Yellow fever kills Leclerc, Napoleon’s commander in Saint-Domingue

Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc died of yellow fever on Tortuga on 2 November 1802, aged thirty. Napoleon had sent him in December 1801 with a fleet and 40,000 men. He arrested Toussaint Louverture and shipped him to France. Weeks before he died he wrote to Napoleon urging a war of extermination against the Black population of the colony. Rochambeau succeeded him; Pauline Bonaparte carried his body home.