Chapter 11
The regiments that had set sail from Irish and English ports throughout 1817 and 1818 had been thinned by desertion and disease. But, despite the horror stories that were beginning to emerge in the Dublin and London newspapers by courtesy of disgruntled officers such as Henry Croasdaile Wilson and Gustavus Hippisley, Irish volunteers kept arriving in the Caribbean, lured by the promises of unscrupulous recruiters.
Between 1818 and 1820 two Irishmen, Thomas Eyre from County Galway and John Devereux from County Wexford, led recruiting drives for volunteers to serve in Bolívar’s armies.
Thomas Eyre was the youngest son of Richard and Anchoretta Eyre of Eyrecourt, County Galway. The family were descendants of Cromwellian planters who had settled near Portumna, and Richard Eyre was a former county high sheriff. Thomas Eyre was suffering from financial troubles when he made the acquaintance of Gregor MacGregor, a Scottish soldier who had fought in the Peninsular War. MacGregor had been one of the first European officers to enter the service of the patriot armies in South America and had fought for four years, between 1812 and 1816. Though he seems to have been a capable soldier, he was over-fond of money and drink and was utterly unprincipled. He was a plump, graceful, well-dressed gentleman-soldier who could charm any company and whose military record, at least in the early days of his American adventures, was exemplary. However, his excessive attention to frivolous details – the cut of a uniform, a desire for titles – so beloved of a certain type of eighteenth-century British officer, gave warning of his superficiality; for he was one of the most daring, incorrigible conmen to emerge in the early nineteenth century, a forerunner of a modern property shark.
After his first stint fighting in South America, MacGregor hit on a scheme for selling land in Florida to investors in Savannah, Georgia. With 150 men raised in the United States and the West Indies, MacGregor had landed at Amelia Island near Jacksonville in north-western Florida. Failing to make progress inland, he had set up a government on the island, with himself at its head. When the treasury ran low, he fled to England. He then managed to inveigle £1,000 out of Bolívar’s agent López Méndez in exchange for raising men and equipment for the patriots. When he failed to make good this promise, López Méndez had him arrested.
Having fallen out with the Venezuelans, MacGregor struck a bargain with an agent by the name of José María del Real to provide troops for New Granada. It was under MacGregor’s patronage that Eyre began recruiting for what became known as the Regiment of Hibernia or Hibernian Regiment.
Eyre’s competitor, John Devereux, was from Taghmon, County Wexford. He had fought, as a ‘mere lad’, in the 1798 Rising; his conduct during the Battle of New Ross was described by the United Irish leader Thomas Cloney as ‘truly heroic’.1 After the rising, the British government accused Devereux of complicity in the massacre of Protestant prisoners in County Wexford and sentenced him to transportation for life, but he received an amnesty and emigrated to the United States.
In 1806 Devereux had been allowed to return to Ireland, but in 1807 the government denied him permission to travel to his home county, which had been the centre of the insurrection in 1798. Instead he travelled to France, returning to the United States in 1815.2 It was in Baltimore, home to many Latin American exiles, that Devereux had hit upon the idea of supplying arms to the patriots, and in 1815 he had managed to secure a meeting with Bolívar in Cartagena on the Caribbean coast of present-day Colombia. During this meeting Devereux had proposed raising men in Ireland for service in the patriot armies. He had then travelled to Buenos Aires, where he had tried to raise a loan for the patriot army and where he was appointed envoy of the Buenos Aires government to the United States.
Devereux had been in Haiti in 1818 when he reiterated to Bolívar his proposal to raise units of volunteers in Ireland. Bolívar accepted, and Devereux, who was now calling himself ‘General’ Devereux, despite holding no such rank in the patriot army, began his recruitment drive for what became known as the Irish Legion.
Ireland was the most fertile recruiting-ground for the British army, and in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo and the arrival of peace in Europe there were thousands of unemployed Irish soldiers trying to earn a meagre living in Ireland and Britain. Eyre’s and Devereux’s recruiters scoured Dublin and Belfast, as well as Liverpool and other English cities, to fill battalions for service in Venezuela. Their efforts to raise men for the Venezuelan army received considerable publicity, and handbills and posters were produced to advertise the lucrative rewards on offer. One of Devereux’s handbills, distributed on the streets of Dublin, promised:
The most flattering encouragement will be given to such young Men, of good Character, as shall be found qualified for GENERAL DEVEREUX’S Irish Legion, about to Sail direct for the Head Quarters of the Supreme Chief, none but effective and spirited Men need apply; well disciplined Soldiers, who have their Discharges, will be preferred, and will find this a most favourable opportunity to improve their Fortunes and acquire a handsome Provision for themselves for Life.3
Throughout the recruiting period, service in the patriot armies was linked to emigration and desperate Irish families were tricked into travelling with the false promise of virgin fertile land.
Devereux’s most influential backer was Daniel O’Connell, who organised and attended a much-publicised dinner in honour of the founder of the Irish Legion at Morrison’s Hotel in Nassau Street, Dublin. O’Connell spoke in glowing terms of Devereux’s enterprise and bought commissions for his 14-year-old son, Morgan, who became a member of Devereux’s staff, and his nephew, Maurice,4 who, after the Irish Legion disbanded, became a lieutenant in the Rifles and died in Quito from disease.5
Such was the jealousy and backbiting between Eyre and Devereux as they recruited their respective armies for service in South America that the former challenged the latter to a duel. But Devereux declined the challenge.6 According to Colonel Michael Rafter, who served with Eyre in the Caribbean,
… this was a great source of triumph to the Hibernians, whose numbers rapidly increased in consequence; but the temporary success of Eyre was counterbalanced by a most weighty consideration:— the uniform of his regiment was excessively plain, while D’Evereux’s lancers strutted about the streets of Dublin blazing in all the splendour of plumed helmets, burnished sabres, and richly laced jackets, and the clicking of their spurs, and the tinkling of their chains, sounded the death knell to the pride of the mortified Hibernians, who never failed to discover [reveal] their envy when they happened to come in contact with their well-dressed brother Patriots. Quarrels and riots ensued, daily encounters took place, and, if Colonel Eyre had not prudently prohibited his officers from wearing their uniform, the streets of Dublin would have overflowed with that Patriot blood which was to have been shed in the emancipation of the suffering Americans.7
In the alehouses of Belfast, Dublin and Cork, recruiters came to blows as they vied with each other to fill the ships leaving for the Caribbean. Given the profits to be made from the sale of commissions in these regiments, it was not uncommon for agents of the same cause to compete for officers. Advertisements promising generous financial rewards and adventure in exotic climes were common throughout Ireland, luring bored, impecunious half-pay officers to stump up the last of their shrinking funds for the chance of fame and fortune in a distant world far from the daily drudge.
Overladen ships left Irish ports throughout 1819 with hundreds of men, women and children on board – many soldiers brought their families with them – excited about the promise of a better life in the New World. Eyre and Devereux had become wealthy men from the sale of commissions in their regiments. Eyre was alleged to have raised £13,000, of which only £7,000 was spent on equipping the expedition to Venezuela, before he set sail for the Caribbean at the head of the Hibernian Regiment to join the rest of MacGregor’s legion.8
About 600 men had sailed under MacGregor’s command, arriving in Haiti in the early part of 1819.9 Bolívar never authorised MacGregor’s actions in the West Indies, and his expedition descended into farce. Having successfully dislodged the Spanish from their garrison in the small town of Portobello in present-day Panama, MacGregor fell idle. His officers got drunk on looted liquor, fraternised with the townspeople and failed to impose the slightest military discipline. When a royalist force, under the orders of the Dublin-born Spanish general Alexander Hore, who had arrived in South America with General Morillo’s expedition in 1815, arrived to retake the town, MacGregor slipped away by jumping out of a window into the sea and swimming to one of his ships, abandoning his officers and men.
MacGregor made for Haiti to join Eyre and the 500 men of the Hibernian Regiment. He now decided to restore his reputation by launching an attack on Riohacha on the New Granadan coast. In September 1819 the Amelia, the Alerta and the Lovely Ann set sail from the port of Les Cayes on the southwest coast of Haiti for the South American mainland, some 450 miles away. There were 235 men, 15 women and four children on the ships. Eyre, his wife and children and the rest of the Hibernian Regiment sailed on the Amelia.10 Within a few days at sea three officers, seven enlisted men, three women and two children had died from fever, including one of Eyre’s daughters, who, in the words of one of the officers on board, Colonel Michael Rafter, was ‘an amiable young creature, whose gentle manners and delicate frame, were but ill calculated to encounter the dangers, fatigues and privations, of such an enterprize [sic], and whose melancholy fate excited a considerable degree of sympathy.’11
Rafter was highly critical of MacGregor, and with good reason. MacGregor had deserted Rafter’s brother in Portobello; Rafter’s brother was subsequently executed by the Spanish. In his memoir of the expedition, Rafter was scathing of MacGregor’s behaviour, not least on board the Amelia.
The weather side of the quarter deck was always held sacred for the perambulations of His Excellency, while twenty officers and three ladies, huddled together on the lee side, gazed on the mighty man, whose thoughts were supposed to be pregnant with the destruction of armies and the fate of empires; and in the contemplation of his greatness, they lost all sense of the privations they suffered for his exultation. The cabin of the vessel, which was large enough to give shelter to all the officers, was occupied by General M’Gregor and the ladies; while the rest, forced to ‘bide the pelting of the pitiless storm,’ upon deck, bore, without a murmur, the constant drenching they received from the torrents of rain, that fell daily, and almost hourly, during the passage.12
The landing at Riohacha took place in the early hours of 5 October 1819. Lieutenant-Colonel Norcott led the attack; MacGregor and his staff officers remained on board to finish their night’s sleep, as did Eyre, who was ill. About 210 men landed on the beach near Riohacha, including the men of the Hibernia Regiment, led by Major Atkinson. The royalists were forewarned, however, having found in Portobello MacGregor’s correspondence with the patriot leaders in Riohacha. Skirmishes took place throughout the night while the patriots awaited the arrival of their commanding officer. After he was attacked by a small royalist force, Norcott ordered an advance through the thick jungle that surrounded the town. Atkinson was killed, but after five hours of fighting the patriots drove the royalists out of Riohacha.
MacGregor and his staff officers had attempted a landing just before dawn but, coming under fire, had retreated to the ship. It was not until MacGregor saw that the town was in the possession of his troops that he made another landing and took command. The patriots had by now broken into the town’s stores and liberated every bottle of wine and spirits they could find. As MacGregor and his staff officers marched through the town, his own troops abused him for what they regarded as his cowardice.
The tropical heat, disease, the fear of a Spanish attack and plentiful amounts of alcohol caused madness and confusion to reign in Riohacha. MacGregor was incapable of enforcing discipline and, paranoid that he would be ousted by his own officers, sought to scheme with the criollo and indigenous townspeople. He began to call himself the Inca of New Granada and insisted on being referred to as ‘His Majesty the Inca’. He attempted to raise a cavalry regiment comprising indigenous troops to protect him from his own men, who were busy looting every household object of value they could find in Riohacha.
The fearful officer corps resorted to desperate measures. One officer hacked off an unfortunate soldier’s hand with a sabre; another officer, incensed at the reply he received from an Irish soldier of the Hibernian Regiment, drew his pistol and shot him dead. Adding to the hysteria was the fact that the hostile Riohacha citizenry laid siege to the town. Rafter recalled:
M’Gregor was entreated frequently to come to some certain resolution, but in vain; he appeared to be in the situation of a man under the operation of the nightmare, who beholds indistinctly the most horrible sights, but is rendered incapable by some invisible power of flying from them.13
Some of the officers, now convinced that remaining in Riohacha spelt certain death, decided to flee. MacGregor concocted a plan of escape, summoning the remaining officers in Riohacha to a council of war and informing them that an attack was imminent. Having promoted Eyre to general, he advised him that, for their safety, he should send his wife and children onto one of the ships at anchor off the coast, and volunteered to escort them. Once on board the ship with Eyre’s wife and children, MacGregor gave the order to put to sea, once again abandoning his officers and men. The Spanish forces, supplemented by criollo and indigenous soldiers, launched an attack, slaughtering what remained of the patriot garrison. Eyre and the remaining officers retreated to Riohacha’s fort, but their resistance was ended when a stray bullet hit a box of cartridges. Eyre and his comrades were killed in the explosion. Of the 66 officers, 169 enlisted men, 15 women and four children who had sailed from Haiti to Riohacha, Rafter estimated that only 23 officers, 47 enlisted men, one woman and two children had survived.14
MacGregor ended his days in Caracas, dying in 1845, but not until he had swindled yet more unfortunates in a scheme that promised investors good agricultural land in the fictional Central American country of Poyais. When the emigrants arrived, they found that all their money had bought them was a few acres of impenetrable, useless jungle on the Mosquito coast, with no way of returning home.15
Six months after the Hibernian Regiment’s failed expedition, John Devereux’s Irish Legion launched another assault on Riohacha from Isla Margarita. Despite his protestations of zeal for the cause of liberty, Devereux’s main interest was money. Not only did he convince hundreds of his desperate compatriots to join the Irish Legion, making handsome profits in the process, he also set up an office in Liverpool to sell land in South America to prospective emigrants, much in the manner of MacGregor’s notorious scheme. However, Devereux had to abandon this side of his business once the Venezuelans discovered what he was up to. In the meantime he had taken £15 each from the first shipload of poor emigrants, who arrived at their destination to discover that there was no land or anybody to look after them.
Devereux was too busy selling commissions to worry too much about the practicalities of equipping and transporting more than a thousand men across the Atlantic. That task fell to Lieutenant-Colonel William Aylmer, who led the Irish Legion in Venezuela in Devereux’s absence. Aylmer, from Painstown, County Kildare, had been a United Irish leader during the 1798 Rising, in command of 3,000 men at Timahoe, on the Bog of Allen.16 He was subsequently exiled from Ireland by the British government and joined the Austrian army as a cadet in the light dragoons. He became a captain of cuirassiers and was chosen to tutor army officers belonging to the British prince regent’s own regiment of hussars after the peace. There is some dispute about whether Aylmer was relieved of his duties by the prince regent because the role he had played during the 1798 Rising had become an embarrassment or he chose to leave of his own volition.
Aylmer returned to Ireland after Waterloo and was idling his time in Painstown in 1819 when he decided to help Devereux recruit men for the Irish Legion.17 He raised the 10th Lancers, commissioning a family friend, Francis Burdett O’Connor, as a junior officer.
Born in County Cork in 1791, O’Connor grew up among the Protestant gentry on the Connerville estate outside Bandon. Despite later claims of Gaelic ancestry, the family were descended from a wealthy English merchant named Conner. The Cork branch of the family was originally a bastion of conservatism, dedicated to defending Ireland from attack on behalf of the crown and hunting down Whiteboys, members of the Catholic agrarian secret society that was pledged to fighting excessive rents and tithes and the enclosure of the land. But there seems to have been a radical shift in the politics of two members of the family, Francis’s father, Roger, and his uncle, Arthur, who embraced Catholic Emancipation and the revolutionary creed of the United Irishmen and changed their name to O’Connor in a gesture of solidarity with the Catholic Irish. The plight of their sister Anne, who committed suicide after she was refused permission to marry her Catholic lover, may have influenced their attitude.18
Roger O’Connor participated in the 1798 Rising and was imprisoned by the British government.19 His brother, Arthur, a radical MP, journalist and United Irish leader, much influenced by Enlightenment ideas and the example of the French Revolution, was arrested and charged with treason in 1797. On his release from prison in 1802 he entered service in France and was promoted a general by Napoleon.
Francis’s brother, Feargus, was a Chartist leader who became influential in British radical politics, while his godfather, Sir Francis Burdett, after whom he was named, was a reforming English MP. Upon Roger’s release from prison the family had gone to live at Dangan Castle, near Trim, County Meath, the former home of the Duke of Wellington’s family, the Wellesleys.20 The castle burnt down shortly after Roger had taken out an insurance policy for £5,000.21 In his memoirs Francis took responsibility for accidentally starting the fire in which his mother died, but there must be a strong suspicion that it was a deliberate act of arson by his father.22
Roger O’Connor was a wild, impulsive man. He was accused of organising the 10 highwaymen who robbed the Galway mail coach, carrying the cash from the Ballinasloe horse fair, in 1812.23 His defence at the trial was that he had held up the coach not for money but to retrieve incriminating letters that were intended for use in a legal case being taken by a peer against O’Connor’s friend Sir Francis Burdett. The plaintiff believed that Burdett was conducting a love affair with his wife. Burdett testified at O’Connor’s trial, and he was acquitted.
Francis O’Connor was also something of a dreamer. He had tried to run away to France to join Napoleon’s forces after hearing about the general’s escape from Elba in 1815 but Burdett dissuaded him from doing so.24 Francis heard of Devereux’s expedition to South America from William Aylmer. After his discharge from the Austrian army Aylmer had been enjoying the leisurely pursuits of a country gentleman and was a frequent visitor to Dangan Castle, where, with the O’Connor brothers, he indulged his passion for hunting. According to O’Connor,
[Aylmer] passed his time visiting all his neighbours in their country houses, remaining days and even whole weeks in some of them, as was the Irish custom, by which the landlords, after having received the best possible education and having left the family home, occupied themselves with nothing else but country pursuits, hunting foxes, deer and hares with hounds; shooting birds and fishing in the summer …25
It was from this class of radicalised, idle young Irishmen that many of Devereux’s officers were drawn. O’Connor was certainly receptive to the romance of the South American adventure as described by Aylmer during visits to Dangan Castle. Aylmer encouraged O’Connor to help him raise a regiment in counties Kildare and Meath, arguing that, because he himself had been absent from the country for so long, ‘the local people did not know him.’26 O’Connor’s participation, Aylmer argued, would smooth over any difficulties.
O’Connor at first refused to take part, having resolved to emigrate to the United States ‘because the British government was persecuting all my family for the reason that my father and my uncle Arthur had been at the head of the 1798 rebellion.’27 However, the prospect of taking part in the expedition continued to tempt him. He was possessed of an ‘independent and indomitable spirit’, ‘an ardent love of liberty and republicanism’ and ‘democratic ideals,’ according to his grandson, Tomás O’Connor d’Arlach, and was fired up by having witnessed the ‘ruin of his family and the oppression of his country.’28 O’Connor finally changed his mind when a letter arrived telling him that he had been named lieutenant-colonel in Aylmer’s Lancers regiment, and he rushed to Dublin to join his unit. His brother gave him money towards the cost of arming, equipping and provisioning the men.
The fare on the ships crossing the Atlantic was meagre. In the early 1800s it was common for the officer in charge of provisioning a ship to skimp on quality and pocket the proceeds; sometimes he ran off with the funds altogether without buying a piece of biscuit. For most of the crossing, the diet consisted of salted meat and hard biscuit – or hardtack, as it was called. Of course wealthy senior officers might enjoy lavish dinners for the first days of the voyage, but then they too were forced to subsist on the mean rations of a pre-refrigerated age, made more palatable by plentiful quantities of claret and madeira. The ships that carried the officers and enlisted men of the Hibernian Regiment and Irish Legion were poorly provisioned. The Irish Legion’s 2nd Lancers, who sailed on board the Hannah in July 1819, survived on rice, porridge and molasses for breakfast and pork or ‘bad’ beef and black biscuit for dinner. Each man received an allowance of two ounces of water a day.29
The Irish Legion’s 1st Rifles sailed for the Caribbean in June and July 1819 under the command of Colonel Robert Meade. While Meade travelled in June with about 200 officers and enlisted men on board the Charlotte Gambier, his second-in-command, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert James Young, from Culdaff, County Donegal, set sail from Liverpool on board the Laforey on 4 July 1819 with 30 officers, 199 enlisted men, 11 women, six children and a crew of 16. The crossing was far from smooth, typical of that experienced by those who sailed with the Irish Legion.
Shortly after leaving Liverpool some of the officers began to complain that there were not enough provisions on board to last the journey. Excessive drinking exacerbated the problem. One of the men was alleged to have stolen the rum ration of some of his neighbours and got so drunk that he was arrested. As he was about to be tied to the forecastle, he drew a couple of knives and threatened to stab anyone who came near him. He was court-martialled and sentenced to three dozen lashes.
The discontent spread to the point where Young, having consulted the ship’s captain, agreed that they would put in at Waterford for further supplies of water and to ‘get rid of the troublesome characters.’30 Forty-two men and five officers were put ashore, who ‘endeavoured to excite, by false reports, feelings extremely prejudicial to our expedition.’31 Young responded by placing a statement in the newspapers to the effect that he had provisioned the ship adequately.
With the threat of mutiny quelled, Young and the rest of the regiment set sail once again. However, the officers and men continued to fight the tedium of the long ocean voyage by getting drunk. Much of the drinking took place during meetings of the Black Lion Club, which had been founded by Young and his fellow-officers after three-and-a-half weeks at sea. The club met on Thursdays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. The lengthy rules stipulated that the meetings on Thursday should end at 10 p.m. and on Saturdays before midnight. Young, the president of the club, wore a cap with the initials of the Black Lion Club marked in green ribbon, while each member had to sing a song or recite a line of verse during meetings. Talk of politics or religion was forbidden, and the penalty for those who infringed the rules was a draught of salt water. The inaugural meeting of the club must have been a raucous affair. According to Young, ‘the novelty of the Club, upon our first meeting, induced several of the members somewhat to exceed, the consequence of which was a violent headache to myself next day, which was the first indisposition I had since leaving Liverpool.’32
Even his hard-drinking fellow-officers were astounded at the quantities imbibed by a Scottish officer on board the ship. Young recounted the officer’s daily regimen as follows: ‘At five in the morning a glass of sling,* a smoke at 7, Breakfast at 8, a glass of grog after, some Toddy at 11 o’clock, Solomongrundy† at one, dinner at 3 o’clock, two tumblers of grog after, a smoke at 5 o’clock, tea at 7, a nip at 8, and a smoke at 9, and then turn in, except upon the meetings of the Club, which enabled him to take four additional tumblers, and to this rule of living he strictly adhered.’33
On 12 August the Black Lion Club met to drink the health of the prince regent on his birthday. ‘This night the members rather exceeded their quantum,’ wrote Young, ‘but [it] was considered pardonable in honour of the day.’34 On 17 August the members resorted to drinking the wine that had been laid in for the sick. Young explained the club’s reasoning in his journal: ‘Having none on board and drawing near the conclusion of the voyage, we determined to punish a few bottles. The Doctor became rather intoxicated, and fell over the tiller ropes on leaving the Cabin.’35
Another vice of the Regency-era Irish officer which was common on the passage across the Atlantic was duelling. William Jackson Adam of the Irish Legion complained of being awakened on the Hannah in the early morning by pistol shots.36 The Irish private Benjamin McMahon, who had set sail from the Custom House in Dublin in the summer of 1818, claimed that he had witnessed 15 duels between officers during the two-month journey.
But, strange to say, only one person was wounded, and that in the heel – the motion of the vessel, perhaps, prevented them from taking good aim. These duels arose out of the most foolish and childish disputes, generally through gambling transactions. Towards the end of the voyage the captain put a stop to this altogether, because, although they missed one another, yet they constantly hit the rigging and cut it up. We had no quarrels amongst the men.37
On board the Laforey, Young took a dim view of duelling, arresting two of his officers on their way to a duel and making further arrests when the ship landed at Barbados. From there the regiment sailed to Isla Margarita, which Young described as ‘the receptacle of Pirates, Corsairs, and all manner of villainy.’38
The Irish Legionaries were dismayed to find scenes of abject misery in the Caribbean. Soldiers who had fought on the Venezuelan mainland and been withdrawn to Isla Margarita were dying in their dozens, either of yellow fever or of their untreated wounds. There was also the danger of attack from the islanders themselves. Two officers were found murdered, stripped naked and with their heads cut off. On their way to their temporary quarters on the night they disembarked, the men passed the skulls of 400 Spanish prisoners, who had been beheaded on the orders of General Juan Bautista Arismendi.39 According to one officer, Arismendi, a native of the island, was ‘the chief, and idol of his countrymen, to whose regard and esteem his great exertions and sacrifices in their defence have deservedly entitled him.’40 He had driven the Spanish from the island, and Bolívar had rewarded him with the command of Venezuela’s Army of the East.
Juan Griego, the principal town on the island, was home to about 500 residents. Most of the single-storey dwellings were made of mud and straw but there were a few tiled houses made of stone. In the local hostelry the Irish officers played billiards and card games with French merchants. The local market sold turtle, fish and fruit. Pork and goat were also available. However, fresh water was in short supply.
The Irish soldiers were soon struck down with heatstroke and disease. Drunkenness was rife. Five days after landing on Isla Margarita, Young had had enough and begged permission to return home, citing fever. He was granted leave of absence. Leaving the rest of the regiment to their fate, he set sail for the British-controlled island of Jamaica with some of his fellow-officers, two of whom died en route. After a period of recuperation, he embarked for England on 26 October, a mere two months after arriving in the Caribbean.
His was not an uncommon experience, for all the Irish officers, accustomed to the temperate climate of Europe and the rarefied customs of the Old World’s armies, struggled to adapt to the harsh tropical conditions. The fact that the sick and injured remnants of English’s volunteers, who had retreated from the mainland after the defeat at Cumaná, were already on the island when the Irish Legion arrived did little for morale. When confronted with the inhospitable environment and the fact that there was no money to pay them, many officers returned home.
Of the approximately 1,000 officers and men who had sailed from Ireland and Britain with the Irish Legion, about 80 officers and 500 NCOS and privates remained by November 1819. They were quartered in the town of Pampatar, on the westernmost point of Isla Margarita. The Irish units included the 1st Rifles, under William Richard Derinzy; the 1st Lancers, under Francis Burdett O’Connor; a battalion of light infantry, the Cundinamarca, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Luke Burke, which had been recruited in Ireland and was officered by decorated Irish veterans of Waterloo; and a company of men from English’s British Legion who had returned from Maturín under the command of Major John O’Lawlor.41 The Irish soldiers, many of them dying of disease in makeshift hospitals, were close to starvation. Duelling again took its toll on the Irish officer corps. ‘They would drink too much wine – giving rise to rash and heated quarrels – and the following day one of the rivals would end up dead,’ O’Connor wrote.42
The senior Irish officers made representations seeking transport to Angostura and stating that they wished to serve under Bolívar’s orders.43 Admiral Pedro Luis Brión refused their request, replying that if the Irish Legion ‘is truly desirous of serving under the orders of General Bolívar and the glorious cause of Venezuela it will realise the importance of active service during the present crisis when a simultaneous movement of all the Republic’s forces is the best measure for exterminating the enemy.’44
As the Irish historian Eric Lambert points out in his detailed account of the foreign participation in Bolívar’s campaigns in the north of South America, the Venezuelans had difficulty getting information about the Irish Legion’s situation on Isla Margarita, owing to the distances and terrain involved.45 In November 1819 the patriot government was based in Angostura, while Bolívar was more than 600 miles away in Bogotá. Communication between Angostura and Isla Margarita was not much easier, given the terrain and the fact that the royalist army lay in between. Complicating matters was the fact that the patriot leaders in Angostura were manoeuvring against each other.
Nevertheless, patriot propaganda heralded the arrival of the Irish troops with great fanfare. Bolívar’s proclamation of welcome was printed in the Correo del Orinoco. Addressed to the ‘Brave Soldiers’ of the Irish Legion, it read:
Irishmen! – Separated from your homeland in order to follow your generous sense of feeling, which has always distinguished you among the most illustrious Europeans; I have the glory of counting you as adopted Sons of Venezuela, and as defenders of the Liberty of Colombia.
Irishmen! – Your sacrifices exceed all reward, and Venezuela does not have sufficient means to remunerate what you deserve; but as much as Venezuela possesses, as much as she has at her disposal, she will gladly give up to the distinguished foreigners, who have brought their lives and their services as tribute to the nascent Republic. The promises that the virtuous and brave General Devereux has made to you in recompense for your incorporation to the Liberating Army will be religiously fulfilled on the part of the Government and People of Venezuela. Believe that we would rather prefer the deprival of all our Property than to deprive you of your sacred Rights.
Irishmen! – History and the blessings of the modern World will give to you your most just and sublime compensation.
SIMÓN BOLIVAR46
Respite from the fever-ridden climate of the island came when Bolívar ordered Colonel Mariano Montilla, a native of Caracas, to assume command of the Irish Legion in the absence of Devereux. He arrived in Isla Margarita with his chief-of-staff, the Irish officer Edward Stopford, at the end of December and was shocked by the insubordination of the Irishmen. However, he was determined to carry out his orders. During the next three months the senior officers drilled the men and created new units in an attempt to impose discipline.
The Irish Legion set sail for the mainland in March in warships under the command of Brión. Montilla was commander-in-chief; Stopford was chief-of-staff. The force comprised the Lancers under O’Connor, the Cundinamarca battalion of light infantry under Burke, and a company of riflemen under O’Lawlor. Lieutenant-Colonel William Richard Derinzy and Captain Robert Parsons served as aides-de-camp to Brión.
Born on the Dutch-controlled island of Curaçao into a merchant family from present-day Belgium, Pedro Luis Brión had fought for the Batavian Republic against the British as a young man. He later studied naval science in the United States before returning home and joining the patriot cause. He was both generous and flamboyant: on the quarterdeck he wore a hussar jacket, scarlet pantaloons with gold lace down the side, a field-marshal’s hat with ‘a very large Prussian plume’, and ‘an enormous pair of dragoon boots, with heavy gold spurs of a most inconvenient length.’ Coming across a Spanish squadron lying at anchor in a bay with most of its crew ashore, Brión, at the head of the patriot fleet, contented himself with ‘firing a salute of twenty-one guns, and hoisting a demi-jean [demijohn] of wine, and a living turkey, at each yard-arm of his own vessel.’47 He was deeply anglophobic, which he did not bother to hide from the British officers, and was attempting to wrest command from Montilla.
Devereux had not arrived from Ireland by the time the Irish Legion embarked for the mainland on 4 March 1820. Because the Legion’s officers were unable to speak Spanish and Montilla could not speak English, orders were communicated in French. The expedition, comprising some 800 men, sailed for Riohacha, which a few months previously had been occupied and then deserted by the Hibernian Regiment.
Approaching the mainland, with the white peaks of the Sierra Nevada in the distance, the men could see the Spanish flag flying over a tower guarding the town. But the royalist troops had withdrawn and the residents had fled, and the patriots marched into Riohacha unopposed. The Spanish flag was lowered and that of the Irish Legion, a gold harp on a green field, was raised in its place. A general order was issued forbidding looting; however, two hours later ‘a soldier and a black were taken in a house.’ Lots were drawn, and the unfortunate black man, having lost, was shot by firing squad.48
Aylmer and O’Connor shared lodgings in Riohacha. Aylmer was deeply disillusioned at having been deceived into believing that he would be promoted to general and that he would receive generous pay once he arrived in South America. For a few days the Irish officers drilled and instructed the men, before the patriots began the march south to link up with Urdaneta’s forces.
Their route took the troops through the territory of the Guajiro people, who were loyal to the royalist cause, on the Guajira peninsula, straddling the border between north-west Colombia and north-east Venezuela. The first stretch of the journey ran through dense forest, which gave way from time to time to Guajiro villages. At Fonseca the Legion skirmished with the Guajiro. Afterwards it was discovered that the German engineers who were in the vanguard had been killed in an ambush and their bodies hacked to pieces.
At the town of San Juan the Guajiro again attacked the Irish Legion. O’Connor’s horse fell beneath him and he was forced to proceed on foot. Water was scarce, and the men frequently collapsed, stricken by heat, thirst and illness. Occasionally a party would be sent back down the path to report on the well-being of stragglers and would find their mutilated bodies.49 At Valledupar, Montilla received word that a party of officers and soldiers, who had been left behind at Riohacha because of injury, had been attacked by the Guajiro at a town called Moreno while they were trying to catch up with the main body of the Legion. The survivors had managed to retreat to Riohacha.
Three days later Montilla convened a council of war. Unsure of Urdaneta’s position, and fearful of being cut off from Riohacha by royalist forces, he asked his officers whether they should still try to link up with Urdaneta or return to Riohacha. All the officers, except O’Connor, favoured returning to Riohacha. O’Connor recalled years later in his memoirs:
I stated to the commander-in-chief that the troops were happy and very willing to continue marching, and would overcome any obstacle that might present itself; but that if we embarked on a countermarch, I would not be able to answer for the preservation of order and discipline, nor for the subsequent fate of the division; assuring the commander-in-chief that I knew the Irish better than he; and that the result would make him see the truth.50
O’Connor was overruled, and the Irish Legion marched back to Riohacha.
O’Connor’s prediction came true, and the volunteers, fed up with a lack of basic rations and pay, became mutinous. When a royalist force approached Riohacha, all the units, except O’Connor’s 10th Lancers, refused to leave their quarters. The Lancers managed to get the better of the enemy but failed to pursue them. O’Connor recalled that Montilla had been impressed by the bravery of the Irishmen.
Talking that afternoon with Colonel Montilla, in a meeting with the other officers, he expressed his regret at having returned from Valledupar, and said that he had had no idea of what class of soldiers were the Irish; that he had been left in true admiration when he heard my voice urging such a small column into battle, and carrying a bayonet in the middle of the smoke, towards the enemy lines …51
If this was the case, Montilla was soon to change his opinion.
When the royalists returned to occupy positions around Riohacha, the Irish Legion advanced en masse to join battle and gained a victory, albeit with 37 soldiers left dead on the field of battle. However, after returning to Riohacha, the Legion, apart from the Lancers, refused to fight any longer, complaining that they had not been paid, that they had been forced to march without food or water, and insisting that they be evacuated to a British-controlled island. Several merchant ships were in Riohacha at the time and these were requisitioned for the transport of about 500 soldiers, women and children to Jamaica. The Lancers, who had maintained their discipline despite suffering the same privations as their comrades, covered the rest of the Legion as it embarked. The Legion’s commander, William Aylmer, now a colonel, who was suffering from fever, had wished to stay in Riohacha and had asked O’Connor to travel with the Legion to Jamaica to report to the authorities about what had occurred. However, Aylmer was so ill that a decision was made to evacuate him. He died shortly after arriving in Jamaica, where he was buried. About a hundred members of the Lancers remained in Riohacha with Montilla.52
The mutiny severely dented the reputation of the Irish volunteers, and Bolívar’s recruitment of foreign soldiers came to an end. The patriot newspaper Correo del Orinoco claimed in its edition of 5 August 1820 that ‘the Irish are brave but insubordinate, their great defect has paralysed the greater part of our most important plans.’53 An anonymous letter published in the same edition reflected the feelings of the criollo officers:
They [the mutineers] have been unmasked and made a name for themselves as the greatest thieves and rebels in the world, and we have been these last days in a state of war with these villains in order to contain them.54
Montilla expressed his disgust in a letter to Bolívar, published the following month in the Correo del Orinoco. He described the scenes in Riohacha as the Irish troops awaited embarkation.
The Irish should have remained in their quarters until they were directed towards the merchant ships that were to take them to Jamaica, as was their wish; but in a few short hours they gave themselves over to the greatest disorder, beginning with looting the few miserable reliquaries that remained in the houses of the residents of Riohacha, getting drunk on the spirits that were in those houses and ending by setting fire to the whole town, which neither the Government nor the senior officers could do anything to prevent.55
A few days after the Irish Legion arrived in Jamaica on 5 June 1820, Devereux landed on Isla Margarita. Having made handsome profits from the sale of commissions in the Irish Legion, he had been facing arrest on charges of fraud in Ireland. Disgruntled officers had begun returning to Ireland and demanding satisfaction. Initially fêted by Dublin society, Devereux was now a pariah – though his friend Daniel O’Connell kept faith in him – and sought to remake himself in South America. While hungry Irish privates had roamed Isla Margarita looking for food, Devereux and his staff enjoyed sumptuous hospitality.
O’Connell’s son, Morgan, was one of Devereux’s staff officers. He was 15 when he arrived in ‘the sandy oven of Margarita’.56 On their arrival O’Connell and the rest of Devereux’s Irish staff were entertained lavishly by General Arismendi in his headquarters. Of the occasion on which he was first presented to Arismendi and his officers, the young O’Connell wrote to his father:
I never saw such a dinner. We began with turtle soup; then fowls, fish, yams, bananas, game, etc., and the largest turkey I ever beheld, as large as a sirloin of beef! all sorts of spiced and forced meats, and a dessert of fruits, half of the names of which I don’t recollect.57
After the meal, toasts were drunk to Bolívar and the elder O’Connell, who was described by one of the Irish officers present, a Colonel Low, as ‘the most enlightened, the most independent, and the most patriotic man, not only in Great Britain, but in all Europe.’58 Low’s seven-year-old son, who had sailed with him to Venezuela and spent his days practising his riding and swordsmanship, made quite an impression on the young O’Connell.
Several other toasts followed. The last was also from Colonel Low’s little son; who quite spontaneously getting up on his chair, gave – ‘May the first man that deserts his colours have a sword through his body!’ His father assured us that he had not said a word of it to him. The little fellow also said to our general, in Spanish – ‘General, there are ten thousand enemies in front; lead on your men, draw your sword, and remember the cause!’ He is a little Irishman.59
A few days later O’Connell enjoyed lavish quantities of champagne at a dinner given by the governor, Francisco Gómez. Unfortunately, during a fandango after dinner, O’Connell’s cousin, Maurice, perhaps having drunk too much, tore a lady’s gown with one of his spurs.60
It was a far cry from the horrors experienced on Isla Margarita by the main body of the Irish Legion. Of those who reached Jamaica in one piece many were transported to Canada, where they ended their days as settlers; others eventually made it home to Ireland. Some faced financial ruin. Matthew Macnamara, a Dublin merchant, had been named commissary-general of the Legion by Devereux. He was responsible for chartering vessels to carry the officers and troops to South America and was led to believe that he would be able to draw bills on the Venezuelan government. However, he discovered that the patriot Ministry for the Interior was unwilling to honour the bills. In December 1820 he petitioned Bolívar, seeking redress for the money he had invested in fitting out and victualling the ships that carried the Irish Legion across the Atlantic. He claimed to have abandoned his business in order to serve the Venezuelan Republic and that his ‘two warehouses, among the biggest in Dublin, were for fourteen months used as barracks, and my own house as a guesthouse for officers.’61 Macnamara wrote that he had been motivated by the noblest principles, ‘always sure of the independence of Colombia,’ and had procured money, property and credit from his friends. Macnamara insisted that he had been ruined by the Venezuelan government’s refusal to pay. He said that his warehouses had been looted of all the goods required for the passage of 5,000 men across the Atlantic, that his house had been sold and one of the ships seized. To avoid ‘further persecutions and arrests,’ he had travelled to Venezuela to ‘implore that the justice of Your Excellency, so universally admired, extends towards those shipowners, those who risk their ships at times when no insurance can be sought.’62
Macnamara cast the blame for Devereux’s failures on the machinations of the Spanish government in Ireland and Britain, claiming that
… the powerful and effective efforts of the Duke of San Carlos, the Spanish [prime] Minister, and his innumerable spies and informers, all funded with a great quantity of money from Spain, helped by the extraordinary effect of the English decree on foreign enlistment, which is a threat to experienced officers of not only being deprived of half their pay, but also to their liberty, have banished all hopes and impeded the efforts of General d’Evereux to bring together the proposed force for Your Excellency.63
Macnamara claimed that these spies were operating in ‘every city and town,’ and that ‘some newspapers in England and Ireland, which before seemed to follow liberal principles, were bought and corrupted: while the Spanish Minister was deliberately establishing newspapers in London to frustrate the efforts of General d’Evereux and his friends.’64 He defended the behaviour of the officers and men of the Irish Legion, arguing that the treatment they had received had forced them ‘from pure necessity to abandon an enterprise upon which they had embarked with the greatest enthusiasm,’ adding that ‘if the difficulties that had arisen in raising this Legion had come to the notice of Your Excellency, justly, it would not have been possible to attach any blame to General d’Evereux, whose efforts, though unfruitful, were incessant, and whose character no-one exceeded in patriotism, disinterest and generosity.’65
It is hard to agree with Macnamara’s judgement. Even if Devereux had been motivated by such noble feelings, he had failed his men miserably. Though history has not been kind to him, depicting him as the worst kind of profiteer, who made money out of suffering Irish soldiers, some of his fellow-officers were more charitable, and he subsequently received a pension from the Venezuelan government. Devereux himself refused to take the blame for what became of the Irish Legion. ‘To each and all who joined my standard’, he wrote in a letter to Daniel O’Connell in 1824, ‘I frankly explained the hardships which awaited them, and that our way to success must be fought thro’ sickness, perils and fatigue.’66
The men, women and children who sailed with the Irish Legion suffered horrendous torments in the Caribbean. Many of those who did not succumb to disease on Isla Margarita sailed for other islands in the Caribbean, hoping to find a permanent home, or a way of returning home to Ireland. But there was a handful of veterans, such as Francis Burdett O’Connor, who remained in South America and fought with distinction for the rest of the war.
* A type of punch favoured in the navy.
† Also known as salmagundi, a salad typically eaten at sea and made up of whatever what was at hand, such as chopped meat and vegetables.