Savanna of Champin. Rochambeau placed a sixteen-pounder there; his guard cavalry stood between Vertières and Champin; the Indigenous spread over it after the battle.

While Capoix was performing prodigies of valor at the foot of Fort Vertières, surrounded by corpses, General Gabart, musket in hand, and General Jean-Philippe Daut, each followed by a battalion of the 10th and by the young soldiers of Port-au-Prince who formed the 3rd battalion of the 4th, dashed into the magnificent avenue that ran along the ravine of Vertières. The French, meaning to annihilate the column, turned all their fire upon it. Whole lines are swept away; but it advances at the charge, unshaken, proud, amid the grapeshot, the cannonballs and the bullets. The gap that opens in the ranks is at once filled by soldiers who show the utmost contempt for death. This fire could not stop the two battalions, which marched on through great fallen trees and Indigenous corpses. At last our bayonets flashed brilliantly on the summit of Charrier, and our soldiers at once answered the fire of Fort Vertières. But our musketry soon fell silent under the sustained fire of the French. It was eleven o’clock. Christophe, who had set up a battery on the summit of La Vigie, was cannonading Le Cap with prodigious activity. The thunder of the artillery and the volleys of musketry were heard without pause. The air was heavy with a thick smoke, torn again and again by the shells and bombs that burst overhead and came down to spread death at Charrier and at headquarters. Dessalines, seated on a broad stone, gave his orders and seemed to delight in this magnificent spectacle. He saw that Rochambeau, at the head of the grenadiers of his guard, was changing position. Fearing that he meant to dislodge Gabart and Jean-Philippe Daut from the Charrier knoll, he ordered Clervaux to go and reinforce them at the head of the 6th. This demi-brigade reached Charrier only after suffering considerable losses. Rochambeau, seeing Capoix on the point of forcing the passage that Fort Vertières defended, did not think it wise to assault the Charrier knoll: Capoix, by dashing into the savanna of Champin, could have fallen upon his rear and cut off all retreat to Le Cap. He had a sixteen-pounder set up in the middle of the savanna, which played briskly upon Charrier. Despite the sustained fire of the forts, Dessalines at once had gunners carry a four-pounder to the summit of Charrier. It soon dismounted the sixteen-pounder the French had just set up. The cavalry of Rochambeau’s guard of honor, two hundred strong, stood motionless not far from the high road, between Vertières and Champin, a spectator of the battle.