Chapter 10
The Irish contribution to the patriot war effort was not confined to the exploits of illustrious army and naval officers such as Bernardo O’Higgins and William Brown. Thousands of Irishmen enlisted in the patriot armies between 1817 and 1824, most of them fighting in the northern part of South America. Some had seen service in the Napoleonic Wars; others had had no military experience before embarking on the voyage across the Atlantic. Hundreds died from tropical diseases, such as yellow fever; others deserted soon after discovering that the riches they had been promised were no more than an illusion. But there were also those who distinguished themselves on the field of battle and earned a place among the heroes of the independence wars.
Their motives varied considerably. Some were driven by financial need, others by a spirit of adventure. Daniel Florence O’Leary was the teenage son of a Cork butter merchant who left home in search of glory, ‘since there is nothing to compare to making noise in this world.’1 Francis Burdett O’Connor was also from County Cork. He claimed to have come to South America to practise the art of war in order that he could use his new-found skills in the liberation of Ireland from British rule. According to O’Connor’s memoirs, when he mentioned this on the eve of the invasion of Peru, Bolívar replied: ‘Comfort yourself, my dear O’Connor, help me in this campaign, which I hope will be the last, and I will give you a regiment of my llaneros* to help you liberate your homeland, your Ireland.’2 John Devereux, who founded the Irish Legion, which fought in Venezuela, wrote that he ‘cherished the delightful hope of coupling the glories of the country of my birth, with the new-born liberties of that country of my adoption.’3
The majority of the Irishmen who fought in South America were responding to calls for volunteers from Simón Bolívar and Venezuela’s patriot government. Bolívar was born in Caracas in 1783 to a wealthy criollo landowner. He studied in Europe, where, in the aftermath of the American and French Revolutions, he became attracted to the political ideas of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu. The criollos of Caracas had first declared independence in 1810, and Bolívar had travelled to London as part of a delegation that was seeking recognition from the British government. During their stay in London they had persuaded their compatriot Francisco de Miranda to return home and become the figurehead of an independent Venezuela.
When Spain regained control of Venezuela in 1812, Bolívar became the leader of the independence movement, replacing Miranda. The latter had been condemned as a traitor by his fellow-patriots for signing a treaty with the Spanish and he ended his days rotting in a Cádiz jail. Bolívar launched a new, brutal campaign against Spanish rule in his native land, which he described as a ‘War to the Death’. The patriots had some initial successes, but the royalists were able to redouble their efforts in 1814. The Peninsular War was over and Napoleon was defeated, leaving the restored Spanish monarch, Ferdinand VII, free to send troops to South America. The arrival of a 10,000-strong royalist force from Spain under General Pablo Morillo forced Bolívar to retreat into the Venezuelan plains at the beginning of 1817. This desperate situation forced the patriots to seek help from abroad.
In 1817, having established a base in Angostura (renamed Ciudad Bolívar in 1846) on the banks of the River Orinoco in what is now south-east Venezuela, Bolívar ordered his agent in London, Luis López Méndez, to recruit volunteers for the patriot army. Méndez was assisted by the American William Walton. The majority of the officers and enlisted men who served in these foreign units were Irish,4 tempted by promises of adventure and riches in exotic South America. On the streets of Dublin, Belfast and Liverpool, handbills and posters advertised the attractions of joining the fight for South American liberty. One handbill passed around Dublin promised volunteers that they would receive ‘Four pence in the Shilling more than the British Army’; a free passage to Venezuela and 60 dollars upon arriving; a daily ration of a pound of beef or pork; a pound of bread; a pound and a half of potatoes, and a noggin of whiskey, oatmeal and butter on the passage; ‘a Proportionate share of Land, Captures and Prize Money;’ 200 acres of land and 80 dollars with which to purchase agricultural implements; and a full discharge and leave to sell the land with free passage home after five years of service.5 It sounded too good to be true, and it was: there was no money, no land and a scarce amount of food when they arrived in South America.
A trickle of volunteers began to arrive in early 1817, but it was not until the middle of the year that Bolívar’s agent, López Méndez, made systematic efforts in London to raise integrated units for service in Venezuela. The first wave of recruits travelled across the Atlantic in the second half of 1817 in half a dozen ships, under the command of six men whom the patriot government had awarded the rank of colonel in the Venezuelan army. Two of them were Irish: Henry Croasdaile Wilson, the choleric and conniving son of an Anglican family from County Galway, and Joseph Albert Gillmore, a former officer in the Royal Artillery from County Antrim.
The first ship to set sail from Portsmouth at the end of July was the 250-ton corvette Two Friends, carrying the Scottish colonel Donald MacDonald and 80 officers and enlisted men belonging to the 1st Venezuelan Lancers, all of whom were promised a daily ration of meat and biscuit, a pint of wine, a half pint of spirits and a bottle of porter, in exchange for the £40 cost of their passage. The volunteers spent several days waiting to embark while the money was found for provisioning the ship. Many were anxious to leave, having run up debts on shore; some had been arrested. When at last the ship departed, at 10 p.m. on 31 July 1817, according to one officer, ‘all was hurry and confusion, and the appearance of the cabins presented a second chaos; the floors were strewed with beds, bedding, trunks, and packages of every description; upon these sat, smoking and drinking, those thoughtless adventurers, celebrating in noisy mirth their escape.’6
The ship was inadequately provisioned, and it put in at Madeira, where supplies of wine, spirits and fruit were brought on board. According to the sardonic author of The Narrative of a Voyage to the Spanish Main in the Ship ‘Two Friends’, one party of six officers brought on board 180 gallons of spirits; ‘this quantity for their number was enormous, but in order to reduce it, they were daily, nay, hourly drinking.’7 This constant imbibing and the resentments caused by MacDonald, who, according to the same officer, ‘imagined himself our commanding officer, demanding our respect for his authority,’8 were the cause of frequent squabbles.
The determination of the ship’s company to hold the ceremony marking the crossing of the Tropic of Cancer, during which a sailor dressed as King Neptune would shave the heads of the uninitiated, caused further rows. According to the anonymous officer, some of the men were ‘determined to resist every attempt to subject them to its endurance, and armed with pistols, placed themselves at one end of the cabin, threatening with death those who should endeavour to coerce them’.9 The Two Friends landed at the Danish island colony of Saint Thomas in September 1817. MacDonald was later killed on the banks of the Orinoco by members of an indigenous tribe en route to Bolívar’s headquarters in Angostura.
The other five ships which carried the first wave of volunteers recruited en masse encountered horrendous storms before they had even left the English Channel. The corvettes Britannia and Prince and the frigates Dowson, Indian and Emerald embarked at the end of November and beginning of December, carrying Colonel Gustavus Hippisley’s 1st Venezuelan Hussars, Wilson’s 2nd Venezuelan Hussars, or Red Hussars, Colonel Peter Campbell’s 1st Venezuelan Rifles, or Black Rifles, Colonel Robert Skeene’s 2nd Venezuelan Lancers and Gillmore’s artillery brigade. All these units were top-heavy with officers and NCOS, because it was intended to raise most of the troops in Venezuela.
The Prince, the Britannia and the Emerald arrived in the Caribbean in January and February 1818. The Dowson and the Indian were travelling in convoy. While the former managed to find shelter in the Cornish harbours of Falmouth and Fowey from the severity of the gales blowing across the English Channel, the Indian was lost, along with Colonel Skeene. Only five men survived the wreck, one of them an Irish officer by the name of John Johnston. Not to be deterred, Johnston managed to get to Venezuela and served with distinction in Bolívar’s armies.
The first wave of volunteers were poorly informed about what to expect in South America. The more self-regarding officers ordered expensive dress uniforms for the sumptuous balls they expected to be held in their honour and practised cavalry charges – of little use where they were going – on the lawns of their town houses. They left unpaid outlandish bills from military outfitters in Dublin and London, which they expected the Venezuelans to honour, and dreamt about the vast country estates in South America they would enjoy in return for their services. According to the anonymous officer who sailed on board the Two Friends, ‘it was evident they had formed high anticipations of the resources of the republic, and had pictured to themselves Oriental splendour and enjoyment.’10
An Irishman on board the Two Friends who had fought in the 1798 Rising in County Wexford had little time for the officers’ pomposity. Colonel MacDonald had outfitted his officers in ‘green dragoon jackets, trimmed with silver lace and faced with scarlet; epaulettes, with the rising sun of Venezuela: shackaes [shakos] mounted with silver lace and gold cord, and surmounted with a yellow and blue plume.’11 From his corner in steerage, the gruff Irishman would pass comment on the officers who strutted up and down the deck in their finery: ‘By Jasus, give me a pike, or a half pike, and I’ll be a better commander than any of ye! Wasn’t I at Vinegar-hill, where ye dars’nt show your noses – ’twas too hot for ye.’12
The English colonel Gustavus Hippisley, who had been the first to sign up with Méndez and for this reason insisted on being given command of all the foreign regiments that sailed to Venezuela, is perhaps the best example of the type of swaggering, deluded gentleman-soldier who landed in South America expecting every type of luxury. According to Alfred Hasbrouck, Hippisley had ordered that his officers be uniformed in ‘dark green jacket with scarlet collar, lapels and cuffs, figured gold lace around the collar and cuffs, an ornamental Austrian knot on the arm, a lace girdle, and dark green trousers edged with similar gold lace down the sides, crimson sash and Wellington boots [calf-length leather boots].’13
The experience of most of the Irishmen who served in northern South America followed a predictable course. The officers spent the journey across the Atlantic drinking claret and madeira; the enlisted men would drink their daily ration of grog, if there was one, and grumble about the officers. The large quantities of alcohol consumed led to fights, especially duels among the officers. These were generally inconclusive: it was difficult to take aim on a pitching deck. An unpopular Irish officer on board the Two Friends fought a duel with a master’s mate, which, according to one of his fellow-officers, ‘created a little interest and variety to our conversation.’ The men exchanged fire, but neither hit the mark; the seconds then intervened to end the duel ‘without detracting from the courage of either.’14 During another duel on board the same ship, two Irish officers let off six shots at each other, only to discover, much to the amusement of the spectators, that they were firing corks.
Upon disembarking at a neutral island in the Caribbean, the volunteers were transferred to the patriot-controlled Isla Margarita, or Margarita Island, about 400 square miles in area and less than 20 miles from the royalist-controlled coast, the Spanish Main. Once they realised that the promises of money and honours were hollow, many of those officers who had not already succumbed to tropical fever elected to resign their commission and either seek immediate passage back across the Atlantic or look for a more hospitable environment on one of the other Caribbean islands. Those few who were able and who chose to carry on had to make their way to the patriot capital at Angostura. This involved sailing south-west towards the Orinoco delta and upriver through the tropical jungle of south-east Venezuela.
Many of the Irish, including Daniel Florence O’Leary, who was not yet 20, were young men who had never left their parish before embarking on this great adventure. O’Leary’s father, Jeremiah O’Leary, was a prominent Catholic merchant in Cork city and was friendly with Daniel O’Connell. O’Connell was a great admirer of Bolívar and may have influenced the young O’Leary’s decision to enlist as a cornet (the lowest rank of cavalry officer) in Wilson’s Red Hussars. O’Leary embarked on the Prince with the rest of the regiment at Portsmouth in December 1817. Most of his fellow-officers fought boredom by drinking and duelling, but O’Leary was not interested and hid himself away in his quarters, reading Spanish literature and grammar. His fellow-officers were determined to have an adventure; O’Leary was deadly serious about shaking the foundations of an empire.
Getting to the Caribbean was only half the battle. From Isla Margarita the Irish volunteers had to make their way towards the heart of Venezuela. If they were able to find a ship that would take them, they would sail south-east along the coast of the South American mainland towards the River Orinoco. Finding the correct channel was difficult, because the tall trees of the jungle presented a uniform appearance all along the coast. It was also difficult to approach the mainland because of the heavy groundswell and the breaking waves.
The appearance of powerful reddish-brown currents signified that they were close to the boca grande, the great mouth of the river. The squawks of eerie-sounding birds, the growls of jaguars from the darkness of the trees on each bank and the evil-looking crocodiles that trailed like assassins through the water beside the shallow-bottomed flecheras that carried them deeper into the jungle reminded the Irish volunteers of how far away from home they were.
One volunteer, Richard Longville Vowell, found that the scenery was ‘strikingly beautiful’ and, ‘when viewed from a ship’s deck, as she glides slowly along the smooth water, presents a magnificent moving panorama.’ He was fascinated by the sheer size of the vegetation.
The banks, on each side, are covered with impervious forests of majestic trees; chained, as it were, to each other by the bejuco, or gigantic creeping plant of South America, which grows to the thickness of an ordinary cable … Among the branches, monkeys of every description gambol, and follow the vessel, springing from tree to tree by means of the bejuco, which has obtained from this circumstance its Indian name of ‘monkey’s ladder’.15
The hot and humid climate made it difficult to breathe – the temperature could climb as high as 40 degrees Celsius during the day – and the volunteers’ throats were constantly parched from the lack of fresh water. Desperate for a cooling draught, they would reach into the fetid river, swallowing the dirty water cradled in their cupped hands, only to be clutching their stomachs in agonising pain a little later, having vomited the meagre contents back where they came from.
Depleted by desertion and sickness, Hippisley’s and Wilson’s units arrived in Angostura in March and April 1818 and joined those who had arrived with MacDonald’s lancers. Gillmore’s artillery brigade had broken up in confusion in the West Indies, and Campbell had returned home from the Antilles after the death of his son. Campbell’s replacement, Colonel Richard Piggott from County Kerry, led the remaining officers and men of the Rifles to Angostura.
About 150 or 200 of the 800 men who had sailed across the Atlantic made it to patriot headquarters deep in the Venezuelan jungle. However, their circumstances had improved little, if at all. Built on a hill on the southern bank of the river, Angostura was a mean-looking place, far from the comforts of home. At the crest of the hill was a small fort and lookout, beneath which was the military hospital, housed in a former convent. The half-built cathedral on one side of the town’s main plaza was the only concession to European notions of civilisation. The only decent buildings in town – built of stone, bricks and tiles, as opposed to the wattle-and-daub huts of the townspeople – were home to the patriot congress and the billets of the senior officers. The barracks was little more than a series of vermin-infested huts. If they were lucky, the Irish junior officers would be given a tattered straw mat for a bed.16
There was little to eat, especially for those officers who had no money. Alfred Hasbrouck’s magisterial book Foreign Legionaries in the Liberation of Spanish South America colourfully describes the volunteers’ mealtimes in Angostura:
When a distribution of rations was necessary, a bullock was lassoed and tied to a stake. It was then killed by stabbing in the neck. Very often no attempt was made to bleed the animal properly before it was skinned. The flesh was then torn and scraped off the bones with utter disregard of precautions to keep it clean. The fact that it might be covered with sand and grit as well as flies, when issued to the ultimate consumer, apparently received little consideration by those in charge of the operation. To secure this ration, even the officers must go for it themselves, and each one carried home his chunk of beef in the heat of the day to cook it as best he could without utensils. Then, when the best pieces had been issued out for immediate roasting, stewing or boiling, the remainder, consisting generally of the muscular tissue, was cut into long narrow strips and hung in the sun to dry for several days. When these strips had become as hard and dry as rope they were considered properly cured, and could be kept indefinitely.17
There were certain luxuries to be had in Angostura, however, for those who could afford them. In March 1819, according to the newspaper Correo del Orinoco, a consignment of goods brought across the Atlantic by the frigate George Canning had arrived from London. This included:
Sadlery, Horsewhips, Dressing Cases, and Ladies’ Work – Boxes, Ladies’ Dresses; Scented Soap of various kinds; Hair, Tooth, Shaving and Coat-Brushes; ready-made Duck Trousers of the best quality; Razors, Penknives, and Scissors; Shoe-Brushes and Blacking; – also, Pistols and Swords, and good Porter.18
The great scourge of the jungle was tropical disease, especially yellow fever. The unfortunate soldier who was bitten by an infected mosquito would start to experience thumping headaches, chills and muscle pains; he would then begin to vomit black bile. The lucky ones would then make a full recovery, but a significant minority would experience internal haemorrhaging and liver failure, which would cause their skin to take on the jaundiced complexion from which the disease takes its name. In April 1818 Sergeant-Major Thomas Higgins had succumbed to fever on the river before even reaching Angostura. Lieutenant Michael Plunkett died shortly afterwards. Each morning those who had died during the night were brought to the cemetery on the outskirts of the town and buried, with little ceremony, sometimes not even a coffin.19 Richard Longville Vowell wrote in his memoir: ‘No place in the world could be more admirably calculated to foster and mature that fatal disease than the sultry city of Angostura, with its stagnant, half putrid lagoon; its matanzas [slaughterhouses]; and its thousands of raw-hides drying on the pavement in front of the stores, in preparation for shipment.’20
The regimental commanders embarked on scouting missions into the hinterland to find the men they needed to fill their complement of troops. The bulk of the men who served under the Irish officers in the foreign regiments were members of indigenous tribes who had lived on the Capuchin missions in the area, or the descendants of African slaves. Piggott’s rifle regiment comprised Irish and English officers and indigenous and mestizo troops.21
A handful of the English and Irish officers were disgusted by their treatment in Venezuela and attacked the patriot government in the pages of the press when they returned home. They wrote memoirs in which they bemoaned their fate and warned prospective recruits of the dangers that faced them in the tropical jungle. In the preface to his book Colonel Hippisley gives a sense of how the Europeans, who were used to modern logistics, were completely unprepared for the conditions and terrain they found in South America.
The utter want of a commissariat, and the intolerable heat of the climate, involve a complication of miseries which no European constitution can withstand; and the author has to lament the death of the great majority of his companions, who perished, like infected lepers, without sustenance and without aid from the unfeeling wretches in whose behalf they fell.22
The anonymous author of The Narrative of a Voyage to the Spanish Main in the Ship ‘Two Friends’ wrote in the preface that he was ‘merely animadverting upon the conduct of the cause, and its probable progress, with the view of explaining his motives, for dissuading his countrymen from giving implicit credit to the specious promises and false representations of interested individuals.’23
However, many of the foreign officers adapted to the harsh conditions as best they could without significant complaint and fought bravely in the long, hard campaigns that followed. William Jackson Adam noted in his memoir that the articles and books that appeared in Dublin and London were written by disgruntled officers – ‘those heroes,’ as he sarcastically described them – and had the purpose of rendering ‘plausible and praiseworthy’ their ‘desertion from the cause of liberty.’ They ‘not only tended to bring disgrace upon the promulgators of their disgrace, but to bring into discredit that noble cause in which, on the first going off, they were so eager; but the difficulties and dangers of which they had not sufficient courage to withstand.’24
With the officer corps decimated, the remnants of the 1st Hussars and Red Hussars were amalgamated into one regiment under Hippisley’s command and received orders to join Bolívar in San Fernando, about 270 miles west on the River Apure, a tributary of the Orinoco. San Fernando was full of injured soldiers and refugees from the battles that had been fought against the Spanish in the early months of the year.
The officers in their spanking new uniforms arrived in San Fernando to meet their comrades-in-arms, llanero and indigenous troops, dressed in little more than rags, who fought for General José Antonio Páez, a bluff, no-nonsense plainsman with no formal education, far removed in class and temperament from Bolívar and the other aristocratic criollo officers. However, it was not long before the impoverished foreign officers were forced to sell their beautiful uniforms in exchange for food. For much of the campaign it was the Venezuelan officers and their men who paraded in the scarlet uniforms of the British infantry, while the Irish and English officers were dressed in rags.
In the town of Achaguas, close to San Fernando, Daniel O’Leary witnessed Colonel Wilson attempting to subvert Bolívar’s authority after the latter had returned to the patriot capital, Angostura. Wilson began heaping praise on Páez during a banquet, even going so far as to suggest that the Venezuelan should be named captain-general of the patriot armies. With his eye on the main chance, Wilson offered to raise thousands more men in England, which he himself would command on his return. O’Leary was disgusted by what he regarded as an act of treachery towards Bolívar and was distressed at the treatment and execution of royalist prisoners. The earnest, intense young officer from County Cork took his mission in South America very seriously, unlike some of his more bumptious fellow-officers, and requested separation from his unit and a transfer to Angostura.25 He had a firm early nineteenth-century sense of honour, evidence of which is contained in a letter he wrote much later – when he was married and had a newborn son, whom he named Simón. In the letter to his wife, Soledad, he expressed his hope that his son would be ‘virtuous and honourable, and that, at the same time, he would not deceive others, nor let himself be deceived.’26
In Angostura, Bolívar learnt of Wilson’s dealings with Páez and arrested him. Wilson was thrown out of the army, and out of Venezuela.27 On his return to Ireland he launched a propaganda campaign against Bolívar and the patriot cause; the patriot newspaper published in Angostura, the Correo del Orinoco, responded by accusing him of treachery and suggested that he was lucky that he had escaped Venezuela with his life.
If the Colonel had picked up his sword on behalf of the insurgents’ cause with even half the vigour with which he employed his pen against it, he probably would have had no differences with [Bolívar] who, after all, could not be the terrible person who has been painted by Colonel Wilson.28
It was later alleged that Wilson was a spy, who had taken money from the Spanish ambassador in London to foment trouble in the patriot ranks.
In the aftermath of the incident with Wilson, O’Leary asked to be transferred to a Venezuelan unit so that he could improve his Spanish. He was assigned to General José Antonio Anzoátegui’s personal guard. It was at this point in 1818 that O’Leary first met Bolívar, who seems to have approved of the Irishman’s conduct.29 It was the beginning of a close relationship, which – while not always quite as harmonious as has sometimes been made out – lasted until Bolívar’s death in 1830. According to O’Leary,
Bolívar had a high forehead, but not very wide and furrowed by lines – the sign of a thinker. His eyebrows were bushy and well-formed. His eyes were black, alive and piercing. His nose was large and perfect; he had on it a small wart that bothered him quite a bit, even though it disappeared in 1820, leaving an almost imperceptible mark. He had prominent cheekbones; the cheeks hollow since I first met him in 1818. His mouth was ugly and his lips were somewhat thick. The distance between his nose and his mouth was significant. His white teeth were even and most beautiful; he looked after them with care. His ears were large but well-positioned.
His hair was fine and curly; he wore it long in the years 1818 to 1821, when it started to grey, upon which he started to cut it. His sideburns and mustaches were red; he shaved them for the first time in 1825.30
Bolívar had dark, coarsened skin – not surprising given the amount of time he spent in the saddle. He was not tall: five feet six inches. Neither was he broad: he had a narrow chest, a slim frame and ‘small and well-formed hands and feet, which a woman would have envied.’31
O’Leary betrays the fascination Bolívar exerted on his subordinates and perhaps the intimacy engendered by weeks and months in the field together. The Liberator’s small vanities sat side by side with a fierce intelligence. It was this keen mind that enabled him to conjure up a daring plan to break the military deadlock between the patriot and royalist forces.
At the end of 1818 a new wave of volunteers began arriving in Angostura, recruited in the cities of Ireland and England by Colonel James Towers English, a Dubliner who had enlisted in Hippisley’s 1st Hussars, and Colonel George Elsom. English was the enterprising son of a Dublin merchant. Orphaned at 11, he had found work supplying horses to the British army before joining the army’s commissariat as a clerk. In 1817 he was commissioned as a lieutenant-colonel in Hippisley’s 1st Hussars. He had ingratiated himself with General Páez by giving him water in the heat of battle when the latter was suffering from an epileptic fit. Páez later presented English with a bloodied lance as a souvenir, which the Irishman was depicted holding in a portrait he had commissioned when he returned to England.32 In the middle of 1818, realising that the Venezuelan Republic was still in desperate need of men, English had signed a contract with the vice-president, Antonio Zea, worth 300 pesos a man, to raise a further thousand troops in Britain and Ireland.
About 1,200 men recruited by English arrived in Angostura. Though they became known as the British Legion, about half the enlisted men were Irish. Officers compiled a list of the British Legion’s NCOS and privates in Achaguas in December 1820.33 Of the 310 men listed, at least 142, or 46 per cent, were Irish (there may have been more; some of the names are illegible). The bulk of the remainder were English, Scottish and Welsh, but there were also Germans, Italians and Venezuelans, as well as volunteers born in India and the United States.
The Irish NCOS and privates came from all over Ireland. Only three of the 32 counties are not represented on the Achaguas list: counties Clare, Leitrim and Offaly. Two-thirds of the Irishmen who appear on the list were from Leinster and Ulster. Dublin provided 30 of Leinster’s 50 volunteers, including Sergeant John James, a 47-year-old shoemaker, Private John Middleton, a 46-year-old watchmaker, and Private James O’Neill, a 33-yearold bootmaker. On the other hand, only a handful of the volunteers from Ulster were from Belfast. Many of the Ulstermen had been employed in the textile industry and came from its traditional heartland: of the province’s 49 volunteers, 39 came from counties Antrim, Armagh, Cavan and Down. Eleven of the Ulstermen gave their occupation as weavers, including 30-yearold Bugler James Rhodes from Armagh and 24-year-old Private James Murray from Ballymena. One, 33-year-old Private James Gilbert from Portaferry, was a cotton-spinner. The high percentage of textile workers perhaps reflected a slowdown in the industry in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.
Of the 43 volunteers who came from Connacht and Munster, 21 were from County Cork, six from County Tipperary, five from County Mayo, and four from County Kerry; there were two each from counties Galway and Sligo and one each from counties Limerick, Roscommon and Waterford. They included Sergeant John Noble, a 33-year-old labourer from Sligo, Corporal John Ryan, a 29-year-old carpenter from Limerick, Private Thomas Ryan, a 44-year-old gardener from Bandon, and Private Martin Hopkins, a 26-yearold weaver from Castlebar.
The Irish volunteers on the Achaguas list ranged in age from 16 to 51 according to the ages they gave the officers, although there may have been younger and older men in the ranks. More than half were in their twenties. There were also 13 volunteers aged 19 and under, 28 were in their thirties, 18 in their forties and four in their fifties.
Sixty-four of the Irish volunteers, 45 per cent of the total, gave their occupation as labourer. But there were also artisans and tradesmen, including bookbinders, tailors, smiths, breeches-makers, carpenters, apothecaries, shoemakers, reed-makers, pipe-makers, watchmakers, gardeners, hairdressers, servants, cutters, furriers, sailors, cabinetmakers, bricklayers, bakers, woollen drapers, musicians, ironfounders, cordwainers [leather workers], painters, glaziers, clerks, butchers, glass-blowers, car men, weavers, cotton-spinners and beaters.
Another regiment of 300 Irish volunteers sailed from Cobh on 17 July 1818 under the command of Major Beamish. All the officers were family or friends of Beamish, and nearly all had seen military service.34 Ten days into the voyage, however, Beamish collapsed and died from a stroke, prompting the main body of the volunteers to demand that the captain return to Ireland. One of those on board, Captain Cowley, who took command and wrote an anonymous account of his service in the Venezuelan army entitled Recollections of a Service of Three Years during the War-of-Extermination in the Republics of Venezuela and Colombia, recalled that he and his fellow-officers were fearful of a mutiny. At one point the men attempted to rush the armed officers and throw them overboard, but they were repelled. Afterwards, according to the author,
… my antagonists were, as before, very violent, and still demanded our immediate return to Ireland, pressing me for an answer on the spot, which I purposely avoided giving as long as possible, wishing to gain time to prepare against a desperate attempt, which I had reason to expect they would make to gain possession of the ship. I observed that they were arming themselves with handspikes, spars, and every other means of an offensive nature within their compass, and consequently felt assured of an attack the very first opportunity.35
The officers were confident of the seamen’s loyalty and ordered two of the eight 12-pound guns in the hold to be brought onto the deck and loaded as a deterrent. A hundred muskets were also brought up and loaded. Believing that one particular junior officer was instigating the unrest, the author took it upon himself to question the men, against the advice of the other officers, who believed he would be thrown overboard.
… but I had more confidence in them; I knew that Irishmen, although easily heated, are as easily cooled … I accordingly went forward, throwing my sword and pistols on the deck, and asked them directly if my suspicions were correct.36
The men informed on the mutinous young officer, who tried to strike Cowley with a handspike. He was finally thrown overboard with a rope tied around his waist to cool his temper, the effect of which was that ‘on being hoisted on board again he was pale and ill from fright, and did not recover during his stay with us sufficiently to leave his cabin.’37
Further ships crossed the Atlantic carrying soldiers under the command of another Irishman, Lieutenant-Colonel John Blossett, English’s second-in-command. English himself sailed in February 1819 and arrived in Isla Margarita that April, where he was promoted to brigadier-general in command of the Irish and British volunteers but under the orders of the Venezuelan-born General Rafael Urdaneta. One contemporary wrote of English:
As an officer, he was destitute of energy, and experience; as a man he was generous and open-hearted. All that can be said of him in reference to his conduct as commander of the British legion is, that he mistook his profession, for which indeed he was physically unfitted.38
Ordered to make an assault on the Venezuelan mainland, Urdaneta set sail on July 1819 with an expeditionary force of 1,200 men, about 800 of whom were Irish and British volunteers, under English’s command. They took the fortress of El Morro and the town of Barcelona before marching north-east towards the town of Cumaná. But Urdaneta and English argued about their next step. The aim of Urdaneta’s campaign was diversionary, to pin down royalist troops who might otherwise be deployed against Bolívar elsewhere, and it was anticipated that any gains made by the patriot armies could not be sustained. Urdaneta favoured bypassing Cumaná, where there was a royalist garrison, and marching inland towards Maturín. However, English thought it vital that an assault be launched on Cumaná, fearing that prolonged inactivity among the troops might well lead to mutiny.
Urdaneta eventually agreed to an attack but warned English that the consequences of the action, which he thought suicidal, would fall on the Irishman’s shoulders. Attempting an attack on a defensive battery outside the town, an assault party of volunteers was forced into a ditch. Urdaneta ordered a retreat, during which the volunteers suffered heavy casualties from Spanish gunfire. About 150 of Urdaneta’s men were killed or injured. The general was now determined to march towards Maturín in the interior. Pleading illness, English was allowed to return to Isla Margarita, where he died in September 1819.
The colonel’s funeral was carried out with a great deal of ceremony, the Irish officers and men parading behind the coffin with arms reversed, along with Venezuelan soldiers, staff officers, naval officers, sailors and marines. At 4 p.m. on 29 September, to the beat of a muffled drum, the procession began moving slowly out of Juan Griego, the main town on Isla Margarita, towards the grave. Three musket volleys rang out as the coffin was lowered into the ground, answered by artillery from the nearby forts and the vessels in the bay. The death of their compatriot moved the Irish soldiers. According to William Jackson Adam, as the soldiers made their way back to their lodgings in Juan Griego ‘the sun was sinking into his watery bed in unusual splendour, and the music playing our national air of “Patrick’s Day,” reminded us of the land of our nativity, from which we were separated, and to which, like our departed countryman, many were destined never to return.’39 The Irishman John Blossett replaced English as commander of the British Legion.
While Urdaneta was leading the attack on royalist positions on the Venezuelan coast, Bolívar and Páez were taking the fight to the Spanish on the country’s plains. The Dubliner James Rooke, who came from a family steeped in the tradition of service in the British army, was among the most prominent Irish officers during the campaigns on the llanos between 1817 and 1819. Rooke’s father was a wealthy English soldier and politician who had served as an aide-de-camp to the unpopular Lord Lieutenant of Ireland George Townshend in the late eighteenth century. Rooke senior had obviously enjoyed his time in Dublin, producing three illegitimate children, including James, with his Irish lover. The younger Rooke had enlisted as a second lieutenant in the 49th Regiment of Foot in 1791 and fought in the French Revolutionary Wars.
He seems to have had plenty of money. In 1798, having bought a commission as major in the Queen’s Light Dragoons, he married Mary Rigge, a doctor’s daughter from Bristol. They settled in the ranger’s lodge of Cornbury Park at Charlbury in Oxfordshire, the estate of the Duke of Marlborough, where Rooke took like a duck to water to the life of a country squire. He passed his days hunting, shooting and gambling; his nights were spent carousing in social circles that included the Prince of Wales. However, like many members of the minor gentry, he was getting himself deeper and deeper into debt at the card table and racetrack. In 1801 he abandoned his family, selling his racehorses and hunters and fleeing to France, where, on the resumption of hostilities between Britain and France, he was arrested.40
Escaping his captors, he made his way to Cádiz and once again was commissioned in the British army. He fought his way across the continent – he was possibly present at Waterloo – and served as an aide-de-camp to the Prince of Orange. After 1815 and the end of the war in Europe he was a widower without prospects, his wife having died the previous year. Always hungry for adventure, he decided to visit his sister, who was married to the British governor of Saint Christopher Island (popularly called Saint Kitts).
It was a fateful decision. It was in Saint Kitts that Rooke fell in love with a ‘very fascinating and elegant’ local woman by the name of Anna, who had been educated in England.41 It was also where he learnt that the Venezuelan government in Angostura was looking for volunteers, and so he wrote to Bolívar proposing that he raise a regiment of hussars in Trinidad. This came to naught, and instead Rooke offered his own services as a soldier. James and Anna Rooke arrived in Angostura on a merchant vessel in 1818. They set up house and lived off the allowance Anna’s father sent her, though it was seldom enough to keep them afloat. While Rooke was off recruiting in the depths of the jungle for indigenous troops, Anna began a love affair with one of her husband’s comrades, causing scandal and becoming the main source of conversation among the Irish and English volunteers.42
Rooke’s military experience ensured that he was given the rank of lieutenant-colonel and a command of unit of hussars. However, not everyone was impressed by Rooke. Daniel O’Leary had time to cast a critical eye over his fellow-countryman in Angostura and found him wanting.
Happy with everyone and with everything, and especially himself, he seemed less than indifferent, pleased with the life he was leading. To him, the climate of Apure was soft and healthy and superior to any other, until he entered the territory of New Granada, the climate of which, according to him, had no rival in the world.43
Rooke may have been a faintly ludicrous character, but he was also accustomed to the hardships of campaigning – he was, after all, a more experienced soldier than the callow O’Leary. There was also perhaps the fact that Rooke’s roguish, devil-may-care attitude was anathema to the sober, level-headed O’Leary. Whatever the truth of the matter, Rooke was to prove that what he lacked in seriousness he made up for in bravery on the battlefield.
Meanwhile, Major Arthur Sandes had replaced Colonel Piggott, who had fallen ill and returned home, as commander of the 1st Rifles. Sandes was a member of the Protestant ascendancy from Glenfield, near Listowel, County Kerry.44 Under Sandes, the 1st Rifles, or Black Rifles, as they were also known, became one of the crack units in the patriot armies. They were at the centre of nearly all the main actions to liberate the northern part of South America, from their first skirmishes with Spanish troops on the shores of the Orinoco in 1818 to the liberation of Bolivia high in the Andes in 1825.
Throughout 1818 and early 1819 Irish volunteers fought with the patriot armies on the llanos. Although the patriots controlled the plains, Isla Margarita and much of the east of the country, their cavalrymen were incapable of making inroads into the highlands and the towns on the northern coast of Venezuela, which were defended by the better-trained royalist infantry.
The Irish soldiers who fought in South America in the early nineteenth century experienced many privations. They endured endless forced marches through humid jungles, strength-sapping climbs over dizzying mountain passes and long days of hunger and boredom in disease-ridden Caribbean islands. How they spent their precious free time depended on their station in life. Because many of the Irish officers who served in the patriot armies left a written record, it is possible to build a more accurate picture of their day-today experiences than those of the enlisted men.
Alcohol helped both the enlisted men and the officers relieve the tedium of life in camp. Francis Burdett O’Connor recalled a party held by Irish officers at Huamachuco in the highlands of northern Peru. It was common for Irish officers on campaign in South America to have a drink together when their paths crossed. An Irish sea captain had given O’Connor a couple of bottles of whiskey with which to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. Even though the day in question had passed, the Irish officers raised a toast in honour of their patron saint. Among those present were Francis Burdett O’Connor, Arthur Sandes and William Owens Ferguson.45
Gambling was another common pastime in the patriot army. According to General William Miller, the English veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who fought in Chile and Peru,
… perhaps no other vice, singly, produced so many drawbacks to the patriot cause as the unfortunate propensity to play on the part of ministers, envoys, and officers of all ranks, who too frequently dissipated public property intrusted [sic] to their care. Insubordination, desertion, occasional defeat, and a prolongation of the miseries of war, were some of the natural consequences of the unhappy propensity.46
The officers and men played cards and even organised horse races. It was not only money they played for. On the same night that the Irish officers had toasted St Patrick, Francis Burdett O’Connor watched as his fellow-countryman Arthur Sandes and his commanding officer, General Antonio José de Sucre, tossed a coin for the hand in marriage of a wealthy Quito heiress. Sandes was engaged to be married to the daughter of the Marquis of Solando; Sucre also wished to marry her and suggested to Sandes the idea of tossing a coin to decide the matter. O’Connor agreed to witness the bet and threw the coin in the air. Sandes lost.
In the early part of 1819, frustrated at the patriots’ lack of progress in Venezuela, Bolívar made an inspired if risky decision: he would march west across the Andes into New Granada (present-day Colombia) and drive south towards Bogotá. The daring plan required tramping across the Venezuelan flood plains towards the province of Casanare, where the patriot forces under General Francisco Paula de Santander were stationed. The joint army would then climb through the Andes by way of a bleak crossing called the Páramo de Pisba before falling upon the more lightly manned royalist garrisons in New Granada. Bolívar was counting on surprise and the fact that the people of New Granada, having suffered the depredations of the Spanish, would be sympathetic to the patriots.
On 26 May 1819 Bolívar’s army of some 2,000 men marched west from the town of Setenta. They included a reconstituted British Legion under James Rooke and the Rifles under Arthur Sandes. It was at the height of the rainy season, and the men sometimes had to wade waist-deep through the flooded plains. To make matters worse, many of them were ill from their poor diet. They had eaten nothing but unsalted meat for months, having no access to bread, fresh fruit or vegetables.47 And the vertiginous, snow-covered peaks of the Andes beckoned on the horizon.
On 11 June 1819 Bolívar’s units merged with those under Santander at the town of Tame.48 On the 22nd, having struggled through the heat and humidity, Bolívar’s army began to climb the steep paths into the mountains. Five days later the vanguard dispersed a royalist force of 300 men, an action that proved to be a fillip to the morale of Bolívar’s soldiers, who now faced a tortuous climb to the Páramo de Pisba. The freezing cold and altitude sickness were now the enemy. Most of the men, used to the stifling heat and humidity of the tropical plains, did not have adequate clothing or boots; the Irish captain, John Johnston, had managed to salvage a pair but threw them into a river in order to share the same privations as his fellow-officers.49 As the army limped up the eastern face of the cordillera the horses began dying on the narrow mountain trails, blocking the path of the rearguard, which was already struggling through blizzards and ice storms. The men began to suffer from dysentery. Hundreds died from hypothermia or disease.
On 5 July the vanguard and the first half of General Anzoátegui’s division reached Socha, where they were welcomed by local people with bread, tobacco and cups of cloudy chicha, an Andean drink brewed from maize. Nine days later the rearguard, including the British Legion, which had lost a third of its number, limped into Socha. Down the valley the royalist forces were waiting.
On 11 July, Bolívar led a thousand men of Santander’s division into the village of Gameza. General Barreiro’s royalist forces were positioned outside the town, on the other side of the river. During the ensuing battle Santander was injured; and, faced with royalist reinforcements, the patriots withdrew. The arrival of the British Legion strengthened Bolívar’s hand, and on 25 July, at the Pantano de Vargas (Vargas Swamp), Bolívar’s army of 2,600 men faced a 3,500-strong royalist force. Bolívar’s troops were largely untested and, because of the gruelling conditions of the Andes crossing, his cavalry and infantry regiments were lacking horses and equipment. Barreiro ordered the King’s 1st Regiment to attack the left flank of the patriot army, held by Santander’s division. Seeing that the patriot troops were offering little opposition, Barreiro urged the centre of his troops forward. Sandes’s Rifles and the Barcelona Regiment bore the brunt of the royalist assault and began moving backwards. With things looking desperate, Bolívar ordered Colonel Rooke and the 2nd Rifles to advance. Rooke took two musket balls in his left arm during the battle, but the charge of the 2nd Rifles helped save the day. Though neither side could claim victory, Bolívar’s army had survived when it looked as if it would suffer a crushing defeat. The surgeon Thomas Foley from Killarney amputated Rooke’s arm, and he was left behind in the monastery of Tunja to recuperate; but he died shortly afterwards. Sandes and O’Leary had also received wounds. Sandes’s wound was the more serious, but O’Leary bore the mark of a sabre on his forehead for the rest of his life.
Two days after the battle at the Pantano de Vargas, Bolívar declared martial law. All New Granadans between the ages of 15 and 40 were ordered to report to the army. O’Leary was put in charge of turning them into soldiers. He was not impressed by the appearance of the indigenous recruits who turned up at the headquarters in Corrales de Bonza.
Nothing could be less military than the outfits they wore: a grey, woollen hat, wide-brimmed with a low crown covered a head that reminded one of Samson, before the fatal scissors would cut off his long, thick hair; an immense, square blanket, of rough wool, with an opening in the middle, through which passed that enormous head, hung from the shoulders to the knees and gave them the appearance of men without arms.50
O’Leary stripped them of their ponchos and began to drill them. However, he found it difficult to teach them the rudiments of shooting ‘without them closing their eyes and throwing their heads back, putting in danger their own lives and those of their companions, rather than their opponents.’51 Despite his misgivings, O’Leary boasted that ‘inside a few days, 800 of these recruits, divided into companies, presented from a distance an imposing sight, and in the Battle of Boyacá, as in all those that were fought afterwards, the indigenous peasants proved that there were no better infantry soldiers in South America than them.’52
On 7 August the decisive battle took place at Boyacá Bridge, resulting in a comprehensive victory for the patriots. Bolívar now marched towards the prize of Bogotá. Receiving news of the spectacular royalist defeat, the viceroy of New Granada, Juan José de Sámano, and many of the other higher royal officials fled the viceregal capital with their families, fearing for their lives.
The Liberator’s daring strategy had paid off. The arrival of English’s volunteers and the experience and bravery of Irish officers such as Rooke, Sandes and O’Leary had helped Bolívar get his campaign off the ground. In December 1819 the patriot government in Angoshura proclaimed the foundation of Gran Colombia (encompassing the modern-day states of Colombia and Venezuela). But this was only the first step in a long-drawn-out war that would see Irish soldiers fight throughout the northern part of the continent for the next six years.
* Plainsmen or cowboys, from the Spanish word llano, meaning plain.