Fort Bélair. Evacuated; received Villaret-Joyeuse’s broadsides unanswered.

In the afternoon of 5 February (the day after the fire), Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse fired several broadsides from the ship of the line l’Océan, of 120 guns, at Fort Bélair, which did not answer; it had been evacuated. Rear-Admiral Delmothe passed through the channel of Le Cap, and almost the whole squadron entered the roadstead without meeting any resistance from Fort Picolet, which had also been abandoned. Humbert’s division at once took possession of the town; Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse, however, ordered the vessels of the squadron not to cast anchor until the captain-general had entered Le Cap. Leclerc had just learned of the occupation of Fort-Liberté by the French and of Rochambeau’s march by way of Sainte-Suzanne upon the Grande Rivière and Le Dondon. He ordered Hardy’s division to land. The troops went ashore at the bay of L’Acul and marched on Le Cap; when they reached the Rivière Salée they were halted by the fire of a battery on the opposite bank. They threw themselves into the water, carried the redoubt with the bayonet and put to the sword a hundred soldiers of the 2nd who held the post. Hardy and Leclerc met no further obstacle as far as Le Cap, where the army camped upon smoking ruins. The whole population that had gone with Télémaque came back into the town with cries of joy, embracing the French, whom it called its liberators. The losses caused by the fire were reckoned at 100,000,000 francs.