Chapter 9
In 1800 a Chilean merchant named Nicolás de la Cruz travelled with his family to the Andalusian port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda at the entrance to the River Guadalquivir. The de la Cruz household were fleeing a particularly virulent outbreak of yellow fever in Cádiz. Sanlúcar had once been an important port in its own right, its inhabitants living off the returning American galleons, their holds packed tight with gold and silver. These were the ships that were too large to navigate their way up the river to the docks at Seville. The town was also home to many religious orders. Generations of missionaries touched Spanish soil for the last time in Sanlúcar before setting off for the New World.
De la Cruz was a wealthy man and, unlike some of the poorer inhabitants of Cádiz, had been able to escape the disease-ridden city. However, the yellow fever followed him and his family and soon it had entered the house in which they were staying, striking down de la Cruz’s ward, a 22-year-old Chilean by the name of Bernardo Riquelme. As the patient writhed with the fever and vomited up black bile, the doctors who had been summoned declared that there was nothing more they could do, and the local priest was called to administer the last rites. The rest of the household withdrew to await the inevitable news while the dying man was anointed with the holy oils.
Through those dark days and nights the young Bernardo suffered alone, thousands of miles from home, with no friends or family to keep him company. His guardian, de la Cruz, was a cold, uncaring man who showed little interest in his charge. But, summoning inner reserves of strength, the patient demanded that the doctors treat him with quinine. The treatment shifted the fever, and gradually he recovered. Bernardo Riquelme had proved that he was a survivor, an attribute he had inherited from his father, Ambrose O’Higgins, the viceroy of Peru.
Ambrose O’Higgins had abandoned Bernardo’s mother, Isabel, after their brief dalliance in 1777 and was a distant, unfriendly figure throughout his son’s youth. Nevertheless the father controlled his destiny for the first two decades of his life. Bernardo was born in Chillán, formerly San Bartolomé de Chillán, in southern Chile, on 20 August 1778. His mother and her family looked after him for the first years of his life; but one day in 1783 three soldiers – a lieutenant, a sergeant and a corporal – arrived at the Riquelme house demanding that the four-year-old Bernardo be handed over to them. The order had come from Colonel Ambrose O’Higgins.
The soldiers tore the child from his mother’s arms and rode north to Talca, a town some 85 miles from Chillán, where he was placed in the household of the Portuguese merchant Juan Albano Pereira.1 Shortly after his arrival in Talca, Bernardo was baptised in the Church of San Agustín, four-and-a-half years after his birth. Albano and his wife acted as godparents. The baptism was performed sub conditione – a conditional baptism performed in the Catholic Church when a priest was not sure whether or not a previous baptism had taken place. The priest who performed the baptism, Don Pedro Pablo de la Carrera, wrote that he was unable to establish whether the child had already been baptised, or the identities of the priest and godparents who might have taken part in any such ceremony – an indication of the furtive behaviour of all who were charged with looking after the young Bernardo.2 It seems that there were in fact two baptisms, both of which Ambrose O’Higgins had ordered to take place.3
To quell the mounting rumours in Talca surrounding Bernardo’s paternity, and conscious of the fact that his son’s guardian, Albano, was elderly and ill, O’Higgins sent Bernardo back to Chillán to be educated by two Franciscans, Francisco Javier Ramírez and Blas Alonso, who were in charge of the Colegio de Naturales. The Jesuits had originally founded the college to provide education for the sons of the indigenous chiefs, or caciques. The Franciscans had taken it over when the Jesuits were expelled from South America in 1767.
O’Higgins then resolved to remove his son from Chile, sending him thousands of miles away to Peru. He gave the mission of removing the boy from the school in Chillán to his old comrade-in-arms and compatriot Thomas Delphin. The Franciscans handed the boy over to Delphin in the middle of the night, so as to avoid the Riquelme family trying to prevent Bernardo from being taken from his home. Delphin then rode with Bernardo to Valparaíso, where they boarded a ship bound for Lima. In the viceregal capital Delphin handed the boy over to another Irishman, a merchant by the name of John Ignatius Blake. It was Blake who now took responsibility for Bernardo’s upbringing and education.
Bernardo spent four years at a college in Lima, under the supervision of Blake, before Ambrose O’Higgins, now approaching the zenith of his career, and perhaps fearing that a whiff of scandal could hamper his ambitions, ordered Bernardo to Europe. For the next six years the young man who had suffered the pain of being removed from his mother at an early age was to encounter privations and indignities. In 1796 he arrived in Cádiz, where he met de la Cruz – Albano’s brother-in-law – who had been employed as a tutor by his father.
De la Cruz made it known that he was ill-disposed to help or show kindness to his new charge, sending Bernardo to London, where he arranged for him to be looked after by the eminent watchmakers Emanuel Spencer and John Perkins. Once again little concern was shown to the young guest from South America, and Bernardo was left penniless, relying on the kindness of strangers. In 1799 he wrote to De la Cruz, wondering why he had received no response to his letters: ‘I do not know what to attribute it to; whether my parents have deserted me, or what must have occurred, since on the other hand I cannot believe that you have forgotten and abandoned me.’4 Without money or the means to further his education, Bernardo resolved to return home to South America.
It was in Richmond in Surrey, at the house of a Mr Eels, that Bernardo was finally shown some kindness. He enjoyed walks along the Thames with his host’s charming young daughter, Carlota, and began mixing with other South American émigrés living in London, among the most famous of whom was the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda.
Born into a wealthy Caracas family in 1750, Miranda had left home for Spain at the age of 21. Enlisting in the Spanish army, he fought under the Irish general Alexander O’Reilly in the disastrous Algerian campaign of 1775, and came to his attention for having allegedly embezzled funds from his regiment. He had also fought in the American War of Independence on the side of the British before becoming disillusioned with his fellow-officers.
Despite his privileged upbringing, Miranda felt himself something of an outsider. In Venezuela the criollo elite of Caracas had never accepted Miranda’s father, who was from the Canary Islands, because he was a Spaniard, while in Spain Miranda was looked down on as an American. His experience of prejudice in the Spanish army radicalised him, and in the late 1780s he embarked on a peregrination across Europe. It was as much a sexual as an intellectual odyssey, from the evidence contained in the diary he kept of his adventures. Travelling through central Europe, Italy and Greece, he never seems to have passed up a sexual opportunity. Even Catherine the Great of Russia seemed powerless when faced with his techniques of seduction. But while Miranda was clearly enjoying himself, he was also busy watching and listening, formulating the political and military ideas with which he hoped to achieve Venezuelan independence.
In 1791 Miranda enlisted in France’s revolutionary army, becoming friendly with various Girondin leaders and fighting in the campaigns against the Prussians the following year. During the Terror he was arrested and brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Through luck he escaped the guillotine twice, but when accused a third time of plotting against the government in 1797 he decided to make his escape, landing in England in January 1798. When Bernardo met him, Miranda was trying to convince the British government that it was in its interest to support his schemes for independence.
The Miranda whom the impressionable Bernardo Riquelme met in London was by this time a professional revolutionary. He was the picture of the eighteenth-century libertine, and middle age had not dulled his appetites, political, intellectual or sexual. To the 20-year-old Chilean, very much an ingénue, he must have seemed a most exotic creature. However, unlike the other male figures in his life, who had treated Bernardo with disdain – including his father, who refused to reply to his letters – Miranda, then in his late forties, showed kindness to Bernardo, dispensing words of friendly advice. ‘Never let misery or despair take possession of your soul,’ wrote the teacher to his student when Bernardo was readying himself to return to South America, ‘since once you give yourself over to these feelings, you will be incapable of serving your country.’ Miranda recommended distrusting ‘any man that has passed the age of forty, unless you are sure that he enjoys reading, and especially those books that have been forbidden by the Inquisition.’5 He also warned:
Youth is the age of ardent and generous feelings. Among those youths of your age you will find many ready to listen and easy to convince. But, on the other side, youth is also the age of indiscretion and of reckless acts. So that one must fear these defects in the young, as much as you would timidity and worry in the old.6
These few words of counsel governed the future actions of Bernardo Riquelme. Not a man to doubt his own worth, Miranda advised Bernardo to retain the letter and reread it on the crossing to South America, destroying it once he had arrived.
Bernardo returned to Cádiz in 1799, hoping for a recommendation from Nicolás de la Cruz so that he could enlist as an officer in the Spanish navy. Once again de la Cruz showed himself unwilling to help, and Bernardo decided to return to Chile. The voyage across the Atlantic was perilous – not least, as he wrote to his mother, because ‘the seas were full of English corsairs and men-of-war.’7 He set sail on 3 April 1800 on board the frigate Confianza, bound for Buenos Aires. The Confianza was travelling in convoy to guard against an attack from the British. Four days into the journey Bernardo was woken up in the middle of the night with the news that some sails had been spotted on the horizon. He hurriedly dressed and had just arrived on deck when a cannonball fizzed through the top of the mainsail. The captain of the Confianza tried to flee, but the Spanish ship proved too slow for the British 46-gun frigate and two 74-gun ships of the line in pursuit. Bernardo was taken prisoner and brought to Gibraltar, where he spent three days without food.
On his release, the penniless Bernardo made his way to Algeceiras on foot, where he had the good fortune to meet his cousin Thomas O’Higgins, a captain in the Spanish army who had been travelling in the same convoy and had also been taken prisoner by the British. Thomas gave him some money and paid for his passage to Cádiz.
Once again the British attempted to capture their ship, but this time the cousins made it safely to port. Forced to fall on the mercy of de la Cruz one more time, Bernardo wrote of his despair in a letter to his father: ‘At present I do not know what to do. I have abandoned all hope of seeing my father, my mother and my homeland, frustrated by the greatest dangers.’ He added: ‘Goodbye, most-loved father, until heaven concedes me the pleasure of giving you a hug: until then I will be neither content nor happy.’8
Worse was to come. Penniless, homesick and forced to rely on the charity of the begrudging de la Cruz, Bernardo was now stricken down with yellow fever. Once he had recovered, De la Cruz threw him into the street, at the instigation of his father. Ambrose O’Higgins had been relieved of his position as viceroy of Peru, in part because it had been discovered that Bernardo had been consorting with Miranda, a known enemy of the Spanish crown, in London. In a fury, O’Higgins had written to de la Cruz, telling him to throw his son out of his house. It was the most miserable moment of Bernardo’s young life. He wrote to his father seeking an explanation:
I, sir, do not know what offence I have committed to deserve such a punishment, nor do I know how I have been ungrateful (one of the offences that I most detest), since all my life I have tried with the utmost determination to give pleasure, and seeing frustrated this my sole ambition, irritating my father and protector, I remain confused.9
Bernardo’s fortunes turned on the death of his father in March 1801. Despite his lack of paternal love, and the role that his son had played in his downfall as viceroy of Peru, Ambrose O’Higgins named Bernardo as the principal beneficiary of his will. He inherited his father’s vast estate in the south of Chile, which included more than 4,000 head of cattle, transforming him into one of the richest landowners in the country. The once poverty-stricken exile was suddenly a man of substance and had no trouble finding the money to pay for his passage back to South America.
In September 1802 Bernardo Riquelme disembarked at Valparaíso in Chile after a five-month voyage at sea. Against the express wishes of his father’s will, he now began using his surname. The illegitimate son, Bernardo Riquelme, had become Bernardo O’Higgins Riquelme, proud heir of the late Irish-born viceroy of Peru.
The estancia known as Las Canteras de San José, close to the Chilean town of Los Ángeles, covered more than 750 square miles. It was in a region known as the Isla de la Laja, the boundaries of which were the River Laja to the north, the Andes to the west and the River Biobío to the south-east. This was the wild frontier country that Ambrose O’Higgins had known so well. He had spent much of his adult life here, fighting or negotiating with the Mapuche, and had bought Las Canteras in 1785, naming as administrator one of his fellow-officers, Pedro Nolasco del Río. Upon finally taking possession of the estancia in 1804, having had to make the long journey to Lima to conclude the execution of his father’s will, Bernardo O’Higgins began life as a modernising estanciero or ranch-owner. He ordered a round-up of the estancia’s livestock, planted 85,000 vines and fruit trees, and dug irrigation ditches.
For the first time in his life O’Higgins was able to spend time with his family. He was devoted to his mother, Isabel, and his half-sister, Rosa. The young man who returned to the Riquelme household was, according to his biographer, Eugenio Orrego Vicuña, ‘handsome, strong, in good physical condition and with an erudition that outdid that of most young men of the era.’ Orrego Vicuña wrote that O’Higgins was
… of medium height, a sturdy build, a robust walk, the face full with most regular features that could without difficulty pass for beautiful; the skin tanned, clear eyes, an open forehead, the hair slightly wavy and somewhat reddish, the mouth well-drawn and the gloss of youth on the cheeks, evidence of his Irish origins.10
For the next five years O’Higgins lived the life of a gentleman-farmer. In 1811, during the early years of the independence movement, he wrote to the Irishman John Mackenna: ‘I could have become a good campesino and a useful citizen, and if I had been lucky enough to have been born in Great Britain or Ireland, I would have lived and died in the fields. But I first drew breath in Chile and I cannot forget what I owe to my homeland.’11
In 1810, reacting to events in Buenos Aires, the royal governor of Chile, Francisco Antonio García Carrasco, began arresting and deporting to Lima criollos suspected of sedition. Fearful of the consequences if Carrasco was to remain as governor, the Santiago audiencia, or royal court, replaced him with an 82-year-old Chilean aristocrat by the name of Mateo de Toro Zambrano. Under the guidance of his secretary, Juan Martínez de Rozas, the lawyer from Mendoza who was quietly directing events behind the scenes, Zambrano called a meeting of the city’s open council. At the meeting, held on 18 September 1810, a ruling junta was formed, with Zambrano as president. The junta organised a national militia, opened Chile’s ports to foreign trade and called a national congress, while still proclaiming its loyalty to King Ferdinand VII.
O’Higgins offered his services to Rozas. He formed two cavalry regiments, hoping that he would be appointed a colonel and be given command of one of them. Instead, Rozas appointed him teniente-colonel, a lower rank, and gave his own brother-in-law the rank of colonel and command of O’Higgins’s regiment. An intensely disappointed O’Higgins considered leaving Chile and enlisting in the ranks of the patriot army in Buenos Aires. However, he changed his mind, demonstrating not for the last time his willingness to sacrifice his own ambitions for the good of the cause. ‘Instead of accusing my friend Rozas of bias and injustice, which at first I had been inclined to do,’ he wrote to Mackenna, ‘I resolved to reserve my indignation for the declared enemies of our cause and convince Rozas of his error by my actions and not my words.’12
Mackenna warned O’Higgins about what to expect during the inevitable war with Spain:
I have known the character of the Spanish for a long time; I know their pride, their ignorance, their stubbornness and their complete intolerance. They are the same men who fought against the Dutch under Philip II: two and a half centuries have changed nothing in them, at least to improve them.13
He predicted that the Spanish officers would employ brutal tactics to crush the young independence movement in Chile and advocated responding in kind. Mackenna’s reflections on the qualities of a good soldier were based on his experience of fighting in Spain’s wars in North Africa and against the First French Republic during the War of the Pyrenees between 1793 and 1795. Mackenna was dismissive of the Spanish officers with whom he had served. ‘Very often I have been left perplexed at the thought of how the poor conduct of the Spanish army and navy officers is more often than not rewarded rather than punished,’ he wrote, ‘while good conduct is almost always disregarded.’14
Mackenna told O’Higgins that to learn the best way to organise a cavalry regiment he should seek out one of the sergeants who had served in his father’s dragoon regiment, learn all he could from this man and then begin raising his own regiment, ‘because there is no better way to learn yourself than to teach others.’15 He also congratulated O’Higgins on how he had overcome his disappointment at not being named a coronel.
… I cannot finish [this letter] without expressing my most fervent approval of your conduct in not harbouring rancour at what, as an Irishman, I have the privilege of calling the ‘nepotism’ of our old friend Rozas. From the number of coronels that he has rustled up for the brothers of his wife, I fear that skirt has influenced, more than was necessary, these appointments.16
In April 1811 an army colonel named Tomás de Figueroa attempted to crush the independent junta in Santiago and prevent elections to the new National Congress. The 1st Regiment of Grenadiers, under Mackenna’s command, easily extinguished the rebellion after skirmishing with royalist troops in the Plaza de Armas in the centre of Santiago. Figueroa was shot and the royal audiencia was abolished.
When the National Congress met in June 1811 it was the moderate reformers who dominated. Representing Los Ángeles, O’Higgins became the voice of the radical minority. When the Congress elected a new, more moderate junta, Rozas was sidelined and withdrew to the city of Concepción in the south of the country. O’Higgins also briefly withdrew from public life to recover from a bout of pneumonia. In their absence a new political and military force emerged on the scene: José Miguel Carrera.
Born in Santiago, Carrera was a dashing 25-year-old, a former sargento mayor in the Spanish army who had fought against Napoleon. On hearing of events in Chile, and governed by fierce personal ambition, he had returned to his homeland in July 1811. For the next decade Carrera and his brothers, Juan José and Luis, who were also officers, vied with O’Higgins for control of independent Chile. It was a vicious, bloody struggle that ended in the premature deaths of both José Miguel Carrera and John Mackenna.
José Miguel Carrera was at the militant end of the political spectrum, desiring the complete separation of Chile from Spain. His first act upon his return to Chile was to overthrow the governing junta. The moderates were swept aside and a new junta, which included Mackenna, took its place in September 1811. Two months later, Carrera once again overthrew the government and assumed dictatorial powers. A new junta was established under Carrera’s presidency, which O’Higgins reluctantly joined.
Carrera and O’Higgins had much in common. Both had been sent to Spain as boys to receive an education and had fallen under the influence of Enlightenment ideas. Both believed in full independence for Chile at a time when the majority of their class, the wealthy landowning criollos, preferred to hold on to the reforms won so far within the Spanish Empire. Yet there were significant differences of temperament and politics. O’Higgins had suffered the anxieties attendant upon his status as an illegitimate child and an outsider; Carrera was from one of the oldest, most respected criollo families in Chile and was supremely confident.
O’Higgins was a resolute general on the battlefield but believed in seeking compromise as a politician. He was convinced that the revolution must be based on representative institutions, advocated a National Congress and had made his support for Rozas dependent on the convening of such an assembly. This was despite his awareness that such institutions might weaken the revolution, which he made known in a letter to Mackenna: ‘For my part, I have no doubt that the first Congress of Chile will demonstrate the most puerile ignorance and be guilty of all sorts of madness.’17
Carrera was an authoritarian. He believed that the weak, divided Congress was harmful to the survival of an independent Chile. O’Higgins resigned when Carrera abolished the Congress and arrested his rivals, including Mackenna. In the south of Chile, Rozas organised resistance to Carrera’s government in Santiago, forming a militia and establishing a junta in Concepción.
O’Higgins worked feverishly to prevent civil war. In February 1812 representatives of Carrera and the Concepción junta signed a peace treaty. In July an insurrection in Concepción toppled Rozas, leaving Carrera the undisputed leader. O’Higgins retired to his estancia.
O’Higgins returned to public life in 1813 when the viceroy of Peru, José Fernando de Abascal, sent a military expedition to re-establish his authority and that of the metropolis over Chile. The government was ill prepared. In May 1814 O’Higgins signed a treaty with the Spanish commander that recognised the provisional government of Chile; but Abascal refused to accept the terms and appointed a new commander, Mariano Osorio, who marched on Santiago.
It was in the town of Rancagua, 50 miles south of Santiago, that O’Higgins and Chile’s patriot army made their famous last stand. For two days O’Higgins and his men held out against the Spanish forces, but by the evening of 2 October Rancagua was ablaze. After cutting off the town’s water supply, the Spanish had resorted to burning out the patriots. O’Higgins ordered the remains of the army to force their way through the Spanish cordon towards Santiago.
Following what became known as the Disaster of Rancagua, the patriot army and their families – men, women and children, their belongings borne by mules and llamas – trudged east across Chile’s central valley. They were heading into exile, fearful of the retribution that would be meted out by the royalists, who were now in complete control of their country. Their destination was Mendoza, in the heart of present-day Argentina’s most important wine-growing region.
Mendoza had originally formed part of the Captaincy-General of Chile under the ultimate authority of the viceroy of Peru in Lima, but in 1776 it became part of the new Viceroyalty of the River Plate, the capital of which was Buenos Aires. The city was an important way station. It was here that travellers making the overland journey from Buenos Aires to Santiago would rest before beginning the painful ascent of the cordillera.
Bernardo O’Higgins, his mother, Isabel, and his half-sister, Rosa, were among the refugees. The weary travellers found shelter from the elements in the refuges that Bernardo’s father had built half a century earlier, but they were low on provisions and had to slaughter their horses and mules for meat.
On the other side of the Andes, in the town of Uspallata, General José de San Martín was waiting to welcome the Chilean exiles. San Martín was a liberal army officer and veteran of the Peninsular War from the Argentine province of Corrientes who, in 1811, had been initiated into the Lautaro Lodge, the masonic-like organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the Spanish government of South America. San Martín had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1812 and helped organise a new lodge to disseminate the revolutionary message. He had become convinced that the best way to protect the revolution in Argentina and drive the Spanish from South America was to attack the royalist heartland of Peru from Chile. To do this he had asked the government in Buenos Aires to name him governor of Cuyo province, whose capital was Mendoza. However, his plans were upset by the defeat at Rancagua and the fierce political rivalries that existed among the Chileans.
Hungry and ill-disciplined Chilean soldiers, exhausted by their journey across the Andes, were flooding into Uspallata, causing chaos. San Martín asked O’Higgins to take command of them and restore order. This infuriated José Miguel Carrera when he arrived in Uspallata shortly afterwards. Relations between O’Higgins and Carrera, which were already strained after Rancagua, were now at breaking-point, and the Chilean community in Cuyo divided between o’higginistas and carreristas.
In a memorial to the Buenos Aires government signed by O’Higgins and Mackenna the o’higginistas condemned the Carrera brothers.
When that beautiful country has had the misfortune of falling under the painful and shameful yoke of a cruel tyrant, we find ourselves obliged, for the honour of the cause of America, to reveal to the eyes of the entire world, the authors of such an ill-fated event.
Chile has seen itself suffocated by the audacity of these conspirators, who for a long time have carried with them the execration of its people … From the dark moment when the Carreras took control of the Government, even the most innocent knew that the day would come when the leader of the Lima troops would make all Chileans cry tears of blood …18
The o’higginistas blamed the Carreras and their cowardice in not coming to the aid of the besieged patriot troops for the defeat at Rancagua.
San Martín was afraid that Carrera and his supporters might challenge his authority and ordered troops stationed on the border with Chile back to Mendoza. Meanwhile, Mackenna travelled to Buenos Aires to report to the government. Carrera also sent emissaries, including his brother Luis. On 30 October, San Martín ordered the arrest of José Miguel and Juan José Carrera and sent them under escort to Buenos Aires.
The enmity between O’Higgins and the Carreras deepened the following month when news reached Mendoza of Mackenna’s death at the hands of Luis Carrera in Buenos Aires. Carrera had challenged Mackenna to a duel and shot him in the neck, severing an artery. Carrera was arrested but was freed when Carlos María de Alvear, an old friend of José Miguel Carrera, became supreme director of the United Provinces.
This was a bleak period for O’Higgins. Forced into exile, he had lost Mackenna, his closest political ally and friend, and seen the man responsible for his death set free. The Carreras were once again in the ascendancy, and the prospects for an invasion of Chile were poor. Ferdinand VII had returned to the throne of Spain – after the French defeat in the Peninsular War – and had begun dismantling the liberal reforms introduced by the Cádiz Cortes and ratified in the constitution. The king was determined to restore his authority in the Americas and prepared to send an expedition of 10,000 royalist troops from Cádiz to the River Plate. In Chile the royalist authorities were instigating punitive measures and imprisoning those patriots who had failed to escape across the Andes. O’Higgins had lost all his material possessions, had no income and was forced to rely on the charity of friends.
The resignation of San Martín’s adversary Carlos María Alvear as supreme director of the United Provinces brought fresh hope. Preparations for an invasion of Chile began, and at the beginning of 1817 San Martín’s Army of the Andes, with Brigadier O’Higgins in command of the second division, began the march across the cordillera. San Martín’s plan was for the army to enter Chile at various points along the western slopes of the Andes. O’Higgins marched north from Mendoza, crossing the Andes at Los Patos, and then swung south into the Putaendo valley and the town of Los Andes. The men battled freezing temperatures, drifts of snow and the thin air as they climbed to almost 10,000 feet above sea level. The officers struggled to keep the soldiers provisioned along the narrow paths that cut through the mountains. Spies warned the Spanish authorities of the imminent invasion but were unable to specify from where exactly the attack would come.
The decisive battle came at a ranch called Chacabuco on 12 February. The patriots triumphed and marched into Santiago unopposed. On 15 February the interim governor of Chile, Francisco Ruiz Tagle, called an assembly of notable citizens to appoint the new political leader. San Martín was the man chosen, by overwhelming acclamation; however, San Martín was determined to press on with his mission to rid the continent of the Spanish, and politely declined. The following day the Santiago aristocracy chose Bernardo O’Higgins as supreme director of Chile, a position he was to hold for the next six years.
O’Higgins was faced with a range of problems, not least the continuing royalist resistance in the south of the country, which remained a threat until the Battle of Maipú in April 1818. He also had tough political decisions to make. He owed his position as supreme director to the goodwill of the Buenos Aires government and his fellow-members of the secretive Lautaro Lodge, whose principal concern was the independence of the rest of the continent and the introduction of genuinely liberal government. O’Higgins, San Martín and Juan Martín de Pueyrredón were all members of the Buenos Aires lodge, and upon taking control of Chile they founded a lodge in Santiago. O’Higgins had to consult his fellow-members before making civil and military appointments, resulting in resentment from the Chilean aristocracy, who believed that Argentines were directing their government. The criollo elite were also wary of assaults on their privileges and resented what they perceived to be the anti-clericalism of the new regime, such as O’Higgins’s decision to exile the royalist Bishop of Santiago, José Rodríguez Zorilla.
But though the royalist threat gradually receded, many difficulties remained, not least challenges to O’Higgins’s authority from the Carrera brothers and the guerrilla leader Manuel Rodríguez. The latter had been a close friend of José Miguel Carrera, under whom he had served in the governing junta. In exile in Mendoza after the Battle of Rancagua, San Martín had selected Rodríguez for intelligence work in Chile. He had slipped across the frontier to report on royalist troop movements and had passed through the countryside disguised as a peasant, monk or servant. In March 1818, after the patriots suffered a setback against royalist forces at the Battle of Cancha Rayada, Rodríguez had taken control of the government, handing out weapons to the people of Santiago and founding a militia known as the Hussars of Death. Members wore black uniforms with a white skull and crossbones on the collar. His cry of ‘We still have a homeland, citizens!’ rallied spirits in Santiago and prepared the inhabitants to defend the city from the royalists. But after the Battle of Maipú, Rodríguez was imprisoned and put to death; his body was thrown into a ditch. Though it is unlikely that O’Higgins gave the order to kill him, some Chileans regarded him as the unseen author of Rodríguez’s death.
The Carrera brothers were another threat to O’Higgins. Juan José and Luis Carrera had been arrested in Mendoza in 1817. The news that they had been shot reached Santiago days after the Battle of Maipú, and the blame was squarely attached to their arch-enemies, San Martín and O’Higgins.
O’Higgins was regarded by some – not least the supporters of the Carreras – as a ruthless tyrant. He had adopted conciliatory positions towards his political enemies for the sake of national unity in the early years of the revolution. Now convinced by bitter experience that the revolution would collapse into anarchy without firm government, he alienated powerful sections of Chilean society. His commitment to pan-American revolution and liberal republicanism was not consistent with their interests. O’Higgins was first and foremost a revolutionary. He wished to end privilege in Chile and introduce republican institutions, but having seen how representative assemblies had contributed to the fall of the patria vieja (old fatherland) – the period of independence between the first junta in 1810 and the Disaster of Rancagua – he came to believe that force was sometimes a necessary evil.
O’Higgins’s greatest achievements in government were the founding of the Chilean navy and the organising and financing of San Martín’s liberation expedition to Peru. O’Higgins was acutely aware that Chile was vulnerable to royalist attack as long as the country’s thousands of miles of coastline were left unprotected and the Spanish remained in control of neighbouring Peru. With the help of the roguish Scottish naval officer Thomas Cochrane, who had fled financial scandal in Britain, and with limited resources, O’Higgins built the navy from scratch, helping to curb Spanish sea power in the Pacific.
Away from affairs of state, O’Higgins took solace in his family. He lived with Isabel and Rosa in the former governor’s palace in the Plaza de Armas in Santiago. He never married, though he did have a son, Demetrio, from a brief love affair. The English author Maria Graham, who visited the palace in 1822, described the supreme director as ‘short and fat, yet very active: his blue eyes, light hair, and ruddy and rather coarse complexion, do not bely his Irish extraction; while his small and short hands and feet belong to his Araucanian pedigree.’19 Of his character Graham wrote: ‘He is modest and simple, and plain in his manners, arrogating nothing to himself; or, if he has done much, ascribing it to the influence of that love of country which, as he says, may inspire great feelings into an ordinary man.’20 Now in her early sixties, Isabel was a small, pretty woman, deeply devoted to her son. Several Mapuche children, whom O’Higgins had adopted while campaigning in the south, also lived in the palace. Maria Graham presented a picture of domestic happiness in her journal after a visit.
The Director was kind enough to talk to them in the Araucanian tongue, that I might hear the language, which is soft and sweet; perhaps it owed something to the young voices of the children. One of them pleased me especially: she is a little Maria, the daughter of a Cacique, who, with his wife and all the elder part of his family, was killed in a late battle. Doña Rosa takes a particular charge of the little female prisoners, and acts the part of a kind mother to them. I was charmed with the humane and generous manner in which she spoke of them. As to Doña Isabella, she appears to live on her son’s fame and greatness, and looks at him with the eyes of maternal love, and gathers every compliment to him with eagerness.21
Surrounded by his loving family but also scheming advisers, such as the unpopular Spanish-born minister Antonio Rodríguez Aldea, who insulated him from public opinion, O’Higgins failed to realise that both conservatives and liberals were conspiring against him. The continuing war in Peru, which the Chilean government was financing, had at first added to his reputation as one of the great liberators of the continent, but the crippling cost to the treasury and O’Higgins’s authoritarian style had made him unpopular. The fact that he was an enemy of privilege and corruption meant little to those who believed that they should enjoy the fruits of independence. By the time O’Higgins realised that his situation was precarious and had rid himself of Aldea, it was too late, and opposition to his rule had coalesced around Ramón Freire, a former comrade-in-arms. On 28 January 1823 O’Higgins resigned; six months later he went into exile in Peru, accompanied by Isabel, Rosa, Demetrio and an adopted Mapuche girl named Petronila. He was never to set foot in Chile again.