Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 1, 2013

The Action of 1 January 1800 was a naval battle of the Quasi-War that took place off the coast of present-day Haiti, near the island of Gonâve in the Bight of Léogâne. The battle was fought between an American convoy consisting of four merchant vessels escorted by the United States naval schooner USS Experiment (1799), and a squadron of armed barges manned by piratical Haitians known as picaroons. A French-aligned Haitian general, André Rigaud (pictured), had instructed his forces to attack all foreign shipping within their range of operations. Accordingly, once Experiment and her convoy of merchant ships neared Gonâve and were caught in a dead calm, the picaroons attacked them, capturing two of the American merchant ships before withdrawing. Experiment managed to save the other two ships in her convoy, and escorted them to a friendly port. On the American side, only the captain of the schooner Mary was killed. The picaroons took heavy losses during this engagement, but remained strong enough to continue wreaking havoc among American shipping in the region. Only after Rigaud was forced out of power by the forces of Toussaint L'Ouverture, leader of the 1791 Haitian Revolution, did the picaroon attacks cease. (Full article...)

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