“The Swede says he can’t pay the jail fees, and he is being kept on bread and water. He appeals to me as a friend of liberty to rescue him. That is easy enough to do. But his letter also makes me think of the day thirty-six years ago when I went aboard the Swedish frigate, the Prins Frederik, at La Guaira, and for the first time felt myself a free man. I had to get so many permits and certificates, from the Church and others, before I was allowed to leave Venezuela. There had been months of little worries and setbacks, even with my father’s influence, and I didn’t feel I was leaving until I was actually aboard the Prins Frederik. I can go back easily to that moment now: the hills behind the little town of La Guaira were like the hills I see here, and I can give this ever present wine-vat smell of Bernard’s estate house to the eight fanegas of cocoa beans in the frigate’s hold.
“And now, and now, Sally, after all these months, letters come from you and others that tell me plainly what I have always felt in my bones: that I have been wasting my time here. I used to be told that it was half the battle to be here, on the spot, and that I had to be patient. Now you write, and Rutherfurd writes, and Turnbull writes, and a few other people write as well, that I should get back to London as soon as possible. Things have changed, ideas have grown. An immense military action with a great commander is being planned, to seize the South American continent before the French do. This is the very idea I have been putting to British ministers these past few years. It has been taken up now, and I am so far away. All the letters agree—and they are already two months old—that if I am not in London at this stage of the discussions there may be no room for me in what is finally decided.
“So I stand to lose the fruit of a life’s dedication. Oh, Sally. I have been dwindling here; I have shown myself too often to these people. I have been dwindling in London as well; I haven’t shown myself to people there. You might think that a man carries his personality, his soul, within him. But here—like a man in prison, I suppose—I have grown to feel removed from both the world and myself. I have to discover myself again. It may take me time to be what I was, and I may discover that I have changed.
“Today Bernard, as secretary of the Council, brought back news from Hislop for Mister Miranda. Hislop says he is unwilling to give Mr. Miranda a passport. He thinks that to do so might expose him to criticism and perhaps to legal action because of Mr. Miranda’s dispute with the Leander men, who claim their wages, and the master of the Trimmer, who claims his fee for the hire of his sloop. He says also that there is a directive from Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, that nothing that can be construed as official British support is to be offered Mr. Miranda.
“Bernard said, ‘That’s what he has to say. That’s what will go on the record. But he really wants to talk to you. He has an idea that something is afoot in London and he wants to know what you can do for him. I think you should go and see him. He can’t actually detain you here, but he can delay you for many months. A letter to London for advice—six weeks. Another six weeks for a reply. A further six weeks for a letter seeking certain clarifications, and so on. Time is valuable to you. He can help there, and perhaps you can think of something to offer him.’
“This was Bernard’s last service to me, making it easy for me to deal with Hislop. I began to feel I was leaving, and I began to feel I was escaping, and lucky, as I had felt thirty-six years before when I had got all my permits and certificates and could go aboard the Prins Frederik at La Guaira.
“Bernard, whom I had sent here some years before, when he was the dependant and I the patron, was staying. He would never leave. He had nowhere else to go. I felt for him then all that I had felt when I had seen him in his London silk at Government House. I felt afresh all his pathos and anxiety, and the fragility of the life he had made for himself with his wife.
“We were standing after dinner in the verandah, looking across the narrow valley. This was what Bernard would always see or, if his circumstances changed, grieve for.
“His hand was resting on the banister of the verandah. I put my hand on his and told him, ‘I don’t know what would have happened to me here if you hadn’t come to see me that day a year ago at Government House.’
“He looked at me, considered me. Tears came to his eyes. He said, ‘I hope it goes well for you, General. I am sure it will.’
“Hislop will not refuse what I offer, Sally. I have something quite important to offer him. The ways of the world are returning to me already, and Leander might see his father even before you read this letter.”
WHERE THERE had been Africans in the grounds, speaking an African language, there were now Chinese. They were small, shrunken men with bony faces. They wore conical straw hats and long black pigtails. Their sun-browned arms were stringy and looked very thin in the very wide short sleeves of their cream-coloured tunics. Their wide, slack pants, in material of the same colour, came down to just below the knees. They looked very old; their eyes looked pulpy and vulnerable.
Some minutes after the servant had taken in Miranda’s name, Hislop came out to the verandah. And it was there, standing, that they talked. The rain and sun of a year had further darkened the pine floorboards, eaten away a little more of the soft wood between the ridges of the hard wood.
Hislop said, “I’ve got your letter, Mr. Miranda, but you will understand that my position is not easy. Be’nard will have told you about Lord Castlereagh’s directive.”
Miranda said, “The directives of ministers are variable, because they do not always remain pertinent. Lord Castlereagh sent his congratulations about the way you dealt with the slave conspiracy. But that has not prevented the free people of colour agitating this past year about one of their number whose ears were cut off. That is potentially a serious matter, and I think you will find that if it goes much further, Lord Castlereagh will distance himself from the action. In fact, I want to talk to you about legal matters. What I have to say will interest you.”
“That was what you said in your letter.”
“I campaigned against Picton when he was governor here, and to some extent I am responsible for his dismissal. Afterwards I sent out an agent here, Pedro Vargas. He didn’t attend to his obligations to me. The reports he sent me were dangerous lies and nonsense. He attached himself to the commissioner who was investigating Picton’s rule. He was described as an assessor in Spanish law and as such he became one of Picton’s accusers. His evidence at the trial condemned Picton. He said that Spanish law didn’t permit the torture of free men. This is nonsense, as we all know. But Vargas was the only man in London with a copy of the relevant Spanish lawbooks, and in a time of a great war it wasn’t easy to get another expert in Spanish law.”
Hislop said, “I’ve spent many nights wondering how I could prove in a London court that the Spanish practise torture.”
“Vargas was a brave man at one time. He took part in a dangerous conspiracy in New Granada. He was imprisoned and tortured. Somehow afterwards he made his way to England. This was in 1799. He turned to me for help when he arrived. He wrote me a long letter full of circumstantial details of his torture. This letter, if produced in a court of law, will destroy the evidence he gave at the Picton trial. The case against Picton will disappear. And so will the case the free people of colour are preparing against you about the man of colour who used a love potion and was tortured by Vallot.”
“You never told me this. We sat in this house a year ago and talked about this matter.”
“I had forgotten. I was reminded of it only a few weeks ago when a sailor wrote me from the jail here. I began to think in my idleness of all the appeals and the begging letters that had been sent me. I don’t think I remember the names of those people. I’ve already forgotten the name of the Swede. And I don’t think that, apart from the details of the torture, the Vargas letter could have been much good. It would have been full of rhetoric, like the nonsense he wrote me from here. There is another reason. All of us who are political exiles and have dealings with the gov
ernment have secret names that are used in correspondence. Vargas’s secret name was Oribe.’ That was how he wrote me, and that was how I remembered it. My secret name, as you know, is Mr. George Martin.”
“This letter is among your papers in London?”
“The papers of thirty-five years. They are in thirty cardboard boxes and two leather portfolios. I have a rough idea where to look. It would be impossible for anyone else to find. The Picton appeal is coming up soon.”
“It might be useful for you to be there beforehand.”
“Important things are preparing, General. A big force, and General Wellesley. I think you have an idea. If I don’t get to London in time, there may be no room for me in the plans now being made. And there may be no need for me to have a staff. If I were to have a staff, I would need someone who has a knowledge of Spanish and would know how to deal with British military people at the highest level. I know very well it’s not been a bed of roses for you here.”
“General.”
“As far as the Spanish government is concerned, they need only know that I am leaving this place, abandoning my enterprise, leaving my ship behind, my supplies, and going back to London. Lord Castlereagh will not be embarrassed in any way. And success, you know, General, wipes out certain things. Of course, since I am going back to London I have no further need of my ship. The ship can be sold or in some way disposed of. There is solid value there. I will leave you as my agent. You will do me that service. I am sure that, between you and Briarly and the master of the Trimmer and the disgruntled Americans of the Leander, certain matters can be adjusted.”
“Something can be done. About Briarly, I think I should tell you that I sent him to the jail for a while.”
“Did you, did you?”
“He complained from the jail about the stench and the filth. I handled his complaint with perfect correctness. I passed it to the provost-marshal. The jail is his responsibility. He collects a portion of the jail fees. The provost-marshal said the jail was as clean as a jail could be kept. It was washed down every day. I passed that message back to Briarly in the jail. I don’t think it did him any harm. He had really become quite impossible. He seized the ship that brought the Chinese from Calcutta. It’s an East India Company ship, but he claimed there had been some irregularity. We are still wrangling about that. Nobody’s sure who’s paying for the ship and the Chinese. Our Treasury here is quite empty. We don’t know whether we are supposed to be paying the Company, or the London government is paying. Until that is cleared up we don’t have a ship to send the Chinese back. They didn’t work out. I feel that when the East India Company people in Calcutta were told by London to send Chinese to us, they just went out and emptied the first opium houses they found. I don’t believe these people ever planted a tree in Calcutta or grew a vegetable or hoed a weed. They are city people. And nobody in London or Calcutta thought about women. These Chinese wouldn’t look at Negro women. And no free mulatto woman would look at the Chinese. So they have just gone mad over the year they’ve been here. They’ve been here for as long as you, General. They hate being stared at, and there are still people who want to come and look at them. They’ve been keeping going only on the opium. Many of them have died. I want to send the rest back as soon as possible.”
“A six or seven months’ journey back. The same time to come over. A year or more here. I wonder what memories the survivors will take back to Calcutta of this part of their lives. Will they know where they’ve been? How they stare!”
“They’ve gathered to look at you. I think it’s because of the long white pigtail you have. It’s unusual here. It’s longer than the Navy pigtail, and you are older than most Navy people. They probably think you are one of theirs, come to take them back home. A passport will be made out for you, General. The British Queen will be leaving for Tortola in the third week of October. That gives you enough time to order your affairs here. In Tortola you will join the convoy for England. That will leave in mid-November. The flagship will be the Alexandra. I think they will find a cabin for you. You will be in London before the end of the year.”
The Chinese looked silently at the two men as they talked, and when Miranda began to go down the verandah steps they came a little nearer to consider him.
Miranda said, “Will anyone in Calcutta believe them when they tell this story? Will they believe it themselves, after a while?”
“General. The active years that remain to me are few. This makes them all the more important to me. My principal aim is, of course, to be creditably employed, but naturally without prejudice to my private interests. General, I think we should understand one another. Service with you will be a privilege, but I should find it hard to accept any rank lower than major-general. It is not from vainglory, I assure you. It is more for the sake of others. I have certain obligations, and I will not be able with a full heart, at this stage of a life with more than its share of hardships and cheated hopes, to accept anything less than I have said.”
“General, you need say nothing more.”
WE JUMP six years. Venezuela is in turmoil, a land of blood and revenge after three years of revolution, and Miranda is a prisoner of the Spaniards, in Morro Castle in Puerto Rico. He is waiting to make his last journey across the Atlantic, to Spain, to the dungeons of La Carraca in Cadiz. Cadiz was where the Prins Frederik took him in 1771. It was the first city he saw in Europe. It was where he bought his silk handkerchief and silk umbrella, and it will be where he will spend the last three years of his life, sometimes chained.
THERE HAD in the end been no major British invasion of Spanish South America. Such an invasion, though, was being seriously planned when Miranda went back to London from Trinidad. General Wellesley (who two years later became the Duke of Wellington) was assembling a large invasion force in Ireland. Miranda—as a South American who would have given legitimacy to the British action—would have had an important place in his army. But then, as so often with Miranda, plans had to be changed. Almost at the last minute the French occupied Spain; Spain all at once became an ally of Britain’s in the war against Napoleon; and the British army that should have gone to occupy Spanish South America went instead to the Iberian peninsula to fight a war of liberation.
Miranda was fifty-eight, white-haired. It might have seemed now that after all the years of waiting there was nothing left for him to do. But then, two years later, Venezuela declared its separation from Spain. The twenty-seven-year-old Simón Bolívar came to London to get help for his country, and Miranda went back to Venezuela with him.
He must have thought he was going back to a revolution that had been accomplished. He found a country split into all its racial and caste groups, a civil war beyond any one man’s managing, and far beyond his military skill. After twenty months the first phase of that war was over. The revolution had for the moment been defeated; in the jails revenge was being taken on republican prisoners; and Miranda—like a man who had run to meet the fate from which he had more than once escaped—was a prisoner himself, betrayed to the Spaniards, his old enemies, by the man who had called him out from London, and had gone to tea one day at Grafton Street.
He was kept for five months in the jail at La Guaira, from where the Prins Frederik had left in 1771. Then he was moved to the fortress of San Felipe in Puerto Cabello, where in 1806 ten of the officers of the Bacchus and the Bee, dressed in white gowns and caps, had been hanged and quartered and burnt with their uniforms and arms and Miranda’s own South American flag. Five months later he was taken to Puerto Rico, to Morro Castle, where thirteen men from the Bacchus and the Bee had for some time been imprisoned, loaded with twenty-five-pound chains, and given beds of stone and pillows of brick.
IT IS there now, while he is waiting to be transported to Spain, that Miranda is allowed visits by a Venezuelan, Andrés Level de Goda. Level is thirty-six, and a lawyer by profession. Thirty-eight years later, when most of these passions have turned to dust, and the reputation of Miranda has been all but e
rased, Level in his memoirs will provide the only witness (apart from official jail-book entries) of Miranda in captivity.
Level is of a creole landowning family, with (at least until the revolution) cocoa and sugar estates on the Venezuelan side of the Gulf. He is a royalist. He wants Venezuela to hold on to the Spanish connection. He thinks the revolution Miranda was called out to serve was started by local aristocrats—second-rate people, in his estimation—to settle personal grudges and to secure their own position, and had no popular support. A Venezuela set adrift from Spain will live through an unending civil war, Level thinks: the country is too full of factions and castes and hatreds.
Politically, Level and Miranda have been on opposing sides. But in Puerto Rico they are meeting in a kind of understanding. Miranda has been betrayed by the revolution and is now beyond politics. Level has been turned by the troubles in Venezuela and Spain into a wanderer with little money. He cannot for the time being go back to Venezuela: the revolution has caught alight again and he has been declared a proscribed person. In Puerto Rico he is dependent on the generosity of the captain-general, Meléndez, who is a friend. So both men, Miranda and Level, are also meeting in a kind of shared destitution.
On many afternoons Level goes to Morro Castle to sit with Miranda in his cell, and they talk while Miranda drinks his daily cup of tea. The head of Miranda’s special guard leaves the cell door open when the two men are together.
Level’s admiration for Miranda grows: the fluent speech, the authority, the voice, the physical presence of the old man, the knowledge of men and books and great events.
Meléndez, the captain-general, shows Miranda every regard. He has Miranda’s meals sent from a tavern outside. He even arranges for Miranda to get money (against funds in London) from an official on the British island of St. Martin, which is only a few hours’ sailing away.
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