Jean Le Roux at Ashby

It was Jean Le Roux’s eighteenth birthday when he set sail from Brest, bound for Saint Domingue in the West Indies. It was to be a complicated voyage – his ship was first directed to Genoa to join a convoy of troops and five ships of the line, part of Napoleon’s attempt to reconquer some sugar islands for France. It was December 1802 and he was accompanying his father, an officer in the engineers, and had also been asked to ascertain the condition of some estates belonging to a family friend.

Le Roux was violently sick for fourteen days, and good only manage to take some bouillon mixed with a little wine. Two of the convoy were detached to pick up a Swiss battalion from Ajaccio whilst the rest of the ships headed for Genoa. The troops they were due to embark, the 2nd Polish Legion, were not yet ready and the young Frenchman spent three weeks in the port, admiring the churches and the nuns. His exuberance was cut short by news of General Leclerc’s death in Saint-Domingue, information which ‘severely affected and demoralised my father – so much so that I tried to persuade him to renounce the voyage and to let the ships leave without him by feigning a sickness and remaining on shore’. Fears of losing his pay meant that Le Roux senior ignored this advice and father and son resolved to continue their journey.  On 26 January the army arrived. A general of brigade and his two ADCSs came aboard their ship, as did the 1st battalion of the Polish Legion and their musicians.

The first few days aboard the crowded ship (Le Roux thinks that there are ‘one thousand or 1100 passengers’) were difficult and stormy but then the ship became becalmed off Gibraltar ‘which the English had stolen from Spain’. The actual passage across the Atlantic was, however, comparatively easy. Le Roux was delighted that the ship had music as ‘at the end of the day the officers and ladies, of whom three were Italians, pretty, adorable and jovial too, danced until nine when the sailors had their turn. These would skip and hop about barefoot but what was most entertaining was their singing of songs with quite suggestive lyrics’. The entertainment improved a notch a few days later when the officers put on a performance of the Barber of Seville by Paesiello.

Such light-heartedness could not last. On 11 March [?] they anchored off Port-au-Prince and the next day the engineers disembarked and made their way into town. Le Roux had been left to guard the baggage at the quayside but curiosity led him into a neighbouring house where he was shocked to see ‘a young officer lying on a bed, dying of yellow fever and just about to breath his last’. It was a shocking welcome to life and death in the colony. Of the 17 engineer officers who arrived only one would remain alive by 17 July.

Life in the colony

Le Roux remained in Port-au-Prince, where he had lodgings with Monsieur Fériand and his ‘good and fat mulatto housekeeper who had managed his household for thirty years or so’. It was an oasis of calm in a colony wracked by war and disease. He was kept busy running the engineer officers’ staff, where he was obliged to supervise some ‘men of colour who were poorly educated, poorly attired, lacked initiative and were not above suspicion, although perhaps this was unfair, when it came to corruptibility’. But he noted the prejudice with which these mulattos were treated by colonists of the old school, and was ticked off by his host for socialising with his new colleagues. Le Roux was stung by the hypocrisy that these very colonists ‘had immoral relationships with the sisters and cousins of these same men’ and resolved to be seen in public with ‘honest men, whatever their colour’.

Yellow Fever

Jean Le Roux’s father became ill with the fever on 31 May and died at noon on 4 June. He also noted that ‘two thirds of the five battalions we had brought with us had also died miserably without being brought into action and two months later barely a tenth survived, and most of these would end their days in misery and bitterness aboard the English prison ships’.

Escape and captivity

Le Roux was offered a position in the engineers or a return to France – he resolved on the latter hoping that, with the help of General Massena, he would obtain a position in a military school and support his mother, now reduced to a pension of 300 Francs. Permission was granted by Rochambeau and he was sent off with despatches on 20 June 1803. There was no state vessel ready for the transatlantic voyage so he embarked upon the Endymion, a merchantman from Nantes, and transferred to Le Cap where he could board the 74-gun Duquesne bound for France. First of all, however, it had to run the blockade or fight its way out with a crew which was set at its peacetime establishment and was, in any case, much depleted. The crew and passengers found themselves prey to discouragement and still not entirely free from the ravages of yellow fever – ‘every morning a bark would take the corpses out into the mouth of the harbour and throw them overboard so that they could be devoured by sharks’. One of Le Roux’s friends, spotting a shark within the harbour, leaned overboard and shouted ‘you have come too early. I’ll be your lunch tomorrow!’ The ship’s crew was losing thirty or forty men a day, and would have vanished altogether  had it not been for the ‘sailors and all kinds of other individuals seized by the police in the town’s bars and gambling houses’ Only on the 19 July, sixteen days after embarkation, did the captain venture to sally forth under cover of a tropical storm. The ship broke out from the harbour and made a run for it but the English gave chase and the ship’s captain lost courage and retired to his quarters, command devolving upon a lieutenant who skilfully handled the situation until the captain recovered. It was then, however, just off Cuba that the English ships caught up with them  and opened up with their broadsides. The French, with insufficient crew, hauled down their flag and surrendered. They were unloaded on Jamaica but fortunately for le Roux, who had been carrying dispatches, he was quickly sent off with other officers to Portsmouth. From there he was marched to Odiham in Hampshire. There, as he could speak English, he quickly became something of an interpreter, a useful skill as ‘although the upper classes speak French, very few of the tradesmen or hoteliers do, except in London’. After a few weeks the fifty officers from Saint-Domingue were then transferred to Ashby in Leicestershire. The French decided to put on a brave face, donned full dress uniforms, and set off  through a population ‘much excited against us by their newspapers who state that the French are to invade and will kill the men, violate the women and eat the children!’. At Coventry Le Roux was perplexed when a woman broke through a crowd of curious onlookers, marched up to him and thrust her infant towards him, shouting ‘You, Frenchman, eat my child if you dare!’ He was quick to respond with ‘Oh you are too pretty a woman to believe so, I would much rather give you a kiss!’. The crowd applauded this witty rejoinder.

At Ashby the officers did what they could to make themselves comfortable, with rent for two to a room at 4.80 Francs a week. In October another convoy of Saint-Domingue officers arrived, some ’40 officers from the garrison at Le Cap, all captains or of inferior rank’. Le Roux received a letter from his mother saying that she had unsuccessfully tried to get him exchanged. He resolved to study, ‘but none of us were from rich families and our education was wanting and, in addition, we were all young men who had left home to become soldiers and had only managed to learn enough to fight and win our epaulettes’. He did manage to learn some arithmetic and trigonometry from some artillery officers but was better served by an officer of a merchantman who arrived in late 1805 and who charged him 1.20 Francs a week for lessons. Times became harder, cloths wore out and the poor diet depressed everyone. For Mardi Gras in 1807 Le Roux and three comrades treated themselves to fresh bread, pickled herring and beer, telling themselves ‘if we were with the Grande Armée in Poland, we might not even have that to eat!’.

Le Roux was forced into knitting woollen mittens to supplement his income but soon the number being produced meant there was a surplus and the price, and his earnings, went down. Five officers married local women to improve their condition, others turned to Freemasonry and Masonic connections. One, Lieutenant de Serre, joined a Baptist community and was baptised in the river. Others formed the idea of staging a play, with profits going to the poor of the town. The actors received some recompense, as well as a haunch of venison and a dozen bottles of excellent champagne from a very satisfied “Comte de Moira”. They staged the Barber of Seville, the Litigants and The Deceit before the practice was stopped by the authorities.

Only in 1811 were the first of the Saint-Domingue officers paroled and sent back to mainland Europe. Le Roux was not above their number and increasingly frustrated. When in April 1812 he was accosted in the market place by a ‘well-dressed man in his forties who came out of the coaching inn’ who offered to organise his escape, he was not averse to the plan. He was landed near Boulogne in May 1812, more than ten years after first leaving France.