Bolivar: American Liberator (30 page)

Patriots who were not given the death penalty as
“traitors to the king” were
condemned to heavy labor, and royalists set revolutionaries to paving roads and building bridges. Wives were chained inside houses; rebel priests, detained and exiled. But by and large, enforcing this new order was not all that difficult; Boves had done a good job of cowing the population. Morillo moved swiftly to take up the pricklier work in New Granada, where a purge of republican leaders followed. Manuel del Castillo, found quailing inside his deserted citadel of Cartagena,
was dragged to the public square and
shot in the back. The president of New Granada’s congress, the statesman and orator Camilo Torres, tried to flee Bogotá with his wife and children, but eventually was captured and killed with a bullet to his brain. To signal the crown’s displeasure, Torres’s corpse was drawn and quartered—his body parts hung out for view in four corners of the city. Manuel Torices, the young president who had welcomed Bolívar so warmly in Cartagena four years before, was shot, then hanged.

But in moving so swiftly from Venezuela to New Granada,
Morillo had created a strategic problem for himself:
Venezuelan rebels with nothing to lose now roamed the plains, trying to reorganize their efforts, getting stronger all the while. Although the Venezuelan coast was firmly under Spanish control except for the patriot stronghold of Margarita—which Arismendi had retaken with a fierce battalion of fifty men—the vast inland wilderness posed difficulties for Spain, and Morillo knew it. The llaneros, on whom his predecessors had relied, were proving true to Boves’s word: they answered to no one. Under a new leader, they gradually defected to the republican side. Morillo had other worries.
A ship holding a million pesos (meant to pay his troops) had burned in port; and worse, as he had approached the island of Margarita his fleet had incurred costly casualties. These challenges would have been surmountable if Morillo had been able to secure money and reinforcements from Spain; but the Indonesian volcano had inflicted incalculable damage on Europe and the mother country. For all his pleading, Morillo got no response from Madrid.
Frustrated, ill-humored, he began to fear that he wouldn’t be able to fulfill the continental mandate he had been given. Even before Bolívar’s return to Venezuela, the Spanish general
began to imagine the worst.

Bolívar’s expedition set sail from Haiti on March 31, filled to capacity with
disputatious officers, querulous wives, a full complement of servants, and an army of black Haitians. They floated away from harbor only to encounter
a paucity of wind. For all their eagerness to restart a revolution, they were creeping across a flat sea. Bolívar decided not to plow a direct route to Venezuela, but to make a brief stop on the island of St. Thomas—ostensibly to pick up recruits, but actually to collect his mistress Pepita Machado, with whom he had been
corresponding
anxiously for months. No sooner had the fleet gone 150 miles, however, than Bolívar received news from a passing vessel that Pepita had already gone from St. Thomas to Aux Cayes and was waiting for him in Haiti. The news caused great consternation. Brion argued vehemently against changing the expedition’s plans for Pepita’s sake. But Bolívar was adamant: Pepita and her family
were probably in danger without him. He commanded all ships to drop anchor at Beata Island, and then sent Carlos Soublette back to Haiti on a schooner to fetch his mistress.

For
more than two days, as the outraged French colonel Ducoudray reported, the revolution stalled as an entire squadron of ships lay anchored off the coast of Santo Domingo, waiting for a woman to arrive. On the third day, the bright-eyed Pepita appeared on the deck of Soublette’s schooner with her mother and sister, and the sailors could do little but gape while a magnificently groomed Bolívar repaired to her quarters to spend another full day and night.
Just as Marc Antony had infuriated his generals by holding up a war and lingering abed with Cleopatra, Bolívar now maddened his officers with his unquenchable libido. Some huffily threatened to abandon the expedition; one—Bolívar’s
cousin Florencio Palacios—actually managed to do just that, and disappeared over the water toward Jacmel.

It was a bad start for a year that—like the peevish weather moving through it—would grow steadily worse before it cleared. But Bolívar had always been a measured hedonist, never quite losing himself fully to the pleasures at hand. Within days, the patriots were back on the high seas. They stopped briefly to pick up cattle for provisions in St. Thomas, vegetables in Saba. It took a month to make the full crossing, but, finally, on May 2, the expedition left the roughening waters to dock at the island of Margarita. Once there, Bolívar proclaimed
the dawn of the third republic, the
liberation of Spanish America, and an
end to his war to the death. Arismendi welcomed him warmly and Bolívar was reinstated as supreme chief of the republic. As much as was possible in that tiny patch of republican officialdom,
el jefe supremo
was brought abreast of the situation.

The news was not good. The island of Margarita was the only republican stronghold in all Venezuela, this by virtue of Governor
Arismendi’s formidable tenacity and grit. The governor was
tall, athletic, muscular—half Creole, half Indian—an incongruous blend of old-world hospitality and rank revolutionary. He was forty, but looked far older for the hard life he’d led and the wounds that riddled his body. His face, according to a seaman who knew him,

exhibits a peculiar ferocity of expression, which his smile only increases. His laugh never fails to create a momentary shudder, and the dreadful distortion of the muscles which it produces, can only be compared with that of the hyena when under similar excitement. His displeasure is always signified by this demoniacal grin . . . and should the object of his rage be at these moments within its compass, death inevitably ensues.

If Spaniards feared Bolívar as the man who had declared war to the death against them, they feared Arismendi as the butcher who had delivered that war to the last letter. Arismendi had been the one, after all, to behead a thousand hapless prisoners in La Guaira. Although Bolívar’s tiny expedition and Arismendi’s troops were no match for Morillo’s prodigious army, Spaniards trembled at the thought of so many republican champions reunited at the gates: the fearsome Mariño, the valiant Piar, the terrifying
Caribbean pirate Beluche who joined them, not to mention hardened veterans from the wars in Europe. Bolívar had actively sought that fear: he had written exaggerated letters to fellow republicans, hoping that false information would leak, and he had boasted, all too publicly, that he had fourteen—not seven—warships, two thousand men, and
“enough arms and munitions to make war for another ten years.” Rumor had it, too, that, given the backing of a mulatto president and boatloads of Haitian warriors, Bolívar was
bringing a black revolution to America. Terrorized, the royalists engaged his troops briefly along the coast, but withdrew quickly to Cumaná.

By June,
as hurricanes blew record winds and a stinging rain from Tierra Firma to the coast of South Carolina, Bolívar still hadn’t been able to recruit enough men or organize what men he had to make a dent on Spanish dominion. When his expedition of three hundred landed in
Carúpano and scattered inland in a desperate attempt to enlist soldiers, the army was
largely made up of officers. He never increased it to
more than triple that number.

But he was able to deliver on his promise to Pétion. In Carúpano on June 2, 1816, Bolívar declared absolute freedom for Spanish America’s slaves.
“I have come to decree, as law,” he announced, “full liberty to all slaves who have trembled under the Spanish yoke for three centuries,” and then he specified that they had twenty-four hours to join his revolution. It was a daring declaration and it fulfilled his obligation to Haiti, but it also
risked alienating fellow Creoles, who believed that their livelihoods—if ever they were able to resume them—depended on slave labor in the fields. But Bolívar’s needs were more immediate. He lacked fighters, and enlisting former slaves was a way to get them. Bolívar had learned that if people of color weren’t for him, they would be against him, and he could afford that risk no longer. Without the support of blacks, his revolution was lost.

Ironically, just months before, the Spanish general José de Cevallos, interim captain-general of Caracas,
had written to his superiors in Spain, complaining about the law that prohibited blacks from serving in the Spanish army. If Spain didn’t support this growing population of people, he argued, “it will form a class more dangerous than the ancient Helots of Greece.” As everyone knew, blacks had fought for Spain under Boves and Morales, but they had done so unofficially; generals had not given them arms, put them in uniforms, trained them as soldiers. “We all know that Venezuela has been restored to the rule of our King because of the efforts of these people,” Cevallos wrote, “the armies carrying our banner have been composed almost entirely of blacks. Many have shown extraordinary valor. . . . Grant them the privileges of whiteness enjoyed by any citizen under the Constitution.” But Madrid didn’t listen, and it was Bolívar now who publicly took the high road.

For all Bolívar’s admirable pronouncements, however, by July his military operation was in shambles. His officers were unable to coordinate their efforts; minions relayed faulty information; and all came to a disastrous head on the beach of Ocumare, where Bolívar had hoped to push his invasion inland. For that very purpose, Colonel Soublette had taken a position in Maracay, halfway between Valencia and Caracas;
McGregor had marched to Choroní; Brion, whom Bolívar had promoted to admiral of the navy, had gone down the coast with the fleet. But on July 10 in Ocumare, plans went badly awry.
Soublette sent his aide-de-camp to Bolívar with the news that his position was good and all was well; but the messenger, whether by malice or misunderstanding, reported something very different. He said that the royalist general Morales was approaching with a force of seven thousand men and was
no more than three miles away. The same aide then returned to Soublette and reported that Bolívar had already pulled anchor and departed.

Disorder now reigned in Bolívar’s expedition, and Ocumare in particular swirled in confusion. No one could be relied upon to relay a reliable fact; no one seemed to know what a reliable fact was. Bolívar instructed his captain, a Frenchman named Villaret, to load the expedition’s considerable store of arms onto the one available warship,
but Villaret stalled, arguing that the crew was too small to defend such a large shipment of guns. Even as they were disputing the point, a wave of panicked Frenchwomen and their slaves streamed onto the beaches, desperate to save their lives; Captain Villaret seemed more intent on rescuing his countrywomen than on saving the revolution. The situation was acute: expensive war matériel lay strewn on the beach, sailors were refusing to take it on board, and a clamoring horde threatened to bring down a tenuous military operation. At one point, two enterprising corsairs took advantage of the confusion to make off with a hefty load of arms.
Making matters worse, Francisco Bermúdez, whom Bolívar had left behind because he was a deeply disruptive influence, suddenly arrived in port, threatening to sow discord. Angrily, Bolívar categorically denied him permission to disembark.

It is unclear what happened next, except that Soublette leaves us with an ambiguous phrase:
“Events were clouded by love,” he wrote to a friend, suggesting that an additional complicating factor may well have been Pepita. She had been traveling at Bolívar’s side—as always, with her mother and sister—and they, too, needed saving. Whether Bolívar lost valuable time trying to
deal with Pepita and her family we will never know. But this much is clear: as the tumult was growing ever more dire, word came that General Morales had already overrun
Ocumare. That report was untrue, but at this point no one was going to doubt it.

For all his attempts to bring matters under control, Bolívar now proved singularly incapable of imposing order on chaos. There was nothing to do but go. In a matter of hours, all of Pétion’s valuable contributions to the revolution were either pilfered or abandoned for the royalists’ taking. As Morales reported exultantly,
“The gang of criminals that once imagined themselves masters of Venezuela has vanished like smoke”; he found Ocumare empty, the port deserted. Littering the ground were the patriots’ precious supplies.

Few events in Bolívar’s life have been the object of as much censure or debate as those disastrous few days in Ocumare. Even he would come to look back at the catastrophe with regret,
admitting much later that perhaps this was the moment in his military career when he might have employed better judgment. In the immediate aftermath, however, he would have a string of excuses.

Taking off in a fast sloop, he
tried to deliver a few arms to patriot forces farther down the coast, but found that every port he approached sported the royalist flag. Yet again, Bolívar was obliged to make a humiliating escape by sea.
He sent Admiral Brion on a frantic mission to the United States to seek diplomatic recognition and whatever arms and assistance he could muster, but Brion’s ship was blown off course by violent winds and wrecked off the coast of Panama. Miraculously, Brion managed to survive. Bolívar himself did not escape the raging winds of the Caribbean. After a tempestuous journey, he was finally able to
deposit Pepita and her family near St. Thomas.
He did not reach the eastern port of Guiria, Venezuela, until a month later—on August 16.

Bolívar looked forward to reuniting with Mariño and continuing to press the revolution toward Caracas, but he was in for a rude surprise. Upon his arrival in Guiria, Mariño received him coldly. Bermúdez, who had sailed from Ocumare to rejoin his old chief, was downright hostile. Old resentments resurfaced to destroy whatever amicable relations Bolívar had been able to craft. Now that the two easterners were back on their own territory, they wanted no part of Bolívar. To them, he was just another revolutionary—
a man with a ready sword, his greatness as yet inchoate, his genius and imagination unseen. Even he had not quite
understood what he needed to do in order to bring about the solidarity his revolution so desperately required. He spent a few days trying to muster support, continuing to call himself by his former titles—Liberator, chief of the Armies of Venezuela and New Granada—but before long, a coup broke out against him. On August 22, Mariño’s supporters gathered in Guiria’s plaza and began to shout,
“Down with Bolívar! Long live Mariño and Bermúdez!” A crowd took up the cries. There was no question Bolívar was out of his element—he was far from Caracas, far from his Granadan admirers, in a remote part of Venezuela he hardly knew. There was also little question that his life was in danger. The Spanish captain-general had offered
10,000 pesos for his head. If he couldn’t rely on his fellow patriots for protection, he was as good as dead.