Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  There was every reason to choose Haiti. During his four-month stay in Jamaica, Bolívar had been introduced to Hyslop’s wealthy colleague Robert Sutherland, an Englishman who ran a lucrative shipping trade there. Sutherland traded in cotton and coffee, and essentially controlled import-export traffic out of that island, operating as Haiti’s de facto minister of trade and finance. But he was also a passionate liberal and an active gunrunner, selling arms and munitions to revolutionaries. With Sutherland in Haiti, Hyslop in Jamaica, and Brion in Curaçao, Bolívar soon had a solid network of some of the most influential shippers and merchants in the region. But in Sutherland he had something else: an ally who boasted a close friendship with President Alexandre Pétion, one of the heroes of the Haitian revolution. The son of a French father and an African mother, Pétion was a steadfast republican and generous soul, who had made it known throughout the Caribbean that in his country all freedom seekers were welcome. Sutherland had spoken to Bolívar of the importance of establishing a relationship with Pétion and, toward that end, urged him to visit Haiti as his personal guest.

  On Christmas Eve, Bolívar landed in the port of Aux Cayes, where many of the fugitives from Cartagena had taken refuge. By New Year’s Day, he was comfortably lodged in the capital of Port-au-Prince. Sutherland received him and personally escorted him to the gleaming white presidential palace to meet the great man Pétion. The Haitian president welcomed Bolívar warmly. “I was immediately drawn to him,” Pétion later confided in a letter, “and I could feel his greatness.” Before long, he offered the Liberator his complete support. When Bolívar said that he would repay Pétion by making him the patron of Spanish American independence, the president replied, “No, don’t mention my name; my only desire is to see that those who tremble under slavery’s yoke are free: Liberate my brothers, and that will be payment enough.” It was a bold demand: ending slavery would alter the social fabric of South America. But Bolívar already knew that he needed to lure the colored classes to his side. He readily agreed. Within days, Bolívar was given everything he needed to mount a new invasion: one thousand guns, thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder, a fleet of seven ships, and all the captains and sailors necessary to man them. It wasn’t the vast, muscular support Bolívar had hoped for from Britain or the United States, but it was enough to attempt a reentry.

  Straightaway, he called a meeting with his cohort in Haiti, a motley crew of friends and rivals: Santiago Mariño, Manuel Piar, José Francisco Bermúdez, Carlos Soublette, Francisco Zea, Mariano Montilla, the French mercenary Luis Ducoudray, and the dashing Scottish colonel Gregor McGregor, who had married one of Bolívar’s cousins at the start of the revolution. Among those, Luis Brion was his most steadfast supporter, and it was Brion now who proposed Bolívar as head of the expedition, but Montilla, Bermúdez, and others objected. Montilla even went so far as to challenge Bolívar to a duel; and Bermúdez continued his insubordination against Bolívar, which had begun even as they battled the Legions of Hell side by side in the waning days of the second republic. In the end, Montilla and Bermúdez were dropped from the expedition. Mariño, the Liberator of the East, was made chief of staff, with the thoroughly dyspeptic Frenchman Ducoudray as his assistant. But as plans developed, it was Bolívar who took command.

  Bolívar busily prepared for the expedition, heartened by the faith of his new sponsor, Pétion; his vital network of European businessmen; and his passionate republican collaborators. All the same, in the course of those few months, he found time to renew his affair with the irresistible young Isabel Soublette, who with her brother Carlos had made the harrowing escape from Cartagena. It was a transitory romance, dashed all too soon by the winds of revolution, but like the congenial hospitality of Haiti, it gave him the fleeting illusion of home.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Revolution Struggles to Life

  Our people are nothing like Europeans or North Americans; indeed, we are more a mixture of Africa and America than we are children of Europe. . . . It is impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong.

  —Simón Bolívar

  Eighteen sixteen was the year without a summer. As Lord Byron put it, the bright sun had vanished and stars wandered “darkling in the eternal space.” The colossal eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia on April 10, 1815—the largest volcanic event in recorded history—had traveled the globe to spew a fine ash over Europe and the Americas. A year later, the earth’s atmosphere was so saturated with sulfur that brilliant sunsets inflamed the English skies, torrential rains washed away European crops, and a persistent gloom hung over North America. At the time, few imagined that a single geologic event in a remote location could affect the entire globe, and yet there was so much evidence of a freak imbalance: stinging frosts carpeted Pennsylvania in the middle of summer, killing the livestock; in Germany, harvests failed, causing a crippling famine; a typhus epidemic swept through the Mediterranean. There were surprising ramifications. Food riots gripped England and Ireland; Luddites torched textile factories with renewed frenzy. In a dark castle in rain-pelted Switzerland, Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein. In northern Europe, J. M. W. Turner was so stunned by the fiery skies that he recorded them in magnificent canvases for years to come. In France, rampant disease prompted a new age of medical discovery. And in the Caribbean, where Bolívar prepared to relaunch his revolution, a perfect calm preceded the hurricane season, which arrived a month sooner than usual, tossing the sea with singular fury.

  Eighteen sixteen also became the revolution’s cruelest year. There were wholesale beheadings, hangings, firing squads—all in the name of “pacification.” General Morillo had installed draconian laws to rid Venezuela—Spain’s most defiant colony—of revolutionaries once and for all. The royalists arrested suspects in rural backwaters and relocated them to heavily defended towns, where they could be overseen. Anyone found wandering the countryside was a candidate for the gallows. Morillo’s men burned crops, purged the forests of fruit trees, killed farm animals, impounded horses, and executed any blacksmith capable of forging a lance’s head or any other weapon. Royalist commanders exacted taxes and punitive fines, making themselves rich and powerful in the process. Patriots, on the other hand, were stripped of whatever property they had. In the course of a single year, Venezuela’s Committee of Confiscation sold land valued at almost one million pesos, thereby funding Spain’s treasury and enabling its army to secure badly needed supplies. More than two hundred haciendas were expropriated—all of them owned by the patriot leadership, including the Palacios, del Toros, and Tovars, many of whom had fled in the mass emigration to the east. But the largest and most retaliatory confiscation was reserved for Bolívar, who was divested of five estates and numerous smaller properties, valued at a staggering 200,000 pesos.

  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 m
arched 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.