Dessalines carried the passage of the Sault and defeated the army of the South at the Pont-de-Miragoâne.

Dessalines, after resting a few days at Petit-Goâve, set out against the Pont. He ordered Clerveaux to occupy the morne Olivier, on the plantation of the same name, and to set up artillery there; the lake lay between the two batteries, which were about three hundred toises apart. For several days they cannonaded each other without deciding anything. Dessalines, leaving Clerveaux before the Pont, moved in the night of 26 to 27 floréal (16 to 17 May) against the passage of the Sault with nearly all his forces. After a terrible fight he succeeded in carrying this defile, taking it by way of the Besseignet plantation, and by daylight he was marching to turn the army of the South. Pétion would have been lost but for a legionary, taken prisoner at the evacuation of Jacmel, who escaped and, trying to rejoin his companions, met Rigaud at the edge of the Duparc stream. This legionary told his general of Dessalines’s maneuvers. Extraordinary thing! of the men of the post of the Sault who fled into the woods, not one had yet appeared! Rigaud sent an order to Faubert to throw himself across the enemy’s path. What above all dismayed Rigaud in this supreme crisis was the danger that threatened the garrison of the Pont. But, by good fortune, Captain Segrettier, returning from Miragoâne, learned from him what was happening; swift as lightning, this captain, in whom the sole idea of saving the lives of his chief and his companions increased a courage that has never faltered, headed at full speed for the Pont, saw the enemy advancing silently and slowly through the woods, redoubled his speed, met Chalumeau, a captain and aide-de-camp of Rigaud, and urged him in vain to turn back, then met a little farther on, on the Châlons plantation, Faubert, who was hastening to Rigaud’s call, and had only time to cry to him: “Form in line of battle, here is the enemy!” and, in one last dash, Segrettier reached Pétion.

Chalumeau, less fortunate than Segrettier, in his devotion to his general, had just fallen under a hail of bullets. The fight began almost at once. Faubert, at the head of his grenadiers, overthrew the 5th demi-brigade of the North. It was with rage that these grenadiers defended the soil of the South, so sacred to them. In the rout of the 5th, it lost one of its battalion commanders, Laméresse, a *mulâtre*. Dessalines brought up the 4th and the 8th. The fight began again with greater violence (1). Pétion, warned at that moment by Segrettier, sent Ogé with the legionaries to reinforce the 3rd. Ogé, who in such circumstances flew to the spot at a speed beyond running, arrived at the moment when the 5th, succumbing to numbers, was beaten and almost annihilated; everyone sought safety in flight. Nevertheless, after two general volleys against the front of the enemy, who already held the road that leads to the Pont, Ogé, judging matters with prudence, perhaps for the first time, since his whole military life is made up only of actions of the rarest daring, ordered the retreat to the village of Miragoâne: it was the only way out that presented itself to him (1).

Rigaud, escorted by a few dragoons commanded by squadron commander Borgella, was obliged to abandon Duparc and the immense stock of supplies that was there. Pétion, for his part, ran a more imminent danger than ever. But with that serene spirit for which he is known, and which was also somewhat the prerogative of Geffrard, he at once devised a plan of safety. They had the cannon spiked and the munitions and provisions thrown into the lake; and with the flags they plunged, accompanied by Geffrard, Gauthier, Boyer and Papalier, and followed by the 4th, then made up of two hundred men at most, into the thick and thorny woods of the Olivier plantation, to reach the Carénage of Miragoâne, a horrible road to open, during which Aly, the old and faithful Aly, showed the courage of a young man. They entered Miragoâne toward three o’clock in the afternoon, their clothes in rags, their bodies bruised and torn by the rocks and the thorns.