General Ralph Abercromby, the commander of the forces committed to the "great push", hesitated over which island to attack when he arrived in Barbados on 17 March 1796. He dispatched a force under Major General Gordon Forbes (British Army officer) to Port-au-Prince. Forbes's attempt to take the French-held city of Léogâne ended in disaster. The French had built a deep defensive ditch with palisades, while Forbes had neglected to bring along heavy artillery. The French commander, the mulatto General Alexandre Pétion, proved to be an excellent artilleryman, who used the guns of his fort to sink two of the three ships-of-the-line under Admiral Hyde Parker in the harbour, before turning his guns to the British forces; a French sortie led to a British rout and Forbes retreating back to Port-au-Prince. As more ships arrived with British troops, more soldiers died of yellow fever. By 1 June 1796, of the 1,000 from the 66th Regiment, only 198 had not been infected with yellow fever; and of the 1,000 men of the 69th Regiment, only 515 were not infected with yellow fever. Abercromby predicted that at the current rate of yellow fever infection, all of the men from the two regiments would be dead by November. Ultimately, 10,000 British soldiers arrived in Saint Domingue by June, but besides for some skirmishing near Bombarde, the British remained put in Port-au-Prince and other coastal enclaves, while yellow fever continued to kill them all off. The government attracted much criticism in the House of Commons about the mounting costs of the expedition to Saint-Domingue. In February 1797, General John Graves Simcoe arrived to replace Forbes with orders to pull back the British forces to Port-au-Prince. As the human and financial costs of the expedition mounted, people in Britain demanded a withdrawal from Saint-Domingue, which was devouring money and soldiers, while failing to produce the expected profits.