1809	Capture of Martinique	209

general sent a trumpeter with a letter proposing terms. These being considered inadmissible, the bombardment recommenced at 10 p.m., and continued until 9 a.m., on the 24th ; when three white flags were discovered flying in the fortress. The British batteries immediately ceased ; and, in the course of the day, the French colony of Martinique surrendered by capitulation to the arms of Great Britain.

As far as appears in the Gazette, no loss was sustained by the British troops during the bombardment ; but the seamen serving on shore under Captain Cockburn sustained a loss of five men and one boy killed, and the Amaranthe's boatswain and gunner (Thomas Wickland and John Thompson), one master's mate (James Scott), one midshipman (Thomas Mills), and the gunner (John Edevearn), of the Pompée, and 14 men wounded ; total, six killed, 10 badly, and nine slightly wounded. The whole of the Amaranthe's loss, amounting to three killed, four badly, and two slightly wounded, arose from the accidental explosion of the laboratory teat in the rear of the great mortar battery on Tartanson. We must not part with the seamen without stating, that they were of the greatest use in the operations of the siege, particularly in dragging the heavy cannon up the heights.

The French acknowledge a loss in killed and wounded, by the bombardment alone, of 200 men : a loss which, had it not been for the timely surrender of the garrison, might have been much greater ; for it appears that the shells of the besiegers had cracked and damaged in several places the roof of the magazine, and that the French troops were in momentary dread of an explosion. This, indeed, was the alleged, and it must be admitted to have been a very natural, cause of the proposal to capitulate. The court of inquiry which sat at Paris an the 6th of December, 1809, to investigate the causes of the surrender of the colony, strongly animadverted upon the neglect of not having previously removed the powder to the galleries of the fortress ; and, for that and other causes, the governor-general, Vice-admiral Villaret-Joyeuse, together with some of the subordinate officers, was stripped of his rank and honours.

On the 8th of December, 1808, a small expedition, consisting of the British 20-gun ship Confiance, Captain James Lucas Yeo, the two Portuguese brigs Voader and Infante, and some smaller vessels, having on board about 550 Portuguese land forces, under the command of Lieutenant-colonel Manoel Marques, and which had been fitted out at the Brazils, with the concurrence of Rear-admiral Sir William Sidney Smith, the British commander-in-chief on that station, took peaceable possession of the district of Oyapok in French Guyane, and on the 15th reduced that of Approuak. This success determined Captain Yeo and the Portuguese lieutenant-colonel to make a descent on the east side of the island of Cayenne ; on which stands the town of the same came, the capital of the colony. The island is divided into two

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