Le Cap. Dessalines decrees against the carrying of Haitians abroad

It was forbidden, on pain of death, for any Indigenous to leave the empire. Haiti, threatened with a foreign invasion, needed all her children to defend her. The emperor declared that Haitian seamen who preferred to surrender to the enemy rather than blow up their ships would be beheaded when one day they returned to their country. While he was still at Le Cap, in October, he learned that some Indigenous had left for foreign parts. On the 22nd of the same month he decreed “That for any foreign vessel, armed or not, on board of which one or more persons should be found who had been carried off from Haiti to be taken abroad, the captain would be arrested, imprisoned for ten months, and then sent back to his own country with orders never to appear in Haiti again; the vessel and cargo would be confiscated for the benefit of the State; and any individual taken on board the said vessels would be shot in a public square.”