of the parvenus and the debaucheries of the harbour towns.

“A raucous man of huge sexual appetite, he tended to attract the young, naive and impoverished whites. A thirst for knowledge an the pursuit of belonging made him seek the membership in esoteric, pseudo-masonic order, called ‘Societé d’Harmonie’.

“He opened a comptoir, dealing in an assortment of goods, acquired, collected or purchased either by trading, smuggling or exchange at Port-au-Prince on the island of Saint Domingue, Haiti. This island, incredibly wealthy, produced huge quantities of sugar and consumed the lives of tens of thousands of slaves brought out of Africa to be worked to death in the cane fields. It produced a rapacious society of bewildering compositions of European and African strains, universally despised by both the black and the white, despising themselves in their misfortune even more.

“In his youth, blinded by his physical appetites, he could not care less about the miserable blacks nor the ‘hoity-toity’ whites, but as he grew older, his envy of the wealthy Europeans who scorned him or used him at their pleasure, filled him with disgust.

“They say it was a Sunday in the middle of August 1791 on the Leonormand plantation in Bois Caiman that a party of persons met and i silence paced the dark night. The plantation Great House shone with an ethereal glow, whiter than white in the full moon. In the gallery, massa and his sons and their wives were rocking gently, digesting, fanning the warm wind. Those who served them their wine knew well, but kept their faces carefully arranged in servitude, bare feet making whispering sounds on the highly polished floor.

“Upstairs, in the enormous rooms bathed in a yellow glow, the children slept or stirred or sucked at the huge black breasts of their wet nurse. She, too, knew. All the slaves of La Cap knew.

The party of persons shipped from barrack to barrack. Their message was their presence. One week later, they struck with a vengeance. A wail of terror that distroyed in fire the filigree, the  gingerbread and the turned wood of the most beautiful houses in the Americas. They butchered all, black, white or mulatto, who barred their way.

“The uprising in the Cap caught him by surprise. He did not know. The swarming mob distroyed his comptoir. The men in rage had no time for his talk. He hid in the cellar of a burnt-out public building, with looters living above him, not daring to breathe. It gave him time to think.

Hunger drove him from his cell. In the dark and blazing night, he saw the madness of the slaves, the aristocrats begging for their lives, the perfection of their French theatrical. He saw the bloody men surge by, a blond baby spiked through waving before them as a banner for the damned, their eyes those of the undead.

“He escaped by swimming out into the Harbour Road, where a schooner was making ready. At first, they fired on him. He commanded them to hold and, responding to the authority in his voice, hauled him up the side as the schooner heaved to, its wake leaving a white line that caught the flaming town, tingeing it to blood.

“This was where I met Victor Hugues. We sailed the Atlantic in a pounding sea. Sheets creaked in the winches. The black sky cracked by day, appearing to shatter with the lightning that walked on crooked legs on the horizon’s edge. He told me he would return, his time had come. He was not escaping. He was in search of a mandate.

“We parted at Marseilles, the sea, exhausted, could only lap. He left before we made fast as he had come, overboard, and made his way to Paris to find the centre of the storm, the vortex of the revolution, to match his rage with theirs, to outrage them.

“Robespierre recognised the zeal in his hatred of the rich, the noble and the clergy, and appointed him public prosecutor at Rochefort. There, I heard that he had set up a guillotine in the courthouse, so as to facilitate the quick turnaround of justice.

“He joined the extreme Jacobine group known as the ‘Mountain’, so called because they occupied the high back seats of the convention chamber. He was known to be one of the ‘enragés’. The Mountain established its control of the convention on June 2, 1793, not by vote but by force, a force that sent many of their fellow revolutionaries flying for their very lives. Such were the revolutionary credentials of this fearsome tyrant.

“Guadeloupe had been French since 1635. In 1759 it was taken by the British. After Britain declared war against France in February 1793, following the guillotining of King Louis XVI, plans were made to recapture the island lost to France, and in 1793 a force of 800 British was landed at Martinique. It was welcomed by the royalist planters, who were terrified by the execution of their king. Many aristocrats were taken off by the British, and several of them found their way to Trinidad.

“He returned with a mandate, as he had planned. It was simple: kill all royalists. He landed in Guadeloupe and routed the British. He erected the first guillotine ever seen in the western hemisphere. He killed thousands of French royalists and sent the remainder scampering for their lives to Grenada and then to Trinidad.

“Also flowing to Trinidad were republicans, pro-revolutionaries comprising poor whites, lower class half-casts, criminals, some insane, adventurers and opportunists of all shades and conditions. The Spanish governor, Chacon, was barely in control of the situation.

“Hugues cynically offered to ‘help’ Chacon. He organised rebellions in St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Grenada. In Tobago, there was serious cause for alarm. Now in British hands, once more the African slaves, most of them French speaking with connections in other islands, had already been indoctrinated by revolutionary fervour that had swept the island, causing Scarborough to be burnt. Now Tobago’s planters were asking for a ‘stout frigate to be stationed in Great Courland Bay’.

“He attempted insurrections in Dominica and Martinique. These failed. His emissaries were captured and put to death. With Castries burning, a man called Dominique Dert was able to grab the Charter of Lodge United Brothers and flee to Port of Spain. Under the French Constitution, it was numbered 327. Later, under the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania, it became No. 77 and yet later again under the Scottish Constitution, it  was registered 251. Captain Ache sailed from the Bay of St. Anne in Martinique with as many people as his 77 gun frigate could carry. His decks awash, he braved a terrible storm to bring royalists and their slaves, free blacks and people of colour to Trinidad. Many of these settled in the wooded valley north of Port of Spain, which they named St. Ann after the bay from which they had been rescued.

“Bryan Edwards, the contemporary historian, described what happened to those who remained:

“The republicans erected a guillotine, with which they struck off the heads of fifty of them in the short space of an hour. This mode of proceeding, however, proving too tedious for their impatient revenge, the remainder of these unhappy men were fettered to each other, and placed on the brink of one of the trenches which they had so gallantly defended: the republicans then drew up some of their undisciplined recruits in front, who firing an irregular volley at their miserable victims, killed some and wounded others, leaving many, in all probability, untouched. The weight however of the former, dragged the rest into the ditch, where the living, the wounded, and the dead shared the same grave, the soil being instantly thrown in upon them.”

The obituary of Victor Hugues in Memorial Bordelais, reproduced in the Trinidad Guardian of March 13, 1827, even after taking account of public attitudes in the reign of that most reactionary of kings, Charles X, last monarch or the House of Bourbon, reflects the opinions, concerning the man, of people who lived at the time of his atrocities.

“The man of blood, the Robespierre of the colonies, has breathed his last - Victor Hugues is dead, and humanity again respires. The accomplice of those wretches who overwhelmed France in misery and ruin, he surpassed them all in his cruel mission. Landing at Guadeloupe, by an effect of that fate that presides over misfortune, he proclaimed liberty to the blacks, and he slaughtered their masters. The moiety of the proprietors fell under his executions, and every family bewailed its victim. The colony, then extremely rich, was plundered, and Hugues amassed by this means immense wealth. The scourge of that quarter of the world, he produced insurrections in St. Lucia, St. Vincent and Grenada, but he failed at Dominica and Martinique - there his emissaries received their merited reward. The whole of them were captured and put to death. The cruelties for which this terrible man was notorious can scarce be enumerated, and some of them even surpass belief. Recalled in 1798, he was confirmed by the Consuls in his office of Commissioner of Guyana, where, as in Guadeloupe, he acquired a considerable fortune by his exaction. After the capitulation of that colony, he returned to France, where Bonaparte made him disgorge a part of the gains of his robbery. He then sought refuge in the Department of Gironde, in the commune of Rion, where he remained until his death, with the exception of six months that he passed with a person named Mark Borders, a potter, his nephew, and formerly his confidential secretary.”

Such was the fanatical revolutionary who descended on Guadeloupe in particular and the Caribbean on the whole. To what extent his presence pushed Chacon into easy surrender to the British in 1797 may only be guessed. The fact is that tens of thousands of us who walk the streets today, were brought here because of the displacement of our ancestors to these shores by Victor Hugues.

General Thomas Dundas

 Trinity Cathedral was consecrated on Trinity Sunday, 1823, and to this day, 177 years on, it still possesses a sense of calm, a quiet repose in an increasingly noisy city.

In truth, there is much repose for the eye in Trinity and many objects of historical interest. The memorial plaques on the walls speak in hush tones of long dead English gentry, the Warners, the Bushes and others. Amongst these milestones of colonial decorum is one that speaks from another time. Shouts, in fact, it thunders from a period in history of these islands that was bloody, murderous, revolutionary and in the true sense of the word barbaric.

This plaque on the southern wall, not far from the main door, commemorates the memory of Major General Thomas Dundas. This memorial tablet has an even more imposing counterpart, which stands in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. This was erected by the British parliament in commemoration of the general’s heroic death, but also in memory of the sad and scandalous defilement of his bodily remains.

General Dundas was a professional soldier. He was in command of the British forces that captured Guadeloupe in April 1794. In June of that year, the forces under his command were attacked by the republic insurgents under the control of Victor Hugues. The guns of Fort Matilda boomed great red flashes into the Caribbean’s story night, keeping the French squadron at bay. By morning, Hugues’ brigands had stormed Basseterre, Guadeloupe’s capital. A company of Hugues’ fiercest fighters attacked the fort. Dundas, putting himself to the fore, saber in hand, in an attempt to hold the breach being made by the insurgents, struck first one bearded sailor with his fist, sending him sprawling to the wall, and then ran another through. Red blood gushed from the fellow’s chest. Dundas turned to call the Scottish 72nd regiment forward. All of a sudden, he felt the sting of pain in his left arm, the force of the lead ball spun him round. He slashed with his sword the face that appeared before him, as his men jumped into the open space, firing, then charging with bayonets at the ready. The second bullet took Dundas in the side, taking him to his knees with a groan. He rose again to stand beside the regimental colours. The swarming brigands maintained a withering fire as the 72nd regiment prepared to charge their ragged line. General Prescot had joined the colour party, and seeing the state of Dundas, ordered the charge be sounded. The line of boy drummers, their faces pale with fright, began a rapid beat. On the shattered wall a bugle called. The forward elements of the 72nd charged. The colour party lurched forward, battle flag snapping in the wind.

Dundas moved forward. The pain that had racked his body was almost a memory now; his mind was blank. “Forward,” he thought. He shouted. The grassy Caribbean ground was turning under his feet, as he was standing still, rooted to the spot. The sky above was innocent in its present state of blue.

The third bullet caught him in the left eye. He died on that day, in that spot, where he had held the breach at Fort Matilda, Guadeloupe.

Dundas was buried there that evening to the sounds of a fierce battle being fought at Pointe-à-Pitre. Victor Hugues routed the British and proceeded to slaughter the French royalist families. Some were shot, others guillotined. Young women were auctioned off to the troops. Other aristocratic ladies were used as gambling chips in lunatic card games played by their former slaves. Hugues was described as ‘the man of blood, the Robespierre of the colonies’. As a man possessed, he marched on the ruin of Fort Matilda, where General Dundas’ body was exhumed and thrown in its decomposing state into a nearby river, where it was attacked by dogs.

On October 4, 1839, more than 40 years later, the ‘Trinidad Standard’ reported an interesting discovery. James Ross, master mason of Port of Spain, whiled directing the removal of a heap of loose stones in the yard of a house in Edward Street, once occupied by an ordinance storekeeper called Edwards, rescued from the rubbish a marble urn and tablet. On being cleaned, the following inscription was found:

Ross immediately informed the governor, Colonel Sir E.M. McGregor, who in turn requested the reverend rector of Trinity Church to assign some fit place within the walls of that edifice for the erection of the memento so providentially rescued from oblivion.

The Dutch establishment in the Caribbean

 The Dutch establishment in Tobago in the 17th century was a serious endeavour to maintain a presence in the Caribbean. As a base of operations for their ventures into the Guyanas and in pursuit of profit, the Dutch were not very distracted by gold. As Professor Phillip Sherlock put it:

“To get at the heart of  West Indian history, we must strip away the romantic nonsense about buried treasure and pirates leading carefree lives in hidden harbours. The magic words are not gold and silver, but salt, sugar, tobacco, logwood.”

Gold and silver drew the Spaniards to Mexico, Peru and Colombia. They neglected Trinidad, because it possessed no gold or precious minerals for them. They paid little regard to Jamaica, because it was fit only for the rearing of horses and the breeding of cattle. There were, however, other commodities that proved as precious as gold, and these attracted other nations to the Caribbean. The Dutch, for example, during the 1600s shut off by Spain from her Portuguese sources of salt, turned to the Caribbean. Dutch  prosperity and power rested on their herring trade, which required a steady supply of salt for curing the fish that was sold throughout Europe.

The Dutch knew that there were large deposits of salt near to Cumana in Venezuela, and from their foothold on Tobago they launched expeditions to the eight mile long lagoon that was separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land. The sun beat down mercilessly on this hot, desolate place, but in spite of the intolerable heat salt was taken from the rim of this salt pond, where over the millennia it had formed as a result of the sea water’s evaporation.

Tobago had been an important port of call for the Dutch from the early 17th century. Unlike so many other islands of the West Indies, it never became a Spanish possession. It had been visited by British seamen in 1580, and a Dutch captain, Joachim Gijsz, on his way back to Holland from Brazil in 1627, stopped there. One of the important commodities that brought the Dutch out to the Caribbean were dye wood trees, fustic and log wood. The log wood is a slow-growing tree, brownish red at the core. This core yielded a fast dye, dark blue or purple in colour. In the 1600s, clothmakers in Flanders and England used log wood to colour their wool. Much sought-after, it soon sold for £100 per ton.

Mahogany was introduced into Europe from the Caribbean. Great stands of mahogany once grew in Tobago, overlooking the calm bays as they did in most parts of these islands. The Spaniards learnt the use of mahogany very soon after they came to the New World. In fact, the oldest known sample of their work is a cross in the cathedral at Santo Domingo, dating back to 1514. The Spaniards built ships from mahogany. They found the wood of the islands harder, with a richer colouring and very finely grained. Philip II of Spain used mahogany in the building of his vast gloomy palace, the Escorial, outside Madrid.

Tobago was a Carib stronghold. Columbus had encountered the Caribs on various islands. He testified of their courage and determination. “they are a wild people, fit for any work, well proportioned and very intelligent.” The Caribs were also strong on other islands as well. They held St. Vincent in such strength that the island was one of the last of the lesser Antilles to be settled by Europeans. Complicated treaties were made, the last of which was in 1773 after the British had been in St. Vincent for more than 10 years. There was money to be made in these islands, and they were considered strategic. In Grenada and in St. Lucia, the French and English fought each other for possession. The sharpest conflicts took place in the 1790s. One of the most skillful of the French revolutionary leaders in the Caribbean was Victor Hugues, a man of extraordinary energy, who stirred up the slaves and the Caribs against the English.

In the years immediately before Hugues arrived in the Caribbean, the English expanded sugar production in St. Vincent in preference to cotton. Sugar rose from 3,200 tons in 1787 to over 14,000 tons in 1828. This meant larger quantities of slaves to be brought in. Hugues urged rebellion in the slave population. He also encouraged the black Caribs of St. Vincent to rise in revolt. The black Caribs of St. Vincent are part African and part Carib, and come about as the result of a slave ship going aground on the island. The slaves found refuge with the Caribs, and their descendants continue to live there to this day.

In the uprising, urged by Victor Hugues in the 18th century, the black Caribs though fierce and courageous, suffered for their rebellion and many were deported to British Honduras (now Belize). To learn more about the islands, read John MacPherson’s excellent geography book ‘Caribbean Islands’.

Capitulation and the Region

As a backdrop to the capture of the island of Trinidad by the British in 1797, it is useful to have an idea of what was taking place in the region generally.

The European wars for territories in the Caribbean reached boiling point in the 1790s. The French Revolution of 1789 served to add civil war to the equation. Turbulence and violence, racial hate and revolt reigned in the ring of islands, in St. Lucia, Grenada, Dominica, among the maroons - former slaves who had taken to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica’s central range -, and most violent and catastrophic of all, in Haiti.

This ‘ring of fire’ had commenced in North America, as the descendants of immigrants there battled against British control.

There was heavy fighting in the Eastern Caribbean. In 1794, British troops took Martinique. A month or two later, they landed in Guadeloupe. There, for the first time, they came up against Victor Hugues, the former inn keeper of that island and now leader of the French Revolution in the Caribbean. He had sailed from Marseilles, France, the year before, armed with republican fever, gold, a handful of loyal henchmen and a guillotine. Hugues was a daring man; people said that he was coloured and hated the ‘békés’, the whites, for being placed by them beyond the diameter of society despite his grasp of culture and his intelligence.

Hugues was possessed of great energy and resolution. The message of the revolution was like a gospel to him.

The squadron under his command attacked the British in 1795 in Basseterre and forced them out of Guadeloupe by the end of that year. The reign of terror took the lives of over one thousand royalists.

Victor Hugues then set to work to drive the British out of these islands and to convert people to the cause of the revolution of republican France. He sent agents to St. Vincent to stir up the population. He sent troops on the heels of the agents, and before long the English were hardpressed to keep Kingstown, while the French, made up of black and coloured troops, and the Caribs held the rest of the island. Hugues dispatched his agents to Jamaica, where for the third time a full-fledged war was waged by the maroons, slaves who had freed themselves, and the British troops. They were so heavily engaged that no reinforcements could be sent to relieve General Maitland’s fever-stricken English soldiers in Haiti. By 1798, the English were compelled to leave Haiti, and in Jamaica, the black maroons had been crushed.

Victor Hugues, undaunted, turned to Grenada, where there was tension between the English and the French. He was a genius at sowing division and a brilliant manipulator! His agents promoted revolt in Grenada. they were followed by picket men, who built up cells or small cadres. Then, soldiers were brought in. A coloured Grenadian planter, Julien Fedon, was chosen as leader. A group of French and free blacks was formed, and then revolutionary troops were sent in from Guadeloupe.

The rising under Fedon broke out at midnight of 2nd March, 1795, surrounded the town of Grenville and engaged in English garrison. They soon overran the town killing all, sparing none.

Fedon withdrew to his estate Belvedere, 2000 ft above sea level on the Mt. St. Catherine. He established three camps, named the ‘Field of Liberty’,  the ‘Field of Equality’ and the ‘Field of Death’. Soon the governor and his staff had been taken, and Fedon warned that any attempt to attack the island would mean their death.

Meanwhile, Victor Hugues was attempting to destabilise Trinidad, and to demoralise Don José Maria Chacon, the governor. He offered to send his men to ‘help’ the governor to ‘control’ the island. Chacon in Trinidad responded by sending a few Spanish soldiers to join the British in Grenada in their planned attack on Fedon’s mountan fortress.

Terrible rainstorms lashed Grenada on the day that Fedon’s encampment was attacked. The English troops were pinned down by relentless fire from above. Fedon’s troops felled huge trees. The English commander inexplicably killed ihmself. Yet the attack was maintained.

At the ‘Field of Death’ a terrible massacre had taken place. The hostages were executed. The governor’s wife and daughters, his aid and accompanying officers were all killed in a hail of bullets. Some 55 persons died. There were a few survivors , among them Dr. John Hay, Fr. McMahon and Mr. Kerr.

The British armed a contingent of loyal slaves, the ‘Corps of Loyal Black Rangers’, and pursued Fedon’s men while garrisoning St. Georges. In April, Sir Ralph Abercromby arrived in Grenada with troops and attacked the mountain stronghold. He defeated Fedon there, but not before another 20 hostages had met their deaths.

Noone saw Fedon die. He was seen trying to sail away in a small boat and is said to have drowned. Thus ended the Battle Mt. Qua Qua.

Over 150 years later, in the latter part of the 20th century, Grenada again experienced revolution, overthrow and massacre of more than 100 citizens at the fort in St. Georges. Is this a case of history repeating itself? Or is this a matter of unresolved issues playing themselves out? Perhaps history repeats itself because of unresolved issues. It is said that people who do not know their past are doomed to repeat it. This is one of the ‘raisons d’etre’ for the Historical Digest!