TWO:During the spring of 1794 the British, under Lieutenant-General Sir Charles Grey, took the French island of Martinique, in which attempt the Duke of Kent, father of Queen Victoria, distinguished himself. They also took St. Lucia, Guadeloupe, and its dependencies, Marie-Galante, Deseada, and the Saintes. But they were not so successful in assisting the French Royalists in St. Domingo to expel the Republicans. They beat the French in three successive battles, but[431] our troops were then attacked by the yellow fever. General Whyte made himself master of the French capital, Port-au-Prince; but General Dundas, who was appointed governor, was carried off by the fever, as also were numbers of the troops. The French general also fell a victim to the fever; but at this juncture arrived the Jacobin Commissioner, Victor Hugues, with a reinforcement of from fifteen hundred to two thousand men. He immediately assumed the command, proclaimed freedom to all the blacks, and the plunder of the Royalists. The Royalists, terrified, submitted, or only feebly supported their British allies, who were thereupon compelled to yield them to their fate. Hughes, one of the bloodiest of the French revolutionists, set the guillotine to work in the hands of the negroes. The Royalists were beheaded or fusilladed in troops, their houses burnt, and their estates ravaged. Before the end of the year this monster had reduced the island to a dreadful desert. In his ferocious fury, he had caused the very sick and wounded in the hospitals to be massacred, and the dead to be thrown out of their graves. Amongst these were the remains of General Dundas, and the other dead British officers, which were flung into the river. Hugues also recovered Guadeloupe, and perpetrated the same cruelties and abominations there.
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FORE:And, as later, he and Larry resumed their places in the amphibian, Larrys captive remained under guard on the tug.Landor himself sat in his tent, upon his mess-chest, and by the light of a candle wrote a despatch which[Pg 8] was to go by courier the next morning. Gila valley mosquitoes were singing around his head, a knot of chattering squaws and naked children were peering into his tent, the air was oven-hot, coyotes were filling the night with their weird bark, and a papoose was bawling somewhere close by. Yet he would have been sufficiently content could he have been let alonethe one plea of the body military from all time. It was not to be. The declared and standing foes of that body pushed their way through the squaws and children. He knew them already. They were Stone of the Tucson press, sent down to investigate and report, and Barnwell, an Agency high official, who would gladly assist the misrepresentations, so far as in his power lay.
FORE:The preparations for invasion turned the attention of the British Government to ports where it was supposed the troops would be embarked. Ostend was regarded with particular suspicion, and Sir Home Popham was sent in May with a small squadron, conveying a thousand men, under Colonel Coote, to destroy the ships and sluices of the Bruges canal there. The troops were landed, and did their work, but found themselves unable to regain the ships from the violence of the wind and the surf, and were surrounded and compelled to surrender. In the autumn of this year Admiral Duckworth sailed for Minorca, and landed eight hundred men, under Sir Charles Stuart, who readily made themselves masters of the island.
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