Quest For The Phoenix

By Jason Joseph
                                             

I bought my first detector in 1995. I was in the military at the time stationed in Monterey, CA. My interests right from the beginning were old coins and relics. I really didn't know much about research at the time, so I just went around old buildings in the old parts of town looking for coins and relics. One of the first places I took my detector was The Presidio Chapel. This was an original Spanish Mission period church that dated to the late 1700'ds. There was a large athletic field that was also still original ground, there was a lot of modern trash, but every now and then an old goody would turn up at this place. My first time hunting this place was very early on in my life as a compulsive metal detectorist. I hadn't even found a wheat penny or a silver coin of any kind.

I started turning up the usual trash, and clad coins. This field is riddled with gophers, so the old stuff can be right on top of the ground or 10" deep. After a couple of hours I found a small button lying right on top of the ground. It looked old, but I had no idea of what I had found. I could see that there was some writing on the front, but the button was somewhat corroded, so I couldn't make it out.Once home, I took a
toothpick .and started removing the corrosion. The design of the button started to become clear. There was a small bird in the middle with the words, "JE RENAIS DE MES CENDRES." around it. Under the bird was "No. 29." Not being too fluent in French, my first task was to find out what the inscription translated to. After a little research I came up with a translation of "I rose from my own ashes." I tried to research what the button was and what it was used for, but being so new to the hobby, I quickly hit a dead end.

The button would sit in my collection for a few more months, and it wasn't until I joined the local metal detecting club did I found out what I had found. A fellow club member and future hunting partner who had been hunting these mission era sites for over 10 years identified the button as a cuff sized Phoenix Button, and also gave me a brief history of the button. Little did I know that this one small find would become somewhat of an obsession of mine.
Henry Christophe became the king of Haiti in 1807. For 12 years prior to this Haitian slaves revolted against their European masters and in this timeframe defeated the English, Spanish and French. In 1802 the French anchored 225 ships in the harbor with 60,000 troops to put down the revolt. The Haitians were greatly outmanned and outgunned, but somehow managed to defeat the French, and by 1803 the French army was spent. Thomas Jefferson quickly took advantage of Napoleon and a French army in desperate need of cash, and convinced him to sell the Louisiana territory for 15 million dollars. Known as the Louisiana Purchase, this was probably the greatest land bargain in history.
Christophe reigned as king until 1820 when he became ill, and was too weak to put down a coup. He committed suicide that same year. The phoenix was Christophe's coat of arms. All of his troops were outfitted with uniform buttons and buckles with this phoenix design. The numbers at the bottom of the buttons denoted the regiment number. The buttons are numbered 1-30 with 11-13, 15-19 and 21-24 being skipped. There is no concrete evidence of why these numbers were skipped. One theory is they were skipped intentionally to fool enemies into believing the army was larger than it really was. NEXT PAGE