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 Haitian Armée Indigène troops led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

On 3 November, the frigate HMS Blanche captured a supply schooner near Cap-Français, and by the end of the month, the garrison was starving and agreed to terms with Dessalines that permitted it to evacuate safely if it left the port by 1 December.

At Môle-Saint-Nicolas, General Louis Marie Antoine de Noailles refused to surrender and instead sailed to Havana, Cuba in a fleet of small vessels on 3 December but was intercepted and mortally wounded by a Royal Navy frigate.

Leclerc and much of his army died in an epidemic of yellow fever in the autumn of 1802, and command fell to the Vicomte de Rochambeau, whose forces were rapidly driven back into a few well fortified towns, relying for communication and supply on maritime links.

Mignonne was becalmed close inshore, and when it became apparent that his ship would be caught by the far larger Goliath, Captain Bargeau surrendered without either side having suffered any damage or casualties.

Working through the shallows, Willaumez managed to bring his frigate safely to Môle-Saint-Nicolas and then subsequently to Rochefort, although Poursuivante was soon afterwards decommissioned due to age and poor condition.

[14] Two days after the engagement between Hercule and Poursuivante, Vanguard and Cumberland were cruising off the northern coast of Haiti to the east of Môle-Saint-Nicolas when another strange ship was sighted attempting to enter the nearby port of Jean-Rabel.

[16] In the month following the capture of Créole there was little further movement from the French naval forces on the island, the yellow fever raging in the harbours and Loring's blockade squadron at sea constraining operations.

[16] In late July the strategic situation altered when orders arrived from France demanding the return of the French squadron, primarily based at Cap-Français under Contre-Admiral Latouche Tréville.

[Note A] On the afternoon of 24 July, a rain squall drove the blockade force away from the post and Quérangal's ships slipped out of the harbour, initially sailing westwards with the prevailing wind.

At 07:00 on 15 July, Quérangal's ship was sighted by a Haitian battery on shore and came under fire, Loring sending Theseus to investigate the gunfire and arriving on the scene himself soon afterwards, Tartar and Vanguard leading the squadron.

The action was decided soon afterwards by the arrival of two ships, the 18-gun British sloop HMS Snake under Commander William Roberts to the northwest and the absent Guerrière from the opposite direction.

[12] This was a serious miscalculation: historian William Laird Clowes notes that the French ships were both desperately under-armed and undermanned and even if they fought alongside one another they would have been unable to match Dundas's weight or rate of shot.

[18] Touffet's voyage was however far from over: on 29 August while in the Eastern Atlantic close to the Bay of Biscay, they were spotted by the independently cruising 38-gun frigate HMS Boadicea under Captain John Maitland, which gave chase, the French ships turning southwards toward the friendly-neutral port of Ferrol in Spain.

The fire from Duguay-Trouin was fierce enough that, in combination with the approaching Guerrière, Maitland considered that they were too powerful for Boadicea to effectively fight and he sheered away, briefly followed by the French ships.

[20] On 2 September, Touffet's small squadron appeared to windward sailing for the port of Corunna and Dacres was well situated to intercept them, opening fire at long range at 11:50.

Although Dacres managed to damage Guerrière's masts and rigging severely, inflicting casualties of six killed and 15 wounded, the French frigate was able to enter Corunna ahead of Culloden.

[21] With the removal of the ships of the line from the squadron at Saint-Domingue, the only remaining force of any significance was based at Cap-Français, consisting mainly of the frigates Surveillante, Clorinde and Vertu.

Fort Dauphin also capitulated later in the day, the French prisoners requesting that Bligh intercede with the Haitian forces nearby which had captured a number of soldiers including General Dumont and were intending to execute them.

[23] In October, Latouche-Tréville obtained free passage from the British due to his poor health, and returned to France[2] leaving Captain Jean-Baptiste Barré in command of the squadron.

[24] In early November, Captain Walker in Vanguard took 850 French soldiers as prisoners of war from the port of Saint-Marc, General D'Henin surrendering his garrison after Dessalines's advancing forces had threatened to massacre them all.

[26] Loring was informed of the terms of the agreement and although Rochambeau was ready to depart on 25 November, his ships crammed with thousands of refugees, the British squadron blocked all of the escape routes.

The French hospital ships Nouvelle Sophie and Justice also surrendered, but were packed with hundreds of sick soldiers and sailors and were subsequently reprovisioned and sent back to France as cartels.

Five American ships: Sisters, Eugene, Thesbald, Adventurer, and Hiram, and two Danish vessels, Diana and Bentley, were also filled with refugees and seized by Loring's force.

The situation was deemed so hopeless that a number of British ship's boats that had been supervising the evacuation of the harbour turned away without offering assistance, abandoning the frigate as a total wreck.

Willoughby was determined to assist the wrecked crew and passengers, well aware that without help they would either be drowned or massacred by the Haitians, who could be seen making preparations to fire heated shot from the fort at the frigate.

The French convoy was sighted during the night of 5–6 December, and soon overrun, the Republic, Temeraire, Belle Louise, Active and Sally Warner all seized by the British warships.