Grand-Goâve. Battle before it: Renaud Desruisseaux routs Christophe then falls; the Rigaudins destroy the fortifications, burn the bourg and abandon it.

His vanguard, composed of the 1st demi-brigade under Christophe’s orders, was attacked again by Figaro at the head of a hundred cultivators, who were driven back with loss. But Colonel Renaud Desruisseaux, advancing at the head of a battalion of the newly formed 5th regiment of the South, rallied the fugitives and appeared on the field of battle. He attacked Dessalines’s vanguard with impetuosity, broke it and put it to headlong rout. Christophe lost more than 200 men. Dessalines, gathering all his troops and giving the right to the 2nd demi-brigade, drove them against the Rigaudins. Renaud Desruisseaux, assailed on every side, bore the shock of these countless masses with courage for more than an hour. But he fell, struck by a ball in the head. Dessalines nonetheless could not break this battalion of the 5th regiment, which made an honorable retreat, carrying off its chief, who never ceased to give orders. The 5th withdrew to Grand-Goâve; it had lost most of its officers. The Rigaudins, hemmed in on every side, destroyed all the fortifications of the bourg, gave it to the flames and abandoned it. Along their way they burned several properties; as for those of the Tapion, they burned every one. They halted at Petit-Goâve. There the brave Renaud Desruisseaux died of his wound. He was buried with ceremony in the middle of the parade ground, at the foot of the tree of liberty. He was a victim of his devotion to General Rigaud’s person; for many a time he had said that this civil war had its origin in the blind patriotism of his general, who ought to have taken up arms against Toussaint Louverture only on precise instructions from the Executive Directory.