Chapter 8
The May Revolution in Buenos Aires raised fundamental questions for the future of the territories that comprised the Viceroyalty of the River Plate. Since the foundation of the viceroyalty in 1776, the capital city, Buenos Aires, had gained in importance as the Bourbons centralised power in their American colonies. This caused resentment in the provinces. The fact that the new junta in Buenos Aires saw itself as inheriting the authority and functions of the viceroy, and attempted to exercise them throughout the territories that made up the former viceroyalty, led to increased bitterness on the part of provincial towns, which wished to follow the example of the recently established United States of America and create a federal system.
The first problem for the junta, however, was continuing royalist opposition. In Córdoba, Liniers and the local bishop led a counter-revolution against the junta, which was swiftly put down by troops from Buenos Aires. More sustained royalist opposition came from the north, in Paraguay and Upper Peru, and to the east, across the River Plate in Montevideo.
In Paraguay, local militias under the command of the Spanish governor, Bernardo de Velasco, repelled an expeditionary force sent by the Buenos Aires junta under the command of General Manuel Belgrano. These same militias then overthrew Velasco, leading to an independent Paraguay. Unlike the other leaders of the independent South American states that were to emerge from the revolutionary period, the Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia built his regime on economic self-sufficiency rather than free trade.
The Buenos Aires junta sent another force to Upper Peru, which was also defeated. Upper Peru was a rich province, full of precious metals; it was also a royalist heartland, which rejected the authority of Buenos Aires. Though it had been absorbed into the Viceroyalty of the River Plate in 1776, economically and politically the region had always looked west, towards Lima, the capital city of the Viceroyalty of Peru. It was not until 1825 that Upper Peru proclaimed independence from Spain.
The most dangerous royalist threat to Buenos Aires came from Montevideo. In the aftermath of the May Revolution, Montevideo became the new viceregal capital and centre of royalist power in the River Plate region. From Montevideo the royalist navy was able to control the entrance to the River Plate estuary, disrupting trade and bombarding Buenos Aires. Despite fierce opposition from some patriot leaders, the Buenos Aires government began putting together a navy to counteract the royalists’ sea power and to blockade Montevideo. The man chosen to lead this navy into battle against the royalists was William Brown, a 36-year-old sailor from Foxford, County Mayo.
Brown was a steely, driven individual, who had arrived in Buenos Aires determined to make his fortune. The royalist navy was preventing him from trading fruit and hides across the River Plate estuary, and so he offered his services to the patriots. His Irish biographer, John de Courcy Ireland, has written that the ‘essential’ Brown was not ‘the Admiral, nor the leader of men, the nation-builder, the merchant, the shipowner, or even the strict but affectionate family man, but William Brown the Master Mariner.’1 It was his tenacity, his stubbornness in overcoming formidable challenges – whether it was the might of the Spanish fleet or the treacherous currents of the River Plate – that separated him from his peers; but he still expected those around him to live up to his own exacting standards. He had a fierce temper and was not averse to meting out severe punishment to those he felt were not pulling their weight. Lashings were common on board his ships, and there were instances of him forcing men to run the gauntlet. He was energetic, brutal and a fine sailor.
Doubt surrounds Brown’s ancestry, with de Courcy Ireland suggesting that he was the illegitimate son of George Browne, collector of revenue for the Foxford district.2 The traditional narrative, discounted by de Courcy Ireland, has it that he arrived in Philadelphia as a boy with his father, who died shortly afterwards, leaving William to cope on his own. The story goes that a merchant captain spotted William wandering alone by the docks and took pity on him, offering him work as a cabin boy and thus giving him his first start as a sailor.
What we know for certain is that by the time Brown arrived in Buenos Aires, lured by commercial opportunities, he was an experienced merchant mariner. In 1810 he was trading arms and munitions across the River Plate estuary, even managing to capture a royalist ship. In 1811 he travelled overland from Buenos Aires to Chile on a commercial trip, crossing the Andes at the Uspallata Pass. On his return to Buenos Aires he was caught burying money outside the city. He was charged with planning to export money illegally and imprisoned, but was released after he contacted the head of the British naval station in Buenos Aires, who pleaded for clemency.3
In 1812 Brown moved with his family permanently to Buenos Aires. He bought a piece of land and built the Casa Amarilla – the Yellow House – close to the city’s famous Boca district. The original house was later demolished, but in 1975 the commission to mark the bicentenary of Brown’s birth launched a project for rebuilding it. The new Casa Amarilla is a short distance from the famous Bombonera football stadium, home to the passionately supported Boca Juniors, and houses a museum and permanent exhibition of artefacts related to Brown’s life.
Brown was a tall, well-built man with a heavy brow, a shock of red hair and piercing blue eyes. His strong, rough-hewn physical characteristics are still evident in the photographs that were taken of him dressed in his admiral’s uniform towards the end of his life (see Plate 12).
In 1814 Brown’s formidable naval skills brought him to the notice of the Buenos Aires government, which was desperate to break the Spanish blockade. In March he was offered command of a small fleet of ships and the rank of lieutenant-colonel, with the responsibility for blockading Montevideo and protecting Buenos Aires from attack. The Buenos Aires government had few ships: the frigate Hércules, the corvettes Céfiro, Belfast and Agreable, the brig Nancy, a couple of small fishing smacks called sumacas, the Itatí and Trinidad, the schooners Esperanza, Juliet and Fortuna, the sloop Carmen, the gunboat Americana, and the feluccas San Martín and San Luis. They were merchantmen that had been hastily transformed into warships. The patriots had few qualified naval officers. Many of those who were recruited by the Buenos Aires government were foreigners – Irishmen, Englishmen and North Americans – including James King, the Irish captain of the 18-gun Céfiro.4
Brown sailed from Buenos Aires on 8 March on board the Hércules, along with the Céfiro and the Nancy. He soon spotted a Spanish squadron, under the command of Jacinto de Romerate, on its way to the island of Martín García. At the entrance to the River Uruguay, some 30 miles north of Buenos Aires, the island was a crucial strategic point on the River Plate estuary. Because of the superior numbers of the Spanish squadron, Brown decided to await reinforcements. The Juliet, Fortuna, San Luis and Carmen arrived from Buenos Aires the following day, and Brown’s combined fleet sailed for Martín García. The Spanish fleet was anchored on the south-east side of the island, protected by a gun battery. Nevertheless, Brown ordered an attack.
The Hércules sustained heavy fire and ran aground. It lay bows-on to the Spanish positions, making it a sitting duck for the enemy guns. Its sails were in ribbons, the hull had been breached in more than 80 places and, because of the position of the ship, Brown was unable to direct more than three guns towards the enemy. Still, he ordered his men to keep firing throughout the night while he tried desperately to make running repairs, using leather hides to patch up the holes in the hull. At high tide the Hércules freed itself. Despite the damage to the ship and the casualties his crew had suffered, Brown was determined to attempt a landing at Martín García. According to the naval historian Miguel Ángel de Marco, ‘Brown was conscious that if he did not achieve a victory, the [Buenos Aires] government and public opinion, so unenthusiastic about the navy, would lack confidence in his future actions.’5 Having repaired the Hércules as best he could, Brown managed a landing on Martín García, seizing the battery and directing fire on the Spanish. Romerate managed to escape up the River Uruguay.
Brown had achieved the impossible, humbling the superior Spanish fleet with a handful of patched-together merchantmen. In April, with the reputation of the infant Argentine navy at a high point, Brown sailed for Montevideo, blockading the city and taking Brazilian and Spanish ships as prizes. On 14 May the commander-in-chief of the naval station at Montevideo, Miguel de la Sierra, sailed out to do battle. Brown drew him out to deep water in order to prevent him making a retreat. There was a ferocious exchange of fire, which ended inconclusively. Brown attempted another attack two days later and suffered an injury to his foot when a cannon escaped its breech ropes. However, he was still able to command the attack from a chair lashed to the deck of the Hércules. On 17 May most of the Spanish ships had been captured or destroyed. The royalist governor of Montevideo, Gaspar de Vigodet, surrendered the city shortly afterwards, and Brown returned to Buenos Aires a hero.
The adulation with which the porteños greeted him was short-lived. The war with Spain continued, and as long as the royalist fleet, based in Callao in Peru, was able to harry the Pacific coastline, it remained a threat. In October 1814, royalist forces supported from Callao routed Chilean patriots at the Battle of Rancagua, forcing the leaders of the independence movement into exile across the Andes. The Buenos Aires government now declared open season on Spanish shipping, and Brown rejoined the war as a privateer.6
In October 1815 he set sail from Buenos Aires on board the Hércules. His brother-in-law, William Chitty, was captain of the ship, while his brother, Michael Brown, commanded a second ship, the Trinidad. Brown arranged to rendezvous with Hippolyte Bouchard, the French commander of another privateering mission to the Pacific, at an island off the Chilean coast, south of Santiago.
Before Brown left for the Pacific, however, he received countermanding orders from the authorities in Buenos Aires, which he chose to ignore. His decision to press on was to have grave consequences.
The journey around Cape Horn was in itself a hazardous undertaking. The seabed surrounding the Horn is a ships’ graveyard, the last resting-place of vessels that have been wrecked by terrific storms, treacherous currents and the jagged coastline. The Hércules and Trinidad were battered by waves that crashed over their topmasts as they fought their way around Tierra del Fuego before they found shelter in the western approaches to the Magellan Straits. Having made contact with Bouchard off the coast of Chile, Brown and his men began the hunt for Spanish prizes. After taking a couple of Spanish ships in open waters, Brown made straight for Callao, attacking royalist gunboats within sight of the shore and capturing the frigate Consecuencia.
Brown next headed north along the coast of Peru towards Guayaquil, an important royalist port in present-day Ecuador. The squadron sailed up the River Guayas, opening fire on the forts defending the city downriver. Brown was hoping to surprise the garrison at Guayaquil, but news of the patriot force travelled overland, and the royalists were prepared when the enemy appeared. The Trinidad was grounded when the tide ebbed, allowing the garrison of one of the royalist forts to concentrate their fire on the deck. Despite Brown having surrendered, the royalists boarded the ship and began executing the surviving crew. They stopped only when Brown threatened to blow up the ship’s magazine.
Brown was taken prisoner but was released in a negotiated exchange. He sailed west to the Galápagos to make repairs before making for Buenaventura in Peru, then in the control of local insurgents, to refit and prepare for the journey back to Buenos Aires. After another hazardous trip around Cape Horn, Brown and his starving, weary crew limped up the Atlantic coast of Argentina towards the River Plate estuary; but, perhaps wary of the consequences of his decision to ignore the countermanding orders from Buenos Aires, he took the unusual decision to resupply in the Brazilian port of Pernambuco before sailing north to British-controlled Bridgetown in Barbados, where he hoped to sell his cargo. He arrived in September 1816.
Brown clearly believed that the British would adopt a sympathetic attitude to his activities. Instead, the captain of a British sloop took the Hércules and its rich cargo as a prize and brought Brown as a prisoner to Antigua, the British headquarters in the Lower Antilles. Brown was in effect charged with being a pirate, operating outside the law – a rich piece of hypocrisy, given the long history of British piracy against the Spanish fleet in the Caribbean.
To make matters worse, both Brown and his brother were severely ill. Michael Brown was suffering from scurvy, while William had contracted malaria. For seven long months, in the deadening tropical climate of the Caribbean, Brown suffered physically and mentally. His ship, the Hércules, and his cargo were sold, he was away from his family for over a year and he was in disgrace in Buenos Aires, accused of being a traitor. In April 1817 he sailed for London to appeal the decision of the vice-admiral’s court in Antigua. Though the appeals court ruled partly in his favour and he received some of the money raised from the sale of the Hércules, he now found himself at the centre of a new action taken by the Spanish ambassador in London. Eventually, having settled both cases, Brown set sail for Buenos Aires, arriving in October 1818, only to be arrested again and brought before a court-martial.
Brown was at his lowest ebb. He had suffered constant physical and mental tortures for three years. He had been battered during two journeys around Cape Horn. He had been taken prisoner twice. He had fallen sick, almost dying of malaria, and endured constant pain from rheumatism. He had been called a pirate by the British government and a low traitor by the government of the United Provinces of the River Plate – later renamed the Argentine Republic – for which he had risked his life on numerous occasions. To cap it all, in September 1819 he contracted typhoid.
These torments were enough to have broken another man, and they almost killed William Brown. On 23 September he threw himself from the roof of a three-storey building. But something deep within him refused to give way, and he survived the fall. Having broken his thigh bone, he was confined to bed for six months.
A court-martial in Buenos Aires found Brown guilty of disobeying orders, stripping him of his rank and depriving him of the remainder of the money he had made during his Pacific campaigns. The civil government took a more lenient view and restored him to the rank of retired colonel. With his military career seemingly over, Brown settled down to a civilian’s life and to finding a way to restore his fortune.7
While Brown was playing a crucial role in solidifying the regime in Buenos Aires, another Irishman was among the leaders of a group rebelling against it. In the Banda Oriental – the territories north of the River Plate estuary and east of the River Uruguay, which roughly approximates to the present-day state of Uruguay – a local chieftan, or caudillo, named José Gervasio Artigas and his band of gaucho guerrillas had been challenging the authority of royalist Montevideo. Artigas had been born in Montevideo in 1764 to a wealthy family but as a young man had spent a lot of time on his family’s farms and had fallen in love with the gaucho lifestyle. Giving up his studies, he began cattle-smuggling, which put him at odds with the wealthy estancia owners. Despite his brushes with the law, and to obtain a pardon from the authorities, Artigas had joined the royalist army in the 1790s and had helped drive the British out of Buenos Aires in 1806.
The following year the British took Artigas prisoner when they occupied Montevideo. He escaped and began a guerrilla campaign against the British, helping restore Montevideo to Spanish control. After the May Revolution of 1810, Artigas threw in his lot with the Buenos Aires junta in an effort to expel the Spanish from Montevideo, leading a band of about 200 men which harassed Spanish troops throughout the Banda Oriental. In 1811 he and his men joined troops sent from Buenos Aires to besiege Montevideo. However, the recently appointed Spanish viceroy, Francisco Javier de Elío, had appealed for help from the Portuguese court in Rio, and an army of 5,000 Brazilian soldiers helped relieve the siege. Fearing for its own survival, the Buenos Aires junta signed a truce with Elío. A disillusioned Artigas and his men retreated west across the River Uruguay. Buenos Aires now considered Artigas a threat and sent troops into the region of Entre Ríos to find and kill him.
Among Artigas’s most trusted lieutenants was Peter Campbell, one of the most romantic figures of all those Irish men and women who swam in the revolutionary currents that were flowing through South America. His story seems to leap from the pages of a picaresque novel. He was a soldier, a deserter, an adventurer, an outlaw, a cowboy, a revolutionary, a military innovator, a naval strategist, a hero and a villain. In his memoirs, the Scottish businessman John Parish Robertson depicted Campbell as a stage Irishman.
‘Por Dios!’ said he; ‘don’t you know Peter Campbell?’ – ‘Camp-béll,’ he continued, laying a strong accent on the last syllable. ‘Pedro Camp-béll,’ (Paythro he pronounced it,) ‘as the Gauchers call me? Troth, now, an’ don’t ye know me; Paythro Camp-béll? An’ ye never heerd of that name, then you’re the only gentleman in the who’al of the country as has not.’8
The footnote attached to this passage in Robertson’s memoir – ‘I will not repeat the profane adjuration by which Mr. Campbell enforced his argument’9 – simply adds to the author’s condescension. Yet from Robertson’s depiction of Campbell, and the story of how he became a gaucho, one gets a sense again of the adaptability of the early nineteenth-century Irishman and of how reputation depends on context. To the Buenos Aires junta, Campbell was a bandit and secessionist, fit to be hunted down and shot; to the later historians of the Uruguayan state, Campbell was a hero and the founder of its navy. Such is the esteem in which he is held by the Uruguayan government that the navy continues to name ships after him, the latest being the frigate Pedro Campbell, commissioned in 2008.
Born in County Tipperary about 1780, Campbell had been apprenticed as a tanner before enlisting in the 1st Battalion of the British army’s 71st Regiment of Foot. In 1806 he had participated in Beresford’s invasion of Buenos Aires and was wounded. During Whitelocke’s failed expedition to occupy Montevideo in 1807 he was captured by royalist forces and held in present-day northern Argentina. Once he gained his freedom, he deserted and travelled into the pampas in the Argentine province of Corrientes.10 This was frontier territory, where hard-living gauchos and enterprising traders made their money from cattle, sheep, sugar and timber.
Campbell found work as a tanner and was drawn to the gaucho life, adopting their distinctive dress and way of living. Some of the skills that the gaucho required when living on the pampas were not dissimilar to those Campbell might have learnt as a child in Tipperary. He was an accomplished horseman and was proficient with a blade. During the frequent brawls that erupted in the frontier towns of the pampas, he used a large carving-knife together with a poncho as a shield in order to defend himself. John Robertson described first meeting Campbell in Corrientes:
Sitting one evening under the corridor of my house, there came up to my very chair, on horseback, a tall, raw boned, ferocious looking man, in Gaucho attire, with two cavalry pistols stuck in his girdle, a sabre in a rusty steel scabbard pending from a besmeared belt of half-tanned leather, red whiskers and mustachios, – hair uncombed of the same colour, matted with perspiration, and powdered with dust. His face was not only burnt almost to blackness by the sun, but it was blistered to the eyes; while large pieces of shrivelled skin stood ready to fall from his parched lips. He wore a pair of plain ear-rings, a foraging cap, a tattered poncho, blue jacket, with tarnished red facings; a large knife in a leathern sheath; a pair of potro boots, and rusty iron spurs, with rowels an inch and a half in diameter … The Hibernian brogue; the mangled Spanish; the countenance when closely scanned; the carroty locks, and bright grey eyes, all revealed to me a son of the Sister Isle, transformed into a more fearful looking Gaucho than any native one I had ever beheld.11
Campbell enjoyed a legendary reputation in Corrientes – ‘being in the confidence of Artigas, he brought, in aid of his personal claims to deference, the acknowledged favour and patronage of that lawless but omnipotent chieftain’12 – and offered his services to John Robertson and his brother, William. For the first decade after 1810 the region to the west of the River Uruguay was full of Artigas’s gaucho and indigenous fighters. Many inhabitants of this wild country believed Artigas and his men to be heroes, fighting both Spanish and porteño tyranny; Artigas’s enemies regarded them as nothing short of bandits and cattle-rustlers. From Campbell’s point of view, cattle-rustling was a legitimate act of war: ‘By troth, Don Pépe’s [Artigas] an honest gentleman; and if so be he’s compelled to take the cattle now and then, sure, where’s the harm, when it’s for the good of the counthrey?’13 Campbell’s sympathies may have derived from the fact that he was born in Ireland in the late eighteenth century, at the height of the enclosures of common land. Once employed by the Robertsons, he changed his attitude.
John Robertson’s depiction of Corrientes in 1815 is that of unbridled anarchy, not dissimilar to Hollywood portrayals of the Old West.
The estancias became depopulated, the herdsmen were seized upon for soldiers; all the natural ties of society were broken or relaxed; the country was overspread with fierce and lawless banditti; rapine and lust stalked over the length and breadth of the land; agriculture was abandoned; the inroads of the Indians from the Great Chaco were frequent; such herds of horses and cattle, as were too numerous and too much dispersed to be systematically driven from the territory, sought shelter in the woods, and there became alzado or wild; the forests teemed with untamed colts; large flocks of vultures were to be seen hanging over the newly dropped calves and foals, ready to devour them; wild dogs, called cimarrones, like evening wolves, ranged the country in droves; the houses were abandoned, and rare was the mounted gaucho to be met with who was not a robber or assassin, often both.14
What Robertson was depicting was the death throes of an itinerant gaucho culture that was already being replaced by the large-scale cattle ranches. Ironically, the ‘gaucho’ Campbell did much to bring an end to the old ways. Despite their disdain for the gaucho way of life, the Robertsons were businessmen, and if they were to do business in Artigas’s territory they needed the help of one of his trusted allies. Campbell acted as an intermediary for the Robertsons. He traversed the countryside with a group of loyal followers – including his second-in-command, a fellow Tipperary-man who went by the name of Eduardo – persuading estancieros by means of money and luxury goods to gather and sell him hides, wool, horsehair and skins. Acting on behalf of the Robertsons, Campbell persuaded local landowners to modernise their businesses, in order that they would be in a position to better supply the Robertsons with the agricultural produce they required. The Scots then sold the produce down the river in Buenos Aires.
Over the next half-century many Irishmen would make spectacular fortunes on the Argentine pampas, trading not only in hides, skins and wool but also in meat, facilitated by innovations in the technology of preservation. John Robertson wrote that Campbell
… aroused the small towns and villages, as well as the estancias, from their dormant position into an active pursuit of business. He knew all the inhabitants personally, and he picked out, with much sagacity, those who were likely to serve him best. He made contracts with them, or he drove them into Corrientes or Goya, to replenish their shops from our warehouses, or with the money we advanced to lend increased activity to their esquinas or pulperias; the pulpero being the combined ‘grocer and spirit dealer’ of South America.15
Campbell was as much an enforcer as a businessman, leaning on those peons or gauchos who were not disposed to see things his way. ‘His physical strength, – his undaunted, if not ferocious, courage when roused, – his dexterity with his knife, and his ever ready appeal to that, or to his gleaming sabre,’ John Robertson recalled, ‘cowed all spirits less daring than his own and left him undisputed master of the field.’16
The Robertsons employed wagon trains to carry the huge quantities of hides that were being gathered by Campbell across the north-east territories of present-day Argentina. These wagon trains transported the hides from the estanciero to Goya on the River Paraná, from where they were brought more than 400 miles downriver to Buenos Aires and shipped to England.
Perhaps Campbell’s greatest attribute was loyalty. He was not an ideologue, or personally ambitious. After deserting the British army he became a frontiersman, hitching his fortunes to Artigas and putting all his talents at the caudillo’s disposal, like a faithful sheriff’s deputy.
In 1815 Artigas wrested control of Montevideo from the Buenos Aires government and founded the Federal League, comprising representatives of the Banda Oriental, parts of the south of present-day Brazil and the provinces of Misiones, Corrientes, Entre Ríos and Córdoba in present-day north-east Argentina. Artigas was now a real threat to the hegemony of Buenos Aires over the region. In 1816 Portugal invaded the Banda Oriental, capturing Montevideo from Artigas at the beginning of the following year. For the next three years Artigas fought a guerrilla campaign against Portugal and Buenos Aires.
Artigas had great faith in Peter Campbell’s fighting capabilities. Campbell harried royalist, Paraguayan, Portuguese and porteño forces on land and sea. He formed a mounted regiment of indigenous Guaraní soldiers, armed with rifles and bayonets. They were a fearsome sight to the enemy as they charged across the plains at a gallop. In 1818 Artigas appointed Campbell commander-in-chief of his naval forces, an appointment that earned him the accolade of ‘founding father of the Uruguayan navy.’ He led expeditions up and down the Rivers Paraguay and Paraná from his base at Corrientes, a few miles downstream from the confluence of the rivers, using shallow-draft boats, known as piraguas, to board enemy vessels. Their knowledge of the strong currents at the point where the two rivers meet – after which Corrientes, or San Juan de las Siete Corrientes (St John of the Seven Currents), situated on a bend in the Paraná, takes it name – allowed Campbell and his fellow-guerrillas to surprise any approaching enemies sighted up- or downriver.
When their former allies in the Federal League turned on them in 1820, Artigas and Campbell had to accept defeat. Campbell was captured and exiled to Paraguay. The dictator, Francia, allowed him to settle in the province of Ñeembucú. The one-time revolutionary leader from County Tipperary took up his former trade of tanning in the city of Pilar in the south-western corner of present-day Paraguay, where he died in 1832.
In 1961 Peter Campbell’s remains were discovered in the city cemetery and were transferred to Uruguay, where they were buried in the Naval Academy in Montevideo.17
After Artigas and Campbell’s defeat at the Battle of Tacuarembó, the Portuguese annexed the Banda Oriental, and it became a province of Brazil. In 1822 the province formed part of the Brazilian Empire, whose sovereign, King Pedro I – the former prince regent of Brazil and son of the Portuguese king, John VI – declared independence from Portugal. While the government in Buenos Aires had allied itself with the Brazilians to defeat Artigas, it regarded the annexation of the eastern bank of the River Uruguay by the Brazilians as a threat to its interests and urged the local populace to rebel. The Brazilians responded by sending a squadron to the River Plate, which anchored off Buenos Aires. The economic blockade threatened the foundations of the infant state, and at the end of 1825 the Buenos Aires government turned in desperation to William Brown.
The Irish admiral could have rejected their advances in a fit of pique – after all, he had felt humiliated and scorned by his treatment at the hands of the government – but he had a strong commitment to service and realised that the Brazilian blockade threatened all the residents of Buenos Aires. He was again obliged to create a navy from scratch. Brown also had to face a far superior Brazilian navy, which could count on experienced Portuguese naval officers. He had 12 warships and 10 gunboats and fewer than 1,000 men; the Brazilians had 129 ships and 10 gunboats in the River Plate alone. Brown had 150 cannon; the Brazilians had 1,600.
Brown’s primary objective was to keep the sea lanes open in order to prevent the Buenos Aires economy from collapsing. He could not hope to win a major naval battle against such an overwhelmingly superior force. Brown’s naval officers included John King from County Mayo, captain of the Congreso, James Kearney, one of the gunboat captains, and Francisco Lynch, born in Buenos Aires, the harbourmaster.18
In June 1826 Brown’s small squadron repelled a larger Brazilian force at Los Pozos, ensuring control of the River Plate’s sea lanes. He was once again a hero in Buenos Aires. But the Brazilians continued blockading shipping entering the River Plate estuary. In February 1827, at the Battle of Juncal, Brown routed a Brazilian squadron. It was a significant victory and kept open the lines of communication to the United Provinces’ expeditionary force in the Banda Oriental.
At the end of 1827 the British government mediated a peace treaty between Brazil and the United Provinces, and in 1828 the Republic of Uruguay came into existence. William Brown returned home, having played his part in the creation of the continent’s newest state, entering politics and becoming governor of Buenos Aires. He was in his early fifties and once again a respected naval hero; but this was not to be his last campaign.
In 1841 he once again took charge of the Argentine navy when war broke out with Uruguay. After a trip to his homeland in 1847, during which he witnessed the devastating effects of the Great Famine, he retired to his home in Buenos Aires. The great hero of Argentine independence died in 1857.