Tomb of the Indigenous (Camp Viet). Viet’s fortified camp on the Azua road stormed by the Haitians and dismantled

On the morning of the 23rd a deputation of the inhabitants of Lamatte came out to meet the Emperor, who entered that town at noon. After taking a little rest there, the troops continued their march in the night of the 24th to the 25th. By starlight they crossed part of that long and superb valley of San Thomé, watered by the rivers Rouan Débert and Matayaye, which stretches thirty leagues between Lescahobes and San Juan. At daybreak the army saw immense savannas unfold before it, cut by countless small rivers and streams; and at one in the afternoon the emperor came in sight of San Juan, after crossing the fine river that bears the name of that town. He at first believed he would meet strong resistance there; but his army entered it without hindrance at three in the afternoon. The garrison and the whole population had evacuated it and withdrawn toward the source of the river Yaque, almost at the center of the island. After entrusting the command of the town to Squadron Leader Isaac Borel, one of his aides-de-camp, and leaving a garrison of three hundred men there, Dessalines set out for Azua on the 27th at six in the morning, by the valley of San Juan, watered by the river of Diae, which rolls its waters from north to south. The troops halted at a ford of this river, spent the night there, and resumed their march on the 28th at 5 in the morning. They had scarcely covered three leagues when Squadron Leader Barthélemy Mirault, who was at the head of the advance guard, brought to His Majesty three Spaniards he had just taken prisoner. These declared that the enemy was camped only three leagues away, under the orders of Commandant Viet, and that they had been sent out as scouts. At nine o’clock Barthélemy discovered several sentries posted behind a stone rampart raised on a mornet; he informed the emperor, who ordered him to go and reconnoiter the enemy. Barthélemy, followed by Dessalines’s staff and a few dragoons, dashed upon the French vedettes, who took to flight; they were pursued relentlessly, and in less than an hour they had fallen back into the main camp, where Viet commanded in person. It was a fortification raised across the high road on an eminence commanded on either side by two mountains. The French and the Spaniards called it the Tomb of the Indigenous, because they boldly declared that the Haitians would be destroyed and buried there. The emperor himself approached within a hundred paces of the position to examine it: it was lined with cannon, girded by a ditch, and flanked by cardasses, aloes and other thorny plants that seemed bound to make it unapproachable; the deepest silence reigned there.

Although the cavalry and the main body of the army had not yet arrived, Dessalines conceived his plan of attack and executed it at once. The advance guard lay in ambush to the left of the fort, the 4th demi-brigade turned it, and Generals Daut and Gabart, at the head of the staff, attacked from the front. Commandant Viet mounted the ramparts, and the cannon at once poured round shot and grape into our ranks. At the same time the 4th delivered the assault at the charge, plunging into the midst of the prickly pears and aloes, to the great astonishment of the French, who had believed this thick hedge of thorny shrubs impassable. “Forward!” cried Dessalines. “You are master of the fort,” answered Gabart,* who was dashing against the entrenchments and breaking into them, while the advance guard, in ambush on the left flank, poured the most murderous fire upon the French. The French and Spanish troops, 800 men in number, at first resisted stubbornly. But Dessalines’s staff, mounted on good horses, and the Haitian infantry, which the difficulties of the ground never stopped, broke into the fort. The French and Spaniards abandoned the position and fled. The Haitians pursued them relentlessly, cut them down with the saber and took great numbers of them prisoner. Viet was taken; he had received no wound. He was a former colonist of the Grands-Bois, known to the Indigenous for his cruelty and his bravery. He had served with distinction under Dessalines’s orders in Toussaint’s time, and later under Leclerc. The emperor said to him on seeing him brought before him: “How could you believe that my troops would be stopped by these thorns and a few cannon, you, a colonist, who ought to have known the agility of the Indigenous in places where the white man would not dare to go?” “I had sworn to Captain-General Ferrand,” answered Viet, “that this fort would become the Tomb of the Indigenous.” In the presence of Generals Daut, Magloire, Bazelais and Gabart, of Adjutant General Mentor, of Pétion, and of Captain Boyer, then Pétion’s secretary, Dessalines had him flogged with acacia branches until he breathed his last. A sapper opened his belly with a stroke of the axe and ate his heart; his entrails were scattered over the savannas. Before his transplantation to Haiti this sapper had belonged to one of those African tribes that feed on human flesh. Like scenes of horror had taken place in 1792 in the public squares of Paris, during the September massacres; yet there were no savage tribes of cannibals in France. Monstrous acts have been committed among every people, and every people has nonetheless produced virtuous men. The English Independents, in the 17th century, gave no quarter to the Irish; they shot them by the hundred or threw them into the sea tied back to back. The annals of Russia present us with horrible scenes in every age, and particularly under Ivan IV.