Rebel slaves who aided free-coloreds were betrayed and massacred

Evidence

“I knew all along that the blacks would get screwed,” one disgusted slave in Port-au-Prince exclaimed. He was right: the Swiss were to be sent to the Mosquito Coast of Central America, a place where, as one planter wrote, “even the devil couldn’t survive.” In fact, though, they suffered a worse fate. The captain who was supposed to bring them to the Mosquito Coast tried, and failed, to sell them in Belize, then dumped them along the shore of Jamaica. The British, alarmed at the prospect of having such slaves in their colony, shipped them back to Saint-Domingue. There, imprisoned in a boat in a remote harbor under the watch of French soldiers, sixty were executed, and most of the rest died of sickness and starvation. It was a tragic betrayal that would not be forgotten, and a taste of the internal conflicts among different groups of African descent in the colony that were to come. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 409

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the wider theme of class/status fractures within oppressed groups seen in later conflicts between gens de couleur and slaves.