50 AUDUBON, THE NATURALIST 
The clash came in July of this year, and in the northern 
province, where the first blood of the revolution was 
drawn at Port-au-Prince. On October 12, 1790, James 
Ogé, a mulatto, inspired, financed and equipped by the 
“Friends of the Blacks” in Paris, landed secretly in 
Santo Domingo, established a military camp at Cap 
Francois and called all mulattoes to arms. His plan. 
was to wage war on the whites as well as upon all mulat- 
toes who refused to join his standard of revolt; but Ogé 
and his company were quickly suppressed, and this in- 
competent leader, who fled to Spanish territory, was 
later extradited and broken on the wheel. This episode 
naturally infuriated the whites against all mulattoes, 
who took up arms at Les Cayes and at other points. 
The whites also armed, and a skirmish occurred at Les 
Cayes, Jean Audubon’s old home, where fifty persons 
on both sides lost their lives, but a temporary truce was 
immediately effected. This was the first serious inci- 
dent in which the town of Les Cayes figured in the 
bloody revolution of Santo Domingo; it occurred, we 
believe, in the late autumn of 1790. Audubon’s mother 
had then been dead four years, and her son, the future 
naturalist, had left the country in the fall of 1789; in 
order to bring out these facts clearly it has seemed neces- 
sary to enter into this detail. 
Later events in Santo Domingo now moved in a 
direction and with a velocity which few then were able 
to comprehend. The danger and the potency of the 
voleano that had long been muttering beneath their 
feet needed but a few touches from without to reveal 
its full explosive power. These were furnished not only 
by the mulattoes, many of whom, after having fought 
under French officers in the American Revolution, had 
returned to the island and there spread wide the spirit 
