sted of one sergeant and eight rank and
file.

On the 2nd of July, the British made an ineffectual attempt to recover
Point a Pitre, and soon after established their head-quarters at
Berville, in Basseterre. The camp at Berville was invested in September,
and on the 6th of October it was compelled to capitulate. Thus the whole
of Guadaloupe, with the exception of Fort Matilda, situated above the
town of Basseterre, and which was still held by a British garrison, was
recovered by the French. At the surrender of Berville, 300 French
Royalists, who were in the British camp, were massacred by the orders of
Victor Hugues, the French commander.

Fort St. Charles, Basseterre, had been rechristened Fort Matilda by the
British on its surrender on the 21st of April, 1794, and against it
Victor Hugues now moved all his forces. The fort was commanded by
Lieutenant-General Prescott with a garrison of 610 men, including the
company of the Carolina Corps which had come to Guadaloupe. General
Prescott, in his despatch, dated "On board H.M.S. _Vanguard_, at sea,
December 11th, 1794," says: "To enter into a minute detail of the siege,
which commenced on the 14th of October, and terminated by evacuating it
on the 10th of December, would not only too much occupy your time, but
might be deemed equally unnecessary. It may be sufficient to remark that
on entering the fort I found it totally out of repair, the materials
composing the wall-work thereof being of the worst kind, and having
apparently but little lime to cement them properly. By the middle of
last month the works were very much injured by the daily and frequent
heavy fire of the enemy, and almost all the carriages of our guns
rendered useless. These were in general in a very decayed state, but
even the new ones for the brass mortars that were made during the siege
gave way from the almost incessant fire we kept up; so that upon the
whole, what from the nature of our defences and the small number of our
garrison, we were in a very unfit state to resist the very vigorous
exertions of our enemy, who began to prepare additional forces about the
20th of last month, but who, from a number of causes, and especially
from heavy and continued rains, could not open their new batteries till
the 6th of this month. On that day they began to fire from twenty-three
pieces of cannon, four of which were thirty-six-pounders, and the rest
twenty-four-pounders, and from eight mortars, two of thirteen