1915, May–June: (Bobo’s Cacos at the Cap: Beheadings, Angels, and the French Cruiser Descartes): Whatever hope Sam may have had for a respite was now gone — …

1915, May–June: (Bobo’s Cacos at the Cap: Beheadings, Angels, and the French Cruiser Descartes): Whatever hope Sam may have had for a respite was now gone — to maintain the army in the North with scant results to show was costing the government 140,000 gourdes a week, while once again recruiters were combing the villages, dragging old men and boys from humble huts and clubbing them, roped and pinioned, to the army. The conflict in the North had become a stalemate, and Bobo’s control over his Cacos slackened — when he remonstrated, their reply was that they could easily cross the bridge eastward out of the Cap, head for the mountains, and find another leader. To give the example, the Cacos beheaded two insufficiently enthusiastic Capois and shot others — Livingston saw the heads being paraded about the streets and called it the worst savagery in all his seventeen years at the Cap. The Paris-educated Bobo, campaigning as a progressive, reproved a Caco general and was told in return that Angels had commanded the killings and if there were a hundred people he would have killed them all. The French cruiser Descartes arrived from Jamaica in time on the 19th to see a general breakdown in which the Cacos, finally defeated at the Haut-du-Cap, threatened to clean out the consulates as a parting shot — Descartes landed marines and posted them at the consulates, the Banque branch, and the archbishop’s house. Dr. Bobo, far from quenched, simply removed to Limonade and continued the revolution. However welcome the Descartes was to consuls and clergy, her presence and that of her landing force ashore did not go overlooked in Washington — from the tall masts of the new navy radio station in Arlington, wireless orders reached the Washington at El Progreso, Mexico, that Admiral Caperton was again needed in Haiti. Trailing a thick plume of black smoke, the cruiser charged eastward for Cap Haïtien on all sixteen boilers, one knot for each, with a bone in her teeth.