Bolivar: American Liberator (88 page)

Thousands of mercenaries, etc.:
See especially Celia Wu’s fascinating
Generals and Diplomats: Great Britain and Peru.
Wu claims that 3,000 British, Irish, and German soldiers volunteered for SB’s army. Others put that figure as high as 7,000–8,000 (Rourke, 213–14).

singing “Ye Gentlemen of England”:
Trend, 127.

the true Liberator had been:
Pi Sunyer, Carlos,
Patriotas americanos en Londres
(Caracas: Monte Avila, 1978), 242.

one young English colonel:
Chesterton,
Narrative of Proceedings in Venezuela.

“as black and barbarous,” etc.:
Ibid., vi, 7–8, 20–22.

“Venezuela, though it has emancipated”:
Adams to A. H. Everett, Dec. 29, 1817,
The Writings of John Quincy Adams
, VI (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 282.

“Unity, unity, unity”:
SB, “The Jamaica Letter,” Kingston, Sept. 6, 1815,
El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar
, 48.

He admitted that he distrusted:
“I feel distrust of everything proposed and desired by these South American gentlemen”: John Quincy Adams,
Writings
, VI, 51.

“There is no community of interests”:
Adams,
Memoirs of John Quincy Adams
, notes for Sept. 19, 1820, V (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1875), 176.

the slave trade was booming:
Wood, 3.

Perry had made the harsh, etc.:
D. F. Long,
Gold Braid and Foreign Relations: Diplomatic Activities of U.S. Naval Officers
(Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1988), 59.

Perry had landed on the very day:
J. N. Hambleton,
Journal of the Voyage of the USS “Nonsuch” up the Orinoco, July 11–August 23, 1819
, in J. F. Vivian, “The Orinoco River and Angostura, Venezuela, in the Summer of 1819,”
Americas
, 24, no. 2 (Oct. 1967), 160–83.

sure signs of yellow fever:
Ibid.

“a charlatan general”:
Hanke, “Baptis Irvine’s Reports on Simón Bolívar,” 360–73.

“He affects the language”:
Ibid.

“Without a ray of true”:
Ibid.

a dinner given in Irvine’s honor:
Rourke, 234–35.

“Thus, . . . as I cross this table”:
Ibid.

Samuel D. Forsyth, etc.:
Hambleton, p. 182 fn.; also John Quincy Adams,
Memoirs
, 49–50.

“eighteen million, struggling to be free!”:
Clay, May 24, 1818, quoted in Randolph Adams,
History of the Foreign Policy of the United States
, 171.

Clay argued passionately:
Annals of Congress, 15th Congress, 1st Session, II, no. 1485, quoted ibid.

Clay moved that the House of Representatives:
Motion “that the House of Representatives participates with the people of the United States in the deep interest which they feel for the success of the Spanish provinces of South America, which are struggling for their liberty and independence”: report by the Committee of Foreign Affairs, in E. McPherson,
The Political History of the United States During the Great Rebellion
(Washington, DC: Chapman, 1882), 351.

fight for a maximum of three years, etc.:
L. Duarte-Level, in Unamuno, 132.

He was haunted by the fear:
SB to Guillermo White, Barinas, May 6, 1821, SBO, II, 560.

“Colombia will be independent”:
SB to José Revenga and José Echeverría, quoted in Robertson,
Rise of the Spanish-American Republics
, 244.

an agenda for renewed war:
SB to Santander, Trujillo, Dec. 1, 1820, SBO, I, 520–22.

written to Morillo, to La Torre, even to King Ferdinand:
SB to Morillo, Barinas, Dec. 11, 1820, and Bogotá, Jan. 26, 1821; SB to La Torre, Bogotá, Jan. 25, 1821; SB to Fernando VII, Bogotá, Jan. 24, 1821, SBO, I, 510–32.

planned every detail:
Duarte-Level, in Unamuno, 146.

Morales . . . had been passed over:
From an unnamed British officer’s account of the Battle of Carabobo, quoted in Charles Dickens’s magazine,
All the Year Round
, XIX, March 28, 1868 (London: Chapman, 1868), 368. The account also appears in Mulhall,
Explorers in the New World
, 232ff.

The royalist army, aware now:
Lecuna,
Crónica
, III, 35.

La Torre’s forces were clearly in shambles:
Ibid., 34.

“the largest and most superb”:
SB to Santander, Valencia, June 25, 1821, SBO, II, 571.

the heavens opened with torrential rains, etc.:
Dickens, 369.

Páez’s cavalry was dispatched:
For a good overall description of the battle, see Duarte-Level’s essay in Unamuno’s
Simón Bolívar
.

laboring under a broiling sun:
Prago, 204.

they scaled the heights, etc.:
Lecuna,
Crónica
, III, 47–48.

“hollow square” formation:
Prago, 205. A tight square or rectangular formation of 500 men in two to four rows, armed with muskets, rifles, or fixed bayonets: essentially a defensive tactic used against a charging enemy. Soldiers in the “hollow square” would withhold fire until chargers were 100 feet away, at which point they would mow down their attackers, creating piles of bodies that served as obstructions to further attacks.

more than a thousand royalists lay dead, etc.:
Lecuna,
Crónica
, III, 52.

six hundred British soldiers lost their lives:
Mulhall, 232.

“My general, I die happy”:
Mosquera, 420; also Lecuna,
Crónica
, III, 51.

one of his violent fits of epilepsy:
Lecuna,
Crónica
, III, 50.

Nearby lay the towering First Negro:
Mijares, 396.

“Saviors of my country!,” etc.:
Mulhall, 232.

he was institutionalizing the Latin American warlord:
Lynch,
Simón Bolívar
, 142.

Epigraph:
“I am not the governor this republic needs,” etc.:
SB to the secretary of state, Cúcuta, April 8, 1813, SBO, I, 53–55.

“I am a soldier”:
Ibid.

he reached the city at night:
Masur,
Simón Bolívar
, 434.

he questioned his patience:
O’LN, I, 578.

written to confess these fears:
SB to Nariño, Barinas, April 21, 1821, SBSW, I, 64–65.

Colombia was a military camp:
Ibid.

all the good men had disappeared:
SB to F. Peñalver, Valencia, July 10, 1821, SBO, II, 577–78.

“Since I am fully convinced”:
SB to Nariño.

not ready for democracy, etc.:
SB to Santander, San Carlos, June 13, 1821, SBSW, I, 267–68.

as feral and rapacious:
SB to P. Gual, Guanare, May 24, 1821, SBO, II, 563–64.

“Even I, riding at their head”:
Ibid.

“We are poised on an abyss”:
Ibid.

governable only by a strong hand:
SB to Santander.

“In Colombia the people”:
Ibid.

begun to question the wisdom, etc.:
Polanco Alcántara, 610–25.

his finances were in disorder, etc.:
Lynch,
Simón Bolívar
, 141.

he freed the few slaves:
O’LB, 196.

Among them was his old wet nurse, Hipólita:
“Hipólita Bolívar,” in
Diccionario de historia de Venezuela
, I (Caracas: Editorial Ex Libris, 1992).

“the only father I have ever known”:
SB to María Antonia, July 10, 1825, SBC,
1823–1824–1825
, 339.

He was antsy, nervous:
O’LB, 197; also SB to Santander, Valencia, July 10, 1821, SBO, II, 576–77. O’Leary describes him as “suffering indescribable torment” from political enemies. In SB’s July 10 letter to Santander, he admits that he is sick and tired, and that his life is far too frenetic. Polanco Alcántara (610) mentions that a long exhaustion had taken SB sometime before. SB mentions this in a May 7, 1820, letter to Santander, in which he says, “I was very sick in San Cristóbal and so came here [to Cúcuta] to recover. I still don’t know what I had but I know very well that I’m still a wreck, with a strong propensity to sleep all the time or to want to rest, which for me represents a serious illness.” SBO, I, 432–34.

“I need to round out Colombia”:
SB to Castillo Rada, Trujillo, Aug. 24, 1821, SBO, II, 588.

“I need to give a third sister”:
SB to Santander, Tocuyo, Aug. 16, 1821, SBO, II, 582.

“Send me that book”:
SB to Santander, Cúcuta, June 1, 1820, SBO, I, 451. SB asks him to have his friend Pepe París send him a copy of “Los Incas del Peru,” by which he very well could have meant Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s magisterial book,
Comentarios Reales de los Incas.
Inca Garcilaso was the son of a conquistador and an Inca princess; his record of Inca customs and traditions was the first work ever written by an American. The Spanish king forbade its publication or circulation in 1780, after Túpac Amaru II’s rebellion in Peru. San Martín had also read the book (and carried it with him) before his liberating army entered Lima in 1821.

having joked that if elected:
SB to L. E. Azuola, Trujillo, March 9, 1821, SBO, II, 547–48.

I am a son of war:
Address to the president of the General Congress of Colombia, Cúcuta, October 1, 1821, DOC, VII, 122, quoted in SBSW, I, 285.

scattering a force of ten thousand:
Paz Soldán,
Historia del Perú
, II, 435. The exact number quoted in the army document is 9,530.

his skin was so dark, etc.:
María Joaquina de Alvear, granddaughter of the Spanish brigadier Diego de Alvear, left a journal (Jan. 23, 1877) in which she claimed that San Martín was the illegitimate son of her grandfather and an indigenous woman—San Martín’s wet nurse, Rosa Guarú. The journal says, furthermore, that the Alvear family offered the child to be adopted into the San Martín family. Indeed, throughout his childhood and youth, San Martín was close to the Alvear family and founded the Lautaro Lodge with Carlos Alvear, who, according to María Joaquina, was his half brother. Complicating the proof of his origins, his birth date is inconsistent in military records, a record of baptism was never found, and his father, Juan de San Martín, is said to have been away from home for the entire year that preceded San Martín’s presumed February birth. None of this has been proven beyond Joaquina de Alvear’s words and subsequent arguments made by Argentine historian Hugo Chumbita, who has written copiously on the matter. See Chumbita,
El manuscrito de Joaquina: San
Martín y el secreto de la familia Alvear
(Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 2007); also Chumbita,
El secreto de Yapeyú
(Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001). Mary Graham, the widow of a British naval captain, also wrote about San Martín’s presumed “mixed breed” background in an 1823 fragment published in
De Don José de San Martín
(Santiago: Editorial Barros Browne, 2000). Madariaga claims San Martín’s mother was a half-caste, and that as a result he bore a “
mestizo
resentment” (Madariaga, 425). Mitre says his birth predisposed him to be “an enemy of the race” of Spaniards (Mitre,
Historia de San Martín
, III, 193, 218, 225). The inherent prejudice in both cases speaks for itself.

“El Indio,” “El Cholo,” etc.:
A. J. Lapolla, “El origen mestizo del General San Martín,”
La Fogata Digital
,
www.lafogata.org/07arg/arg1/arg-9-2.htm
.

“I, too, am Indian”:
Galasso,
Seamos libres
, 200.

served under two notable British officers:
R. Rojas,
San Martín
(New York: Cooper Square, 1967), 22–23.

Accompanying him was Carlos Alvear:
This, including the information about the Masonic lodges and Lautaro, can be found ibid., 21–24.

banning secret societies:
Gould, 180.

“conspiring, corresponding, intriguing”:
Madariaga, 405.

“Here go 40 saddle blankets”:
Pueyrredón to San Martín, Nov. 2, 1816, Buenos Aires, Documentos Archivo General San Martín (DAGSM), IV (Buenos Aires: Coni), 526.

“He wants wings for cannon,” etc.:
Padre Luis Beltrán, quoted in R. Rojas,
San Martín
, 99.

half his infantry would be black:
Bethell, 128.

“If a Spaniard resists”:
R. Rojas,
San Martín
, 112.

illegitimate son of a former viceroy:
O’Higgins was the “hijo natural” of Ambrosio O’Higgins, an Irishman who fought for the Spanish crown and became governor of Chile as well as viceroy of Peru. His mother was from an aristocratic family. Despite the illegitimacy, his father took a great interest in his education and his fortunes, although the two never met. See Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna,
Vida del capitán jeneral de Chile Don Bernardo O’Higgins
(Santiago: Jover, 1882).