Revolutions - 5.12- The Desired One

Episode Date: August 29, 2016

The restoration of King Ferdinand VII spelled big trouble for Spanish American Independence. 

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 5.12, the desired one. As you may have noticed, we are in the annual revolving door phase of Simone Belivar's revolutionary career. He was forced into exile in 1812, then he staged a triumphant re-entry into Venezuela in 1813, but then we ended last week with Belivar heading back into exile in 1814. This week, he will return to Cardahan. to restart the project of Spanish-American independence, only to find himself yet again on a boat out to sea in 1815, on his way to yet another triumphant re-entry into Venezuela in 1816. The door just goes round and round and round.

And I mean, you'd think at a certain point he'd just give it up. But the man had sworn an oath on top of the sacred mount to liberate his country or die trying, so, you know, never give up, never surrender by Grapphar's Hammer by the Sons of Warven. You shall be avenged. After getting put on a boat by his uncle Jose Felix Rebus, Belivar and his one-time rival, but now fellow exile, Santiago Marino, arrived in Carthagena on September the 19th, 1814. And upon arrival, Belivar was greeted warmly by both the city leaders and the common people. Though he was arriving under ignoble circumstances kicked out of Venezuela by his own senior officers on suspicion of treason, Belivar's name was still spoken with reverence in Cartagena.

To them, he was still the Liberator, and he was still commissioned as a brigadier general in the armies of New Granada. So he took up residence in the former Bishop's Palace in Cartagena and started taking meetings with local leaders to get the lay of the land, and what he heard did not fill him with feelings of great patriotic joy. After Belivar crossed the border into Venezuela to begin the admirable campaign, New Granada had gone back to squabbling with itself, as the centrifugal forces of federalism pulled everyone apart from everyone else. So when Belivar arrived in Cartagena in September 1814, he actually found things very similar to the situation when he had first arrived in the city back in 1812.

Bogota and Tunha locked in a fierce rivalry, Cardahana still pretty much just doing their own thing, and royalist forces taking advantage of Patriot discord to seep their way back in between them all. So just before Belivar had left on the admirable campaign, though, things had looked way more unified, with President Antonio Noreno, leading the Bogota Centralists into an alliance with the Tunha Federalist led by President Camilo Torres. Well, unfortunately, that alliance had not lasted very long. The reason it had not lasted was because Noreno raised an army of about 2,000 men and marched them southwest in the direction of Quito in the summer of 1813. This is just as Belivar was marching east towards Caracas. Noreno successfully captured the

the city of Popoyan and its all-important gold mine, but as he moved towards the city of Posto, everything fell apart. His army was defeated by a royalist force, and when a rumor went around that Noreno himself had been killed, the army just dissolved. Abandoned in the field, Noreno was himself cornered and captured, so Noreno did complete his march to Kito, but unfortunately it was as a prisoner of war. Noreno would then get put on a ship that sailed him all the way back to Spain, and this time he would not escape. So by the end of 1815, Antonio Noreno was sitting in Akadi's prison. The same prison, incidentally, where Francisco de Miranda now sat.

After only a brief stay in Puerto Rico, the old precursor had been sent back across the Atlantic, and he too now sat in a cadiz jail cell, writing letters to everyone he could think of to try to secure his release. But nobody could do anything for him. And next week, we will say our fond and sad farewell to Francisco de Miranda. Back in New Granada, the principal upshot of Noreno's capture was that it allowed the leaders in Bogahton to pull back from their partnership with the Federalists, which is why Belivar found the situation so seemingly unchanged when he came back in September 1814. After about a month in Cartagena, Belivar and Marino and a few others made their way up to Tunha to try to help reunify the Republican forces. Belivar obviously does not see eye to eye with the federalism of the guys in Tunha, but they were the most united.

thing going, and had been the ones to back his invasion of Venezuela, so he did sort of owe them one. And it was doubly imperative for the patriotic Republicans to join under whatever umbrella would hold them altogether, because by the time Belivir got to New Granada, the most sensational news of all had already crossed the Atlantic, and it threatened to undo everything, finally, and irrevocably. The French had been booted out of Spain, and King Ferdinand the 7th had been restored to the throne. This was glorious news for everyone but the truly committed Republicans like Belivar who knew that the liberation of Spain would surely mean the subjugation of America. So looking back through the transcripts, it looks like we last checked up with events in Spain in episode 5.9. And we wrapped up there in the spring of 1812 with the ratification of the Constitution of 1812.

Now, in terms of the Peninsular War, the situation had turned into a grim and bitter stalemate. The British held Portugal, the Regency and Cortes continued to run out of Cadiz, but King Joseph Bonaparte and the French controlled the rest of the peninsula. Spanish insurgents waged relentless guerrilla war everywhere, but all of them then endured harsh French anti-insurgent retaliation. There seemed to be no end in sight, until events on the other side of the world broke the stalemate, because in June 1812 what happened? That's right, Napoleon invents. Russia. Now, the Russian invasion was catastrophic on its own terms. Napoleon left in June 1812 with 685,000 men and returned in December with just 120,000. But in the bigger picture, the invasion of Russia had a major destabilizing domino effect and pretty much spelled the end

of the French occupation of Spain. The Allies were emboldened to launch new offensive, just as Napoleon was forced to draw troops out of Spain in his ultimately failed attempt to hold onto his collapsing eastern flank. So in Iberia, the Allied British, Portuguese, and Spanish forces under Wellington advanced in the summer of 1812, and they actually chased King Joseph out of Madrid and took the capital. But a French counterattack in the fall forced the Allies into retreat. By that point, though, reports of the unfolding disaster in Russia were leaking out to all

side. So in early 1813, Wellington launched another offensive, and this now was the beginning of the end for the French. King Joseph abandoned Madrid for good in March, and then with the French in retreat on all fronts, Wellington and 80,000 men caught up to King Joseph's retreating 60,000 men at Vittoria on June the 21st, 1813, and they cracked the French lines. A casualties in this battle were just about equal, but Joseph had to break and run for it, and whatever unity the French forces had left was shattered.

They were forced to regroup in a thin sliver of territory up on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, with the Allies now controlling most of the rest of the peninsula. Wellington kept up his offensive then, and though the campaign was bitterly contested, the French were slowly pushed back into France. And this is just as Napoleon is getting beat at Leipzig in October 1813, sending him too back into France. A half million enemy forces were now converging on the emberer from all sides.

With the French on the run, the Regency government in Cades had room to breathe for the first time. And this nicely coincided with elections to the first ordinary cortes that was to be convened under the Constitution of 1812. That ordinary Cortes would supplant the extraordinary Cortes that had been the effective government of Spain since it first convened itself back in 1810. As these elections unfolded through 1812 and 1813, though, it became clear that the liberal ideals written into the Constitution were not representative of Spanish public opinion. One of the biggest complaints being that all those liberal ideas look nearly identical to the policies of the French Bonapartist government. I mean, liberals from across Europe are kind of working from the same batch of theories. So when it came to economic policy and political theory and the role of the church, the Spanish liberals sounded a lot like the French occupiers.

The only major difference, it seems, being that the Spanish liberals wanted Ferdinand to be king rather than Joseph. So with the occupation ending, most Spanish. seemed inclined to dump anything that smelled even remotely French. So when the new Cortes convened in Cades in September 1813, it turned out to be a far more conservative body than its predecessor had been, and one of the first orders of business was voting to reconvene in January in Madrid, removing the government from the backyard of the Cades merchants and putting it into the backyard of old guard absolutists, now coming out of the shadows. But by the time the Cortes reconvened in January, huge, huge news had come.

A desperate Napoleon was attempting to stabilize his western flank, and to do so, he decided to finally release Ferdinand from his imprisonment in December 1813. The terms were that Ferdinand would be returned to the Spanish throne, and in exchange, he would agree to a ceasefire with the French, and then ultimately joined France in an alliance against the British and Portuguese. But this was some truly desperate self-deception on Napoleon's part if he actually thought Ferdinand was going to join him. For one thing, events were now moving way too fast. Ferdinand would not even return to Spain until March, and by then Napoleon was pretty well beat.

He had waged his war against the inevitable through the six days campaign of February, but the Allies took Paris in March, and the emperor himself was forced to abdicate in April 1814 and accept exile to Elba. So even if Ferdinand had wanted to join the French, which he did not, there was never really any time for him to do it anyway. So with the liberation of Iberia and the collapse of the French Empire, Spain now found itself at a crossroads. For six years, the Regency Cortes had governed in Ferdinand's name, but now the king himself was free. So would he accept the Constitution of 1812 and embrace a modern constitutional monarchy for Spain, or would he try to go back prior to the abdications of Bayonne? And

and revive the absolutism of the Bourbon dynasty. But though the new Cortes, now meeting in Madrid, is more conservative than the extraordinary Cortes that had met in Cadiz, it was still liberal enough to produce a decree on February 2, 1814, said Ferdinand swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution was a prerequisite for them recognizing his sovereignty. So when Ferdinand finally crossed the border back into Spain in March, he was met at the border by a general bearing the February 2nd decree.

Now, Ferdinand did not really know what to expect in Spain. I mean, after all, he had been cooped up in a chateau in France for the last six years, so he took the February 2nd decree under advisement. But as he approached Madrid, wherever the restored king went, the people seemed wildly and genuinely to support him. During his years of imprisonment, patriotic Spaniards had come to refer to Ferdinand as the desired one. though this was not a nickname that's going to survive his coming reign. Old friends and high-ranking church officials and ministers of the old regime then flocked to Ferdinand's side and not one of them advised him to recognize the Cortez or the Constitution of 1812, which suited Ferdinand just fine.

Then in April, the king arrived in Valencia and received the spontaneous backing of an 8,000-man army. Then shortly thereafter, he received a petition signed by one-third of a petition signed by one-third of, of the delegates in the Cortes, the most conservative third, telling him that they themselves viewed the Cortes and the Constitution as illegitimate, because the extraordinary Cortes had not been convened correctly, and it had vastly exceeded its authority when they drafted a new constitution. So by the beginning of May 1814, King Ferdinand, the desired one, had the support of the common people, the church, a significant part of the army, and a big chunk of the Cortes itself. Basically, if he wanted to, he was safe to overthrow the Constitution of 1812,

and he really, really wanted to. On May the 8th, 1814, the king signed a decree announcing that the Constitution of 1812 was nullified, and all decrees issued by the Cortes since it had convened in 1810 were hereby vacated. On May the 11th, the army he controlled entered Madrid and made sweeping arrests of major liberal leaders, sending the rest running into exile. On May the 13th, the king himself then entered Madrid. The liberal, patriot government that had seen Spain through the peninsular war was dead. Far from being thanked for their service, the men who had run that government were now outlaws or in prison. King Ferdinand and his advisors then set to work putting everything back to the way it had been in 1808, right before the abdications of Bayonne.

So we, of course, need to focus on what this all means for the Americas. because, spoiler alert, putting things back the way they had been in 1808 is really not going to fly in the Americas. Even royalists in Spanish America, the guys fighting for God and the king, did not want to go back to heavily restricted trade and arbitrary policies set in Madrid without real participatory input from the Americans. I mean, you couldn't just pretend like the last six years haven't happened. But King Ferdinand and his ministers sure are going to try, and their plan was to literally restore all of the Americans. the old Audiencansia's put back in the intendants and the captain generals and restore all the viceroys and just generally make sure that the peninsula areas were back in control of the Americas. But there was some recognition in the restored bourbon monarchy that many places in the

Americas were still in rebellion. Venezuela is of course a mess, as was the Rio de la Plata. New Granada is still mostly in rebellion. New Spain is still grappling with insurgent armies. But unlike the Cortes, Ferdinand now had troops that he could use to impose a little order. With Napoleon safely imprisoned at Alba, ha ha, ha, the reconstituted council of the Indies formally recommended to the king in September 1814 that a huge armada be sent to begin the reconquest, and the king said that sounds great. So a massive expedition slowly came together in Cadiz, ultimately numbering 10,500 troops sailing on 60 ships of various shapes and sizes.

It was the single largest military expedition the Spanish had ever sent to the Americas. And its destination was the war-torn and bloody province of Venezuela. Now, King Ferdinand and his ministers are going to make a lot of mistakes between now and, oh, let's say, 1820. A lot. But they made a surprisingly good decision when they picked the man to lead this expedition. They went with General Pablo Morillo. Murillo was a lifelong soldier, almost literally. He had joined the Spanish Marines in 1791 at the tender age of 13, and so he came of age

during the wars of the French Revolution, though he generally found himself on the losing side. In 1793, he had served in the Spanish contingent at the siege of Toulon, and so was among those sent running by the audacious attack of young Napoleon Bonaparte. Murillo was then stationed in the Pyrenees through 1794, but as the Leveille, he was a on mass slowly began to overwhelm the Spanish defenses. He was taken prisoner by the French in early 1795. But that was just as the Spanish were capitulating. So upon his release, Mario rejoined the army and found himself fighting alongside the French rather than against the French. For the next decade, Murillo fought the British, culminating with his participation at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805,

where he was wounded and taken prisoner again. Now, I can't quite nail down when the British release, released him. But Murillo was a free man when the abdications of Bayonne hit in 1808, whereupon he volunteered for the Patriot Army and found himself once again fighting against the French rather than alongside them. And that's the life of a professional soldier. Your friend today is your enemy tomorrow, is your friend again the day after that. Murillo served with distinction during the Peninsular War and was known for his personal courage and knack for actually winning battles. So his ascent up the chain of command was rapid. He had signed up in 1808. wait as a mere lieutenant. And five years later, as Wellington was preparing for the final push,

Murillo was a field marshal in the Spanish army. During that final campaign, he once again served with notable distinction, and basically Pablo Murillo was a smart, dedicated, patriotic, and experienced officer. And while on almost every other front, King Ferdinand would prune himself to be a disastrous judge of both character and policy, he somehow accidentally appointed Murillo to command the expedition to restore order in Spanish America. Murillo was further granted broad power and discretion to complete his mission, a mission that was nothing less than the end of independence in South America. The king formally appointed him governor and captain general of Venezuela

and president of the restored Caracas Audiencia. With all of these powers in hand, he was ordered to then land in Venezuela at the head of this mighty fleet, use whatever combination of carrot and stick he thought best to bring the natives to heal, and then move on to New Granada, on his way ultimately down to Lima, Peru. Belivars fears back in the Cardagena Manifesto that Venezuela would become the Corro of all South America. It looks like that's coming true. So Murillo and his armada set sail from Cadiz in February 1815 on a two-month-long voyage across the Atlantic, and they expected when they landed on the other side to be landing right in the middle of a bloody and bitter Venezuelan Civil War,

but by the time they arrived in April 1815, it turned out that bloody and bitter civil war was pretty much over, and the Second Republic had been dead, dead, dead for months. To wrap up that war, let's go back to September 1814, just after Jose Felix Rebos has put Belivar and Marino on a boat. Now Rebos and Manuel P.R. plan to vigorously defend this last little enclave of Republican power they had, but the situation was now reversed from a year ago. The Royalists, or more specifically Beauvais and the legions of hell, controlled almost the whole country, with the Republicans limited to this little enclave down around the city of Kumanah. The end of the Second Republic honestly feels pretty inevitable at this point.

In October 1814, Boves advanced east, forcing Rebos and what was left of the Patriot forces to just abandon Kumanah. Now Rebos managed to keep a force in the field until December, but they were finally cornered at Eureka and forced a fight against an army that outnumbered them two to one. Smashed by the legions of how the Patriot Army just ceased to exist. The only consolation being that as the Republican forces broke, Bovese himself took a spear to the heart that killed him instantly. But though the death of Boves is good for the Republicans in the long run, in the short term, it did them no good.

Rebus fled west trying to make his way back to New Granada, but after taking refuge outside the city of Pasqua, he was betrayed and captured. The royalist who found him then killed Rebos, cut off his head and fried it in a vat of boiling oil. The head was then sent along to Caracas, where it was put on public display for all to see. The only part of Republican Venezuela now left was a small garrison holding the island of Margarita under Manuel P.R. and they would find themselves not lasting very long because the destination of Mario's giant armada was the island of Margarita. So bringing this all back around now to Belivar, by the time that he was heading up to Tunha from Cartagena, he knew that Spain had been liberated and the king restored. He did not yet know about Mario's expedition, but it was not too hard to guess that something like it was probably on the way. When Belivar reached Tunha, he once again found himself greeted as a hero rather than a goat.

President Camillo Torres hailed him as a great man who just so happened to be unlucky in the field. Now the principal concern of both Torres and Belivar at this point was bringing Bogota back into the shared fold of the Union of New Granada, and the Congress in Tunha put 1,800 men under General Belivar's command and said, go to Bogota and make them see reason. Belivar and his new little army reached the gates of Bogota on December the 10th, 1814, and despite a brief show of resistance, the people of Bogota didn't have much in the way of a military force to withstand a siege. Belivar promised leniency if they opened their gates, and so after two days, they did. And unlike Boves, Belivar kept his word. He didn't go running and to slaughter everybody. With Bogota now under Belivar's military authority, the Toon-Haw government voted to re-euvre.

reconvene in the old vice regal capital. It was bigger, it was richer, and more importantly, it would cement the sense of shared purpose and help everyone keep an eye on everyone else. With Bogota secured, Belivar then planned a reverse Magdalena campaign. Over the past year, resurgent royalist forces had been retaking positions all up and down the river. So in January 1815, Belivar set out with more than 2,000 men down the river rather than up it to clear them all out. reestablished communication lines with Cartagena, and then most importantly, keep pushing on to the port of Santa Marta

that sat at the mouth of the Magdalena River. That city was currently held by royalists, and Belivar wanted to make sure that the inevitable force from Spain that would be coming inevitably would have no safe place to land in New Granada. But once again Belivar's dreams of a unified American defense against a Spanish invasion was stymied by his fellow Americans.

specifically this time it was a guy named Colonel Manuel Castillo. Now, this is not the first time that we have met Castillo. And to be honest, the only reason I didn't mention his name the first time we met him is that I forgot that he was the same guy who's going to be causing trouble for Belivar now. Remember the colonel who resigned with a hundred of his men rather than follow Belivar into Venezuela? That was Colonel Castillo. The same Colonel Castillo, who was about to drive Belivar into exile and bring

Cartagena to ruin. So Colonel Manuel Castillo pretty much hated Belivar, thought him a crazy fanatic who wanted to spill New Granodin blood and waste New Granodan resources on harebrain schemes in Venezuela, which isn't like 100% inaccurate, but from Belivar's perspective, their shared sense of purpose and sacrifice was supposed to be for the greater good. Well, Castillo wants no part of that, and he was in Cartagena when Belivar came back. And as soon as the fanatical little Venezuela, Whalen left for Tunha, Castillo started up a smear campaign against Belivar. He played up the stories of Belivar's betrayal at Kumanah, how it was not clear whether Belivar's incompetence or cowardice had contributed more to the collapse of the Second Republic. And Castillo did a good job rebranding

Bolivar as a villain. So by the time Belivar arrived at the lower reaches of the Magdalena River, he was informed that Cartagena was no longer his friend and that Castillo was recruiting troops not to fight the Spanish, but to fight Bolivar. So this forced Belivar to break off his approach on Santa Marta and instead focus on Cardahena, which meant that through March and April 1815, Belivar's forces just kind of sat around on the swampy lower reaches of the Magdalena River, while Belivar tried to negotiate his way back into the good graces of Cartagena. This all led to the onset of cant diseases that killed both men and morale, and desertions from his army became free.

frequent. Belivar finally decided to try to force the issue and he marched on Cartagena, hopefully to get them to open up their gates as Bogota had. But instead, as Belivar approached, Castillo opened fire with the heavy guns, forcing Belivar and his forces to take cover and then even worse, it turned out that Castillo had poisoned all the wells in the surrounding area, so drinking water was non-existent. The depressing siege of Cardahena took its toll on Belivar, I have to think at this point that doubts really were starting to creep in about whether any of this was ever going to work. And then on April the 24th, 1815, the other shoe finally dropped. Jubilant royalists carried through news that the great Spanish armada of 60 ships and 14,000

men, or so it was reported, had landed on the island of Margarita and destroyed the last of the Republican forces. It was only a matter of time before they moved on to New Granada. As Belivar was processing this information, he got word that a royalist unit had attacked and taken mompox in his rear. So now down to just 700 men and surrounded by enemies of every variety on all sides and the great hammer of Murillo, perhaps just a few weeks away, Belivar gave up. He sent a letter to Cardahena saying, I will resign my commission and leave the country as long as you take care of my men. Castillo agreed to these terms, and so on May the 8th, 1815 Belivar once again got on a boat headed into exile, his third such trip in less than

four years. This was really not working out the way Belivar had intended. So this time, the once again Exile Belivar headed for Jamaica. And he had there at least one friendly contact, an adventurous merchant named Maxwell Heeslop, who had been among those selling black market guns to the Second Republic. He slop promised Belvoir money and the use of a 24-gun ship he owned for the cause of Spanish-American independence, but for the rest of 1815, that cause seemed lost, and Belivar had to just sit in Kingston and stew. But despite all this, Belivar could still count himself as lucky, because it had been a really good time to get out of New Granada. Now, the Armada of Pablo Marillo did not immediately come over to Cartagena. They lingered in Corridor.

for the summer of 1815, as Murillo tried to restore order to a province that had just been leveled by civil war and natural catastrophe. I mean, whole towns were now just abandoned ruins. The legions of hell alone can be blamed for about 80,000 civilian casualties during their marauding, and you add into that the Caracas earthquake and various Republican atrocities and the war to the death, and then just disease and starvation and people fleeing the country. I mean, it wouldn't surprise me if the casualties ran as high as 200,000, and this from a province that it had only about 800,000 in it, on the eve of the abdications of Bayonne.

So we're talking about one full quarter of the population here. But once Murillo felt like he had Venezuela kind of on its feet, or perhaps just to the point where you could hand it to civilian authorities and get back to soldiering, Murillo left Venezuela in September 1815 with his armada and headed for Cartagena. Now, the fortifications of Cartagena were as impressive as they had been when the British had failed to take the city way back during the war of Jenkins' ear. As long as the residents don't give up hope, there's no way that even 60 ships and 10,000 men could take the city. And while the residents were perhaps a bit reticent about all of this, Colonel Castile was determined to not let the city fall,

and he introduced martial law to make sure no one's resolve broke, even as the situation got worse and worse and worse. The siege of Cardahena would ultimately drag on for four months. The walls would stay firm, but everyone inside would wither. But Belivar is lucky. He's not trapped in Cardahana. He is in fact now in Kingston, Jamaica, living on a small stipend arranged by his merchant friend. And if he had ever let self-doubt creep in while sitting outside of Cartagena, Belivar didn't show it in Jamaica. He sent out an explosion of letters every which way seeking aid, everyone he could think of in the United States, whether working in the government or in the private sector. He sent letters to the old British foreign minister, Richard Wellesley, begging for assistance,

men, money, whatever you can spare. But the world was turning a deaf ear. Just recently freed from the War of 1812, President James Madison went back to trying to stay out of European entanglements and signed a law for bidding U.S. citizens from joining any campaign in Spanish America. As for the British, after their great victory at Waterloo, they proceeded to sign an agreement with the members of the Holy Alliance. That was Prussia, Russia, and Austria, the goal now being stability, sweet, sweet stability after 25 years of nonstop war. So the British also made it illegal for their officers to sign up for service in Spanish America, though as we will see, more than a few are going to come anyway. And the most famous letter Belivar wrote during this

period of exile in Jamaica, though, was not a request for eight, but rather a response to a request for information. An Englishman living on the other side of Jamaica had been curious about what had gone wrong in Venezuela and what the prospects were for Spanish-American independence. Belivar answered in early September 1815 with a long letter that seemed very much to be written with an eye on being disseminated to a wider audience than just the recipient, and indeed it would be. Along with the Cartagena manifesto, the letter from Jamaica is a statement of Belivar's political

principles and also a nuanced and fairly prescient analysis of politics in Spanish America, a lot of which still holds up today. But I'm going to talk about the letter from Jamaica in more detail next week, because Belivar surveys the current status of all the various regions of Spanish America, and I want to use that as a framework to spend next week pretty much doing the same thing to get us caught up on all fronts as we move to the next phase of Spanish American independence. Now, meanwhile, things in Cartagena were getting really bad. By the end of November 1815, there was nothing to eat, there was nothing to drink, disease

and starvation had set in, and already close to 6,000 people had died. Now, Colonel Castillo was prepared to hold on until everyone inside was dead, but everyone else had had enough. In early December, a cabal of senior military commanders, including a cadre of Venezuelans in exile, deposed Colonel Castillo. With Castillo removed from power, 2,000 residents of Cartagena abandoned the city for the shoreline, where they pitifully surrendered themselves to the Spanish. The next day, December 6th, 1815, Marillo's army entered Cartagena.

As they secured the nearly empty city, they found Castillo cowering in the corner of a house. He was arrested, taken down to the main square of the city, and shot. Now, coincidentally enough, it was just a few days after the fall of Cartagena, that Simone Bolivar found himself once again on the run with every intention of running back to Cardahena, not knowing, of course, that the city had already fallen. And what he was running from is a mysterious little episode, because apparently Belivar had grown to dislike his landlady, and on December the 10th, 1815, decided to move to different lodgings.

The very next day, an exiled Venezuelan officer, Belivar's former paymaster, actually, arrived in Kingston looking to reconnect with his old chief. This guy went to Belivar's now former lodgings, not knowing that they were his now former lodgings, and not finding Belivar, this unfortunate guy decided to go to sleep in Belivar's old hammock. Now, the reason I call this guy unfortunate is that all of this coincided with a conspiracy

to assassinate the Liberator. Belivar's black attendant had been promised $2,000 pesos, an obscene amount of money, to kill Belivar, and it just so happened that the murder was planned for that very night. So, the assassin slipped into Belivar's apartment and stabbed the body in the hammock to death, except it wasn't Belivar who was dead. It was just some random guy. Now, nobody knows who orchestrated this assassination attempt, but Belivar quite rightly determined that he was no longer safe in Jamaica.

So on December the 18th, 1815, Belivar loaded up a ship with supply, and decided to return to Cardahena to see what he could do to help his old comrades withstand the siege. But shortly after setting sail, they passed some ships coming the other direction that told them, yeah, no, Cardahena has fallen already. So it isn't safe for Belivar anywhere. Where could he now go? The answer brings us back around to the final episode on the Haitian Revolution, with no place to go on the mainland and without support from any of the other major power,

hours in the Caribbean, there was only one place Belivar could go, the Republic of Haiti. Belivar was told that he would find asylum in Haiti, and so on Christmas Eve, 1815, a beleaguered Belivar landed in Le Chai. Next week, Belivar will meet and befriend President Alexander Petsion, the leader of the Republic of Haiti, and find the Haitians willing to offer him not just asylum, but aid. And so when Believer returned once again to his war with the Spanish. It would be with the guns and ships provided by the Republic of Haiti. And President Petion's only stipulation for providing these guns and ships was that when Belivar got back to Venezuela, that he would emancipate all the slaves.