This neglect of theirs was never so very conspicuous as on the last two days before the attack; for on the preceding Saturday, most of them were that evening at a public comedy acted in Roseau; and on Sunday evening, when the militia guard were composed of the chief civil officers and principal inhabitants, who turned out volunteers in that service; being unused to the hardships attending patrolling the streets all night, and watching to give notice of approaching danger, they preferred the more inviting enjoyments of diversions and good cheer in the guard-room; where, overcome by these amusements, between two and three o’clock in the morning they all retired to their own homes, wholly unapprehensive of further danger for that time. This same evening, some ill-disposed French inhabitants found means to insinuate themselves into Cashacrou fort, where they contrived to make the few soldiers there on duty intoxicated with liquor, and afterwards filled up the touch-holes of the cannon with sand; so that when it was stormed by the French the next morning it was easily taken, and two of the English soldiers paid dearly, the consequence of their great imprudence, by the loss of their lives; being driven, with fixed bayonets, over the ramparts of the fort, and dashed to pieces by the rocks at the foot of it. The enemy began the attack between three and four o’clock in the morning of Monday, the seventh of September that year; but they had intended to have made their invasion much earlier, having set out on the expedition from Martinique between the same hours the preceding evening, but were detained by calm weather in the channel between the two islands. This was a very providential event for the English inhabitants of Dominica, as there is every reason to believe, that had the attack been made an hour sooner than it was, many of them would have been massacred in their beds; if not by the French soldiers, there was every probability to apprehend it would have been done by a lawless banditti, composed of renegado white men, negros, mulattos, and the outcasts of society from several French and other foreign islands; who, with large knives and pistols stuck in their belts, were prepared for the perpetration of every species of rapine, barbarity, and murder. These wretches, upwards of one thousand in number, were obliged to be satisfied for their failure of plunder on this occasion, by a contribution laid on the inhabitants by the Marquis de Bouillé, of four thousand four hundred pounds current money, which was distributed among them a few days after the surrender of the island.