“Esteemed sir: Liberty is the watchword of our times, in all continents. As Spaniards, in a land which has been ours immemorially, we have aspirations like your own. Our purpose is to tell you, always with the respect due to a distinguished compatriot, how we have fared under your British patrons since the British conquest of our island. Picton, the first British military governor, who is now in London expiating his crimes, sought simply to cut off the Spanish head. He expelled nearly all Spaniards of culture and breeding and professional attainment. You will not hear from your convivial host, Hislop, how he has dealt with the peon remnant of your compatriots, the keepers of grog-shops, the boatmen and huntsmen, the charcoal-burners, the hawkers of tallow and dried horse-meat, simple people like those you surely would remember from your childhood, people who do not know fine words and in their current humiliations are protected only by their faith and pride. Hislop—who in his craven way has not dared to touch the French of family, holding their very Negroes inviolate, exempt even from the corvée—has made militia service compulsory for all Spaniards. This entails a charge of one hundred dollars for uniform and equipment. Hislop himself has fixed this charge. Very few of our peons can pay this sum, so most will have to leave the island or take to the high woods, abandoning in either case what little property they have to Hislop’s Treasury. So, in less than ten years of British rule, we have become runaways and outlaws in our own land, and our language is judged to be a servant’s language.
“And now you come among us. On both sides of the Gulf we have got to know the prospectuses of your London sponsors, Turnbull and Forbes. They offer many desirable modern manufactures at a fair price, but it cannot be a surprise to you if in the eyes of some of us you appear less a liberator and a lover of freedom than a Caracas man who has remained true to his origins, and has returned as the factor of a British commercial enterprise that seeks to reduce the people of the continent to peonage, as has happened to people in large parts of Asia, and as has happened here.
“Since the British conquest you and Picton between you have used the language of liberty and revolution to seduce many good people away from the fear of God, the sentiments of humanity, and the no less sacred duties of religion and society. You have lured these people to this island, your base for subversion, and you have kept them here like caged wild animals, to be released at your whim on an innocent populace. These misguided people have been ready to give everything to you and your cause. You have given them nothing. Your revolution, because it is baseless and finds no echo in the souls of good men, because it has degenerated into a personal enterprise and is without nobility, has never come. And when these proud Spanish spirits, recognizing their error, have rebelled against their betrayal by you and Picton, ways have been found of silencing them. Think of Juan Mansanares, for some time so loud and boastful in the grog-shops of this town, and flush with English money, then mysteriously dead at the age of thirty-six; old Manuel Guai, at first hidden away by Picton, then cruelly poisoned with pills of opium mixed with crushed glass; his friend José España, driven by his despair back across the Gulf, betrayed in his own hearth, beheaded, his fair body quartered, his head displayed in an iron cage at the Caracas Gate of the port of La Guaira; Andrés de España, languishing for years in the infamous jail here; Juan Caro and Antonio Vallecilla, both dead, their graves unknown. Think of these men, and all the others whose life and passion you and Picton ate away month by month and year by year, and wonder that you felt so little trepidation at setting foot on this bloodstained soil. Wonder that you never thought that your fate might be like theirs, and that this usurped island might also become your prison and grave.
“Whatever encouragement Hislop gives, his word is worthless. He is a soldier; his honour lies in obedience. He will feast you today; he is famous as a good host. He will turn his back on you tomorrow, if he is required to do that. You may discover, as we have done, that he has claws. Justice approaches for the fifty-eight men you abandoned off the coast. Justice approaches for you too. You are more alone and unprotected here, in what used to be your homeland, than you ever were in London. Six copies have been made of this letter. At least one will get to you, and you will think of TUPAC AMARU.”
Hislop said, “General, General. I shouldn’t have shown you the letter on your first day. It has unsettled you.”
“It has, I know Spanish hate, but it’s always a shock whenever I am reintroduced to it. This is a letter of hate. You were talking earlier of the hatred the people here got you to feel for the free man of colour whose ears they wanted to cut off. They made you look at him. They told you he believed in his own powers. They showed you hell in his eyes. They made you feel you didn’t have just to punish the man, you had to destroy what was inside him. Spanish hatred is like that. It’s never far away, and it’s mixed up with ideas of faith and truth and retribution. As a punisher you’re in the right. You’re in the place of God.
“I know about this hate because it’s in me too, after all these years. I have dealt in it myself, and I know that what I’ve done is partly responsible for this letter. Hate against hate. I’ve said things about Spain and the Spaniards I shouldn’t have said. I said foolish things, wounding things. I know how to wound them. When I left Caracas in 1771 Spain was the centre of the world for me. History, culture, elegance. The United States didn’t exist—the American colonies were poorer than we were—and the French Revolution was twenty years away. I’m ashamed to tell you how much money I spent on clothes in my first month in Cadiz. It was some years before I saw that the ideas I had had about Spain and its position in the world were exaggerated. When I deserted from the Spanish service and went to the United States in 1783, at the end of the war, I found for the first time I could say things about Spain that I had grown to feel. And it actually did me no harm. I saw that. And then there was the execution of the second Tupac Amaru. That affected me more than the Americans I was with. I began to say things I shouldn’t have said. The president of Yale rebuked me one evening. He said the Spaniards had a higher regard for law than I allowed. I said I knew about Spanish legalism: I had graduated in law from the University of Mexico. I made that up on the spur of the moment. It came out very easily, and it silenced him.
“It was much worse when I went to Russia. I felt I was so far away that it didn’t matter what I said about Spain or myself. I made full use of the freedom, I should tell you. And the empress and her nobles were so interested, so protective. I was dazzled. I felt it was what I was born for. I had never felt so safe. I said things about Spain to please them, dreadful things about the Inquisition and superstition and Spanish ignorance and degeneracy, dreadful things about the Spanish king and his son, the Prince of Asturias.
“I was in demand. One night at a gathering in St. Petersburg a fine gentleman I hadn’t met, as soon as he caught sight of me, came right across the room towards me. I smiled and bowed, getting ready for his Russian French, expecting him to be hampered by the language but friendly and interested and as anxious to invite me to his house as so many of the other Russian noblemen I had met. It wasn’t French that came out of this fine gentleman’s mouth, but Spanish, the Spanish of Spain, spoken in a tone and with the forms you would use with a servant. He was the Spanish chargé d’affaires, Macanaz. He wanted me to produce—there and then, almost—the Spanish patents which made me a colonel and a count. That was my style in Russia. It did no one any harm, and it gave the Russians pleasure. I was staggered by his contempt. It was the contempt of the well-born Spaniard from Spain for the South American. I felt shabby, caught out. It was like being pushed back to the Caracas of twenty years before. I was about to say that I had served for some time in the Princess Regiment and had retired from the service as a colonel. But at the last moment I changed my mind, and the crudest street-corner obscenities of Caracas came out of my mouth. In any other setting he would have had to draw his sword. But in that room he had to digest the insult. He didn’t forget, of course. He wrote to the ambassador, and
the ambassador wrote around to other people about me. I thought about that incident quite recently, when the Bee and the Bacchus were cut off. It was very strange. I was leading an invasion, something I had talked about for years, and then with the memory of that far-away St. Petersburg room I thought, ‘And now you’ve put yourself within their reach.’ ”
Hislop said, “What will happen to those men?”
“No question. The Spaniards will treat it very seriously. The officers, Donohue and Powell and the others, will be executed. The men will all be imprisoned. I always told them. Tell me—this is about something in the letter—why do you think all the agents I sent out here failed me, or went bad? You know about Bernard. I know about the others.”
“They got tired of waiting. They lost faith. Like Picton. In spite of what people say about him, he didn’t come here to buy estates. He never wanted to be a planter. He is a military man, and he came here hoping for action. They promised big things in South America, but the alliances kept changing in Europe, and the politics kept changing in London. The invasion was postponed and postponed. You can’t ask a man to wait and wait. Not everyone has your steadfastness, General.”
“Steadfastness. I don’t know. Perhaps there has never been an alternative. No second possibility ever came up. No one has ever offered me a second idea.”
“No one would ever think of doing that, General.”
“There was a time when I used to talk against Picton in London. I thought he was destroying my agents and destroying the revolutionaries from across the Gulf. I was wrong. Old Manuel Gual and the others who were killed here were killed by a Venezuelan I now know about; Caracas recruited him and gave him the famous glass pills. The one man of mine Picton expelled and sent back to Europe turned out to be a fraud. My bad judgement again. The man could write me a witty letter about the unreliable revolutionaries of France, and then, almost on the same day, write a tearful letter to the king of Spain, begging to be forgiven. Picton expelled him almost as soon as he saw him. I was enraged when I heard, but he did me a service there.
“Actually there was another reason why I talked against Picton. But I couldn’t admit it to anyone. In 1798, without knowing anything about me or my past or all the work I had done for the revolution, he wrote to London about me. He said they might find me useful, but I shouldn’t be told too much. The actual words were much worse. I can’t forget them. They were reported back to me by my friend Rutherfurd. Those words did me much harm with the ministers. I know them by heart. ‘There is a native of Caracas now in London who might be useful on this occasion, not that he possesses a great local knowledge, or has any considerable connection, being the son of a shopkeeper of Caracas …’ This was nearly thirty years after I had left home. I had done so much, established my cause and my character, taken so many risks. He had ignored all that. And he himself had done nothing.”
Hislop said, “He was only repeating what the Caracas people had put in his way, to damage you.”
“I know that. I knew it then. And things like that don’t worry me at all now. But I couldn’t forgive him then. I always talked against him. So much so that when the ministers in London decided to replace him by commissioners and to have him investigated, the news was brought to me as good news, and I was asked to send out one of my own people with the new commissioners. I thought I should send the most reliable man I knew, to re-establish my credit generally. I couldn’t have chosen anyone worse. Bernard, you know, came out and never wrote me a word. This man wrote all the time. His name was Pedro Vargas. Every two or three weeks, when the mail ships arrived from Barbados or the Leeward Islands station, the people in Whitehall would send me bundles of letters from the first commissioner’s office, from my man Pedro Vargas. Every word was false. I should have spotted it. The language was rhetorical, in the Spanish manifesto style. Vargas was a master of that. I was a messiah, a redeemer. Everyone in Venezuela and New Granada was waiting for me, ready to give their lives and property to the cause.
“One letter made me lose my head. He said that he was writing in great excitement. For various reasons the moment for action had absolutely come. We shouldn’t wait. If necessary the two of us alone should start the revolution. Once we landed, at any spot on the coast, people would flock to our banner. I took the letter to ministers. I showed them what Commissioner Vargas—giving him this false title—had written. I nearly caught myself out, with that exaggeration of the dignity of Pedro Vargas. I told the ministers I would be willing to forego the allowance I had from the British government if they would give me a ship and equipment and allow me to go to Trinidad and raise a force from among the black troops there. Fortunately they refused. I don’t know whether othey knew more about Vargas than I did. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had turned up here and asked for black troops to invade the continent? You hardly have enough men to defend this little town. And the planters wouldn’t have given me their Negroes. I would have had to go back to London and ask them to give me my allowance again.
“I later discovered that Vargas hadn’t even embroidered some little incident or some piece of local gossip. He had written that letter just to give a little variety to his reports. He had attached himself to the suite of the first commissioner as a kind of secretary and assessor in Spanish law. He would sit in the first commissioner’s house—this very house—and every few days write me a fairy story. He was getting an allowance from me, ten shillings a day. He was getting a good deal more from the first commissioner. He had been a revolutionary at one time. He had been part of a conspiracy in New Granada and had exposed himself to real danger and had suffered. But what mattered to him now was getting that regular money from the first commissioner.”
Hislop said, “It was Vargas’s evidence that condemned Picton at the trial in February. I’ve read the transcript. Vargas was called as the Spanish legal expert. He was the only man in England—if you would believe it—who had the relevant Spanish lawbooks. He said that there were very old Spanish laws that permitted torture, but no modern ones. And that was it. Strange that all the bigger charges of hanging and burning should have been thrown out, and this case of petty theft should have brought Picton down. Signing the order that the very respectable magistrate brought him for the torture of the young mulatto girl. And Picton is tried, and the magistrate is untouched. And very strange that Picton should have been ruined by this man you sent here who let you down. He has opened up the possibility of all those charges against me now. The mulatto and the love potion, the very first week I came here. Every night in my head I work out my defence in the Court of King’s Bench. I wonder who I’m going to call as a witness, and how I’m going to prove that the Spaniards do torture. And then I think it’s a waste of my life, all this worrying about something I had almost nothing to do with.”
Miranda said, “Even when I was enraged by Picton, I didn’t want him brought down like this. He would despise the lie and he would despise us for it. I certainly didn’t want him brought down all these years later by someone like Pedro Vargas.”
“MY DEAR Sally, all goes well. You see, you are too nervous. With Hislop’s help we have brought the Leander Americans round. There are still days when they get drunk and make a racket, but discipline gets better and better. We drill them and the French every day at the local barracks. Count Loppinot de Lafresillière refused absolutely to serve under an American, and we have decided it is better to keep the two groups apart. This time we will make a little armada of ten ships. The British are helping unofficially with the ships, and I can gauge the strength of my support in London from the attitude of people like Admiral Cochrane and General Maitland and Hislop here. These men court me. I can see regard in their faces. They still think I am the man who can do things for them, and I thank God for that. Hislop thinks I can give him a good job, and Maitland and Cochrane (his immense greed makes him easy to manage) expect me in due course to grant them vast estates on the continent.
“It is wrong, querida,
for you to think of these men as snakes in the grass. When I was young I used to complain in that way. I was wrong. You must not encourage Leander and Francisco to expect more from men than they should expect. You must not talk to them about snakes in the grass. These men, Cochrane, Maitland, Hislop, owe me no loyalty. A mutual interest draws us together. When there is no interest, we will pull apart. There will be no immorality or disloyalty in pulling apart. If you don’t start thinking like that, querida, you will eat yourself up. You will be in a perpetual moral frenzy in which you will condemn everybody except yourself, and people would start wondering what it is about you they don’t like. It is something I’ve talked to you about. I think it is most noticeable in your attitude to certain members of your family.
“As for Turnbull, he is my oldest friend. We met more than thirty years ago in Gibraltar, when he was a young factor and I was a captain, and we have been friends ever since. Whatever happens now, he will have regard for me afterwards, and I for him. I will not find people like Turnbull and Rutherfurd again. The time for that kind of friendship is past. If Turnbull gets impatient with me, I get impatient with myself. A friend doesn’t have to watch his words always. Don’t be suspicious of him. Don’t be unhappy about him. I write this only because, as you know, I am worried about your nerves.
“My serial letter, or my letter-journal, never stops. I speak to you constantly in my mind. I report everything to you, sometimes very small things, because I love your love. You have almost become my waking mind. But not everything I speak I will write.
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