The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (58 page)

Walker's own army consisted of the duped, the drunk, and the depraved. The troops lacked blankets, disease ran rampant, wages were nonexistent. Men who finished their terms of service were forced to remain. “Walker even posted sentries at the gangplanks of departing steamers to cut off the possibility of escape,” writes historian Robert E. May
⁴⁵
Walker's survival rested on one thing: a steady influx of fresh cannon fodder.

In November, the Costa Ricans launched a second invasion in the south. This Walker saw as the paramount danger, since it threatened his access to reinforcements. As he later wrote, “It was all-important to keep the Transit clear.” On November 18, he decided to abandon Granada and fortify Rivas, which dominated the transit road.
⁴⁶
He left behind a force under Charles Henningsen with orders to destroy the city When the destruction began, the allies stopped dithering and attacked; close-range fighting raged in the streets for two weeks as the filibusters pillaged and burned. Walker finally returned with a steamboat, landed a relief force, and evacuated the embattled garrison. “Granada has ceased to exist,” Henningsen reported. On leaving the smoking metropolis, he erected a sign that read,
“Aqui fue Granada”
—“Here was Granada.”
⁴⁷

By December 20, Walker had concentrated the bulk of his army at Rivas and garrisoned key points along the transit route: Virgin Bay, San Carlos, Castillo Viejo, and Hipp's Point, where the Sarapiqui River flowed into the San Juan. When he looked over his situation, he felt reassured. True, he had abandoned the northern provinces, but cholera had driven out an invading army once before. Most important, he was expecting large contingents of fresh troops, due at Greytown at any moment. “Walker,
keeping his forces concentrated
, can maintain himself in Rivas,” reported a U.S. naval officer who visited his encampment. “I have no hesitation in saying that if the external aids he has hitherto relied upon do not fail him, he will repel his enemies.”

The key, of course, was the “external aids,” the filibuster recruits. On January 2, 1857, the steamboat
San Carlos
departed Virgin Bay, carrying passengers for New York; Walker expected it or
La Virgen
to return with his reinforcements from the east. “In a few days,” Walker wrote, “uneasiness was felt on account of the non-arrival of the steamers from the river.” There were any number of reasons why the boat might be late, he told himself, as he waited, and waited, and began to dread.
⁴⁸

THE MAN WHO MADE WALKER WAIT
was Sylvanus Spencer, acting on Vanderbilt's orders.

Spencer was a man adrift on the tide of fortune. Orphaned when very young, he was taken in by a family in a tough part of New York's Thirteenth Ward. The
New York Times
would write, “His boyhood is presumed to have been a hard one—at least he came out of it a very hard boy.” He went to sea early on and rose rapidly in the often brutal society of sailors. As mate, he frequently punched recalcitrant subordinates. He talked freely and often, in a bit of a Yankee accent, as he strode the deck in his customary dark clothes and Panama hat.

The tide that carried Spencer toward Vanderbilt began to rise back on April 25, 1855, at the very moment when Walker was preparing to embark on his invasion of Nicaragua. On that day, the square-rigged
Sea Witch
sailed out of New York Harbor. It belonged to Howland & Aspinwall, the mercantile house of William Aspinwall, and was bound for Hong Kong “to take a cargo of coolies for Panama,” the press reported. Its captain, by the name of Frazier, commanded a crew of twenty-three, and Spencer served as first mate. Once at sea, Frazier abused his mate, picking petty quarrels, giving demeaning orders, and belittling him in front of the men. On June 4, Spencer snapped. “By God, I took more from you this morning at the breakfast table than I ever did from any other man,” he shouted. “If I continue the voyage in this ship, or if you do not send me on shore out of this ship, either you or me will have to die.” The next morning, Spencer announced to the crew that he had found Captain Frazier bludgeoned to death in his bunk.

On December 19, 1855, Spencer stood trial for murder in the U.S. District Court in New York. The jury found him not guilty because no one had witnessed the crime.
⁴⁹
But the incident seems to have made other ship captains reluctant to hire him, so he drifted to Greytown, Nicaragua. “He asked me if I had any employment for him,” Joseph N. Scott recalled. “He told me he was a sailor and would turn his hand to anything.” First Spencer labored as a stevedore; then Scott made him the mate on one of the river steamboats, the
Machuca
. As such, he learned the river and Transit Company operations well. After four months in Nicaragua, Spencer returned to New York.
⁵⁰

At some point in 1856, he went to see Cornelius Vanderbilt. Spencer would later claim that he did so because he had inherited Accessory Transit stock from an uncle, but he may simply have been swimming with fortune's current. The Commodore would say nothing about their talk, but his calculations upon meeting Spencer are all too clear. His strategic assessment of Walker's situation had not changed, despite the failure of Birdsall's mission. If he could seize the steamboats on the San Juan River, he would block reinforcements from the Atlantic side. That also would stop passengers from crossing the isthmus, forcing Morgan and Garrison to withdraw their steamers (as they were not running a charity). He would, with one stroke, cut Walker off on both oceans. In Spencer, he found precisely the man for the mission. He was physically tough, accustomed to command, and, most important, intimately familiar with the terrain, the fortifications, and the steamboat operations. So Vanderbilt placed all his hopes—the fate of millions of dollars, of a critical channel of commerce to California, of a war involving six nations—in the hands of an acquitted murderer.
⁵¹

On October 9, 1856, Spencer departed New York for Costa Rica. He carried an agreement that Vanderbilt had made with Luis Molina, the Costa Rican chargé d'affaires in the United States. In San José, Spencer met with President Juan Rafael Mora and explained the plan that Vanderbilt had drafted—and how it would benefit them both. The Commodore would get his property back, and Mora would cripple Walker's army. Mora was no fool; such a plan had occurred to him before. But Spencer offered two things the Costa Ricans lacked: a detailed knowledge of the Transit operations, and $40,000 from Vanderbilt to pay expenses.
⁵²
Mora agreed to give Spencer some Costa Rican soldiers to carry out the mission; if he succeeded, General José Joaquín Mora, the president's brother, would follow with 1,100 men. If he failed, it would cost Mora little.

Spencer marched north out of San José with a work detachment, crossing the mountains to the headwaters of the San Carlos River, which flowed northeast into the San Juan. He and his carpenters felled trees and lashed together several large rafts to carry his detachment. On December 3, President Mora formally placed 250 troops under the command of “Captain S. M. Spencer,” writing that they were “under your orders to carry out the military operations as you will think proper.”
⁵³

On December 16, Spencer ordered his men into the rafts. They pushed out into the stream, drifting down under the rain-forest canopy that rose some two hundred feet above them, through heavy rain and dense humidity Finally the current carried them into the wide San Juan. On the morning of December 22, he ordered them to pull the rafts into the mouth of a creek near the location of his first target: the filibuster fort at Hipp's Point. Hearing a steamboat churning upstream, he told everyone to lie down flat and be still. The boat chuffed up to their hiding spot, then continued on its way.

Spencer led his men through the forest to the rear of the fort. A Costa Rican scout shimmied up a tree, and scooted back down to report. He saw forty to fifty men, with two cannons—more than enough to defeat an attack, if the Costa Ricans lost the element of surprise. Silently the troops filed into position and crept up behind the unsuspecting filibusters. Spencer drew his revolver to fire the shot that would launch the assault.
⁵⁴

THE MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS
may well be the quiet ones, the private ones. On November 26, for example, Corneil finally did something right in his father's eyes by marrying Ellen Williams of Hartford, Connecticut. It remains unclear how they met, but the Commodore heartily approved of “our dear Ellen,” as he called her, and showed genuine warmth for her family. He and Sophia attended the wedding in the Hartford home of Ellen's father, Oliver E. Williams.
⁵⁵

Vanderbilt's existence was divided into public and private, the carefully concealed and the loudly promoted. In November, Texas newspapers announced that he had formed a steamboat-and-railroad line from New Orleans to Galveston in competition with Morgan's most lucrative business. On December 10, Vanderbilt went to Washington to attend the opening of the new Congress. “Railroad and steamboat robbers crowd the lobbies,” the
New York Times
wrote. The House postal committee duly reported a bill to grant him the Atlantic mail contract. “A provision of this contract is that, in the event of this line not making as quick time as the Cunard steamships, $1,000 shall be deducted for every twelve hours' deficiency,” the
Times
noted.
⁵⁶

Some of the Commodore's secrets were meant to go public. On Christmas Eve he wrote a letter to the stockholders of the Accessory Transit Company to prepare them for an impending revelation. He noted that the
Prometheus
had been attached in one of the many lawsuits and auctioned off that very day, and that he had bought it for the bargain price of $10,011. But he purchased it in their interest, to be ready to reopen the line at a moment's notice. “Present appearances indicate a realization of my hopes,” he wrote, “that the company will be speedily restored to their rights.”
⁵⁷

THE CRACK OF SPENCER'S GUNSHOT
echoed through the rain forest, sending the Costa Ricans surging forward with fixed bayonets. Panic swept the filibusters. They had posted no sentries, never imagining an attack from the rear. The Costa Ricans speared them and shot them as they scrambled over the breastworks and slid down the riverbank. Perhaps half a dozen escaped alive. Spencer detailed a platoon of thirty or forty troops to hold the works; then he and the rest returned to the rafts.

At around two o'clock in the morning on December 24, Spencer and his men drifted into Greytown harbor. Silently they boarded four Accessory Transit steamboats anchored in front of the company buildings, and crept onto Punta Arenas. “At daylight an alarm was sounded at Punta Arenas… that the Costa Ricans were there,” recalled Joseph Scott. “All the hands were called together to defend ourselves.… We organized into a company, with firearms, to retake the boats.”

Though outnumbered ten to one, the iron-bearded Scott organized a counterattack, only to be interrupted by Captain John E. Erskine, commander of a squadron of British warships in the harbor. Erskine announced that he would not tolerate any violence on either side—thereby confirming Spencer's possession of the steamboats—though he did convince the Costa Ricans to evacuate the point.
⁵⁸

After the troops returned to the steamboats, Spencer strolled into Scott's office. It was almost exactly a year since he had first set foot there, begging for work. Now he commanded an armed force that was changing the course of the war. “I asked him what he was going to do with the steamers,” Scott reported. “He said he meant to take them up the river.… [He said] I could do no further harm with them, meaning that I couldn't carry any more filibusters up the river.”
⁵⁹

Spencer ordered the little fleet to put on steam and head up the river. At the mouth of the San Carlos, he directed the smallest boat to turn into the tributary and notify General Mora of their success. Then Spencer used his knowledge of transit operations to bloodlessly capture the remaining steamboats and Castillo Viejo, one by one, giving the standard signals until he was close enough to surprise the crews and garrison with his Costa Rican detachment. But one target promised to be more difficult: the heavily fortified battery at San Carlos, where the San Juan River met Lake Nicaragua. After Spencer seized
La Virgen
, he loaded it with troops and ordered its engineer, William Wise, to put on all steam for San Carlos. Wise recalled that he nervously remarked that he would rather be put ashore in the wilderness than “risk his life in front of the heavy cannon stationed at the fort. To this Spencer replied that it was useless for [Wise] to talk, that he must get up steam and go up the river.”
⁶⁰

On December 30, Spencer stopped the boat just below San Carlos and detailed a detachment of sixty troops. He ordered them to sneak behind the fort, approach as closely as possible, and wait for a signal. He planned to trick the garrison, but if he failed they were to launch an attack. The men rowed to shore in boats, and
La Virgen
continued to San Carlos. Spencer piloted the steamboat to its usual anchorage and gave the customary blast from the whistle. The fort answered in kind. A boat rowed out with a few filibusters and the garrison's commander, Captain Kruger, to pick up mail.

As Captain Kruger's men tied up their boat alongside
La Virgen
, Spencer leaned over the rail. “Is that you, Kruger?” he asked.