Chapter 12
Thomas Charles Wright led the small scouting party into the dense vegetation, listening for any sound that might alert them to the presence of the enemy – not an easy task amid the strange noises that seemed to echo off the verdant canopy of branches.
Born in Queensborough, County Louth, Wright was a captain in the Rifles Regiment, which had sailed with the first wave of volunteers, and was securing the perimeter of the patriot camp for the night. The dreaded fizzing sound of an arrow reached his ears before he felt a searing pain in his right shoulder. The patriot troops shouted in confusion and began firing into the trees while a sergeant tried to extricate the arrow from Wright’s arm. Just as he pulled it from his commanding officer’s shoulder, he too was struck with an arrow. Wright survived to report the attack to his superiors, but his sergeant died.
After the Battle of Boyacá, Bolívar had ordered the Rifles to march north from Bogotá towards Pamplona. Wright was injured while the Rifles were marching through royalist-controlled territory. Their orders were to link up with the Irish Legion and march towards the River Magdalena. They faced stiff resistance. Capuchin missionaries, who were fiercely loyal to the Spanish crown, had been organising bands of Guajiro to attack the patriot forces moving through this part of present-day north-west Colombia. Wright recalled that twice a day the Guajiro would attack the Rifles as they desperately searched for the Irish Legion. The Guajiro were skilled in the use of the bow and arrow and would attempt to isolate members of the column trudging through the jungle. Once they spotted a patriot lookout on his own, one of their warriors would crawl along the ground until he was within firing distance. He would let loose an arrow, then run up and grab the stricken guard’s firearm before disappearing back into the trees. After one incident, during which an officer and three men of the regiment were ambushed, the Rifles took extra precautions when making camp, sending scouting patrols, like the one Wright was leading when he was injured, into the jungle.1
In November 1820 the Rifles took part in the siege of the heavily fortified town of Ciénaga de Santa Marta – aided by the Irish Legion’s Lancers, who had remained behind after the events in Riohacha – injuring or killing 700 royalists. Two Irish officers, Major William Peacock and Captain James Phelan, died from injuries received in the battle, and both Arthur Sandes and Peacock were cited for bravery. The patriots marched into Santa Marta a few days later.2
Meanwhile the political landscape in Spain had changed. Ferdinand VII was determined to crush the continuing resistance to Spanish rule in the Americas by reinforcing royalist forces. Ten battalions were preparing to embark at Cádiz at the beginning of 1820 when a group of liberal officers, headed by Rafael de Riego, mutinied. They imprisoned the king and demanded the full enactment of the Cádiz constitution, which had been cast aside by Ferdinand on his restoration in 1814.
At the end of November Bolívar and the commander of the Spanish forces, General Pablo Morillo, met and signed a truce at the Venezuelan town of Santa Ana de Trujillo. Afterwards Morillo sailed for Spain, leaving the Spanish army in the hands of General Miguel de la Torre.
The armistice was broken in 1821. Bolívar’s divisions assembled in the west of Venezuela for the last push towards Caracas. The battle that decided the future of the country was fought at Carabobo, just west of the Venezuelan capital. The British Legion, under the command of Colonel Thomas Ferriar, fought as part of the 1st Division of Infantry; the Rifles, under Sandes, were part of the 3rd Division.
Following the patriot victory at the Battle of Carabobo, Bolívar was able to concentrate his attention on the south. Meanwhile in Chile, O’Higgins and San Martín were preparing to move north into Peru. The patriot armies were now able to bring to bear a pincer operation, with the goal of removing the last bastion of Spanish power from the continent: the Andean territories belonging to present-day Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia.
O’Higgins and San Martín realised that the security of an independent Chile depended on driving the Spanish from their stronghold in Peru. Chile continued to be vulnerable along its thousands of miles of coastline from Spanish expeditionary forces, which were manned and supplied from Peru. It was vital, therefore, that this continuing threat be destroyed. To do this, O’Higgins had secured the services of the Scottish admiral Thomas Cochrane to command the patriot fleet and hunt down Spanish warships and transports. In August 1820 a joint Chilean-Argentine expedition of about 5,000 men set sail from Valparaíso for Peru on board 25 ships. The Chilean government bore the cost of the expedition, which put a significant strain on its finances.
Cochrane’s chief surgeon was John Oughan. Born in Ireland, Oughan had studied in London and Edinburgh before emigrating to the United States, where he enlisted in the army being raised by the Carrera brothers for the liberation of Chile. He had participated in Belgrano’s campaign in Upper Peru before joining Cochrane’s expeditionary force. After the war in Peru had ended, he worked in Tucumán in northern Argentina before settling in Buenos Aires, where he became a prominent member of porteño society. Not long after his arrival in the city, however, he threatened to shoot the British vice-consul, Woodbine Parish, and was committed to an asylum. In a celebrated and scandalous case, Oughan protested that he was sane. Two medical inquiries found likewise, but Parish was determined to keep Oughan committed and managed to have an English doctor, Henry Bond, examine the patient. In his report Bond concluded that Oughan was suffering from an ‘indisposition of his moral faculties,’ and Parish convinced the authorities to have Oughan repatriated.3
San Martín was commander-in-chief of the Peruvian expedition, and among his aides-de-camp was an Irishman named John Thomond O’Brien. From Baltinglass, County Wicklow, O’Brien had sailed for Buenos Aires in 1811, hoping to make his fortune as a merchant. He had been lucky to make it to South America after his ship struck rocks off the island of Fernando Pó (present-day Bioko) along the coast of west Africa, leaving only a handful of survivors. O’Brien was caught up in the independence movement shortly after arriving in the River Plate, fighting in Uruguay under General Miguel Estanislao Soler. He was injured during the siege of Montevideo and was present for the royalist surrender of the city on 23 June 1814. He later took part in the campaign against Artigas before enlisting as an officer in a cavalry regiment in San Martín’s Army of the Andes.
O’Brien was a buccaneering character, whose womanising often got him into trouble. According to one story, after surviving the shipwreck off west Africa in 1811 he had boarded an English ship to complete his voyage to South America. During the passage he had seduced the daughter of an English Quaker couple. At the father’s request, the ship’s captain, also a Quaker, had removed O’Brien from the ship.4
Preparing for the invasion of Chile in Mendoza, O’Brien had got himself into trouble again, making insinuations about a relative of one of his fellow-officers, the Argentine general Juan Lavalle. O’Brien’s remarks had infuriated Lavalle, and the two men fought a duel with sabres in the main thoroughfare of Mendoza, which left O’Brien with a scar on his wrist.5 O’Brien was also a bullfighting aficionado and had enjoyed showing off to the ladies of Mendoza in the bullring, tying ribbons around his legs to better demonstrate his dexterity in front of the bull.6
As one of San Martín’s staff officers, O’Brien was present at the Battles of Chacabuco, Cancha Rayada and Maipú, earning promotion to the rank of colonel. After the Battle of Maipú he went home to Ireland; but he returned to South America in time for the expedition to Peru, having been promoted to the rank of sargento mayor. During the Peruvian campaign he reached the rank of colonel.
San Martín’s Liberating Army of Peru landed near the town of Pisco, about 130 miles south of Lima, in September. At the beginning of October, after the failure of peace talks between San Martín and the viceroy of Peru, Joaquín de la Pezuela, a division of the patriot army under General Juan Antonio Álvarez de Arenales, began moving south, capturing the towns of Ica, Nazca and Acarí, before wheeling north into the sierra. The viceroy, Pezuela, was fearful that Arenales would attack Lima, and he sent a division east to cut off his army.
The commander-in-chief of the royalist division was an Irish-Spaniard named Diego O’Reilly. He led his troops into the Andes, to the Cerro de Pasco, a town built on silver-mining which is 14,000 feet above sea level. With the hollowed-out mountain behind them, the royalists faced Arenales’s numerically superior forces. The patriot armies routed O’Reilly’s division, taking him prisoner. He was brought to San Martín’s camp and allowed return to Spain along with other royalist officials. Facing disgrace and with his career in ruins, O’Reilly committed suicide by drowning, jumping off the ship taking him home.
Meanwhile San Martín’s forces had embarked for the north, and on 20 November 1820, from the balcony of a house in the town of Huara, San Martín proclaimed the independence of Peru. The north of Peru declared itself in favour of the patriots, and by the summer of 1821 the bulk of the royalist forces retreated from the viceregal capital of Lima into the Andes. On 12 July, San Martín entered Lima in triumph. Three days later the principal residents of the city signed a solemn act of independence, and on 28 July San Martín once again formally declared the independence of Peru.
Motivated by his dream of a unitary South American state, Bolívar also wished to drive the Spanish from Peru, including the landlocked fastness of Upper Peru – present-day Bolivia. First, however, he directed himself towards the audiencia of Quito, the Spanish administrative unit roughly analogous to the territory of modern Ecuador but including parts of southern Colombia, the northern part of Peru and parts of north-west Brazil.
In 1809 the criollos of Quito had been among the first in South America to declare themselves independent, overthrowing the audiencia and creating their own junta loyal to Ferdinand VII. This short-lived government fell in 1812 and Spanish authority was restored, until in October 1820 a new junta in the Ecuadorean city of Guayaquil declared its independence. The Guayaquil junta was determined to declare itself independent not only of Spain but also of Gran Colombia. While this might have been desirable in principle, in practice the Guayaquil insurgents needed Bolívar’s help to drive the Spanish out of Quito. It was in preparation for the invasion of Ecuador that Bolívar, with his headquarters in the north of Gran Colombia, near Lake Maracaibo, sent Daniel O’Leary to Panama to take charge of the Alto Magdalena Battalion.
Panama had declared its independence in November 1821 in a bloodless revolt, the Spanish garrison having left the isthmus to reinforce Ecuador. Fearing a Spanish invasion, the Panamanians had voluntarily agreed to become part of Gran Colombia. The Venezuelan general José María Carreño was sent to Panama to take charge of the patriot troops; Francis Burdett O’Connor was appointed his chief-of-staff. Shortly after arriving, O’Connor was ordered to raise and take command of an infantry battalion and was given the rank of lieutenant-colonel.
In the sleepy town of Panama, thousands of miles from home on the Pacific coast, the two young Irish officers, O’Connor and the recently arrived O’Leary, watched pearl fishermen ply their trade by the rocks that rose out of the bay, ‘talking always of our distant homeland, our unforgettable and beloved Ireland.’7 While O’Leary would shortly set sail for the port city of Guayaquil, O’Connor was left languishing reluctantly in Panama.
Bolívar planned to squeeze the Spanish in a two-pronged attack. While a force of 3,000 men under his command would attack overland from the north, a second force, under the command of General Antonio José de Sucre, which had landed at Guayaquil, would help distract the Spanish forces from the south. O’Leary and the Alto Magdalena Battalion were supposed to reinforce Sucre, but by the time they arrived in Guayaquil, in March 1822, the Venezuelan general, having defeated a royalist force sent from Quito to put down the insurgency, had already departed.
Marching from the north with 3,000 men, including the Rifles under the command of Colonel Arthur Sandes, Bolívar was faced with a hostile local population and exceptionally difficult terrain. Quito is almost 10,000 feet above sea level, and the route through the Andes was over dangerous ravines, fast-flowing rivers and vertiginous mountain paths. The royalist commander, Colonel Basilio García, chose to make his stand at a hacienda called Bomboná in the shadow of a volcano named Galeras.
The Spanish were in a commanding position. Between the patriot and royalist lines was a ravine. The royalists entrenched themselves in a heavily wooded area commanding elevated positions from which to fire down upon Bolívar’s left flank, while to the patriots’ right was the torrential River Guáitara. Nevertheless, on the morning of 7 April 1822 Bolívar ordered an attack. While two battalions, the Bogotá and the Vargas, under the command of General Pedro Torres, attacked the centre, General Valdés and the Rifles, under Sandes’s orders, climbed the volcano to fall on the royalists’ right flank, using their reversed rifles with fixed bayonets to get grip on the treacherous slopes.
Captain Ramírez and Captain Thomas Charles Wright led two companies in a bayonet charge of the royalist right flank. Meanwhile Torres’s battalions were being cut to ribbons by the royalists, losing two-thirds of their men. Despite the heavy losses, they managed to dislodge the royalists from their entrenched positions, in no small part thanks to the actions of the Rifles battalion. The official battle record, written by Bolívar’s chief of staff, General Bartolomé Salom, stated: ‘The Republic owes this victory to the talents and military virtues of General Valdés, as well as the invincible Rifles battalion and its colonels Barreto and Sandes, and the graduate lieutenant colonels Ramírez and Wright.’8
The victory at Bomboná had come at a great cost: hundreds of patriot soldiers had been killed. Bolívar was not able to pursue the fleeing royalist troops, because night had fallen by the time the battle was won. Lacking troops and supplies, he was forced to retreat north. Yet his victory at Bomboná had also forced the governor of Quito, General Melchor Aymerich, to divide his forces. This left Quito vulnerable to attack from Sucre’s forces in the south. On 24 May 1822, on the slopes of Mount Pichincha, overlooking Quito, Sucre defeated the royalist army, leaving Bolívar to accept the capitulation of the royalist town of Pasto.
Two months later one of the most celebrated events in the history of South American independence took place in Guayaquil.9 On 26 July, San Martín and Bolívar met in private to discuss the future of the independence campaign. At stake was the direction of the war in Peru and its future political system – San Martín favoured an independent monarchy with a European prince taking the crown, Bolívar wished for a republic – and whether or not Guayaquil was to become part of Gran Colombia or the new Peruvian state. Bolívar was to get his way. Ecuador became part of Gran Colombia, and Bolívar arrived in Peru shortly afterwards to prosecute the final campaign against the Spanish in the Andes. Having done so much to drive the Spanish out of Chile and Peru, San Martín meekly – or nobly, depending on one’s point of view – acceded to Bolívar’s wishes, returning to Argentina and shortly afterwards going into exile in France.
Prepared now to drive the Spanish from their mountain strongholds in the Peruvian Andes, Bolívar arrived in Lima in September 1823. On 10 September the Peruvian congress awarded him full military powers.
The Spanish forces were in disarray. The liberal regime had fallen in Spain and Ferdinand VII had once again set about restoring his absolutist view of the monarchy. The Spanish officers were divided between liberals and absolutists. The Basque-born General Pedro Antonio de Olañeta, a convinced absolutist, led a revolt from Potosí in present-day Bolivia against José de la Serna, a liberal who was now the acting viceroy. This forced de la Serna to send troops loyal to Spain, under the command of General Jerónimo Valdés, to Upper Peru to put down Olañeta’s insurgency.
Shortly after arriving in Peru, Francis Burdett O’Connor was appointed chief-of-staff to General Sucre. At a council of war in Huamachuco, in Peru’s northern highlands, Bolívar asked O’Connor to give his views on the best way to proceed; this was despite the fact that O’Connor was the only colonel present, the rest being generals. O’Connor recalled the scene in his memoirs:
I stood up immediately, and, concentrating on the map, I indicated our position, from the Cerro de Pasco, from Cuzco, from La Paz, from Potosí and from La Lava, twelve leagues [40 miles] to the south of Potosí, where it was said that General Valdés had marched against Olañeta. I demonstrated the long distance that separated Cuzco, the headquarters of the viceroy, and La Lava, and gave my opinion that, without losing any time, the campaign in the South should begin. I continued establishing my view with reasons and arguments in my favour when General Bolívar rose from his seat, and started to fold up the map, saying: ‘This young officer is giving us a true lesson in the art of war. There is nothing left to be said, nor to be heard. Tomorrow the army marches.’10
O’Connor admitted the self-serving nature of the story, and that it was possible that Bolívar, ‘a man of limited patience’, would have behaved the same way if any of the other officers present at the council had said the same thing.
Thousands of patriot troops began moving south through the Andes in June 1824 towards the Cerro de Pasco and the royalist army. The trek through the mountains was hazardous, with cavalrymen being forced to dismount at the end of the day and continue marching in the dark along narrow paths above precipices of hundreds of feet. Battalions became lost, confused about where the right path lay. General William Miller, in his memoirs, recalled the confusion:
The frequent sound of trumpets along the broken line; the shouting of officers to their men at a distance; the neighing of horses, and the braying of mules, both men and animals being alike anxious to reach a place of rest, produced a strange and fearful concert, echoed, in the darkness of the night, from the horrid solitudes of the Andes.11
The misery was compounded by the painfully cold temperatures and frequent snowstorms. To the rear a commissary drove the thousands of head of cattle that had been requisitioned along the way to feed the army.
It took a month to reach the Cerro de Pasco, thousands of feet above sea level. In the freezing conditions Bolívar and his staff reviewed their battalions. At a banquet given for the officers in the house where he was staying, Bolívar asked O’Connor to add a toast to the many that had already been given. O’Connor was momentarily stumped but recovered in time to toast ‘the Colombian army, which is ready to liberate Peru from the Spanish yoke.’ According to O’Connor, Bolívar then jumped up on the table, threw back his drink and hurled his glass against the wall, saying, ‘This is my toast.’12
On 6 August, at Junín, close to the Cerro de Pasco, the patriot cavalry defeated the Spanish forces under the command of José de Canterac in an encounter in which not a single shot was fired. Though it was not much more than a skirmish, the victory at Junín raised the morale of the patriots, and they drove south towards Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca Empire, close to the ruins at Machu Picchu. In October Bolívar handed command to Sucre in order to return to Lima, where he hoped to raise funds and troops for the war effort.
The patriot armies were now about 150 miles from Cuzco as the crow flies, but between them and the Spanish lay winding mountain roads and the River Apurimac. The royalists, with their strength recovered following the recall of Valdés’s division from Upper Peru, now prepared to attack. On 3 December, Valdés attacked Sucre’s rearguard at a place called Matará, which comprised General Lara’s division. It was the Rifles Battalion, under the command of Colonel Sandes, that bore the brunt of the attack.
Though more than 200 men had died, and hundreds more were dispersed, the Rifles had managed to fend off Valdés’s division, allowing the bulk of the army to escape. Six days later Sucre led his armies into battle against the royalists at Ayacucho, one of the most famous names in the history of South American independence. Almost 1,500 royalist soldiers were killed; the patriot fatalities were less than 400. A handful of Irish officers – Sucre’s chief-of-staff, Colonel Francis Burdett O’Connor, the Rifles’ commanding officer, Colonel Arthur Sandes, the Rifles’ medical officer, Hugo Brown Blair, the Rifles’ company commanders, William Owens Ferguson and Thomas Charles Wright – were on the battlefield on that momentous day.
Two days after the famous victory, O’Connor had a row with his immediate superior. Sucre had asked O’Connor to draw up a list of the army’s strength. He wished to have included on the list those soldiers belonging to the Rifles Battalion who had dispersed after the attack at Matará. O’Connor presented the list to Sucre without writing down the names of the absent men. Sucre was furious and, plucking a pen from behind his ear, scribbled out a name on a piece of paper in front of him. The royalist general Canterac, who had been invited to dine with Sucre that same day, entered O’Connor’s office afterwards and asked him what he had done to provoke the general; O’Connor replied that he had done nothing, to which Canterac replied that he had just come from Sucre’s office and had seen a list of proposed promotions to general on his desk. According to Canterac, at the top of the list was O’Connor’s name with a fat line through it.
On 25 December 1824 the patriots entered the ancient city of Cuzco. O’Connor was underwhelmed.
I thought I would find the splendid vestiges of the ancient Peruvians’ might and civilisation, but, unfortunately, the Spaniards had destroyed and defaced everything, and the city had been modernised … How impressive was the architecture of the Peruvian Indians, and how surprising were their buildings! What a shame that the conquistadors, only greedy for gold, did not understand their merit and did not know how to preserve them! There are remains here of a very ancient and very advanced civilisation.13
Olañeta had refused to recognise the terms of Canterac’s surrender and continued to resist the patriot armies in Upper Peru. In January Sucre marched towards Puno, on the shores of Lake Titicaca. After the patriot victory at Ayacucho, much of Upper Peru now transferred its loyalty, including La Paz and Santa Cruz. It was in the south of the country, in the mining district of Potosí, that Olañeta made his last stand. It is somewhat fitting that this final act of resistance took place close to Potosí’s legendary cerro rico, the ‘rich mountain’ that had been discovered by the Spanish conquistadores in the sixteenth century and had supplied what had at one time seemed a never-ending river of silver from the colonies to the metropolis. It was the lure of South American silver that had brought the Spanish to the New World in their droves. Having been driven from virtually the rest of South America, it was at Potosí that the last royalists tried desperately to hang on.
Despite his altercation with O’Connor after the Battle of Ayacucho, Sucre gave the Irishman command of two battalions of the Peru Division and the Junín Cavalry Regiment. O’Connor marched towards Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, and then on to La Paz. He and his battalions left La Paz in the vanguard of the patriot army to head south towards Potosí. Outside La Paz he was met by a German soldier with a message from Olañeta; the soldier also handed over a small pouch containing poison. Olañeta had hoped to get one of the patriot officers to poison Sucre in exchange for 10,000 pesos. O’Connor took the soldier prisoner and passed him over to Sucre.
In his memoirs O’Connor tells the story of how he came to be ruminating on the future of Upper Peru as he travelled south. Casimiro Olañeta was a nephew of the royalist general who, in opposition to his uncle, had come to espouse liberalism and had joined the patriot cause. He asked O’Connor whether he believed Upper Peru, once freed from the grip of his uncle, should become part of the new independent Peruvian state or the United Provinces of the River Plate, present-day Argentina. Up to the late eighteenth century Upper Peru had been part of the Viceroyalty of Peru and looked towards Lima; then, in 1776, it became part of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate, with its capital in Buenos Aires. As told in his memoirs, O’Connor had been poring over maps of the region and had become well versed in Upper Peru’s history and traditions. He replied:
Doctor Olañeta, if this country of Upper Peru offers as many natural resources further on, towards the south, towards La Quiaca, as we have come across since the Santa Rosa pass, which I understand is the correct boundary to the north, I do not see why there is any reason for it to become part of Lower Peru or of the Argentine Republic.14
According to O’Connor, Olañeta immediately galloped off in the direction of General Sucre. When O’Connor arrived at the camp, he entered Sucre’s lodgings, where all the officers rose from their seats, embraced the Irishman and proclaimed him in one voice, ‘Founder of the New Republic’.15
On 29 March 1825 the patriot armies marched unopposed into Potosí. General Olañeta had retreated south. Ten days later, as O’Connor marched towards the south, he received word that Olañeta had been killed in a mutiny at Tumusla. The war in Upper Peru was finished; and – but for a few royalist strongholds, such as Callao – so was Spain’s South American empire.
The cost to the Irish officers and men had been considerable. In his memoirs Thomas Charles Wright listed the fatalities among the Rifles’ predominantly Irish officer corps. While his account is not definitive, it gives a good indication of the heavy toll exacted. According to Wright, four officers, Captain Fallon and Lieutenants Edward Poole, John Seymour and a man named Reid, had died of yellow fever shortly after arriving in Venezuela. Lieutenants Westbrook and James Byrne died in the Andes and on the campaign in New Granada in 1819. Three of the Rifles’ officers died from injuries sustained in combat with indigenous warriors near Lake Maracaibo in 1820: Lieutenant Reynolds was shot through the heart by an arrow, Captain James Phelan died after his leg was amputated, and Major William Peacock similarly never recovered from his injuries.
Yellow fever claimed the lives of Captain François Schwitzgibel, Lieutenants Bunbury, Macnamara and French, and the Rifles’ surgeon, Dr O’Reilly. Daniel O’Connell’s nephew, Lieutenant Maurice O’Connell, died from fever in 1822, as did Captain George Featherstonhaugh and Lieutenant Charles Church. Major Charles Rudd contracted an illness and died in 1823 in Esmeraldas. Captain Duxbury died from injuries sustained at the Battle of Ayacucho in 1824, as did Lieutenant Timothy Keogh. Finally, the regiment’s commanding officer for most of the campaigns, Colonel Arthur Sandes, died from dropsy at the age of 39 in the Carmelite Convent in Cuenca, Ecuador.16
Of the 21 officers mentioned above who died, at least 12 were Irish. And that was just the officer corps of the Rifles; hundreds, if not thousands, of Irish sergeants, corporals and privates were buried in unmarked graves in the frozen earth of the Peruvian Andes, the sun-baked sand of Isla Margarita, and the mulch of the Amazon basin. They had come for different reasons: some had died fighting for personal gain, others for honour and glory, while a handful had a genuinely cherished belief in liberty for South America. Whatever their reasons, without their efforts the history of the continent would have been very different.