Durand plantation. 60 whites of Jérémie surrounded and killed here.

General Geffrard, immediately after the opening of the market of which we have just spoken, had ordered General Férou to go and seize Jérémie at the head of his division. The troops under Férou’s orders had left Camp Gérard in the first days of July. They passed rapidly through the Figuier de la Colonie and Les Côteaux, and halted at Tiburon. The following day they stopped at Les Irois, on the Gauthier plantation. 5 July. Colonel Bazile, of Férou’s division, who had followed another road, came out at L’Anse-d’Hainault. General Férou came to join him there. Bazile’s troops, forming the advance guard, marched on Camp Bourdon, which three hundred French held. Bazile, at the head of eighteen hundred men, fell upon them just as they were evacuating the camp. He scattered them and killed a great number. He then surrounded a detachment occupying the Bayard plantation. The whites laid down their arms and were put to the sword. 19 July. Colonel Bazile, pressing on rapidly through the night of 19 to 20 July, reached the post of Marfranc, armed with a 4-pounder and held by 500 French. As soon as the Indigenous entered the river that flowed not far from the fort, they received a round of grapeshot. They crossed it under the enemy’s fire and gained the opposite bank. The French, evacuating the position, were vigorously attacked. They defended themselves with rare courage until sunrise. Then they abandoned the 4-pounder, scattered in small platoons, and went to rally on the Gérin plantation, from which they took the road to Jérémie without being molested. 20 July. At the same time Voltaire and Thomas Durocher took prisoner 60 whites from Jérémie, commanded by one Ferrare, whom they had surrounded on the Durand plantation at Fond Bleu, in the heights of Corail. The whites were sacrificed to the last man, despite the efforts Thomas Durocher made to save them. Bazile gathered all the cultivators of the district of La Grande-Rivière, whose number rose to three thousand men. He drew near Jérémie, where Fressinet was in command. Fressinet asked him by letter for a suspension of arms of ten days, promising that when the truce expired he would evacuate the place. Bazile sent the letter on to General Férou, who had his headquarters a few leagues from Jérémie. Férou consented to the truce and ordered Bazile to hold himself at Fouache for the ten days it would last. As the French had still not evacuated by 1 August, Férou sent Bazile the order to besiege the town. The next day he came to the army to direct the operations of the siege. The French, who were expecting a brig from Port-Républicain, obtained an extension of the truce to the 4th. On the morning of the 4th, Fressinet, seeing no ship arrive from Port-au-Prince, embarked the white garrison on the vessels in the roadstead and set sail, leaving the town furnished with its war matériel. In the afternoon General Férou entered Jérémie. The same day General Geffrard arrived there by the road of Le Bac. He had left General Gérin in command of the troops surrounding Les Cayes. He conducted himself at Jérémie with the greatest moderation, and approved Férou for having consented to the capitulation of the French troops. General Fressinet was captured by the English warships and taken as a prisoner to Jamaica. Geffrard sent Commandant Lafrédinière to take possession of Pestel, which Léveillé, chief of the volunteers of the mountain of Petit-Trou, wanted to sack from top to bottom. Some weeks later squadron commander Bonnet arrived at Jérémie from the island of Cuba. Geffrard welcomed him with distinction and sent him to Dessalines in the West. Dessalines named him adjudant-general on his staff. After Rigaud’s fall Bonnet had taken refuge at Santiago de Cuba. On the arrival of Leclerc’s expedition he had come back to the colony, as we have seen, with a host of other officers of the South. After Toussaint was shipped away in 1802, when the persecutions began against the Blacks and the men of color, Bonnet lived in obscurity at Le Cap so as not to be arrested and drowned. He was in that town when he learned that the troops under Pétion’s orders were preparing to rise against the French. Unable to join them, and sought by the French police, he found the means of making contact with an American captain, who took him aboard and carried him to Santiago de Cuba.