Oh, LeClerc had managed to lure L’Ouverture to a parley and had enchained him, then shipped him to die in an alpine prison in France-dead of cold, hunger, and heart-break that Napoleon Bonaparte would betray him, the “Napoleon of The West,” and break all the promises of the French Revolution, of Liberte, Fraternite, and Egalite, of the heady vows of abolishing slavery anywhere in every French colony, in hopes that without L’Ouverture, the rebellion would end.

It wasn’t even Saint Domingue anymore, either. Now, the rebel slaves had begun to call it Haiti, or Hayti, which-so far as Lewrie could tell from the many battles-to-the-death, the ambushes of whole battalions at a whack, the massacres of masters, mistresses, and overseers, and pretty-much anyone else of the former ruling castes, and the betrayals that had taken place here-translated from Creole patois as “Hell On Earth.”

The last desperate refuges for the surviving French of Saint Domingue were the ships in harbour, anchored as far out as they could from the shore guns, but still be in the port proper; to venture out further would put them at risk of being raided and boarded at night by the blockading British squadron.

“One’d hope that Rochambeau had wits enough t’spike his coast artillery, before he abandoned the forts, Mister Westcott,” Captain Lewrie said to his waiting First Lieutenant.

“Well… he is French, sir, so there’s no telling.”

Their frigate, HMS Reliant, along with the rest of the squadron that had sailed from Portsmouth in May on an independent mission, lay three miles to seaward of the coast, right at the edge of what had come to be accepted as the limits of a nation’s, or island’s, sovereignty, the Three Mile Limit. Three miles because that was the Range-To-Random Shot of the largest fortress gun then in use, the 42-pounder. Had the French ever had 42-pounders emplaced on Saint Domingue? Lewrie didn’t know, but, just to err on the side of caution, that was how far out Commodore Loring had decided they would come to anchor.