Bolivar: American Liberator

by Arana, Marie

  He set about finding his mistress, Pepita Machado. “They say the Machados have gone to Caracas,” he wrote his nephew Leandro Palacios. “If that is true, there’s nothing more to say; but if it’s not, I want to ask a favor of you. Mr. José Méndez Monsanto is holding 400 pesos for that family’s voyage, and I’ll pay whatever it costs to bring them. . . . Try to persuade the family to travel, and tell Pepita that if she wants me to be true to her, she’d better come here.”

  Ensconced in the relative safety of Angostura, he devoted himself to the much neglected business of government. If the revolution was stalling, it was because Venezuelans needed to be rallied, allies won, soldiers recruited. Whenever Bolívar’s revolution seemed to be going badly, it generally heralded a great leap forward. He worked furiously now to gather more intelligence, produce propaganda, establish diplomacy, outfit his army: a larger plan was forming in his head. As Morillo would write one day, Bolívar was the revolution. And he was far more dangerous in defeat than in victory.

  THE CITY OF ANGOSTURA, WHOSE name means “narrows,” sits on a slender strait of the Orinoco River, three hundred nautical miles from the sea. Situated between hills and a rolling current, it is an outpost Humboldt had visited and described as a calm redoubt on a mighty river, flanked by a profusion of natural resources. It had been built fifty years before by the enterprising Spanish crown, which understood the economic importance of moving large shipments of goods from the bountiful interior. Farmlands fanned out along the river; ranchlands flourished immediately behind. Orange, lemon, and fig trees perfumed the balmy air. It had once been a beautiful city. The glistening white houses were ample, low, made of adobe, capped with red tile, handsomely elaborated with wooden windows. Splendid mansions overlooked the river, some with capacious verandas; it was said that Bolívar had given the most splendid of all to his former lover Isabel Soublette as a wedding present. Anyone could see that Angostura had once been a jewel in its riverine setting, but it had fallen to ruin during Piar’s long siege and ensuing occupation.

  Angostura’s houses had been vandalized to such an extent that on Bolívar’s return in early June he was moved to write, “It pains me to see that all the houses on the perimeter of town have been ruined or destroyed in order to get at the wood; even those on the main plaza have suffered, particularly the windows and doors.” It seemed every city in Venezuela had borne similar depredations. Resources were scant, and whatever was needed was simply ripped from the structures at hand. The armies had come to rely on improvisation: clothes could be made from curtains, carts from doors, spear tips from iron grilles. On the plains, Páez had amassed all the silver his men had captured and melted it down to make money. On the coast, patriot soldiers sold coffee and cocoa in order to buy guns from the Antilles.

  Bolívar threw himself into organizing this new capital of the republic. He wanted to establish an effective press, a working congress, diplomatic relations, a foreign legion. By June 27, he had begun publishing a newspaper. He called it El Correo del Orinoco, and it was to be the official voice of his future government: an organ in which he could publish laws, decrees, dispatches from the war, news highlights from Europe and North America. Taking an intense personal interest in its publication, he set out a mission from the start: “We are free, we write in a free country, and we seek to deceive no one.” It was meant to be a direct counterpoint to the Gaceta de Caracas, the mouthpiece of the Spanish crown, which had been publishing pro-royalist propaganda (on Miranda’s old printing machine) for almost a decade. Bolívar was passionate about the press, and rightly so. If Spanish kings had been adamant about keeping Americans ignorant, he would be adamant about keeping them informed. “The printing press is the infantry of the Army of Liberation!” his newspaper crowed.

  It was on the pages of El Correo that readers learned that Bolívar had finally embarked on establishing a congress. Many had wondered why it hadn’t happened before. His close friend and confidant Fernando Peñalver—a former president of the old congress of 1812—had finally persuaded him that the question had grown urgent and that it was time for citizens to share the rule. As Bolívar set out to build stores of war matériel—cannon, rifles, gunpowder—he worked to organize an election. And so the last months of 1818 were taken up by a swirl of administrative tasks, forcing Bolívar to be as resourceful behind a desk as he had been on a battlefield.

  His letters and papers from this period show a leader engaged in every aspect of creating a republic, a man who, even as he puzzled over the architecture of governments, was working to procure arms and recruits, regularize the currency, stimulate trade along the Orinoco. He fretted about pay for his soldiers; desertions had been dire, and his men could hardly be blamed—they were unclad, penniless, badly nourished. He needed to do something about that. He was also obliged to settle a number of prickly legal disputes. He jailed, then deported the mutinous British mercenary who had tried to drive a wedge between him and Páez; he accepted the resignation of another querulous Englishman, Colonel Gustavus Hippisley, who although he had arrived only weeks before was complaining bitterly about his compensation.

  Immediately thereafter, he was presented with two complaints from an American agent, J. Baptis Irvine. This irascible Baltimore newspaperman had been delegated by the United States government to seek restitution for the seizure of two American ships that had sailed up the Orinoco with supplies for the Spaniards. His second complaint: Bolívar’s flamboyant Scottish general Gregor McGregor, on furlough, had turned up on the Florida coast, captured Amelia Island, planted his own flag, and turned it into a refuge for pirates. McGregor’s timing couldn’t have been worse; Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was trying to pressure Madrid to hand over Florida. The correspondence shows a courteous but firm supreme chief, standing his ground, trying to preserve peace with the foreigners. If these conversations weren’t always congenial, they were indicative of a new reality: Bolívar and the revolution were gradually being recognized in the outside world.

  INDEED, THE ORINOCO WAS BUSTLING with outsiders. Admiral Brion, who was living in one of the lavish mansions on the waterfront, was overseeing a veritable whirl of activity along the river. Commerce was so brisk that a French merchant was able to import fine wines to sell to the residents of Angostura. A Creole matron was draping her bed in European lace. War supplies, too, were suddenly becoming plentiful. In June, a British ship delivered clothing and supplies for ten thousand men; days later, Brion himself brought in a valuable cargo of arms. By the end of July, a large ship had sailed in from London, followed by a brig from New York, bearing enough muskets, pistols, gunpowder, swords, and saddles to outfit an entire army. Bolívar purchased any and all such supplies, paying for them however he could—with mules, fruit, tobacco, livestock. “Arms have been my constant concern,” Bolívar had written to Luis López Méndez, his agent in London, but now they were flowing to him in abundance. So much so that at times there was no need for the equipment. One shipment arrived with fine leather saddles for Páez’s cavalry—saddles his wild horsemen would never use. The remnants of Wellington’s war with Napoleon, nevertheless, were beginning to put Bolívar’s troops at striking advantage. Within a few months, he had stored away fifty thousand stands of arms.

  Wellington’s victory had provided something else to the republic: regiments of seasoned war veterans. As irony would have it, British soldiers who had fought alongside General Morillo’s officers in Spain were now enlisting to fight against them in Venezuela. The two years that followed the Battle of Waterloo saw a vast reduction in the size of the British army. In April of 1817, the London Times reported that half a million ex-soldiers were coming home to Britain’s greater population of 25 million. In good times, this would have been difficult enough; but these were not good times—England and Ireland had suffered famine, riots, rampant unemployment—and soldiers were returning to almost certain poverty. When Bolívar’s London agent López Méndez announced he wanted to recruit experienced soldiers to fight
in the revolution, he found himself flooded with applicants.

  López Méndez had been living in Miranda’s house on 27 Grafton Street since Bolívar had left him there in 1810, acting as a publicist for the revolution. He had never been able to get official British support for the Venezuelan republic, but now, with what may have been tacit approval from the Duke of Wellington—who, after all, had once planned to come to the aid of Miranda—British war veterans rushed to enlist before their government issued a proclamation that would forbid it.

  The offer that López Méndez made to British officers was spelled out in interviews: pay equal to whatever they had received from the British army, a promotion to one rank higher, and a salary that would begin on arrival in Venezuela, with full compensation for travel. A fierce competition for commissions began, and money began to change hands to secure places in the regiments. Colonel Gustavus Hippisley had been one of the first potential commanders to present himself to López Méndez, offering to raise a corps of cavalrymen. It was called the 1st Venezuelan Hussars and it consisted of thirty officers and 160 noncommissioned officers—including field surgeons, veterinarians, trumpeters, blacksmiths, a riding master, and a tailor. Scheduled to leave the English shore in November of 1817, they were to be followed by four more brigades, totaling a detachment of more than eight hundred officers, some accompanied by their wives.

  The preparations to equip these officers in London were detailed, fastidious, almost laughable, given the primitive conditions for which they were bound. Colonels took care to outfit their officers with dress uniforms that featured gold lace and filigreed epaulettes as well as handsome field uniforms with ornamented cuffs and collars, elaborate belts, leather pouches, sabers, crimson sashes, warm capes, bright caps, and the current fashion rage among the military—Wellington boots. Gold buttons were cast with the regiments’ insignias. Harnesses and saddles were commissioned from London’s finest saddleries. Special rifles were ordered. All this was undertaken on the assumption that the commanding colonels and regiments would be reimbursed once they reached Spanish America. It was also undertaken with stunning inattention to the fact that the soldiers would be living in the tropics, serving alongside men who fought barefoot, naked, bareback, with no other weapons but sticks and spears.

  Dinners and social events were organized throughout London to celebrate the volunteers and, as the weather grew chillier, members of the regiments could be seen around the city, standing about grandly in their uniforms. A pending proclamation would soon forbid citizens from taking up arms against Spain, but everywhere they went, the Venezuelan regiments garnered breathless, adoring publicity. “The frequency of their mess-dinners, and other parties, in and near the metropolis; the appearance of some of the gentlemen at public places of amusement; and last but not least, the excellence of the regimental band, which attended the officers wherever they dined together, were themes of general conversation” in London.

  Of the five ships that sailed from England in November of 1817, only four arrived in Venezuela the following March. One ship, bearing the regiment of lancers, went down in a storm at sea, losing every soul that had signed up to serve in it. By the time the other four were sailing up the Orinoco toward Guayana, the troops were much depleted, having succumbed to malaria or typhus or internecine violence, or the temptation to jump ship along the way. Of the more than eight hundred men who had started out in full uniform and high hopes, only 150 set foot in Angostura. They hadn’t been such seasoned veterans, after all. They were adventurers, dreamers, in search of the fabled land of El Dorado. None had actually shown proof of service to López Méndez, and, as it turned out, Gustavus Hippisley, who had reinvented himself as the commanding colonel of the 1st Venezuelan Hussars, had been a mere lieutenant before he applied. Although there were many—the intrepid Irish Colonel James Rooke, for instance, or Daniel O’Leary, Bolívar’s aide-de-camp—who were serious and skilled soldiers, there were just as many who had never seen service at all.

  They came looking more like a theatrical troupe than rugged soldiers, arrayed in showy uniforms that were utterly useless, except as curiosities to sell. They were, more often than not—and to their superiors’ constant consternation—dead drunk. As one historian described it, the Irish, Scots, and English in Venezuela “fought with a rifle in one hand and a bottle in the other.” Alcohol saturated every aspect of their lives and they were plied with it generously at all times. “They drank while they were being recruited. They drank while they waited at port for their ship to be ready. They drank while the departure was delayed and they drank while they sailed.” Hippisley’s correspondence reveals that during the four-month journey, they were often too intoxicated to carry out simple tasks. Men would drink until the inevitable brawl, or they would fail to return from shore, or fall overboard and drown. In a communiqué sent just hours before they pulled into Bolívar’s camp in San Fernando, the commanding colonel worried that his men would make a bad impression on Bolívar, who—as it was well known—was not a heavy drinker. “Any man seen drunk, either on or off duty,” he warned, “would be punished as severely as the military code would allow.”

  The British arrived in Angostura in mid-April of 1818. By mid-May, they had made the hard trip upriver to San Fernando on the Apure. They couldn’t have arrived at a more difficult time for the republicans: Bolívar had just been defeated spectacularly by Morillo’s army at La Puerta; and, only recently, the attempt had been made on his life. When the British officers stepped off their canoes in San Fernando, Bolívar was sick, nursing his suppurating lesions. They laid eyes on an ill-humored little man—impatient, in pain. He welcomed them as cordially as he could, but understandably, he was distracted; he gave confusing orders, was taken aback by the colonel’s immediate demands for pay. It wasn’t until he had returned to Angostura, his spirit renewed, his energies invigorated, that he saw them for what they were. He quickly identified the priggish buffoon Hippisley as an irritant to be removed. This was a man whose failures of judgment and rampant pretensions might have been comical if they hadn’t had such tragic consequences. Bolívar accepted his resignation, scolding him bitterly for his “ridiculous threats, which I despise.” He then jailed Colonel Henry C. Wilson for attempting to undermine his command with Páez. He allowed any of the foreigners appalled by the conditions of his post to leave without reprisals or recriminations. The ones who remained would prove to be an invaluable infusion of grit and dedication. Within a month, he would be sending for more. Within five years, fifty-three ships would bring more than six thousand volunteers from Britain and Ireland to serve in South America; 5,300 actually arrived. The ones who made it up the Orinoco to the plains quickly learned that making war in that faraway terrain was no easy way to earn money. Their contributions made a great difference to the revolution in that precise moment in history. Bolívar was convinced of it. He was known to say that the real Liberator of Spanish America was his recruiting agent in London, Luis López Méndez.

  IN AUGUST OF 1818, BOLÍVAR learned that his nephew Leandro Palacios, who was trying to raise guns and men in the Caribbean, had finally located Pepita Machado. His mistress had not returned to Caracas, as gossip had it, but had remained with her mother and sister in the bustling port of St. Thomas, making arrangements for their return. It had been almost two years since Bolívar had laid eyes on her, and he was eager to see her again. But there were questions: Why had she contemplated going back to Caracas? Was she trying to give fuel to his enemies? Had she taken up with another man? “People are saying a million things that strike me as preposterous rumors,” he wrote Leandro, “the doubts they arouse in me are making me truly cross.” In his next missive, he enclosed a letter for Pepita, entreating her to come. As spring appeared and Bolívar busily planned a major offensive in New Granada, good news arrived from Leandro. Pepita and her family had just boarded a ship for the long journey to Angostura.

  Bolívar was delighted. He assumed that Pepita would reach him in time to accompany h
im on the long march overland, as she had done so often before. But it was not to be. Before she could reach Angostura—before summer had turned the Orinoco into a torrid cauldron—his war plans had called him to move west again.

  Imagine, if you will, the drama inherent in this narrative: the clear assumption that his lover would join him on the battlefield; the vision he had of her at his side. Certainly, she had been there for many pivotal moments. She had been present at the end of the Admirable Campaign, glancing back from a cluster of girls as they ushered him to glory. She had been with him during the harrowing evacuation of Caracas, as the two had braved wind and rain to flee Boves. She had joined him on his triumphant campaign from Haiti, forcing an entire expedition to drop anchor while they consummated a happy reunion. And she had been there to witness his flight from Ocumare, when the revolution had seemed irretrievably lost. He hadn’t seen her since that disastrous retreat—since the day he had deposited her hastily on the island of St. Thomas.

  After Leandro’s letter announcing her approach, Pepita’s name floats like a wayward wisp into the neverland of legend. History has a poor record of her. But she was less legend than real: a feisty, headstrong, flesh-and-blood woman who was loved by Bolívar and emphatically disliked by his men. It is said that she tried to follow him into battle, but became too ill to travel. Some claim she died along the way. It is argued just as feverishly that she perished of tuberculosis in the town of San Rafael, a mere seventy-five miles into the Orinoco, and never made it to Angostura. Or that she died in Achaguas, which would mean that not only did she reach Angostura successfully, she traveled three hundred miles more, past San Fernando, into the wilderness in his pursuit. We will probably never know what truly happened. What is sure is that Bolívar carried the hope of her pending arrival through the end of that busy year and into the next, as he made sorties, planned a war, organized congress, and solidified the republic.