Le Lamentin. 800 English troops land under Spencer.

On 1 June, at eleven in the morning, the frigate Pénélope moored broadside to Fort Touron, and the ships Belliqueux and Sceptre against Fort Bizoton, which was armed with five guns and two mortars. Monbrun held this last fortification with a few gunners and 450 men of the Legion of the West. The English opened fire on the place. Under cover of the bombardment, 800 men of European troops of the line landed at Lamantin, led by Colonel Spencer. Fort Bizoton answered the broadsides of the English squadron only feebly. At six in the evening the rain began to fall so heavily that the firing ceased on both sides. Captain Daniel, at the head of sixty grenadiers of the 41st regiment, marched with the bayonet against Bizoton, whose gates were opened to him by traitors. Monbrun, seeing a company enter the fort, thought that Republicans were seeking shelter there from the downpour. Captain Daniel came up to him and said in French: “You are my prisoner.” “Not yet,” answered Monbrun, and he felled him with a ball to the head. Colonel Spencer entered the fort with a battalion; they fought in the darkness, with the bayonet and hand to hand. The soldiers of the Legion of the West, seeing themselves betrayed, fell back on the town. Monbrun had been wounded in the hand in the melee; throughout the town he was suspected of treason. On 2 June, at daybreak, the English flag was flying over Fort Bizoton. In the afternoon Colonel Hampfield landed with 200 men at the Pointe de la Saline and seized Fort Touron, which was handed over to him by a battalion of the Regenerated. The white people of the town, fearing the fury of the newly free, took refuge some aboard the ships in the roadstead and others in Fort Saint-Joseph, the better to lend the English a hand. Polvérel and Sonthonax assembled the Regenerated and harangued them, telling them that if they were beaten they would go back into servitude; they answered with prolonged cheers, but in truth they thought only of pillaging the town. Sonthonax, who believed that Monbrun had delivered Fort Bizoton to the English, wished to have him arrested, but gave up the plan, being no longer able to hold the place. A council of war met, and it was decided there that the civil commissioners would go to La Charbonnière, four leagues from Port-Républicain. Sonthonax and Polvérel left the town after exhorting the newly free not to burn it. General Bauvais, at the head of a detachment of the Legion of the West that had come out of the Croix-des-Bouquets, accompanied them (3 June). Bauvais, no longer able to hold his ground in the plain of the Cul-de-Sac, into which the English had penetrated, had evacuated the Croix-des-Bouquets and rallied to Sonthonax, in whom he still respected the representative of France.