Petit-Trou. Taken by Jourdain and Gérin; never lost by the freedmen during the revolution.

Meanwhile Jourdain and Gérin, men of color who had been at the meeting at Rastau’s near Port-au-Prince, had gone to the quarter of Petit-Trou (province of the South), where they had their properties. They resolved to carry out what they had promised their brothers of the West, that is, to raise the plantation gangs and take the town from the whites. Most of them assembled, armed the enslaved and came to attack Roy de Kermeler, a white colonist who commanded at Petit-Trou. After a bloody fight they entered the place and took it on 30 August, the day of the fight at Nérette. They respected persons and property. Before 1789 Roy de Kermeler had cruelly persecuted Jourdain. The freedmen and the enslaved asked for one head only, and that was Kermeler’s. They rushed in a crowd toward his house, ready to wreak the cruellest vengeance on him. Jourdain checked their fury, and by the influence he held over them compelled them to respect his enemy’s house. He went alone into Kermeler’s house, handed him a sword, and declared that he had come to avenge the insults he had received, by single combat, and not to murder him. The mulatto and the white man crossed swords in the presence of the insurgents, who formed a circle around them, and after a struggle whose outcome long remained in doubt, Kermeler fell, struck in the chest. Jourdain had him buried. A few days later the whites of the parishes around Petit-Trou marched against the insurgents, but they were beaten at every point. Jourdain gave liberty to the boldest of the enslaved men he had raised, and restored order and work in the countryside. Petit-Trou was never taken from the freedmen during the whole revolution.