Bolivar: American Liberator (38 page)

In the course of that conflagration, many of the British were wounded. O’Leary had taken a gash in the head. Colonel Rooke had sustained a grave wound to his left arm. When the field surgeon amputated that arm in order to save his life,
Rooke grasped the hewn limb with his good hand, thrust it high in the air, and shouted,
“Viva la patria!” Someone asked, “Which country, England or Ireland?” but the Irishman shook his head. “The one that will bury me,” he said. Three days later, his corpse was lowered into Colombian soil.

On the evening of that battle, Pedro Martínez,
a twelve-year-old stablehand in Bolívar’s retinue, noticed two men crouched in a gully by the river. When he and an armed companion surprised them where they hid, the runaways tried to pay him off with a few gold coins. But the boy refused. By the time the youths had escorted their prisoners back to the patriot camp, they knew that one of them was Brigadier Barreiro. The army had already captured his second in command, Colonel Jiménez.

For all that the Spaniards had agonized about Bolívar’s legendary war to the death, not one prisoner taken at the Battle of Boyacá was singled out for execution. Bolívar would be generous to Barreiro and his officers, making it clear that he planned to pursue an exchange of prisoners. But as the battle drew to a close and
Bolívar chased stragglers over the rolling hills for many miles and managed to apprehend some, he chanced upon a face he knew. It was Francisco
Vinoni, the republican
traitor who, in 1812, had thrown open the dungeons of Puerto Cabello and turned over that valuable fortress to the Spaniards—the infamous Vinoni, whose treasonous act had precipitated the most bitter and damaging experience of Bolívar’s career. The Liberator had always said that if he ever got his hands on Vinoni, he would extract a cruel revenge. He pulled the prisoner out of the lineup and ordered his men to hang him.

With the road to the capital open now, Bolívar and a small squadron set out for Bogotá. As one of his officers wrote,
“A lightning bolt doesn’t fall from the sky as swiftly as General Bolívar descended on the capital.”
He rode, ragged and shirtless, his coat fluttering against bare skin, for all seventy miles of the journey. As he raced through the humid countryside—his wild long hair riding the wind—he hardly looked like a general who had vanquished a king’s army. But it was so. His war to the death, discarded so many years before, now worked greatly to his favor: the Spaniards in Bogotá fled the capital with little more than the clothes on their backs, abandoning houses, businesses, the entire viceregal treasury, to the patriot army. Viceroy Juan José de Sámano, author of so many atrocities against New Granadans, had no time to worry about the fate of his people now. The viceroy saved himself, stealing away in the guise of a lowly Indian. By the time Bolívar strode into his palace, he was gone.

In the official report to Spain’s Ministry of War, the most important Spaniard in those American colonies, General Morillo, would sum it up this way:

The rebellious Bolívar has occupied the capital of Bogotá, and the deadly outcome of this battle gives him dominion over the enormous resources of a highly populated, abundantly rich nation, from which he will take whatever he needs to prolong the war. . . . This unfortunate loss delivers into rebel hands—apart from the Kingdom of New Granada—many ports in the South, where he will now deploy his pirates. . . . The interior of the continent, all the way to Peru, is at the mercy of whoever rules in [Bogotá]. . . . In just one day, Bolívar has undone all we have accomplished in five years of this campaign, and in one single battle he has reconquered all the territory that soldiers of the king have won in the course of so many past conflagrations.

CHAPTER
10

A weak man requires a long fight in order to win. A strong one delivers a single blow and an empire vanishes.

—Simón Bolívar

B
olívar dismounted swiftly and ran up the steps of the viceroy’s palace.
It was five
P.M.
and the mountain air was beginning to regain its vigor. It had been unseasonably warm,
a stifling day in the capital. Dazed and disbelieving, the republicans of Bogotá had just begun to emerge from the torpid ignorance in which the viceroy had kept them. They had been told the royalists had prevailed at Pantano de Vargas, which was patently untrue; but then came the Spaniards’ swift and frenzied departure from the capital, the stores of gunpowder detonating in the distance. As Bolívar rode into the viceregal capital, hurtling along the city streets—windblown and shirtless—citizens ventured out, curious at first, and then in wild, gleeful abandon.

He astonished the throngs, according to one witness, with his memory for names. He
greeted Granadans as he went, although it had been more than four years since he had seen them. His movements were quick, economical, with little apparent regard for the grandness of the moment—his energy electric,
despite the eight-hour ride. Once he was
inside the palace, republican leaders asked if he didn’t want to rest a while and he responded,
“Absolutely not. I never tire on a horse.” He addressed them briskly, courteously, grasping the lapels of his jacket as he spoke. Mainly, he asked questions, and, as they answered, he crossed his arms and listened intently. He asked about his benefactor and supporter Camilo Torres, the former republican president. (
“Where Bolívar is,” Torres had once said, “
there
is the republic.”) The president had been brutally executed and dismembered by Morillo’s officers, his head thrust on a spear and displayed a few yards from the very spot where Bolívar now stood. Bolívar asked, too, about President Torices, the young warlord of Cartagena who had welcomed him years before, and whose head had met the same fate as Torres’s, on a spear, in front of that palace. As Bolívar glanced about,
it was clear that Viceroy Sámano’s reign had taken a hard toll on the people. He could see evidence of it etched deeply into their faces.

He wrote to his vice president in Venezuela to report that Bogotá was his now. The viceroy had
fled in such a fright that he had
left a bag of gold on his desk,
a half million pesos in the treasury, and enough arms and munitions to supply an entire army. In the course of a single battle, Bolívar had toppled his iron rule. But not until hours before the Liberator’s arrival had Viceroy Sámano realized his reign was over. He had been
dining with his courtiers, blithely unaware that his army had been crushed, his commanding officer taken prisoner. Because Brigadier Barreiro had lied to him about the outcome of the battle at Pantano de Vargas, calling himself the victor, the viceroy believed that Bolívar’s ragtag soldiers were not a threat and Spain’s army was invincible. The viceroy had been bragging about Barreiro to his dinner guests on that evening of August 8 when an official burst into the room with news that the king’s army had been vanquished at Boyacá, the commander taken prisoner, and patriot forces were fast approaching the capital.
“All is lost!” the official wailed. “Bolívar is upon us!” As a historian of the day recounted it:
“The bravura of the viceroy quickly evaporated into terror, and all he could think of was saving his own skin.” He fled west to the Magdalena, disguised as a lowly peasant, then embarked incognito for the five-hundred-mile voyage downriver to Cartagena and, eventually,
across the seas to Spain. When Bolívar dispatched a division to apprehend him, he was gone, lost among the crowds—one more traveler on a busy waterway.

Bolívar went through the viceroy’s palace, amazed by the riches that had been abandoned in the mass evacuation, but he was careful not to gloat. As far as he was concerned, the war had not ended with the liberation of Bogotá. There was much yet to accomplish: Caracas was not free; Morillo was still on the loose; and, in spite of all patriot advances, Spain still controlled a number of vital areas—Coró, Cartagena, Cúcuta, Pasto, Quito, the viceroyalty of Peru. There was no question that Bolívar was thrilled by the victory at Boyacá and sure of its consequences, but he made no public claims. He kept his generals on the move, enlisted prisoners to the patriot side, and worked hard to raise more troops.

Yet even with the seriousness of the work at hand, Bolívar never failed to enjoy lighthearted pursuits. He played cards with his officers, bantered with them, rode with them, organized festive celebrations. Soon after his entry into the capital,
he gave a fancy ball for all the leading families of Bogotá. That night, just before dinner, Colonel James Hamilton, a British officer with whom he had developed a warm friendship, arrived in such a state of dishabille that Bolívar couldn’t help but express surprise.
“My good and brave colonel!” he gasped, when he saw him, “what a dirty shirt you have on!” There was good reason for Bolívar’s candor: a year before, when he had
lost all his shirts in battle, Hamilton had generously given him six of his own. The Englishman now apologized for his slovenliness and explained that he was wearing the only shirt he owned. Bolívar chuckled and ordered his servant, José Palacios, to fetch the colonel a clean shirt; but Palacios only stared at his master, until Bolívar was forced to say,
“Well, why don’t you go?” The servant stammered, “Your excellency has but two shirts, one is on your back, the other is in the wash.” Bolívar and the colonel laughed heartily at that. Shirts had always been a precious commodity in the revolution: lost in transport, seized in battle, used as tourniquets, robbed from corpses. Now they had become a source of brief merriment between two men who, until that war, had never lacked for sartorial finery.

The official celebration of Bolívar’s victory was held on September 18, and all Bogotá turned out for the festivities. Church bells pealed,
twenty young beauties in pristine white dresses came forward gamely to bestow crowns of laurels, and Bolívar marched alongside Santander and Anzoátegui in a victory procession that led to the very square where so
many of his cohort had died. But even with all the joy and high spirits, few Granadans understood how momentous their victory truly was. In seventy-five days, in a wholly improvised maneuver, Bolívar had freed New Granada and opened the way for the liberation of much of Spanish America. His march over the cordillera had much in common with Hannibal’s over the Alps, except that terrain and climate were harsher in the Andes, and Hannibal had taken years to prepare for the challenge. San Martín had crossed the Andes, too, on the far south of the continent, but, like Hannibal, he had trained his soldiers for years in advance. Bolívar’s genius was to achieve the feat as an improvisation, fashion his strategy on the fly.
As one historian put it: he had fulfilled all of Napoleon’s maxims—destroy the army, capture the capital, conquer the country—but he had realized them in one sweeping motion. As Bolívar himself had written prophetically four years before:
“A weak man requires a long fight in order to win. A strong one delivers a single blow and an empire vanishes.”

For all the grandness of the victory procession, for all the pomp and apotheosis of the ceremony, the Liberator again proved human. He had an eye on one of the beauties in white—a lovely dark-eyed girl of seventeen, Bernardina Ibañez. He had met her six years before, as a guest in her parents’ house during his campaign up the Magdalena River. She had been a child then; now she was in the full flower of young womanhood, an irresistible beauty whose charms escaped no one’s notice. The British captain Charles Cochrane described her as
an ebony-haired Venus with the eyes of a coquette and the lips of an angel. Bolívar was taken with her immediately. He danced with her at the ball and began seriously to court her favor; some historians say she became
one of the great infatuations of his life. But she was already in love with one of Bolívar’s most able colonels, Ambrosio Plaza, and the young lovers hoped to marry. Although Bolívar considered sending his officer far away so that he could have Bernardina to himself, General Santander interceded. Santander pleaded with Bolívar to allow the young man to stay in Bogotá and remain by Bernardina’s side. Eventually, Bolívar
agreed, writing to Santander good-naturedly,
“No doubt this marriage will please you, for it is sure to increase the population of young Granadans. Me, too, for I love this young couple.” There was good reason for Santander’s interest in the girl’s welfare: he had fallen into an ardent affair with her older sister, Nicolasa, a married woman whose royalist husband had fled—all too conveniently—in the evacuation. The Ibañez women would be
the source of much gossip in New Granada for months, even years, to come.