Chapter 4
In 1751 one of the many Irish merchant families of Cádiz, the Butlers, gave a job to a recently arrived Irishman in the city. The new employee, Ambrose O’Higgins,1 was rather old to be starting work as a clerk – he was already in his early thirties – but he knuckled down and did what he was told. When he was not busy entering numbers in the long, narrow columns of one of his employer’s ledgers, the new clerk would stroll up and down the docks, watching the heavy sacks and chests full of exotic-smelling goods from the Indies being unloaded from the cavernous holds of the wooden merchant ships, pondering the wonders that lay on the other side of the glittering expanse of water.
Ambrose was born about 1721 in the townland of Ballynary on the eastern shore of Lough Arrow in County Sligo to Charles and Margaret Higgins, small farmers. He later founded and named the city of San Ambrosio de Ballenary (present-day Vallenar) in Chile in honour of his birthplace. Though there is little documentary evidence concerning O’Higgins’s early life in Ireland, it is likely that he grew up in a modest house, his family struggling to make ends meet in the impoverished Ireland of the 1720s. In any event, the Higgins family’s circumstances led them to change their fortunes by moving to Summerhill, County Meath, when Ambrose was still a boy. It may have been that he could not afford to travel to Spain until the middle of the century, when he was already 30 years old. By the time he arrived in Cádiz in 1751 his achievements had not matched his ambition, but he was determined to remedy that fact by his unstinting application to whatever task was at hand. He spent five years working in the city, building important contacts in Irish political and mercantile circles until, in 1756, he had an opportunity to see the New World for himself.
O’Higgins travelled to South America to sell goods on behalf of a group of Cádiz merchants. It is also possible that he visited a younger brother, William, who was living in Asunción.2 His first port of call was Buenos Aires, from where he set off on the long overland trek towards Chile. The first part of the trip across the pampas – the flat, grassy plains that surrounded Buenos Aires to the north, west and south as far as the eye could see – was not too arduous. It was enlivened by encounters with groups of dusty-looking gauchos rounding up the wild cattle that grazed on the pampas, or sitting around at night, expertly carving pieces of beef from a bloody carcass to roast on the camp-fire. Things became more difficult as he rode farther west; for between the pampas and wine country of present-day Argentina and the narrow strip of land that hugs the Pacific coastline – present day Chile – lie the Andes.
If O’Higgins’s career had so far been unspectacular, there were signs that he possessed an inner drive, mental resilience and the capacity to endure physical hardship that surpassed that of ordinary men. Summoning all his reserves of energy, he began to climb into the frozen cordillera – the part of the Andean mountain range separating the modern republics of Argentina and Chile. The memory of that first punishing climb across the Andes – he was to traverse the mountain range many times – was to remain with him for the rest of his life.
O’Higgins spent two to three years in South America. When he returned to Spain in 1760, he sought to become a naturalised Spaniard so that he could trade in the Americas using his own capital. He also looked for a government job. He was now almost 40 and still had not found his calling.
It was an encounter with John Garland, an Irish-born military engineer in the service of the Spanish crown, that gave his career the push it needed. Garland was highly esteemed by his superiors. Having entered the Spanish army as a cadet in the Hibernia Regiment in 1738, he had risen to the rank of captain when he began his career as a military engineer in the Royal Engineer Corps in 1751. When he met O’Higgins in 1761 he was preparing to travel to South America to work on upgrading the Spanish crown’s defensive fortifications in Chile. Garland was impressed by his fellow-Irishman’s drive and ambition and employed O’Higgins as a draughtsman. Before leaving Cádiz, O’Higgins took out various loans to invest in goods for sale in the South American market. He also entered into a business arrangement with the wealthy Irish merchant Juan Bautista Power.
Garland and O’Higgins set sail on board the frigate La Venus in January 1763, arriving in Montevideo that May. In Buenos Aires, O’Higgins visited some of the contacts he had made during his previous stay in South America and tried to dispose of the goods he had brought with him from Spain. At the same time he prepared to make the arduous journey overland to Santiago. It was the beginning of winter when he set off; Garland had chosen to remain in Buenos Aires until the spring, but O’Higgins was eager to get to Chile.
O’Higgins arrived in Mendoza in the west of present-day Argentina in late June, having covered 600 miles across the pampas. The distance remaining to Santiago was just over a hundred miles as the crow flies, but once again the cordillera stood in his way. Conditions were even worse than the first time he had made the crossing, because it was the height of winter. O’Higgins trudged up the lower slopes of the Andes but was forced to return to Mendoza during a violent storm. He was unperturbed and tried again a few weeks later. This time he succeeded in making it across the icy passage to the other side of the Andes and down to Santiago. Garland arrived in the city at the end of the year.
In the middle of the eighteenth century the territory roughly corresponding to present-day Chile was administered as a captaincy-general. This meant that, although Chile was under the jurisdiction of the viceroy of Peru, the capital of which was Lima, it enjoyed a considerable amount of autonomy. This reflected Chile’s unique geographical position, sandwiched as it was between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes. Its political and military independence was encapsulated in the figure of the governor and captain-general, who in 1763 was Antonio Guill y Gonzaga. Guill was responsible for implementing the Spanish crown’s reforms in Chile, the most pressing of which, in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, was the modernisation of the dilapidated fortifications along the Pacific coastline and the subjugation of the indigenous Mapuche people in the south. To this end, Guill ordered the experienced soldier and engineer Garland and his draughtsman, O’Higgins, to map and rebuild southern Chile.
The region of Chile between Santiago and Cape Horn is one of the most beautiful parts of South America. Hundreds of azure-blue rivers trickle down the snow-capped peaks of the Andes through lush green valleys into glassy lakes. In the 1760s this was a wild and dangerous place, the site of the ever-shifting frontier between Spanish-controlled territory and those lands still under the sway of the Mapuche, who had resisted Spanish rule since the arrival of the first conquistadores in the 1540s.
Mapuche is both the name of a specific tribe who lived in the Araucanía region of Chile and a broader term given to the different indigenous peoples who shared linguistic and cultural characteristics and who lived in a region covering the lowlands of southern Chile between the Rivers Biobío and Toltén, a part of the Argentine pampas and the section of the cordillera in between. In the latter half of the eighteenth century unstable truces were punctuated by short, sharp wars between the Spanish and the Mapuche.
The Spanish were acutely concerned about their inability to subjugate the indigenous people in the south and made concerted efforts throughout the eighteenth century to tackle the problem.3 The frontier between the Spanish Empire in America and Mapuche territory was the River Biobío. This political and cultural border was to shape O’Higgins’s future career. Like many a self-made man in the Americas, he was to prove his worth in the harsh, dangerous frontierlands. As if acknowledging the fact, this was where he later established his great hacienda, or cattle ranch, Las Canteras, in an area known as the Isla de la Laja, a triangular wedge of lush, grassy land, the bottom corner of which was sandwiched between the Biobío and the Andes.
O’Higgins participated in an assembly of Mapuche chiefs convened by Guill in December 1764. These gatherings, called parlamentos in Spanish, took place periodically during the Bourbon era. The 1764 parlamento was held near the fort of Nacimiento in the heartland of Mapuche territory. On the banks of the River Biobío – in recognition of the frontier between royalist-controlled lands and Mapuche territory – O’Higgins witnessed the governor, Guill, the Bishop of Concepción, Pedro Ángel Espiñeira, the oidor (judge) Domingo Martínez de Aldunate, and Field-Marshal Salvador Cabrito sit down with 200 Mapuche leaders. Thousands of royalist troops and Mapuche warriors hovered in the background in case of trouble. After several days of discussion, the caciques, or tribal chiefs, agreed to the Spanish proposal that they settle in towns and allow Christian missionaries among them. In practice the agreement was meaningless and the Mapuche returned to their traditional form of living.
The isolated ports of southern Chile, such as Valdivia, were vulnerable to attack from the fleets of hostile states plying the Pacific, including the British and Dutch. Guill had ordered Garland and O’Higgins to oversee the construction of new fortifications at Valdivia, the most strategically important port in southern Chile, lying at the confluence of the Rivers Cruces and Calle-Calle. Valdivia was the main access point by sea to the south of Chile and supplied ships making the hazardous journey between Spain and Lima, the viceregal capital which enjoyed a monopoly of trade with the metropolis for most of the colonial period. In the seventeenth century the Dutch had occupied Valdivia briefly. In response, the Spanish had built around Corral Bay an extensive system of forts, one of the biggest in the Americas.
After scouting the terrain in Valdivia, Garland and O’Higgins travelled to the Chilean city of Concepción in the spring of 1764. A devastating earthquake and tsunami had reduced the city to ruins in 1751. It was Garland and O’Higgins who decided where the new city would be built.
Garland threw himself wholeheartedly into the task of rebuilding Valdivia’s defences, perhaps to forget the heartbreak of losing his fiancée to another man. In Santiago he had become engaged to María Alcalde y Ribera, the 21-year-old daughter of a wealthy Santiago noble. As a foreigner, he required a licence to marry; but by the time this was granted the young woman had fallen for another. Garland worked side by side with O’Higgins to carry on the work begun by the talented Catalan engineer José Antonio Birt, who had to resign following a horse-riding accident.
The Irishmen’s plans for the new system of fortifications at Valdivia were ambitious and expensive. The budget for the construction of four forts was 357,000 pesos, and they estimated that they would need 500 labourers. To supply the bricks required for the construction of the new fortifications, Garland built two factories on an island opposite Valdivia. The factory workers worked day and night to keep the furnaces going, and by the beginning of 1767 Garland had 220,000 bricks with which to start building. He drew elaborate maps and plans of the project, many of which survive in the Spanish archives. He himself bore the cost of the drawing materials, the paper, brushes and inks, which left him frequently without money.
In 1768 Guill appointed Garland as political and military governor of Valdivia, noting that he had ‘proved to me on several occasions his love of royal service, his disinterest and his Christian conduct.’4 Despite this ‘love of royal service’ Garland was unhappy in Valdivia. It was a remote place, with few luxuries and constantly under threat from the Mapuche. His sense of isolation must have increased when O’Higgins returned to Spain in 1766. Garland was finally relieved in March 1775, but he was not to see Spain again. Having sailed up the Pacific coast to present-day Panama, he contracted typhus in Portobello and died on board the schooner Doña Marina a few days out to sea. In his will he bequeathed 9,000 pesos to the poor widows and orphans of Valdivia.5 He also left a rich architectural and engineering legacy in southern Chile.
O’Higgins had cited ill health in his petition to be allowed return to Europe in 1766, but it is likely that he wished to lever his achievements in Chile into a new position. To do so, while idling at court he had written the Descripción del Reyno de Chile in 1767, in which he outlined his ideas on how best to pacify the Mapuche and to maximise revenue for the Spanish crown. His thoughts on the former were based on his experience of having attended the parlamento of Mapuche caciques at Nacimiento in 1764.
O’Higgins presented a map of Chile to complement his report (see Plate 5), which he had drawn himself, based on earlier maps. The map, extending from Copiapó to the archipelago of Chiloé, was primitive, but he knew exactly the type of information that would interest the officials at court: the rivers and the position of mercury, gold and copper mines. Splashes of red ink marked volcanoes. Realising that the crown wished to establish the whereabouts of Jesuit property in South America – as the king was in the middle of expropriating the order’s possessions throughout the Spanish Empire – O’Higgins wrote in the top left-hand corner of his map: ‘Nota bene, the letter “R” marks the missions and possessions which belong to the regulars of the Company [of Jesus] in Chile.’6 In the region directly south of Santiago, between the Rivers Maipo and Rapel, he wrote: ‘All of this territory is very well populated by very industrious and hard-working Spaniards and Mestizos.’7 He differentiated the indigenous tribes and the areas of southern Chile in which they lived.
O’Higgins turned to Richard Wall to get a hearing at court. Though no longer serving as secretary of state, Wall still had influence, which he used to help his fellow-Irishman. Wall and O’Higgins had very different temperaments. It would be unfair to say that Wall had arrived at the pinnacle of government by accident; but, enjoying the benefit of powerful connections in the Jacobite aristocracy, he had not the steely determination of the self-made O’Higgins. Unlike the austere, unbending O’Higgins, Wall relished the social, sensual and intellectual opportunities afforded him by his position, first as an esteemed diplomat and then as the king’s prime minister.
O’Higgins wore his ambition less lightly than Wall, and the obstacles he faced were far greater. Whereas Wall’s post-army career suffered only brief setbacks as he glided effortlessly through Europe’s courts and salons, opera houses and casinos, O’Higgins grimly crisscrossed the Atlantic and the Andes, gambling everything but always firmly convinced of his own merits. Wall was the ultimate insider – as far as that was possible for a foreigner – gracious and debonair; O’Higgins was the ruthless outsider forcing his way in. But Wall and O’Higgins shared a bond: their Irish origins. It was through Wall that O’Higgins was able to get a petition to the minister for the Indies, Julián de Arriaga, asking for a position as an administrative official in the frontier country of southern Chile. O’Higgins’s gamble did not pay off: Arriaga turned down his request.
O’Higgins was undaunted and returned to Santiago in 1769, offering his services to the interim governor, Juan de Balmaseda. Hostilities had recommenced between royalist forces and the indigenous tribes in the south of Chile, and Balmaseda needed tough men to lead the campaign. Now close to 50, but with undimmed energy, O’Higgins embarked on a new career, that of a soldier. Commissioned as captain in a regiment of dragoons, he was ordered south to help lead the campaign against the Mapuche.
O’Higgins owed his subsequent starry rise through the royal administration to his exploits as a soldier in southern Chile. During one engagement he received a serious head injury. Within four short years he had been promoted a maestro de campo, or field-marshal, a rank in the Spanish army just below that of the powerful captain-general. The continuing unrest in the south of Chile was a blessing for his career.
The fact that a foreigner was rising so rapidly through the ranks caused fierce resentment among O’Higgins’s peers. The extent of this frustration at the fact that countless Irish soldiers and engineers, such as Garland, O’Higgins and the Irish-Spaniard Antonio O’Brien, were being employed in influential positions is captured in a document in the national archives in Santiago that sums up O’Higgins’s career between 1769 and 1777: ‘It was believed then in Chile that every foreigner was a distinguished mathematician or an excellent engineer and this requirement was what facilitated O’Higgins’s entry into the militia.’8 The author of the document mentions that O’Higgins had been ordered to construct a fort at Antuco but had instead sought a confrontation with the Mapuche and laments the fact that the Irishman was promoted to lead a cavalry company on the Chilean frontier despite the fact that it was prohibited to give this highly sensitive position to a foreigner.9
When not putting down rebellions on the frontier, O’Higgins was working on a project that had long been close to his heart. In 1765 he had drawn on his own experiences – he had twice crossed the cordillera in the harshest conditions – to write a report about the viability of building refuges, called casuchos, in the Andes between Santiago and Mendoza, crucial for communications between Santiago and Buenos Aires during the winter months. His recommendations had been accepted and the work had been carried out. However, by 1771 these casuchos had fallen into disrepair. O’Higgins was given the task of repairing the existing casuchos and building new ones. His actions on the frontier – he was regarded as an expert on the Mapuche – had earned him the esteem of his superiors, not least the governor of Chile, Francisco Javier Morales, who granted him a six-month leave to travel to Lima.
Peru had been the jewel in the Spanish imperial crown since the time of Pizarro; and Lima, the seat of the viceroy of Peru, the highest royal official in South America, was known as the Ciudad de los Reyes, the City of the Kings. It was the centre of the crown’s governmental machinery on the continent. There were about 40,000 limeños (residents of Lima) when O’Higgins arrived, making it one of the most populated cities on the continent. The tiny Spanish elite at the top of the social pyramid included the viceroy, the judges or members of the Lima audiencia, the highest court on the continent, and the treasury officials who oversaw the collection of revenue. Beneath this small group, which relied upon the favour of the Spanish crown, were the criollo aristocracy, who made their living from land ownership and trade. Through Lima’s port of Callao went the silver from the mines in Bolivia on its way to Spain and, passing the other way, the luxury goods from Europe.
By the 1770s, however, Lima’s importance had diminished and economic power was moving north and west across the continent. The Viceroyalty of New Granada, encompassing present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Panama, had been created in 1717, and ports such as Caracas, Buenos Aires and Montevideo were benefiting from the introduction of less restrictive trade rules. In recognition of the growing economic power of the southwestern regions of the continent, the Viceroyalty of the River Plate, roughly comprising the present-day countries of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, was created in 1776, with its capital at Buenos Aires.
Despite Lima’s decline, the limeños carried on as if they lived at the centre of the universe. The streets were full of rich traders doing business, imperious royal officials riding through the streets in gilded carriages, and hungry pedlars, hustlers and beggars who scraped and scrabbled as best they could for a couple of pesos. Andean villagers flocked to the city, escaping famine and drought and trying to get by from the sale of textiles and foodstuffs. The population was made up of the peninsulares, the Spanish-born high officials; the American-born criollos of Spanish descent; the indigenous peoples, known to the Spanish as índios; the descendants of African slaves; and those of mixed race, such as mestizos, mulattos and zambos.
In 1773 O’Higgins arrived at the glittering court of the viceroy of Peru, Manuel de Amat, a native of Barcelona, bringing with him a warm recommendation from the Chilean governor, Morales. Amat had become a wealthy man and lived in opulence in Lima’s viceregal palace, to which society came bowing and shuffling. His lover was a young actor named Micaela Villegas, who was known to the wider populace as La Perricholi. The nickname derived from her frequent rows with Amat, who, in fits of rage, would call her, in his Catalan accent, a perra chola, or Peruvian bitch, which to Peruvian ears sounded like Perricholi. In their more understanding moments Amat would address her as Miquita and promise to erect sumptuous buildings in her honour.
O’Higgins spent three months in Peru, apprising the viceroy of his work in Chile during long conversations, visiting the theatre and the opera, and attending bullfights at the Plaza de Acho, the most famous bullring in Lima. By the time he returned to Chile he had been promoted lieutenant-colonel (second in command) of the corps of dragoons on the Mapuche frontier. He was now a powerful man with connections at the viceregal court in Lima.
O’Higgins was a shrewd and intelligent politician. He worked to establish himself as a go-between with the royal authorities and the Mapuche, putting himself forward as an authority on all matters relating to the indigenous peoples of the south. He was the viceroy’s most useful source of information when it came to learning more about the southern part of Chile. He convinced the Mapuche that they should send ambassadors to Santiago to treat with the new governor, Agustín de Jáuregui. He also prepared a report on the defensive installations in the south of Chile that was the basis for improvements in the 1770s.10
During his expeditions through the south of Chile, O’Higgins would stay at the home of Simón Riquelme, a local landowner, and his wife, María Mercedes de la Meza, in the town of San Bartolomé de Chillán. Their daughter Isabel was only 12 or 13 when Higgins first met her. The stout, red-faced Irish officer was in his mid-fifties, and his career was finally taking off. Over the next five years, as he passed through the town on his frequent journeys south to the frontierlands, Isabel began to fall in love. O’Higgins seems to have made some form of marriage proposal, and Isabel agreed to go to bed with him. When the 18-year-old Isabel gave birth to a son in August 1778 the Irishman reneged on his promise. There was a 40-year gap between the lovers’ ages, and O’Higgins was desperate to prevent any scandal that might damage his career. He also ordered that the baby be taken immediately from the young mother and raised by foster-parents. This cold, calculating act was to have important repercussions for Chile’s future.
In 1786 the new viceroy of Peru, Teodoro de Croix, appointed O’Higgins governor of Concepción, one of two new administrative provinces in Chile, the other being Santiago. O’Higgins had found his place in society. ‘He was of medium height and fat, had a narrow and coarse face and brown eyes of a harsh and penetrating expression, to which were added a stubborn expression and very thick eyebrows,’ according to one of his biographers, Jaime Eyzaguirre.11 Because of his red face and his bushy eyebrows the local people gave him the nickname of ‘el camarón’, ‘the shrimp’.12 More respectfully, the Spanish crown had awarded him the title of Baron of Ballenar. In 1788, in further recognition of his service, the king appointed O’Higgins the new governor of Chile. Firework displays and a great ball were held in his honour in Santiago.
Owing to the frequent destructive earthquakes that reduced its buildings to rubble, Santiago was a city in a state of constant transformation. Low, lime-washed adobe houses lined the streets, which ran perfectly from north to south and from east to west. In the western part of the city the small hill of Santa Lucía – known in pre-Columbian times as Huelén – protected the santiaguinos from the freezing winds that blew down from the sentinel-like Andes, visible in the distance to the east. The River Mapocho flowed through the south-western corner of the city. The centre of Santiago was the Plaza Mayor or Great Square. The governor’s palace, the audiencia, the treasury, the town hall and the prison ran along the northern side; the cathedral dominated the western side.
The plump, no-nonsense Irish governor plunged enthusiastically into his new role. He introduced important measures in Santiago relating to public health, infrastructure and crime. There were new rules governing the keeping of animals in the city. Pigs were no longer allowed to roam free but had to be kept indoors or in corrals, and dogs had to be tied up. Citizens were no longer allowed to wash their clothes in the local water sources and were ordered not to throw their rubbish or dead animals into the rivers. Clothes that belonged to those who had died of infectious diseases had to be destroyed. There were new building regulations. Construction had to be licensed by the authorities to ensure the safety and well-ordered development of the city. To prevent street crime it was forbidden to loiter near corners, doors, walls or the entrances to alleys. The new governor forbade the carrying of arms, including pistols, daggers, knives and swords or any other type of sharp instrument; privileged citizens were exempt. The penalty for contravening this law was four months in prison; there was a year-long sentence for those convicted of a second offence; and those convicted a third time faced two years’ exile and 200 lashes, to be administered in the street or at the foot of a gallows with the offending instrument tied to their neck.
Tramps and ‘bad-living people’ were ordered to leave the city, and the unemployed were ordered to work on public schemes or sign up for the militia for six years. Those who sheltered the idle and the lazy faced fines of 30 pesos and six months in jail. Beggars were licensed by the Church and the municipal authority; those found without the requisite documents were treated as vagabonds and given 50 lashes. O’Higgins was committed to rooting out dissent and promised harsh penalties for those found ‘plotting or gossiping’ in public or in secret against the king or his royal officials.13
One of O’Higgins’s most significant accomplishments was his abolition in 1789 of the encomienda, the system of forced labour for the Mapuche introduced by the Spanish in the early days of the conquest.14 But the Bourbon reforms were as much about power and control as they were about modernising the colonies. Santiago was a deeply conservative, class-divided society, and the Catholic Church was the supreme arbiter in questions of public morality. O’Higgins was a cold, humourless man, with a strong puritanical streak, who was more than happy to implement draconian punishments for moral transgressors.
Singing or reciting ‘indecent, satirical or bad-rhyming verse’ in public places was forbidden, as were ‘provocative dances’. A curfew banned citizens from walking in the streets and prohibited bars and taverns from opening after 9 o’clock in the winter and 10 in the summer; anyone found to be indulging in ‘dances, singing or other noisy activities’ after these hours could find themselves in prison for eight days. Wearing outfits that ‘did not correspond to one’s status, sex or position’ could also result in harsh penalties. Nobles could face a fine of 50 pesos; for ‘plebeians’ the punishment was six months in jail. Gambling and drunkenness were also punished. Men found with women in public places after the curfew could look forward to 30 days in prison; the women were sent to the Casa de Recogidas, a type of prison for fallen women (not unlike the Magdalene asylums of a later era in Ireland). Guards patrolled the streets at night to enforce this strict moral code.
There was a different rule for the elite. The authorities were not to interfere with ‘honourable persons, well known and in no way suspicious,’ or those who had gone out with ‘rational and prudent, or diligent, honest or necessary motives.’ There were punitive measures for adulterers. Married men ‘found in places other than their residences, must return to live at the home of their respective wives, with the warning that if, after thirty days, they have not done so, they will be arrested and remanded in custody, or escorted to the coast,’ from where they would be deported.15
During his period of office O’Higgins wrote detailed reports on how to improve the Chilean economy, recommending the cultivation of rice and cotton and the development of mining. In relation to the cotton industry, he suggested using the expertise of Irish women immigrants to teach Chilean children how to work the material properly.16
As governor of Chile, O’Higgins helped the careers of several Irish soldiers. At the outbreak of the conflict with revolutionary France in 1793 he not only donated part of his salary to the war effort17 but paid for the maintenance of four nephews for the duration of the war. Patrick O’Higgins, a subteniente, and Peter O’Higgins, a cadet, were serving in the Hibernia Regiment, while Charles and Thomas O’Higgins, both cadets, were serving in the Irlanda.18 O’Higgins later requested that Thomas be transferred from the Irlanda to the Regiment of Dragoons of the Frontier in Chile. Ambrose O’Higgins had created this unit especially for the defence of the southern part of the country and wished to see his name carried forward in the unit’s officer list.19
In 1794 O’Higgins successfully petitioned the Spanish court to give his close confidant Thomas Delphin, who was a colonel in a cavalry regiment in the militia in the south of Chile, the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Spanish army.
There was perhaps a less severe side to the bullish Irishman. According to friends, including Delphin and the lawyer Juan Martínez de Rozas, who was to become an important figure in Chile’s independence struggle, O’Higgins would talk animatedly about his son, Bernardo, and explain his reasoning for sending him to Europe.20 Delphin later testified that O’Higgins had felt deeply the injury he had done to Isabel Riquelme.21
In 1796 O’Higgins was created Marquis of Osorno. The award of a title by the Spanish crown was dependent on proof of noble blood, and this was the reason why he began calling himself O’Higgins instead of Higgins. Of even more significance, on 16 September 1795, the king appointed O’Higgins viceroy of Peru, the highest royal office in Spanish America. The young Irish clerk who had left the family farm in County Meath for a job in a Cádiz counting-house now held the most powerful position in the Spanish colonial administration. He also became an extremely wealthy man, drawing an annual salary of 70,500 pesos.
For the next five years, until his resignation in 1800, O’Higgins worked to strengthen the position of the Spanish crown in South America, rebuilding coastal defences and collaborating with the Inquisition in suppressing the circulation of seditious newspapers.22
O’Higgins gave important jobs to members of his family, trusting them to carry on the important work of maintaining the viceroyalty’s defensive strength. In 1796 he entrusted his nephew Thomas O’Higgins with the task of inspecting the garrison on the archipelago of Chiloé in the south of Chile and establishing the best route for a new road between the main island and the newly settled city of Osorno. He ordered his nephew to visit Valdivia and the ‘principal Chiefs of the Indians and confirm them in the ideas of peace and fidelity which the Viceroy himself desires from them’ and to offer the Mapuche ‘special protection if they continued in a good disposition.’23
Thomas O’Higgins embarked from Callao on board the brig Limeño on 12 September 1796, bound for Valparaíso and Santiago. He then travelled south by sea towards Valdivia and Osorno. He spent eight months in the south of Chile, inspecting militias, examining the defensive and infrastructural requirements of the region and meeting the caciques. During his mission O’Higgins received word that Spain was at war with Britain. In Valdivia he ordered an increase in the number of artillerymen.
Thomas O’Higgins presented his report to his uncle in Lima on his return eight months later. It contained important observations on the political, economic and military situation in southern Chile for the prosecution of the war with England. He also wrote to the king’s prime minister, Manuel Godoy, informing him of the peaceful relations between the settlers and the Mapuche.24 The viceroy was extremely pleased with his nephew’s work and sent him to Spain to report in person to the court, given that ‘one could not trust pen or paper in the present circumstances of war.’25 O’Higgins also recommended his nephew’s promotion to lieutenant-colonel. However, the promotion was refused, on the grounds that O’Higgins had served only 11 years in the army.26
John Mackenna was another Irishman who benefited from O’Higgins’s largesse. Born in 1771 in Castleshane, County Monaghan, to William Mackenna and Leonora O’Reilly, Mackenna was the nephew of Count Alexander O’Reilly, into whose care he had been placed as a boy. In 1791, while serving in Spain under the orders of his uncle, Mackenna had conceived a plan to create an elite Irish-Spanish Legion within the Spanish army to fight revolutionary France. Mackenna’s idea was to amalgamate the three existing Irish regiments, the Irlanda, Hibernia and Ultonia, with three of the best remaining regiments in the Spanish army. The resulting force of some 50,000 men would have been led exclusively by veteran Irish officers. The septuagenarian O’Reilly had looked with favour on Mackenna’s proposal but had turned it down on the grounds that the Spanish government would not accept it.27
Having served his apprenticeship in the Spanish army, Mackenna travelled to South America in 1797, arriving in Lima with a recommendation for the Irish viceroy. O’Higgins was impressed with the young man from County Monaghan and appointed him governor of Osorno. Over the next decade Mackenna laboured to improve southern Chile’s defensive fortifications, continuing the work of his compatriots Ambrose O’Higgins, Thomas O’Higgins and John Garland.
Those Irishmen who had benefited from Ambrose O’Higgins’s help were eternally grateful. In 1811, on the eve of war between the Chilean patriots and Spain, John Mackenna, then the patriot governor of Valparaíso, wrote that Ambrose O’Higgins ‘had a clarity of intelligence that simplified the most complicated and difficult problems.’ He added that his life, ‘faithfully related, would present one of the most beautiful moral lessons in the history of humanity. I know of none better to imprint upon the spirits of the young the inestimable value of inflexible honour, untiring work and unshakeable strength.’28
Why did Mackenna, a patriot who was preparing to break Chile’s connection with Spain, hold the late viceroy in such esteem? After all, as viceroy of Peru, O’Higgins was a symbol of Spanish tyranny. It was perhaps because Mackenna could see that the stern, unyielding viceroy of Peru had turned his ambitions into reality, that it was possible for an Irishman from a humble background to succeed in the New World against the odds. In a letter to Bernardo O’Higgins, Mackenna wrote:
Hannibal, Caesar, Maurice [of Nassau] and Frederick [the Great] had great advantages at the start of their lives in relation to their social situation, fortune and education. Your father, though descended from a noble family, the lords of Ballinary, found himself launched into a strange country at the start of his career, without money, without family and without friends. He died at 80 years of age in the office of Viceroy of Peru, having passed through every rank over the course of seventy years, from a humble employee of a Cádiz merchant house to the highest position that can be granted to a commoner, having achieved this not through corruption or favouritism but despite them and because of his outstanding talent as a soldier and a statesman.29
Ambrose O’Higgins had been an unflinching royalist but he was a source of inspiration to Mackenna because he represented what it was possible for an Irishman to achieve in the Spanish Empire. The most renowned names of the next generation of Irish emigrants to Spain and its colonies would earn their fame by destroying the very foundations of that empire.