The New Hampshire Gazette

PHILADELPHIA, June 12.

SOMETHING CURIOUS!

A French Decree! Founded on American Jacobin Newspaper AUTHORITY !! Read it.

TRANSLATED FROM A CAYENNE PAPER.

In the name of the French Republic.

THE particular agent of the Executive Directory of France delegated to French Guiana, seeing the above decree* officially notified; and seeing that it results from American Papers in our possession, under date of the 11, 14, 18, 21, 25 and 28 July; 1, 4, 15, 18 and 22 August; 1, 5, 12, 15 and 26 September, and 3 October, 1796; 1, 3 and 22 Feb. 1797; seeing that commanders of English vessels of war have insulted, pillaged, pressed, whipped, put in irons American citizens navigating under the flag of the United States, opened the letters of which they were bearers, taken and condemned their vessels and cargoes as good prizes; has decreed, and decrees as follows:

Ist. All the vessels of the Republic, and French cruisers, are authorized to take, and bring into the ports of the Republic, American vessels bound to or from an English port, and those which, without being cleared expressly for an English port, are cleared for a vague destination, such as for the West-Indies or the Islands.

2d. The vessels designated in the preceding article, and their cargoes, are declared to be good prizes.

The decree of the Directory of the 14th Meidor, 4th year, and the present, shall be read, published, printed and posted up, throughout the whole colony, with which is charged the administration of the department to which they shall be addressed, and the chief of the marine administration, the military and marine commanders, and the tribunal doing the functions of a tribunal of commerce who are severally charged with execution of the said decree.

Decreed at Cayenne, 11th Germinal, 5th year of the French Republic, one and indivisible.

(Signed) JEANNET.

The Administration formally confirmed and published this decree!

NOTES:

*The decree of the Executive Directory has been published here. The copy printed at Cayenne, is certified by Citizen Adet.

It is easy to perceive, that the American papers, cited in this decree, are the Jacobin Gazettes of the United States, and that the instances quoted, are even out of date, false and scandalous. It is also very evident, that the French Agents, in the United States, have published those very accounts in the Aurora, Argus, Chronicle, and other hireling papers, merely to give a pretext to the plunderers in the West-Indies, to seize and confiscate American vessels, and that the Printers of them have been base and sordid enough to send them those papers, in order that they may be adduced as documents, to justify their infamy!

The American merchants and seamen, who suffer under the piracies in the West-Indies, now look to those Printers as the Authors of their misery; and were they to prosecute for reparation, an honest jury would do no less than grant a verdict in their favor.