Chapter 15
In November 1825 Francis Burdett O’Connor rode a mule across the Atacama Desert in present-day northern Chile. The Irish veteran of Bolívar’s campaigns in Peru and Bolivia spent days crossing the cracked, parched ground. The Atacama is one of the driest regions on earth and, because it never rains, the surface has been compared to that of Mars; scientists who are interested in seeing how life might survive on the Red Planet have conducted experiments on the slopes of Licancabur, the volcano that straddles the border between Chile and Bolivia.
Though there was little on the surface to draw humans to this remote, rocky landscape, underneath the crimson sand there were rich mineral deposits: sodium nitrate and copper. Until the early twentieth century and the development of new synthetic processes, Chile exported vast quantities of sodium nitrate, also known as Chilean saltpetre, which was in global demand for the manufacture of fertilisers and high explosives.
Bolivia has maintained a territorial dispute with Chile since the end of the war against the Spanish in Upper Peru over a section of the Atacama Desert. Bolivia’s borders roughly corresponded to the colonial province of Charcas, which had once been part of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The province stretched from the Amazon basin in the north almost to the present-day border with Argentina in the south. The Bolivian government claimed that the province’s western boundary was more than 300 miles of the Pacific coast. In 1776 Charcas province became part of the Viceroyalty of the River Plate and fell under the jurisdiction of Buenos Aires. Under the new dispensation, exporters had to send their goods and commodities to Buenos Aires instead of to Arica, the Pacific port that was claimed by Peru after independence and is now part of Chile.
Between 1879 and 1883, during the War of the Pacific, Chile fought Peru and Bolivia over this long, dry strip of land and its valuable mineral deposits. Chile emerged victorious, and Bolivia lost its access to the sea, a national disaster that was unequalled until the Chaco War with Paraguay in the 1930s. Bolivia is still fighting for sovereign access to the Pacific, having brought its claim all the way to the International Court of Justice in the Hague in September 2015. Access to the Pacific was a priority for President Evo Morales in 2016, in the same way that it was a priority in 1825 for Simón Bolívar, after whom the country is named.
Bolívar based his claim on the boundaries of Charcas province, and he ordered O’Connor to survey the Pacific coast to determine the best site for Bolivia’s main port. Setting off from Tarija in the south of Bolivia in November with a Bolivian adjutant and a Colombian servant, O’Connor passed over the Andes towards Tupiza, where verdant valleys gave way to burnt-red sierra. In a place called Santa Rosa the earth was pockmarked from gold-mining.
In early December, after days of riding across the desert with little water, O’Connor caught sight of the dark blue of the ocean, the rays of the low sun dancing like golden starbursts on the waves behind the tiny fishing port of Cobija. He rode his mule into the deserted village and found a solitary man walking on the beach. The man told him his name was Maldonado and that he and his brother were the only survivors of a smallpox epidemic that had wiped out the population of the village. He invited O’Connor to spend the night with him. When O’Connor entered the man’s house, he found candles flickering in front of statues of the saints that he had taken from the church to protect against the plague.
The following day a brig appeared on the bay. It was the Chimborazo, under the command of Thomas Charles Wright, the Irish officer who had fought with the Venezuelan Rifles. Bolívar had given Wright, an experienced sailor who had served as a midshipman in Britain’s Royal Navy, command of a flotilla in the Pacific and ordered him to help O’Connor with his survey. The Irishmen spent the night of 9 December on board the Chimborazo, anchored off Cobija, celebrating the first anniversary of the Battle of Ayacucho.
The next day, the Irishmen began their scouting expedition of the Pacific coast. Their mission was to find not only the best-equipped port for merchant vessels but also the one that was best connected to the silver mines of Potosí. Over the following days O’Connor made notes about each port’s suitability for the development of Bolivian trade. In his final report he chose Cobija ahead of the more southerly Paposo, which was a better natural port, because there was not enough water or provisions on the route from Paposo across the Atacama Desert to the Bolivian Andes. In his memoirs O’Connor wrote:
If I had been able to look into the future. I would have fitted out two ports, Paposo and [Cobija]; the first with warehouses for disembarking goods, and the second as a point of departure for Potosí, arranging that bundles and other cargoes were transported from one point to the other in launches, which would have hugged the coast without any danger. In this way, Chile’s later unfounded claims, and its usurpation of Bolivia’s richest province, would have been avoided.1
The Bolivian government subsequently claimed access to the sea along a corridor connecting a few hundred miles of Pacific coastline – stretching north and south from Cobija – to the state’s Andean hinterland.
Once the survey was finished, Wright set sail for Arica on the Chimborazo, where he was to pick up Bolívar and bring him to Lima. O’Connor returned to Bolivia by way of Quillagua, which is now little more than a ghost town in the middle of the Atacama Desert. It is one of the driest places in the world. About half a millimetre of rain has fallen on the town in the last four decades. Copper mining has had a devastating effect on the town. The few inhabitants live along the banks of the contaminated River Loa. In 1825 the residents of Quillagua told O’Connor that the main street running through their town from east to west was once the boundary between Peru and Upper Peru. According to O’Connor, this was a crucial piece of evidence, backing up Bolivia’s territorial claim. O’Connor regretted that his reports had gone unheeded by Sucre, his commanding officer.
I do not know if he received the report; but he certainly made no provision regarding the information I provided him about the boundary between Lower and Upper Peru. What I can state with certainty is that if I had accompanied the commodore [Wright] to Arica, if I had met with the Liberator, who was travelling to Lima, and if I had made him aware of the information I had taken from the elders of Quillagua, the Liberator, on his arrival in Lima, would have fixed the border between Upper and Lower Peru by decree, which would have increased Bolivia’s territory.2
The role played by O’Connor and Wright in this continuing border dispute is one example of the important ways in which Irish veterans of the wars of independence helped shape the economy, society and politics of the new republics. The experiences of the Irish who remained in Latin America after the wars of independence varied considerably. Some built successful careers in the armed forces of the post-war republics; others became politicians and diplomats. All had to negotiate the tumultuous period of violent political reorganisation that invariably bedevils infant states.
Many of the Irish officers fought in the civil wars that plagued the continent after the Spanish had been driven out. As Daniel O’Leary recognised in 1830, despite the ‘work, hardships and dangers’ of the campaign for independence, ‘the revolution has just begun.’3
While separatist tensions had existed since the creation of Gran Colombia at the Congress of Angostura in 1819, Bolívar had managed to hold the state together through the force of his personality and by pleading for national unity at a time of war. The final victory over the Spanish had barely been achieved when he was forced to confront his political and military rivals. In response to the internal and external threats to the state, Bolívar attempted to impose a new, centralist constitution, much to the dismay of his political rivals in Bogotá and Venezuela, who preferred a federal system, when not advocates of outright independence from the unitary state of Gran Colombia. O’Leary was a staunch ally, and Bolívar entrusted him with the most important and delicate missions.
In 1826 Bolívar sent O’Leary to negotiate with a former ally, the Venezuelan general José Antonio Páez, to prevent him separating from Gran Colombia. Two years later O’Leary was in Lima, trying unsuccessfully to prevent war between Peru and Gran Colombia. When the Peruvians declared war, O’Leary fought in the army of Gran Colombia, with the rank of brigadier-general.
In 1828 a convention was summoned to Ocaña, close to the border with Venezuela in the north-east of the modern state of Colombia, to put to bed the various constitutional issues that had bedevilled Gran Colombia. But when Bolívar’s supporters failed to win over the federalist majority, they withdrew, and Bolívar claimed dictatorial powers. The scene was now set for a bitter struggle between Bolívar loyalists, who argued that central authority was paramount at such a fragile moment in the life of the state, and those who had come to regard the Liberator’s behaviour as tyrannical.
O’Leary was tough, shrewd and fiercely loyal. He worked day after day to fulfil Bolívar’s dream of a unitary South American state stretching from the Pacific to the Atlantic and from the Caribbean coast to the southern Andes during the critical years between the end of the wars with Spain and Bolívar’s death. These burdens were exacerbated by the absences from his family.
O’Leary was newly married, with a young daughter, and the absences from his wife, Soledad, and children caused him great pain. This can be seen from a letter to Soledad he wrote in Guayaquil in 1828, in which he expressed his desire to live in what is now Ecuador. ‘I am sorry that I did not bring you here. But if our differences with Peru are concluded amicably we will come to live in the South which is, above all, the country that I love the most.’4 In a letter written the following month he complained: ‘Your letters are very short and very different from those you wrote to me when I was in Ocaña.’5 Coupled with his love was a jealous and controlling streak, as can be seen from a letter he wrote to Soledad in March 1830.
I see from your last letter that they have not deceived me about the visitors. You, yourself, have said it to me now. I forbid you again to allow them in under any pretext. The fewer visitors you have, the fewer enemies you will make. Neither do I like it that you are going out. It does not seem right that you do it in my absence. Every day I love you more and more …6
He wrote in much the same vein a day later when he complained that, ‘in the middle of chores and problems, I dedicate a great part of my week to you. And you answer me with a lot of paper, but few letters. Leisure is your world and work is mine.’7 His baby daughter Mimi’s upbringing troubled him. He ordered his wife to teach her the alphabet, and added: ‘Do not let her go around with servants. She will learn shameful things and vulgarities and will turn out badly brought-up.’ To emphasise his point, he added: ‘Tell her from me that señoras do not sweep and that I wish her to learn to read and write.’8
It was in the context of the growing opposition to Bolívar within Gran Colombia that an event occurred that was to tarnish O’Leary’s reputation, with some historians going so far as to brand him a murderer. In 1829 the Colombian general José María Córdova, renowned as the Hero of Ayacucho for his actions during that decisive battle, rose up in opposition to Bolívar, whom he regarded as adopting absolutist tendencies, inimical to Córdova’s avowed democratic sympathies. Bolívar sent O’Leary to Antioquia, in the northern part of present-day Colombia, to put down the rebellion.
O’Leary had the reconstituted 900-strong Rifles Battalion at his command, many of them foreign volunteers, including the Irish officers Rupert Hand and Thomas Murray. Hand was a Dubliner, a wild character who had already caused trouble while serving with the foreign volunteers in the south of Venezuela. He had retired from the army in 1824 because of ill health – a bullet had lodged in his left testicle during a duel with a fellow-Irishman, William Lynch, in Achaguas in August 18209 – having participated in the Battle of Carabobo and the campaigns along the northern coast, and retired to live in Mérida, in the Venezuelan Andes. But he was incapable of keeping out of trouble and was arrested for robbing the local post office. After being acquitted, thanks to the testimony of former comrades in the army, he went to live in Bogotá. It was here that he was recalled to service.
On 17 October, Córdova’s and O’Leary’s forces faced each other at a town called El Santuario, about 40 miles east of Medellín. When O’Leary called upon Córdova to surrender and save the lives of his men, his adversary is said to have replied: ‘Córdova will not surrender to a rotten, paid-for foreign mercenary.’ Córdova fought bravely but was outnumbered by three to one and was forced to retreat from the battlefield because of injuries to his shoulder and chest. He was taken prisoner and given shelter in a nearby house. It was then that Hand arrived on horseback. According to witnesses, he fell off his horse and began drunkenly staggering around. Drawing his sabre, he brushed past Murray, who was in command of the guard looking after the prisoner. Upon identifying the wounded Córdova, Hand killed him in an act of unbridled savagery, repeatedly stabbing and slashing his chest and head with his sword.10
It is possible that O’Leary gave the order to execute Córdova; historians continue to contest his level of involvement. O’Leary himself denied having ordered the killing, but he was vilified in the opposition press by those who believed Córdova had died trying to protect the republican foundations of the revolution. In a letter to Soledad he wrote: ‘The Caracas papers are using all their means to make me hateful to the Venezuelans. This would not bother me much if I was not so annoyed and tired; because the more one side attacks me, the better I look in the eyes of the other.’ O’Leary was bored and disillusioned and ready to retire. ‘No, I have resolved to serve no more. All desire I had to succeed is gone. All my ambitions are finished.’11
Part of the problem was that during the revolution, when the patriots needed manpower, foreign volunteers were welcomed with open arms; but after independence had been achieved, many viewed them as unwelcome interlopers. When Bolívar ordered O’Leary to cut loose some of the foreign officers who still held rank in the Gran Colombian army, the Irishman was unhappy, believing it was unjust to get rid of men who had proved themselves to be the most loyal, and that it was ‘very late to be telling them that their services were no longer required.’12 He again considered resigning over the issue, possessing as he did the soldier’s typical mistrust of politicians.
The virtues that O’Leary held most dear are expressed in a letter in which he advised his wife how to raise their son.
As it happens he has been born in the middle of revolutions. It is important that he knows that, in political tumults, he who is most audacious is victorious. Tell him to meditate well before uniting himself to a party, but once it is done, his choice should be constant and tenacious; that he should never be a traitor, no matter the prize for the treachery. Tell him never to be cruel nor violent, but that if the public good demands it, he should be prepared to shed blood. Nothing ennobles more the character of a man than well-intentioned generosity. My son must be affable and kind-hearted in prosperity, but remind him that disgrace lies in being proud, stubborn and inflexible.13
In the same letter O’Leary exhorted his son to avoid ‘low company’ and ‘drunkenness, which reduced men to the level of beasts,’ and advised him not to covet riches, to shun extravagance but to remain generous.
O’Leary was an avid reader and, as might be expected, had studied the classical campaigns. ‘It is better to study men than things,’ he wrote. ‘I strongly recommend to my son that he prefer the character of Julius Caesar to that of Pompey, and that he looks with horror upon the crime that made a hero of Brutus.’15 O’Leary advised his son that ‘a good upbringing and fine manners’ covered ‘a thousand defects,’ adding, ‘The last piece of advice that I will give my son for now is that he worships God and that he respects the beliefs of others, no matter what they may be.’16
Despite Córdova’s death and O’Leary’s victory at El Santuario, power was trickling through the fingers of the Bolivarian loyalists. In 1828 William Owens Ferguson of County Antrim, Bolívar’s loyal aide-de-camp, was shot dead in a dark alley in Bogotá in a failed assassination attempt on the Liberator. Ferguson had returned with Bolívar to Gran Colombia in 1826 and had been charged with putting down rebellion in Venezuela. He left a revealing journal of that voyage, describing the extraordinary distances and the unforgiving terrain that Bolívar and his officers covered during the period.17 The authorities organised a public funeral, and Ferguson’s remains were buried in Bogotá’s cathedral.
Ferguson had been a member of the Irish-officered Rifles, Bolívar’s elite unit, which had fought bravely at Bomboná, Junín and Ayacucho. The battalion was disbanded in 1830. According to Alfred Hasbrouck, rather than ‘allow their colors [flags] to be sullied by ignoble hands, the officers solemnly burned them.’18
The other Irish officers of the Rifles also remained loyal to Bolívar in the fractious years spanning the period from the end of the war in Peru and Bolivia to the Liberator’s death in Santa Marta in present-day Colombia in 1830. Arthur Sandes, who had been promoted to brigadier-general before his retirement, settled in Ecuador, serving as governor of both Guayaquil and Cuenca. The battalion’s chief surgeon, Hugo Blair Brown, a Presbyterian from County Donegal, lived in the Antioquia region in the north-west of Colombia in 1824. He continued to work as a doctor and converted to Catholicism in Medellín in 1829. Seven years later he married Eduvigis Gaviria, niece of the first vice-president of Gran Colombia, Francisco Antonio Zea.
Thomas Charles Wright had served with distinction in the Rifles in Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador. He settled in Guayaquil, where he founded the institution that became Ecuador’s national naval school. In 1828 he again entered the fray as both soldier and sailor when Peru began a campaign to expel Gran Colombian forces from Bolivia. Wright was captain of the port of Guayaquil when the Peruvian Libertad sailed into the Gulf of Guayaquil in an attempt to blockade the city. On board the Guayaquileña, Wright drove off the Peruvian ship, using his knowledge of the gulf’s currents. In February 1829 he rejoined the Gran Colombian army as a colonel, serving as an aide-de-camp to General Sucre. In 1835, after Ecuador had seceded from Gran Colombia, he fought in a brief civil war with the forces backing the liberal candidate, Vicente Rocafuerte – his wife’s uncle, for the Ecuadorean presidency. In 1845 Wright was forced into exile, spending 15 years outside Ecuador, first in Chile, then in Peru. He returned to Ecuador in 1860 and died in Guayaquil in 1868.19
Growing resentment about his autocratic style caused Bolívar to resign the presidency of Gran Colombia in 1830. He died from tuberculosis on the way into exile on 17 December close to the town of Santa Marta. His tortured final days are imagined in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The General in His Labyrinth. The great Liberator of the continent from Spanish rule drew his last breath knowing he had failed to persuade his fellow South Americans of his vision of a unified state. Gran Colombia was abolished in 1831 and replaced by the Republics of Ecuador, Venezuela and New Granada – renamed Colombia in 1863.
Bolívar’s Irish allies found themselves in an unenviable position. Hand had been promoted after the Battle of El Santuario, becoming governor of the Chocó region along the Pacific coast. In 1831 he was serving as military governor of the port of Chagres in present-day Panama when he was deposed and taken prisoner in an uprising by political prisoners. ‘There were scores to be settled and revenge to be taken for past misdemeanours,’ according to Matthew Brown. ‘The activities of foreign Bolivarians like Rupert Hand offended the sensibilities and nascent nationalism of the New Granadan liberals who were now in power.’20 Hand was brought to Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast, where he was tried for the murder of Córdova. He now became a victim of the political changes in New Granada and his trial a litmus test for those seeking to prove their anti-Bolivarian credentials. According to Brown, in his fascinating study of Hand’s trial and escape,
… the tumultuous events of the late 1820s were discussed and debated, and the manner in which political groups took up positions on these historical questions played an important role in distinguishing Liberals from Bolivarians. The defeat of José María Córdova at El Santuario was one of the most contentious of these questions. Liberals defended Córdova’s rebellion and attacked the foreign origin of those soldiers who had defeated him.21
Despite the efforts of British diplomats to secure Hand’s release, in April 1833 a regional court found him guilty and sentenced the Dubliner to 10 years’ imprisonment. When Hand’s lawyers appealed the decision, the higher court sentenced him to death. But within minutes of being informed of the decision, Hand had escaped, walking out of the prison in disguise, boarding a French ship in the bay and fleeing to the Dutch island of Curaçao. It is probable that his escape was effected by the combined efforts of the British, French and United States merchant and diplomatic community in Cartagena, with the local authorities turning a blind eye.22
Hand was one of the great Irish survivors of the revolutionary period in South America. He returned to Venezuela in the middle of the 1830s, finding work in Caracas as an English teacher – thanks to the efforts of O’Leary, his old commanding officer – and drawing an army pension.23
O’Leary was the most prominent Irish casualty of the anti-Bolivarian purge in Bogotá. In 1830, after Bolívar’s resignation as president of Gran Colombia, O’Leary fled to Jamaica with his wife, young daughter Mimi and newborn son Simón. A second daughter, Bolivia, was born in Cartagena.
He returned to Caracas in 1833 at the invitation of his brother-in-law, Carlos Soublette, who was then the Venezuelan minister for war, and in May 1834 was sent to London to persuade the British government to recognise Venezuelan independence. It was while serving as a diplomat in Europe that O’Leary paid his first visit home to Ireland since leaving as a teenage volunteer in 1817. He spent six years in Europe working as a diplomat for the Venezuelan government, returning to Caracas in January 1840. The following year he became acting British consul in the city. After a spell as consul in the Venezuelan town of Puerto Cabello, he was appointed the British government’s chargé d’affaires in Bogotá in 1844. In 1851 he signed a treaty on behalf of Britain which outlawed the slave trade between the two countries.24 O’Leary spent most of the last decade of his life in the city from which he had once been exiled for his close association with the Liberator working on the great man’s biography. He died in 1854 and was buried in Bogotá Cathedral.
Perhaps the saddest story is that of Bernardo O’Higgins, who left Chile with his mother and sister in February 1823. Shortly before heading into exile he had thought about travelling to England and Ireland, ‘to visit the country of my education and the land of my forefathers, which retains such a deep place in my affections.’25 In a petition to the Chilean government he wrote: ‘Given that I have left behind the difficult and troublesome position of Supreme Director, I can now dedicate myself to private activities and I hope that the government will be so good as to allow me travel to Ireland for some time to reside in the bosom of my paternal family.’26 Instead, he settled in Peru, where the government granted him the Montalván hacienda, 25 miles outside Lima. The war against the Spanish was far from over when O’Higgins arrived in Lima, and he offered his services to Bolívar. But though he was on the margins of Bolívar’s staff at the Battle of Junín, O’Higgins played no significant part in the remainder of the Peruvian campaign.
O’Higgins spent the next two decades in Peru, cultivating sugar and greeting Chilean political exiles, who urged him to return home. Chilean politics was divided into two broad camps: conservatives, who believed Chile should have a strong, centralist government that respected traditional values, especially those of the Catholic Church, and liberals, led by Ramón Freire, who wished to see a federal, democratic government imbued with Enlightenment ideas. The o’higginistas, who wished to see the exiled hero of independence return to Chile, belonged to the former camp.
The liberals were in power for six years after O’Higgins’s departure from Chile, until 1829, when the forces of General José Joaquín Prieto ushered in a conservative revolution after the short-lived Chilean civil war. Under Prieto, who became president, and his prime minister, Diego Portales, the government was centralised, authoritarian and conservative. In 1836, fearful of the threat to the regional balance of power, the Chilean government went to war with the newly created Confederation of Peru and Bolivia, and in 1838 a Chilean expeditionary force entered Lima.
When O’Higgins heard the news, he rushed to join the celebrating Chilean forces in the Peruvian capital. The Chilean officers are supposed to have mixed drops of O’Higgins’s blood, from a finger he had deliberately cut for the purpose, with their wine. They then raised their glasses to the former supreme director, who shed tears and hugged the officers in an act of unfettered emotion.27 His joy was replaced by profound grief a few months later when his beloved mother, Isabel, died.
The war ended in 1839 with a Chilean victory and the dissolution of the Peru-Bolivia Confederation, and O’Higgins once again made plans to return home. He had even purchased tickets on the steamship Chile, which made the passage from Callao to Valparaíso. But his health was failing, and after suffering a heart attack he was unable to travel. He died in his town house in Lima on 24 October 1842.28
Not all those who remained in Latin America were rewarded with positions in the civil administration. After the wars of independence were over, many Irishmen who had fought in the patriot armies and now found themselves down on their luck a long way from home pleaded with the new governments to give them some means of subsistence.
John Devereux was another great survivor. He arrived in South America too late to see action with his own Irish Legion. After challenging the Colombian vice-president, Antonio Nariño, to a duel over an alleged slight to the honour of James Towers English’s widow, the Englishwoman Mary English, he was thrown in jail. The mutiny at Riohacha had made the Irish Legion an embarrassment, and Bolívar, who in 1820 had decided that the recruitment of foreign volunteers was more trouble than it was worth, decided to appoint Devereux as one of his government’s diplomatic representatives in Europe.29
Devereux was never one to underestimate his own abilities. His aristocratic pretensions are evident by the fact that he changed the spelling of his name – d’Evereux and d’Evereaux being two variants – to make it look more distinguished. In a letter to Daniel O’Connell he wrote:
This honor [sic] I did not court or seek, but, as I was for returning, the Government intimated to me in the most flattering terms, that it was their wish to confer on me some work of their distinguished favour and confidence – such … as the Govt of the United States conferred on the illustrious Lafayette when he returned at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War of that Country – only that his was confined solely to his own Country.30
Devereux was arrested in Venice in 1825 over a financial transaction, and he emigrated to the United States. He died in London in 1860.31
John Thomond O’Brien, San Martín’s former adjutant, is a good example of the type of Irish revolutionary-entrepreneur whose involvement in the independence movement was intertwined with a pursuit of commercial opportunities. Shortly after arriving in Buenos Aires in 1812, O’Brien joined the patriot army. For the next few decades of his life he dreamt of becoming a successful entrepreneur. According to the Chilean historian Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, ‘O’Brien was neither a soldier of fortune nor a mercenary, he was a “soldier and nothing more” because he fought in four republics and was born to be a soldier and fought for noble causes.’32 O’Brien fought for the independence of four republics on the South American continent.
O’Brien had reached the rank of colonel at the end of San Martín’s successful campaign in Peru and had returned to Ireland to promote a scheme for enticing Irish settlers to South America. When it failed, he joined Bolívar’s army in Upper Peru as a private. After the campaign was over, Bolívar awarded a silver-mining concession to O’Brien on the outskirts of Puno in present-day Peru. The silver mines had been abandoned for a couple of decades, but there were still rich veins in the rock. Perhaps because of injury or poor health, O’Brien was unable to cope with the high altitudes of the Andes and he sold up to an English merchant by the name of John Begg.33 He returned to Europe in the late 1820s to seek capital for investment in South America but was back on the continent in the early 1830s, tending to business interests. In 1834 he was in the Amazon, hoping to mine gold. He won the support of President Gamarra of Peru for the project, but politics intervened, and he was once again forced to return to his military career, joining the army of the Peru-Bolivia Confederation. Again he won renown as an officer. Santa Cruz promoted him to brigadier-general and awarded him the Bolivian Legion of Honour for his role in the Battle of Yanacocha in 1835.
O’Brien was on his way back to Europe and had reached Buenos Aires when he was arrested by the Argentine dictator, Rosas, who suspected him of plotting against his government. He was released, thanks to the efforts of the British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston.
He now tried his luck at running an estancia in Uruguay, but his livestock was destroyed during the civil war between the liberal Colorados and the conservative Blancos, which were backed by Rosas in Argentina. The civil war lasted for 12 years. The Blancos under Rosas’s ally Manuel Oribe besieged Montevideo for nine years, during which the Colorado government sent O’Brien to Britain and France to seek support. After the war, O’Brien continued to cross the Atlantic, serving as Uruguay’s consul-general in London and condemning Rosas. Having decided to make his home in South America – spending his winters in Lima and his summers in Chile – in 1851 he sought financial assistance from the Peruvian government. In 1859 he returned for the last time to Ireland. In 1861, en route to South America, O’Brien fell ill in Lisbon, dying in the Portugese capital aged 74.34
Francis Burdett O’Connor outlived them all. In a photograph taken of him towards the end of his life, O’Connor, who was then enjoying a secluded, peaceful life in a remote part of southern Bolivia, stares at the camera with a stern gaze (see Plate 19). He is dressed in a double-breasted frock coat and check trousers. With his thinning hair and long white whiskers he resembles one of those American outlaws who survived long enough to be interviewed by reporters eager to get the story of what life was like in the Old West. In fact two of the Old West’s most famous characters were to make their final stand not far from Tarija a few decades later. The notorious bank robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, on the run from the Pinkerton detective agency in the United States, were shot and killed in the Bolivian village of San Vicente in 1908. Looking at the photograph another way, O’Connor seems the very picture of Victorian middle-class respectability. He was a devout Catholic in his last years and a celebrated Bolivian hero, who had served as commander-in-chief of the army. It was as military governor that he first spent time in Tarija, high in the Andes of southern Bolivia.
In 1826, at the age of 35, a brush with death prompted O’Connor to consider starting a family. He was injured in a skirmish with rebels and was confined to bed for three months, allowing him time to ponder his mortality. Once recovered, he resolved to marry 17-year-old Francisca Ruyloba. The couple lost several babies in infancy but a daughter, Hercilia, survived to carry on the O’Connor name in southern Bolivia. Hercilia’s son, Tomás, was born with the surname d’Arlach after his father but, unusually, adopted his mother’s surname as a patronymic. The surname O’Connor d’Arlach is still common in the south of Bolivia. Eduardo Trigo O’Connor d’Arlach is a noted historian of the region and a former deputy foreign minister.35
O’Connor defended Bolivia from the threat of its neighbours to the west and south, Chile and Argentina. Twelve years after he mapped the borders of the new Bolivian state, he once again sought to protect the territorial integrity of the country when he fought, alongside John Thomond O’Brien, for Santa Cruz and the Peru-Bolivia Confederation, repelling the Argentine forces at the Battle of Montenegro in 1838. When he was not serving his adopted country on campaign, he worked on his farm at San Luis, outside Tarija, venturing out to attend mass or visit the Franciscan fathers in the nearby monastery. He died, aged 80, on 5 October 1871.