July 14, 1789, found the elder Audubon enlisted as a soldier in the National Guards at Les Cayes. These colonial troops, which were originally militia organizations modeled after similar bodies in France, were reorganized at this time to meet any possible emergencies. Affairs in the southern provinces of Santo Domingo had followed, up to this moment, their normal course, and Jean Audubon, who could have learned nothing of what had transpired at home, decided to entrust his various interests to the hands of agents and return to France. This was probably in late August or early September, 1789, as we know that he first returned to the United States and visited Richmond, Virginia, at the close of that year.[26] Strangely enough, on the twentieth day of the former month the National Assembly at Paris had voted the celebrated Declaration of Rights, which was destined to upturn the whole social system of Santo Domingo and to convert that island into a purgatory of the direst anarchy, strife, and bloodshed which the world had ever known, or at least remembered; but fully six weeks must have elapsed before news of this grave decision could have reached the colony. At this time Jean Audubon was no doubt regarded as a very rich man, and though he happened to leave Les Cayes at a critical moment, little could he have dreamed of the disaster that awaited him there as well as in his beloved France. His personal affairs during this eventful period, involving as they necessarily do the early life of his distinguished son, have hitherto been shrouded in the dark and sinister history of that ever smiling but ever turbulent island. Now, however, the veil of mist that has settled over the page can be penetrated at the most important points. In this and subsequent chapters we shall follow the life of father and son through the course of events which has been thus briefly summarized. To return to the earlier threads of our narrative, at about the close of 1783, Captain Audubon was engaged by the Coirond brothers, colonial merchants at Nantes, to take charge of their foreign trade, which centered chiefly at Les Cayes,[27] Santo Domingo, then a most thriving and populous town, as it is today the largest seaport on the southern coast of the Republic of Haiti. Their ships brought sugar, coffee, cotton and other West Indian products to France, and laden with fabrics, wines and every luxury known to the colonists of that day, returned to Les Cayes, as well as to Saint Louis, an important port a little farther to the east, where these merchants also possessed warehouses and stores.