LIIIA. D. 1819SIMON BOLIVAR
Onceat the stilted court of Spain young Ferdinand, Prince of the Asturias, had the condescension to play at tennis with a mere colonial; and the bounder won.
Long afterward, when Don Ferdinand was king, the colonial challenged him to another ball game, one played with cannon-balls. This time the stake was the Spanish American empire, but Ferdinand played Bolivar, and again the bounder won.
“Now tell me,” a lady said once, “what animal reminds one most of the Señor Bolivar?”
And Bolivar thought he heard some one say “monkey,” whereat he flew into an awful passion, until the offender claimed that the word was “sparrow.” He stood five feet six inches, with a bird-like quickness, and a puckered face with an odd tang of monkey. Rich, lavish, gaudy, talking mock heroics, vain as a peacock, always on the strut unless he was on the run, there is no more pathetically funny figure in history than tragical Bolivar; who heard liberty, as he thought, knocking at the door of South America, and opened—to let in chaos.
“I don’t know,” drawled a Spaniard of that time, “to what class of beasts these South Americans belong.”
They were dogs, these Spanish colonials, treated as dogs, behaving as dogs. When they wanted a university Spain said they were only provided by Providence to labor in the mines. If they had opinions the Inquisition cured them of their errors. They were not allowed to hold any office or learn the arts of war and government. Spain sent officials to ease them of their surplus cash, and keep them out of mischief. Thanks to Spain they were no more fit for public affairs than a lot of Bengali baboos.
They were loyal as beaten dogs until Napoleon stole the Spanish crown for brother Joseph, and French armies promenaded all over Spain closely pursued by the British. There was no Spain left to love, but the colonials were not Napoleon’s dogs. Napoleon’s envoys to Venezuela were nearly torn to pieces before they escaped to sea, where a little British frigate came and gobbled them up. The sea belonged to the British, and so the colonials sent ambassadors, Bolivar and another gentleman, to King George. Please would he help them to gain their liberty? George had just chased Napoleon out of Spain, and said he would do his best with his allies, the Spaniards.
In London Bolivar unearthed a countryman who loved liberty and had fought for Napoleon, a real professional soldier. General Miranda was able and willing to lead the armies of freedom, until he actually saw the Venezuelan troops. Then he shied hard. He really must draw the line somewhere.Yes, he would take command of the rabble on one condition, that he got rid of Bolivar. To get away from Bolivar he would go anywhere and do anything. So he led his rabble and found them stout fighters, and drove the Spaniards out of the central provinces.
The politicians were sitting down to draft the first of many comic-opera constitutions when an awful sound, louder than any thunder, swept out of the eastern Andes, the earth rolled like a sea in a storm, and the five cities of the new republic crashed down in heaps of ruin. The barracks buried the garrisons, the marching troops were totally destroyed, the politicians were killed, and in all one hundred twenty thousand people perished. The only thing left standing in one church was a pillar bearing the arms of Spain; the only districts not wrecked were those still loyal to the Spanish government. The clergy pointed the moral, the ruined people repented their rebellion, and the Spanish forces took heart and closed in from every side upon the lost republic. Simon Bolivar generously surrendered General Miranda in chains to the victorious Spaniards.
So far one sees only, as poor Miranda did, that this man was a sickening cad. But he was something more. He stuck to the cause for which he had given his life, joined the rebels in what is now Colombia, was given a small garrison command and ordered to stay in his fort. In defiance of orders, he swept the Spaniards out of the Magdalena Valley, raised a large force, liberated the country, then marched into Venezuela, defeated the Spanish forces in a score of brilliant actions, and was proclaimed liberator with absolute power in both Colombia and Venezuela.One begins to marvel at this heroic leader until the cad looms out. “Spaniards and Canary islanders!” he wrote, “reckon on death even if you are neutral, unless you will work actively for the liberty of America. Americans! count on life even if you are culpable.”
Bolivar’s pet hobbies were three in number: Resigning his job as liberator; writing proclamations; committing massacres. “I order you,” he wrote to the governor of La Guayra, “to shoot all the prisoners in those dungeons, andin the hospital, without any exception whatever.”
So the prisoners of war were set to work building a funeral pyre. When this was ready eight hundred of them were brought up in batches, butchered with axes, bayonets and knives, and their bodies thrown on the flames. Meanwhile Bolivar, in his office, refreshed himself by writing a proclamation to denounce the atrocities of the Spaniards.
Southward of the Orinoco River there are vast level prairies called Llanos, a cattle country, handled by wild horsemen known as the Llaneros. In Bolivar’s time their leader called himself Boves, and he had as second in command Morales. Boves said that Morales was “atrocious.” Morales said that “Boves was a man of merit, but too blood-thirsty.” The Spaniards called their command “The Infernal Division.” At first they fought for the Revolution, afterward for Spain, but they were really quite impartial and spared neither age nor sex. This was the “Spanish” army which swept away the second Venezuelan republic, slaughtering the whole population save some few poor starving camps of fugitives.Then Boves reported to the Spanish general, “I have recovered the arms, ammunition, and the honor of the Spanish flag, which your excellency lost at Carabobo.”
From this time onward the situation was rather like a dog fight, with the republican dog somewhere underneath in the middle. At times Bolivar ran like a rabbit, at times he was granted a triumph, but whenever he had time to come up and breathe he fired off volleys of proclamations. In sixteen years a painstaking Colombian counted six hundred ninety-six battles, which makes an average of one every ninth day, not to mention massacres; but for all his puny body and feeble health Bolivar was always to be found in the very thick of the scrimmage.
Europe had entered on the peace of Waterloo, but the ghouls who stripped the dead after Napoleon’s battles had uniforms to sell which went to clothe the fantastic mobs, republican and royalist, who drenched all Spanish America with blood. There were soldiers, too, whose trade of war was at an end in Europe, who gladly listened to Bolivar’s agents, who offered gorgeous uniforms and promised splendid wages—never paid—and who came to join in the war for “liberty.” Three hundred Germans and nearly six thousand British veterans joined Bolivar’s colors to fight for the freedom of America, and nearly all of them perished in battle or by disease. Bolivar was never without British officers, preferred British troops to all others, and in his later years really earned the loyal love they gave him, while they taught the liberator how to behave like a white man.
It was in 1819 that Bolivar led a force of two thousandfive hundred men across a flooded prairie. For a week they were up to their knees, at times to their necks in water under a tropic deluge of rain, swimming a dozen rivers beset by alligators. The climate and starvation bore very heavily upon the British troops. Beyond the flood they climbed the eastern Andes and crossed the Paramo at a height of thirteen thousand feet, swept by an icy wind in blinding fog—hard going for Venezuelans.
An Irishman, Colonel Rook, commanded the British contingent. “All,” he reported, “was quite well with his corps, which had had quite a pleasant march” through the awful gorges and over the freezing Paramo. A Venezuelan officer remarked here that one-fourth of the men had perished.
“It was true,” said Rook, “but it really was a very good thing, for the men who had dropped out were all the wastrels and weaklings of the force.”
Great was the astonishment of the royalists when Bolivar dropped on them out of the clouds, and in the battle of Boyacá they were put to rout. Next day Colonel Rook had his arm cut off by the surgeons, chaffing them about the beautiful limb he was losing. He died of the operation, but the British legion went on from victory to victory, melting away like snow until at the end negroes and Indians filled its illustrious companies. Colombia, Venezuela and Equador, Peru and Bolivia were freed from the Spanish yoke and, in the main, released by Bolivar’s tireless, unfailing and undaunted courage. But they could not stand his braggart proclamations, would not have him or any man for master, began a series of squabbles and revolutions that have lasted eversince, and proved themselves unfit for the freedom Bolivar gave. He knew at the end that he had given his life for a myth. On the eighth December, 1830, he dictated his final proclamation and on the tenth received the last rites of the church, being still his old braggart self. “Colombians! my last wishes are for the welfare of the fatherland. If my death contributes to the cessation of party strife, and to the consolidation of the Union, I shall descend in peace to the grave.” On the seventeenth his troubled spirit passed.