Description

The blockade of Saint-Domingue was a naval campaign fought during the first months of the Napoleonic Wars in which a series of British Royal Navy squadrons blockaded the French-held ports of Cap-Français and Môle-Saint-Nicolas on the northern coast of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, soon to become Haiti, after the conclusion of the Haitian Revolution on 1 January 1804. In the summer of 1803, when war broke out between the United Kingdom and the French Consulate, Saint-Domingue had been almost completely overrun by the rebel Indigenous Army led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. In the north of the country, the French forces were isolated in the two large ports of Cap-Français and Môle-Saint-Nicolas and a few smaller settlements, all supplied by a French naval force based primarily at Cap-Français.