A Way in the World (32 page)

The planters are refugees from Haiti and the other French-speaking islands to the north. The planters are not all white. There are many mulattoes and blacks among them, and they are known, in the caste language of the time, as “free people of colour”; they are not called Negroes. An unusually high proportion of the slaves in Trinidad are “new Negroes,” freshly imported from Africa.

The island now lives by and for these plantations, and away from them there is almost no life. Travel is controlled. There are no wanderers, no floating, free population. There is no place here for a metropolitan man like Miranda. There must have been times during the year when—waiting on developments, and at the mercy of the British government—he would have felt like a prisoner, and wondered whether he would ever get out, leave what had once been part of his native land, and go back to London, to his house and family.

After a long, idle year he does go back. This is where his story should have ended, with this escape from what had once been part of his native land. That would have been irony enough. But he isn’t allowed to go out on a dying fall. He is too famous, has been active for too long, has talked too much. Another fate has been prepared for him.

Three years later the real revolution in Venezuela is started by Bolívar and others. They call Miranda out from London. They think they need him. Miranda is the most famous South American or Spanish American of his time; he knows important people in England and the United States. The revolutionaries also believe they need Miranda’s military skill: the word among South Americans is that in military matters he
is second only to Napoleon. (For eleven years he had been a captain in the Spanish service in Spain, North Africa, and the West Indies. Fleetingly, before he deserted and went to the United States, he was a colonel. But when he got to France he encouraged the French to believe that he had been a general in the American War of Independence; and, in the early days of the French Revolution, he had served for seven months as a general in the revolutionary army, until he was arrested for incompetence.)

So, unexpectedly, after the rout and disgrace and idleness of three years before, there is this complete triumph for Miranda. He lands in Venezuela to a ready-made revolution (such as he has been predicting for twenty years), and is received ceremonially as its leader and hero. For a while everything goes well. The Venezuelan revolution is triumphant, and Miranda as general secures its victories—though his engagements are particularly bloody, and the revolutionary who talks about civil liberty turns out to have a brutal, too assertive side. This brutality is one of the things that make people question the revolution.

Miranda had left Venezuela when he was twenty-one, and in 1810–11 he had been away for nearly forty years. And just as in that time he had made himself over many times—becoming a lover of liberty among the Americans; a revolutionary among the French; a Mexican nobleman and a count among the grandees of the Russia of Catherine the Great; a ruler in exile among the British, a man who could open up a whole continent to British manufactures—so in his projections Venezuela and South America had been steadily adapted to the fantasies of late eighteenth-century European thinkers. The people of the continent deserved the best. Both whites and Indians were worthy of Plato’s republic. And then, in a further version of this fantasy, both whites and Indians somehow became Incas, as pure and as noble as the philosophers had judged such people to be.

But the Venezuela in which Miranda now finds himself
isn’t like that at all. Venezuela is more like the Trinidad Miranda was lucky to escape from three years before. Venezuela is a colony in the New World, with slave plantations, and it has all the divisions of that kind of place: Spaniards from Spain, who are the officials; a creole Spanish aristocracy; creole Spaniards who are not aristocracy; mulattoes; the Negroes of the plantations; the aboriginal Indians. This kind of place is held together only by a strong external authority. When that external authority goes, people can begin to feel they are sinking. Freedom for one group can mean slavery or oppression for another group.

So the Venezuelan revolution, as it progresses, deepens every racial and caste division in the country, encourages every kind of fear and jealousy; and the revolution begins to fail. The ordinary people of the country begin to go over to the other side, the side of old authority, and the reverences and law and religion they know.

Miranda appeals to the slaves to join him. They don’t listen; in fact, as the area controlled by the revolutionaries shrinks, the slaves of Barlovento rebel, and there is a moment when it seems they might capture the capital, Caracas. And now, to buy peace, or at any rate to buy time, some of the very men who had called Miranda out from London, to lead their revolution, decide to hand him to the Spaniards. They wake him up one night and march him to the dungeon of a coastal fort.

That is where it ends for Miranda: the fate he has feared ever since he deserted nearly thirty years before. This fear has grown through all his life as a revolutionary. He fears Spanish prisons as only a former Spanish officer can fear them; he fears the legal-religious cruelty and vengefulness of Spanish punishments as only a man who has dealt in these things himself can fear them. In the recent Venezuelan wars he has had men hanged; he has had heads spiked.

He is sixty-two now. He has four more years to live. All
these years will be spent in jail; some of the time he will be chained. He will never see London and his family again. He will move from the jail in Venezuela to the jail in Puerto Rico, to the dungeons of Cadiz. The dungeons of Cadiz are infamous. But when the captain-general of Puerto Rico, who handles Miranda with honour throughout, comes to tell him that orders have come for him to be taken to Cadiz, Miranda embraces the captain-general and thanks him. As though he is content at the end to lay aside the fantasies of thirty years—fantasies of an immense Spanish-American republic of Colombia stretching from the source of the Mississippi (all the land west of the river) down the length of the continent to Cape Horn, fantasies of Incas worthy of Plato’s republic, fantasies which (like Columbus’s ideas about the New World, and Raleigh’s) also contained a dream of a fabulous personal authority.

THROUGHOUT HIS
adult life Miranda was particular about his papers. He kept everything he considered important, sometimes even printed invitations. He did so at first as a traveller, one of the earliest South Americans out in the greater world; later he kept things out of a sense of history and personal destiny. If he isn’t well known now it isn’t only because he achieved little, and because the South American revolution doesn’t have the universal appeal of the three great revolutions—the American, the French, and the Haitian—that came earlier. It is also because on the day he was betrayed he was separated from his papers—the sixty-three leather-bound folio volumes he had brought out from England two years before—and the papers were lost for more than a century. When the papers were recovered the South American revolution had receded, its history had hardened, and, as with the corpses at Pompeii, where Miranda should have been there was a void.

For Venezuelans Miranda is the Precursor, the man before Bolívar. And when I first read about Miranda and began to look at his papers, I too, but in my own way, thought of him as a precursor. I saw him as a very early colonial, someone with a feeling of incompleteness, with very little at home to fall back on, with an idea of a great world out there, someone who, when he was out in this world, had to reinvent himself. I saw in him some of my own early promptings (and the promptings of other people I knew).

I feel now that I was carried away by a private idea of an ancestry, and overlooked too much of what was obvious. There is something in the idea of colonial incompleteness, and his political cause cannot be denied. But Miranda was also, right through, from the time he left home, something of a confidence man. It was too easy: he was the first South American of culture (and often the first South American) people outside had met, and he found he could tell them anything about who he was and the place he had come from. He could tell the president of Yale, for instance, during a discussion of Mexican writing, that he had studied law at Mexico University.

This is the man we will see arriving—in latish middle age, thirty-five years after he had left South America—in the Gulf in 1806. And it is necessary now to go back and understand a little more of Miranda the confidence man.

He was born in Caracas in 1750. His father was a Canary Islander and a linen merchant. That is, neither a proper Spaniard from Spain, nor someone accepted by the creole Spanish aristocracy. But a rich man, rich enough to pay eight thousand pesos—a large sum—for a captain’s commission for his son in the Spanish army; and rich enough to get a notary in Spain to prepare a genealogical account of the Mirandas, proving their Castilian purity and nobility through seven generations.

It is to take up this commission that young Miranda leaves
for Spain in 1771. In Spain he is enthusiastic for the sights, the wine, the prostitutes; he notes down everything. To cover some of his expenses (and this might be his merchant father’s idea) he has brought four hundred and fifty pounds of cocoa beans—no doubt grown on the slave estates in the valleys north of Caracas. The cocoa fetches a hundred and fifteen pesos. This—to give an idea of the extravagance of the metropolitan life Miranda is hoping to enter—is what he pays for a silk handkerchief and a silk umbrella. And these are only two items in a long list of expensive dress things which he acquires on arrival.

A year later he receives his commission. He quarrels with people all the time. It is his nature; he is at once too assertive and—no doubt as a Venezuelan and Canary Islander—too easily slighted. However, the years begin to pass; there is a period of service in North Africa. As he settles into regimental life—he is imprisoned at least twice for insubordination—his assertiveness begins to show in other ways. On the parade ground one day he uses his sword to hit a soldier about the head and he damages the man’s hearing; then he has the man taken down to the dungeon, stripped naked and beaten. He also begins to steal the regiment’s funds. The practice is not unusual among officers who have bought their commissions and have in various ways to make their money back. There are complaints, delayed enquiries, rambling written excuses—much of the rest of Miranda’s military life will be like this.

There is now the American War of Independence. Miranda very much wants to go, and he does. He is with the Spanish force at the siege of Pensacola. After the outnumbered British forces surrender, Miranda does some shopping. He buys three Negro slaves and a large number of valuable books. He buys the slaves one at a time in the course of two weeks and keeps the three receipts among his papers; the receipts are proof of his title. He also says that a British
prisoner made a gift to him of a Negro man called Brown. These four slaves will be taken as contraband (no doubt on a Spanish military transport) into Cuba or some other Spanish territory and sold at a profit. There are pickings of this sort for Spanish officers in this war.

More is to come. The governor of Cuba cooks up a scheme. Miranda will be gazetted a colonel and sent to the British island of Jamaica to arrange the exchange of British and Spanish prisoners. The mission is genuine enough; but Miranda will also (after squaring the British authorities) buy two ships in Jamaica, load them up with Negroes and British china and linen, and take them back to Cuba. There everything (including the ships: a master stroke) will be traded. Miranda will be set down at the port of Batanabó with his harmless personal luggage (including the many fine books he has bought in Jamaica); the contraband ships and their cargo will make their own roundabout way to Havana. Miranda will take all the risks. The governor of Cuba, the patron of the scheme, will keep his hands clean.

It is a stupendous fraud, hard to keep secret, and there are Spanish officials who are outraged by it. Almost as soon as Miranda leaves Batanabó, with his six trunks in three carts, he is arrested and quite deliberately roughed up by excise officers. No respect is shown to his uniform or to his official passport. His excuses are ingenious, as always, but they don’t help. The officials are implacable; even the governor is bypassed. The case—developing over twelve months—goes to the king of Spain, and the news that gets back to Cuba is so bad that Miranda decides to run. With the help of the governor he gets a berth on an American sloop and slips away to the United States. And that is just as well. The king of Spain’s decision, six months later, is that Miranda is to be stripped of his commission and sentenced to ten years of garrison duty in Oran in North Africa.

By this time Miranda, in the United States, is mingling
with the highest in the land. The governor of Cuba has played fair with him; he has given him a letter to the Spanish minister to the United States, and the Spanish minister diligently introduces Miranda to distinguished people. For the first time in his life Miranda finds himself of interest as a South American and a cultured man, as a man in his own right; no one in the United States in 1783 would know or care what a Canary Islander or a Venezuelan creole is. And delicate gifts of social manoeuvre come to Miranda; it is as though he has been educating himself for this moment. At one gathering he says that the military man he has modelled himself on is General Wolfe. It just happens—and no one is more surprised than Miranda—that the man he says that to knows highly-placed friends of the general. Miranda is passed on to those friends; they pass him on to others. And so it goes on for a year and a half.

At some stage the idea gets around that Miranda’s interest, or long-term cause, is an American-style freedom for Spanish America. The idea adds to Miranda’s dignity; and he doesn’t reject it. So when word arrives that Miranda is really a deserter from the Spanish service, it does him no harm. When he leaves the United States to go to England he has a letter of introduction to the secretary to the Treasury in Whitehall. He has moved very fast. Just eighteen months before, in colonial Havana, he was a contrabandist and a deserter; now, already, in London, he has become a kind of negotiator in the South American cause. And twenty years or so later Venezuelans, with colonial pride and exaggeration, will add a further gloss to Miranda’s time in the United States: they will make him a general in the American War of Independence, standing shoulder to shoulder with Lafayette and Washington.