A Way in the World

  “A second Spanish letter was thrown yesterday in the sentry box here (and Bernard later sent a copy of the same letter that had been left at the Council room). This one is about the big thanksgiving service they held in the Metropolitan Church of Caracas for the capture of the Bee and the Bacchus, and about the sentences at Puerto Cabello on the fifty-eight men. Sixteen days ago they were all taken out in ankle fetters to the prison yard and made to kneel down while their sentences were read to them. The ten officers were to be hanged. All the others were sentenced to eight or ten years in prison with hard labour. They are to sleep on beds of stone, with pillows of brick, and they are to wear twenty-five-pound chains. The ten executions took place seven days ago. I know that the Spaniards would have hurried through the legal process so that all this news could get to me before this second attempt.

  “It would be nice if the details were exaggerated. But I know they are not. The scaffold was outside the prison gate. The ten men, in white gowns and white caps and in leg-irons, were led out to it. After each man was dropped the hangman, a Negro, slid down the rope and sat on the shoulders of the hanged man. The bodies were then decapitated and cut into quarters. The quarters were heaped together with the uniforms and arms of the dead men, covered with the torn-up scraps of my Colombian flag, and set alight. I knew that they were going to do some special dishonour to the flag you made in Grafton Street, Sally. But I won’t tell you.

  “The atmosphere of the Inquisition, my revolution treated as heresy—it is more undermining than I would have thought. If I, at one time, knew how to wound them, they still know how to trouble me. One of my first thoughts, when I read this letter, was that I had done the right thing to have the boys baptized. When I was thirty-five or so, and after just fifteen years abroad, when I was in the United States and then when I was in Russia, the whole world of my early years in Venezuela seemed very far away, seemed to be part of another life. I felt I had forgotten so much. Now it’s as though I’ve never left, as though 1771 was last year.”

  • • •

  “MY DEAR Sir, We are in such a State here. My uncle has just brought back six copies of your Picture from Mr. Holland the Printseiler. My uncle says the engraver should have done better but these people have to do too much and they cut corners and they don’t try to understand the work they are copying, before they finish one job theyre looking for the next one. The picture shows the Crown in the Clouds above your head and my uncle says it is poor work that crown, badly drawn but people don’t care. He says the picture is in Mr. Holland’s window and people stop and look at the crown and wonder so perhaps Mr. Holland knows his business. But the deseat of these London tradesmen my dear Sir they give no Credit to my uncle for the picture which he did at the small table in the Front Library. They say it is done from the life by their artist with the Navy in the Barbadoes my Uncle says it’s the kind of thing they always say. Below your picture they have engraved the names of the ships of your little fleet My dear Sir. What a fleet my dear Gen I never had the least idea. We daily wait to hear good news. What pretty names your ships have Lily Attentive Bulldog Trimmer Mastiff. I cannot tell you how Excited Leander is that one ship has his name, he pulls his toy ship on its wooden block all over the house and he says Mamy I will take my ship, and go to the Genl. When I tell him that the ocean is very big and his ship wouldnt sail very far he says Mamy I will buy a bigger ship and go and fight for the G. He reads his book well and he promises not to trouble little brother who is now sleeping and is as pretty as your picture My own dear General. These are their happiest days my dear Sir.”

  “OH, SARAH. We are separated by more than the ocean. We are separated by time, by three to four months. You write about things here as they were four months ago, and what I write now you will read in two months. I don’t know what will have happened by then. It’s failed, Sarah. The whole thing failed. You were right. The people in London let me down at the last moment. They withdrew their support. And I’m back in Trinidad.

  “I am not at Government House. Officially I have no position here. I have no headquarters. I am a private person, and while I am here I must give up all attempts to revolutionize the continent. On the morning I arrived I went to call on Hislop. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t know me, but he behaved as though he knew nothing about what I had been doing. When I asked for permission to stay, he said it was out of his hands. He said the merchants didn’t want me to land. They had made a petition to him. They said that for six months they had been cut off from trade with the Main because of me, and they were being ruined for nothing at all. The petition was going to be debated that very morning in the Council. Hislop thought I should attend the meeting. I suppose that was friendly advice. If I hadn’t gone, perhaps Bernard wouldn’t have spoken up for me as he did, and if Bernard hadn’t spoken up, the vote would have gone against me. Hislop would have been full of regrets, of course, but I would have had to leave. Heaven knows where I would have been now.

  “And things seemed to be going so well in the beginning, Sally. Ah, those good beginnings! I’ve had so many of them. How they encourage, and at the same time how they unsettle! We sailed without interference to the town of Coro. We fired at the fort. There was some return fire and then the Spanish soldiers withdrew. We landed and entered the town with no trouble. Just three men wounded. Then we found there was nothing to celebrate. We had entered an empty town. Not a soul. The Venezuelan agents in Trinidad had done their work well. They knew our strength, and exactly where we were going to land, and they knew that the British were only going to support us from the sea.

  “For years I had believed—and people like Gual and Caro and Vargas had encouraged me to believe—that when I landed the people would flock to my colours. No one came now. I thought they had been threatened by the authorities, and I thought I should deal with the situation in a Spanish or Venezuelan way. That side of my character took over. I felt that, having appeared with such a naval force, I should speak very loudly. I issued a proclamation. I said that Spanish rule had ceased, that all officials should come forward and declare their loyalty to me or suffer the consequences, and that all able-bodied men should enrol under my colours. It was a wrong thing to do. No one came forward, and my authority with my own men was further undermined. I sent out small parties to the villages round about to reassure the people. I found the Spaniards had forestalled me. They knew how to fight this war. For weeks the priests had been preaching against me. Everyone who helped me was to be excommunicated. The bishop of Mérida had declared me a heretic.

  “For the next ten days the Spaniards who had withdrawn from Coro shadowed us, fifteen hundred of them to four hundred of us. No question of engaging them, no question of making a march over the hills to Caracas. The strain began to tell on our volunteers. Their discipline began to break. One day there was an incident between the two groups, the French and the Americans. Three more men wounded, a cook killed. This greatly alarmed me. I thought we should make our way back to the coast. We had no carts, of course, for the wounded and the sick, or horses or mules. We had to use litters, changing the carriers every half hour or so. It slowed us up. I felt I had walked into a Spanish trap. I felt that at any moment the Spaniards might fall on us. I drove the litter-bearers hard. At one stage I threatened to shoot some of them with my own hand. They haven’t forgiven me. I am not staying in Government House, and now they shout abuse at me in the streets.

  “Late one night we re-embarked’. I didn’t know what to do. I had waited so many years for this moment. I wrote to the British governor of Jamaica for help. It was foolish. Of course he couldn’t send troops to me. I waited six weeks to hear that, our supplies running out, food very scarce, people getting sick and mutinous. And then a message came from Admiral Cochrane, telling me he couldn’t help any more. London had forbidden it. His help to me was to be limited to protection from a naval force of the enemy, to prevent enemy succours being landed, and to secure my re-embarkation. In short, it was finished. I had th
ought of Cochrane as an avaricious man, easy therefore to handle. Now the style of his letter, so precise and pointed, like instructions on the battlefield, spoke to me of the capacity that had made him an admiral, and of a power that I had never possessed.

  “This was the mood in which, after beating eastwards against the wind for five weeks, that wind like the wind of my misfortune, I returned with my ragged force to Trinidad, and on the very day of my return had to show Hislop a good face, and then, like a man still only a step from power, had to sit in the Council while the contraband traders debated my future.

  “Cochrane shows me honour still, in a way. He has arranged for me to stay in the house of Lieutenant Briarly, RN. Briarly is so far correct. He lives in greater style than Hislop, but as the leading Navy man here he does run something like a parallel government. He enforces the Navigation Acts here. His command is only a dismasted hulk in the harbour, but when he is aboard that he is outside Hislop’s jurisdiction. Such is the power of this Navy. The Navigation Acts have to do with trade. This means that Briarly is a kind of customs officer. This means that he splits with the contraband traders and the ship’s captains and offers protection to others. He is making a fortune. He knows to the last shilling how much he is worth, and I have already been made to know it too. I know that this Port of Spain house where I am staying is worth ten thousand dollars (and he keeps on saying he can sell it any day), and I know that in addition he has a large country estate worth fifteen thousand pounds, with eleven mules and thirty-three Negroes. He is forever writing down the names of these thirty-three on little scraps of paper, and putting numbers next to them, as though he wants to count his Negroes and add up their value all the time.

  “The Spaniards and Venezuelans here, the traders and the peons, still hiss me in the street. They did it the morning I arrived. I thought they would have stopped by now. They do it in a way that always takes me by surprise. They don’t look at me, so when the sharp hissing sound starts I can’t tell where it’s coming from. It is a terrible sound. It would cut through a military band.

  “A defeated man has to put up with criticism, and I thought at first that they were mocking me because I had failed. Then I thought it might have been because of the American malcontents from the Leander, who make endless scenes in the streets and are dunning me for money I don’t have. Terrible stories have been spread, too, about our retreat to the coast and my threatening of the litter-bearers. Then I thought they were hissing me simply for being alive, after so many men had died. I know now that almost on the day we left for Coro the Venezuelan agents here began to spread the story of the executions at Puerto Cabello, the hanging and the burning of the men in white gowns in A white caps, the twenty-five-pound chains for the living, with the beds of stone and pillows of brick. And then I thought it was quite simple. I felt that I had let them down because I had failed. I thought that because I had failed I had exposed them as South Americans to ridicule.

  “This was so wrong. It is vanity on my part to think like that. I am assuming that these people look on me as their liberator, look to me to restore their dignity. I am assuming they look on me as I look on myself and have been looking on myself these past twenty years. The opposite is true. The peons here look on me as a heretic and traitor. They are happy that I have been, defeated and the men from the Leander are in rags. The Venezuelan agents have taken good care to circulate the bishop of Mérida’s proclamation against me. I am an atheist, a monster, an enemy of religion, leading a gang of scoundrels from the United States and the islands against my country.

  “I have never these past twenty years, in the United States and England and Europe, had to defend myself against that charge, and I don’t know how to do so here. I don’t know how my life has been so twisted that this distorted picture of my character can be thrown at me. This has caused me much distress, Sally, as much distress as the defeat and the humiliation and the idleness I have to endure here. I begin to feel, not only very far away, but also that I am losing touch with things.

  “I don’t know how to say to the peons here, what the world knows, that since I left the Spanish service I have held no job and had no idea other than that of South American independence. That is how I define myself in the will I made just before I left London. You will remember I say there that I have known no people anywhere else so worthy of a wise and just liberty. What means do I have of making them understand that here? The six thousand books you look after in Grafton Street have been left, in that same will, to the University of Caracas when freedom comes, and I leave the books in memory of the literary and Christian values the university taught me. My sons were both baptized before I set foot on my native land, and when we were coming south in the Leander I never stayed on deck when on Sundays Captain Lewis read prayers. The Spaniards have taken all the accidental things in my life, the wild things I said in the United States and Russia when I first felt myself a free man, and the fact that I now need all the volunteers I can get, the Spaniards have taken these accidental things and created a picture of me that I do not recognize. I know that I have followed a straight path, and I am very clear in my own mind about what I want. But I have no means of making myself clear to these people. And, worse, everything I do now confirms their picture. I have written to London for four thousand men. Rouvray has gone with the request. That, too, will add to this picture of the traitor and atheist.

  “Briarly, regularly counting his Negroes and adding up his fortune, has begun to sense my solitude and friendlessness, my loss of direction, my floating state here. He has so far been correct with me, treating me as the colleague and friend of his admiral. But now I get some feeling of a change, and this might mean that the ministers in London have given Cochrane more urgent things to attend to. I am nervous of the ruffianly gang of midshipmen who serve Briarly. They have been corrupted by their licence as young officers, tormentors of ordinary seamen, and enforcers of the Navigation Acts, and they take pleasure in chasing and beating up unsuspecting people. They don’t touch Negroes, who would have the protection of their owners. But they can give poor white people and free people of colour a rough time. The other day, in daylight, they chased an Englishman through several city yards. They said he was an informer. He ran into somebody’s yard and they ran in after him. They pulled the poor man from under a bed in a Negro hut at the back of the yard—it was an enormous joke to them that he was hiding there—and to complete the joke they tarred and feathered him, and Hislop’s alguazils could do nothing.

  “I’ve been reporting my doubts about Briarly. His attitude to me has changed. I know it now.

  “At dinner yesterday he said, ‘I’ve had a run-in with Biggs the American, the man from the Leander. He’s not exactly friendly towards you. You haven’t paid him or anybody else for six months. He’s told me a lot of other things. He says he’s going to write a book about this whole business of yours.’

  “ ‘I know. I’ll have to take what comes.’

  “ ‘Let me be blunt. Why is it that whenever you’ve been put to the test as a military man, you’ve let people down?’

  “I did well in North Africa. At Melilla. But that was thirty years ago.’

  “ ‘Exactly. I was thinking of the siege of Maastricht when you had bluffed your way into command of the French.’

  “ ‘There was a trial in Paris. I was cleared of all charges. Biggs should have told you.’

  “ ‘And Puerto Cabello in April, and now.’

  “I suppose you can say I had bad luck.’

  “I have good luck.’

  “As sometimes happens when I am in an unequal relationship with a man in authority for whom I have no regard, I began to exaggerate the side of my character that was opposite to his. It can look like irony to some, but it really is a form of unhappiness. I became soft, over-cultured. I said, ‘Cicero says good luck is one of the four qualities of a successful military man.’

  “ ‘What are the other three?’

  “ ‘Talent, milita
ry knowledge, and prestige. The words have very wide meanings.’

  “ ‘Don’t you think it would have been different at Coro if you had had a man of luck at your side? A man who believed in his luck wouldn’t have been so much on the defensive. He might have shown you some way of cutting off the Spanish force that was shadowing you, squeezing them between you and the ships, and then marching on Caracas.’

  “I had no faith in the men. They had begun to fight among themselves.’

  “ ‘How are you going to pay them off? And settle the master of the Trimmer? He’s going to sue you. He says you hired his ship in Barbados. Why don’t you sell the Leander? It will fetch a good price. You will pay off everybody if you sell it well.’

  “ ‘Who will buy it?’

  “‘I will buy it. That’s not charity. It’s a business deal. I will refit the ship in Antigua or Barbados, get it up to Admiralty standards, and sell it to the Navy. The Navy needs ships. I know exactly what they need.’

  “He said no more, and now to some extent I wait on his decision. He knows that, and for some days he has not mentioned the Leander. I feel uneasy, because it seems too easy, and because I’m not sure now what’s coming from Lieutenant Briarly.

  “I got to know today.

  “He said abruptly at dinner, ‘I think before you sell, the Leander should make one last run under American colours. Up the river to Angostura. That’s where you should have gone in the first place. The river is narrow, the town is not well-protected. I know the place. As a good Navy man, my first thought when I look at a town from a river or the sea is, “What’s the best way of attacking this place?” It’s a mental exercise for me. And the Venezuelan ship captains bring me information all the time. I know exactly what to do at Angostura. An hour’s hot work by good Navy gunners would deal with the military barracks and such fortifications as they have. We could then move up and down at will, covering you. We could hold the town for quite a while. You could land and proclaim your republic. If it works you stay. If not, in five days you are back here.’