The Invention of Nature (22 page)

Chimborazo and Carquairazo in today’s Ecuador – one of the many striking illustrations in Humboldt’s Vues des Cordillères (Illustration Credit 12.1)

Throughout the revolution Bolívar would use images drawn from the natural world – as if writing with Humboldt’s pen – to explain his beliefs. He talked of a ‘stormy sea’ and described those fighting a revolution as people who ‘ploughed a sea’. As Bolívar rallied his compatriots during the long years of rebellions and battles, he evoked South America’s landscapes. He would talk of magnificent vistas and insist that their continent was ‘the very heart of the universe’, in an attempt to remind his fellow revolutionists what they were fighting for. At times, when only chaos seemed to rule, Bolívar turned to the wilderness to seek meaning. In untamed nature he found parallels to the brutality of humankind – and though this fact didn’t change anything about the conditions of war, it could still be strangely comforting. As Bolívar fought to free the colonies from Spanish shackles, these images, nature metaphors and allegories became his language of freedom.

Forests, mountains and rivers ignited Bolívar’s imagination. He was a ‘true lover of nature’, as one of his generals later said. ‘My soul is dazzled by the presence of primitive nature,’ Bolívar declared. He had always adored the outdoors and as a young man had enjoyed the pleasures of country life and agricultural work. The landscape that surrounded the old family hacienda San Mateo near Caracas, where he had spent his days riding across fields and forests, had been the cradle for this strong bond with nature. Mountains, in particular, held a spell over Bolívar because they reminded him of home. When he had walked from France to Italy, in the spring of 1805, it had been the sight of the Alps that had channelled his thoughts back to his country and away from the gambling and drinking in Paris. By the time Bolívar met Humboldt in Rome that summer, he had started to think in earnest about a rebellion. When he returned to Venezuela in 1807, he said, there was a ‘fire that burned inside me to liberate my country’.

The Spanish colonies in Latin America were divided into four viceroyalties and were home to some 17 million people. There was New Spain which included Mexico, parts of California and Central America, while the Viceroyalty of New Granada stretched across the northern part of South America roughly covering today’s Panama, Ecuador and Colombia, as well as parts of north-western Brazil and Costa Rica. Further south was the Viceroyalty of Peru as well as the Viceroyalty of the Río de La Plata with Buenos Aires as its capital, encompassing parts of today’s Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. There were also so-called captaincy generals, such as those of Venezuela, Chile and Cuba. The captaincy generals were administrative districts that provided autonomy to those regions, making them like viceroyalties in all but name. It was a vast empire that had fuelled Spain’s economy for three centuries but the first cracks had occurred with the loss of the huge Louisiana Territory which had been part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The Spanish had lost it to the French who had then sold it on to the United States in 1803.

The Napoleonic Wars had severely affected the Spanish colonies. British and French naval blockades had reduced trade and resulted in huge losses of revenue. At the same time, wealthy criollos such as Bolívar had realized that Spain’s weakened position in Europe might be used to their own advantage. The British had destroyed many Spanish warships in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the most decisive naval victory during the war, and two years later Napoleon had invaded the Iberian Peninsula. He had then forced the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, to abdicate in favour of Napoleon’s own brother. Spain had no longer been an almighty imperial power but a tool in France’s hands. With the Spanish king deposed and the mother country occupied by a foreign force, some South Americans had allowed themselves to believe in another future.

In 1809, a year after Ferdinand VII’s abdication, the first call for independence had been made in Quito, when the creoles had taken power from the Spanish administrators. A year later, in May 1810, the colonists in Buenos Aires followed suit. A few months after that, in September in the small town of Dolores, 200 miles to the north-west of Mexico City, a priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla had united creoles, mestizos, Indians and freed slaves in their battle cry against the Spanish rule; within a month he had an army of 60,000. As revolt and unrest swept across the Spanish viceroyalties, the creole elite of Venezuela had declared independence on 5 July 1811.

Then, nine months later, nature seemed to side with the Spanish. On the afternoon of 26 March 1812, as the inhabitants of Bolívar’s hometown Caracas crowded into the churches for Easter services, a massive earthquake destroyed the city, killing thousands. Cathedral and churches crumbled, and the air was thick with dust as worshippers were crushed to death. As the tremors shook the ground, Bolívar surveyed the devastation in despair. Many saw the earthquake as a sign of God’s fury against their uprising. Priests shouted at the ‘sinners’ and told them that ‘divine justice’ had punished their revolution. Standing in the rubble in his shirtsleeves, Bolívar remained defiant. ‘If Nature itself decides to oppose us,’ he said, ‘we will fight and force her to obey.’

Eight days later another earthquake struck, bringing the death toll to a shocking 20,000 people, about half the population of Caracas. When slaves on the plantations west of Lake Valencia rebelled, looting haciendas and killing their owners, anarchy descended across Venezuela. Bolívar, who had been put in charge of the strategically important port town of Puerto Cabello on the northern coast of Venezuela, one hundred miles west of Caracas, had five officers and three soldiers and stood no chance when the royalist troops arrived. Within weeks the republican fighters had surrendered to the Spanish forces, and a little more than a year after the creoles had first declared their independence, the so-called First Republic had come to an end. The Spanish flag was hoisted once again and Bolívar fled the country at the end of August 1812 for the Caribbean island of Curaçao.

As the revolutions unfolded the former American President, Thomas Jefferson, bombarded Humboldt with questions: If the revolutionaries succeeded what kind of government would they establish, he asked, and how equal would their society be? Would despotism prevail? ‘All these questions you can answer better than any other,’ Jefferson insisted in one letter. As one of the founding fathers of the North American revolution, Jefferson was deeply interested in the Spanish colonies and genuinely afraid that South America would not establish republican governments. At the same time, Jefferson was also concerned about the economic implications that an independent southern continent would have for his own country. As long as the colonies were under Spanish control, the United States exported huge amounts of grain and wheat to South America. But once they turned away from colonial cash crops their ‘produce and commerce would rivalize ours’, Jefferson told the Minister of Spain in Washington, DC.

Meanwhile Bolívar was plotting his next moves and in late October 1812, two months after he had fled Venezuela, he arrived in Cartagena, a port town on the northern coast of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in today’s Colombia. Bolívar was brimming with ideas for a strong South America where all colonies would fight together rather than separately as before. In command of only a small army but reputedly equipped with Humboldt’s excellent maps, Bolívar now began a bold guerrilla offensive hundreds of miles away from home. He had little military training but as he moved from Cartagena towards Venezuela, he managed to surprise royalist forces in inhospitable environments – on high mountains, in deep forests and along rivers infested with snakes and crocodiles. Slowly Bolívar gained control over the Río Magdalena, the river along which Humboldt had paddled from Cartagena to Bogotá more than a decade earlier.

Along their warpath Bolívar gave stirring speeches to the people of New Granada. ‘Wherever the Spanish empire rules,’ he said, ‘there rules death and desolation!’ And as he marched, he gained new recruits. Bolívar believed that the colonies of South America had to unite. If one was enslaved, so was the other, he wrote. Spanish rule was a ‘gangrene’ that would affect every part unless ‘hewn off like an infected limb’. It was the colonies’ own disunity, he said, that would be their downfall, not Spanish arms. The Spanish were ‘locusts’ that destroyed the ‘seeds and roots of the tree of freedom’, he said, a pest that could only be destroyed if they united against them. He charmed, bullied and threatened to convince the New Granadans to join him on his way to Venezuela to free Caracas.

If Bolívar didn’t get his way, he could be brash and insulting. ‘March! Either you shoot me or, by God, I will certainly shoot you,’ Bolívar shouted when one officer refused to cross into Venezuelan territory. ‘I must have 10,000 guns,’ he demanded on another occasion, ‘or I shall go mad.’ His determination was infectious.

He was a man full of contradictions, as happy in a hammock slung on the branches amid a thick forest as on a packed dance floor. He would impatiently draft the nation’s first constitution in a canoe paddling along the Orinoco but would also delay military action for his own gain to wait for a lover. He said that dancing was the ‘poetry of motion’, but could also coldly order the execution of hundreds of prisoners. He could be charming when in a good mood but ‘ferocious’ when irritated, with his moods shifting so fast that ‘the change was incredible’, as one of his generals said.

Bolívar was a man of action but also believed that the written word had the power to change the world. On later campaigns he would always travel with a printing press, carrying it up and down the Andes and across the vast plains of the Llanos. His mind was sharp and fast, he often dictated numerous letters at the same time to several secretaries and was known for making snap decisions. There were men, he said, who needed solitude to think but ‘I deliberated, reflected, and mulled best when I was at the centre of the revelry – among the pleasures and clamour of a ball.’

Simón Bolívar (Illustration Credit 12.2)

From the Río Magdalena, Bolívar and his men marched through the mountains towards Venezuela, fighting and defeating royalist troops. By spring 1813, six months after he had landed in Cartagena, Bolívar had freed New Granada but Venezuela was still in Spanish hands. In May 1813 his army descended from the mountains into the high valley where the Venezuelan city of Mérida was situated. When the Spanish heard that Bolívar was approaching, they left Mérida in a panic. Bolívar and his troops arrived with their clothes worn, hungry and ill with fever but to a hero’s welcome. The citizens of Mérida declared Bolívar ‘El Libertador’ and 600 new recruits signed up to his army.

Three weeks later, on 15 June 1813, Bolívar issued a brutal decree that proclaimed a ‘War to the Death’. It condemned all Spaniards in the colonies to death unless they agreed to fight alongside Bolívar’s army. It was ruthless but effective. As Spaniards were executed, royalists defected and joined the republicans – and as Bolívar’s army moved eastwards towards Caracas, their numbers increased. By the time they arrived in the capital on 6 August, the Spanish had fled the city. Bolívar took Caracas without a fight. ‘Your liberators have arrived,’ he told the inhabitants, ‘from the banks of the swollen Magdalena to the flowering valleys of Aragua.’ He talked of the vast plateaux they had crossed and the huge mountains they had climbed – aligning their victories with the rugged wilderness of South American nature.

As Bolívar’s soldiers marched through Venezuela along the War to the Death’s bloody trail, killing almost every Spaniard they found, another army rose: the so-called ‘Legions of Hell’. Made up of rough plainsmen from the Llanos, along with mestizos and slaves, the Legions of Hell were under the command of fierce and sadistic José Tomás Boves, a Spaniard who had lived in the Llanos as a cattle dealer and whose army would eventually kill 80,000 republicans. Boves’s men were fighting against Bolívar’s privileged class of creoles who they claimed were to be feared more than Spanish rule. Bolívar’s revolution descended into a merciless civil war. One Spanish official described Venezuela as a region of death: ‘Towns that had thousands of inhabitants are now reduced to a few hundred or even a few dozens,’ villages were burned, and unburied corpses were decomposing in the streets and fields.

Humboldt had predicted that the South American struggle for independence would be bloody because colonial society was deeply riven. For three centuries the Europeans had done everything to cement the ‘hatred of one caste for another’, Humboldt told Jefferson. Creoles, mestizos, slaves and indigenous people were not a united people but divided and mistrustful of each other. It was a warning that came to haunt Bolívar.

Meanwhile in Europe, Spain had finally been released from Napoleon’s military grip and was able to concentrate on its unruly colonies. Having taken back his throne, the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, now equipped a huge armada of some sixty ships and dispatched more than 14,000 soldiers to South America – the largest fleet Spain had ever sent to the New World. When the Spanish arrived in Venezuela in April 1815, Bolívar’s army – weakened by the fighting against Boves – didn’t stand a chance. In May, the royalists took Caracas and the revolution seemed to be over for good.

Bolívar once again fled his country – this time to Jamaica from where he tried to drum up international support for his revolution. He wrote to Lord Wellesley, the former British Secretary of State, explaining that the colonists needed help from Britain. ‘The most beautiful half of the earth,’ Bolívar warned, was going to be ‘reduced to a state of desolation’. He was willing to march all the way to the North Pole if he had to, he added – but neither England nor the United States was yet willing to involve themselves in the volatile Spanish colonial affairs.

James Madison, the fourth American President, declared that no US citizen was allowed to enlist in any kind of military expedition against the ‘dominions of Spain’. Former President John Adams thought the prospect of South American democracy a laughable idea – as absurd as establishing democracy ‘among birds, beasts and fishes’. Thomas Jefferson repeated his fears of despotism. How, he asked Humboldt, was a ‘priest-ridden’ society going to establish a republican and free government? Three centuries of Catholic rule, Jefferson insisted, had turned the colonists into ignorant children and ‘enchained their minds’.