Revolutions - 5.17- The Big Rock On The Side Of The Road

Episode Date: October 9, 2016

In 1820 a mutiny in Cádiz changed the course of Spanish American history.  . 

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 5.17, the Big Rock on the side of the road. The Battle of Boyakha was for once, an indisputable and permanent triumph for Simone Bolivar. He had been a professional revolutionary for nearly a decade now, and he had spent most of it trapped in a revolving door. He was exiled and then returned and then exiled and returned again. He won battles, but they were. then suffered equivalent reverses. He suffered equivalent reverses, but then somehow bounced back. He was constantly on the move, but he never seemed to get anywhere. While now, he had finally gotten

somewhere. New Granada was cleared of any peninsular royalist army. The Republicans had seized Bogota, and they would not be giving it back. The nation that would become modern Colombia was now free and independent and would remain so. The only part of the colony still under Spanish control was now Cartagena, and though Cartagena was a city that could be defended militarily by six guys in a slingshot, it could be reduced by prolonged siege, and in short order, it would be under a prolonged siege. But this was no time to sit back and bask in the glow of victory, to get lazy or complacent, quite the opposite. The liberation of New Granada only fueled Belivar's momentum. He remained in Bogota from the first week of August to the last week of September 1819. But as we ended last week,

episode, Belivar put the government in the hands of Santander, and then himself rode off on a slow-moving tour northeast through the newly liberated cities of New Granada on his way back to Venezuela. In every city he passed, there were celebrations and balls and parties and dancing. Belivar's entourage became a traveling celebration as the people rejoiced in their liberation. And they'll Belivar celebrated, and the whole thing must have been something of a dream. Reality did not waste much time crashing back down on his head. For one thing, even though Belivar was constantly surrounded by secretaries and soldiers and civilian well-wishers, at this moment of his greatest triumph, he was personally in a very lonely place.

It had now been fully three years since he had laid eyes on his longtime mistress, Pepita Machado. He did not know where she was or whether or not he would see her again. Now, if you'll recall from back in episode 5.14, Papeda had been with him through the disaster at Akumare in the summer of 1816, but after redepositing her on the island of St. Thomas, they had just never linked back up. In the intervening years, Belivar had been re-exiled to Haiti in 1816, then returned to Venezuela and gone off and captured Angostura in 1817, then led that failed campaign to capture Caracas on 1818, and then marched across the Ghanos and up into the mountains of Neuros. New Granada in 1819. Papeda had been present for none of this. Now, mostly this was because in the chaos of war, they had lost touch with each other. I mean, it's the early 1800s, keeping in contact with somebody over long distances is tricky in the best of times. But in all of this mess, forget it. So after returning to Angostura in the summer of 1818, Belivar finally said enough is enough, and he sent a nephew to personally track Papita down.

And this was a search that took months, but ultimately the happy news that Papita had been finally located on the island still of St. Thomas and would soon be on her way. But it was still a while before Belivar got confirmation that she had actually boarded a ship, and even then, days continued to pass without any sign of her. In the meantime, Belivar kept busy arranging the Congress of Angostura and then preparing for his still secret plan to invade New Granada, a plan that included a place for Pepita by his side, but she just kept not showing up.

By the time he had to march into New Granada in May 1819, he had to ride without her. And so he was now forced to celebrate his greatest triumph alone. Adding to his depressed spirits, after leaving Bogota, Belivar proceeded to get hit by a continuous string of bad news. I don't know exactly the order that all of this came in, but I would guess that the first thing he heard was that Santander had gone and done something really dumb. In the aftermath of the Battle of Boyaka, most of the senior royalist commanders had been captured alive, including the commander-in-chief, General José Maria Barrario. With the war to the death ancient history, Belivar treated his prisoners with all due courtesy, and he hoped to eventually exchange them for Republican prisoners.

But almost as soon as Belivar departed Bogota, Santander decided he could not risk letting these officers live. On October the 11th, Santander ordered General Barrario and 38 others removed from confinement and marched into the center of town. They were given no explanation for the sudden rousting, and not even the courtesy of a perfunctory tribunal. It was in fact only when Santander ordered Barario to kneel that the royalist general finally understood what was going on. With no further ceremony, Santander ordered the kneeling general shot in the back. Then the other 38 men were lined up against a wall and executed. It was a shocking scene for the residents of the city. Though they were happy, the viceroy was gone, General Barrario himself had never been particularly disliked. I mean,

many people actually liked him quite a bit. And then, to add insult to injury, Santander then led a parade to celebrate and capped it all off with a splendid ball. The sudden cruelty of Santander's new regime came as an unwelcome surprise to the residents of Bogota. When Belivar was told about all this, he wrote a tense letter back to Santander saying, okay, I understand that you were afraid that they might have gotten up to something, but really, this is not how I wanted things handled, and it will make our lives difficult. But, okay, I forgive you for doing what you thought was best. Clearly, though, this was through gritted teeth. Though he could not risk Santander going completely rogue, so Belivar kept the chastisement to a minimum. Shortly thereafter,

Belivar was told that another general he couldn't risk alien. had also ignored his orders, because it turned out that Jose Antonio Paz had never gone to Cucuta as he had been ordered, that instead of guarding the rear while Belivar pushed up into the mountains, that Paz had ridden hundreds of miles east to winter in the small town of a Chagwas. So, as Belivar crossed back into Venezuela, he recognized that he was going to have to once again walk a fine line between reprimanding Paz and alienating him. Now, in general, I did give you an order and you did say you would do it. I know you're not a military man by training, but that does have to mean something. But he couldn't go too far and drive PAS away from the cause, because without Paz, there was no free Venezuela. And it really was that simple.

Then once he crossed the border into Venezuela, Belivar got hit with two pieces of personally tragic news. The first was that one of his favorite officers, and a guy Belivir had been grooming for a prominent position in the hierarchy of the new republic, had suddenly gotten sick and just died. and as if that wasn't depressing enough, the really terrible news hit. The reason Pepita Machado had never appeared in Angostura was that she too was dead. And there is no confirmed version of what actually happened to her. Some say she never left St. Thomas. Others say that she sailed away but died en route. Others that she made it to the mainland but died before reaching Angostura.

And others say that she passed through Angostura, made it up the Orinoco River and out onto the Janos, before finally succumbing to a fatal illness. The common link does seem to be that that fatal illness was tuberculosis, but even that is built on unsubstantiated rumors. Frankly, nobody knows what really happened to Pepita Machado. The news hit Belivar like a ton of bricks, but he was good at compartmentalization and all about that old-style Roman stoicism in the face of adversity. But just a few months after riding triumphantly into Bogota,

after the Battle of Boyaka, he had to have just been emotionally deflated. And then came even more bad news, news that turned his slow procession into a rapid march. It had been just about nine months since Bolivar had departed Angostura, and he had left behind what he thought was a functional government in what he thought were the capable hands of Vice President Francisco Antonio Sea. And the armies of the Eastern Cadillos were supposedly sitting there just awaiting further instructions. But now he received dispatches that all was not well back east, that Santiago Marino had refused an order from the vice president to join his forces with Bermudez, and further

that another key general, a guy whose name I have not specifically mentioned yet, but it's Juan Batista Ardismendi, had been insubordinate enough that Bermudez had tossed him in jail. And though Belivar did not know it at the time, the situation was further being rocked by a strong rumor that Belivar himself had been killed in New Granada. Belivar quickened his return home, but events would move faster than he could. Indeed, by the time Belivar found out that things were amiss back east, they had likely already gotten even more amiss. Belivar had studiously avoided major confrontations with insubordinate commanders over the year, Manuel PR being the one notable exception. But Vice President Seya had tried to test the legitimate authority of

the civilian government by sacking General Santiago Marino for his refusal to follow orders. But Marino had quite a bit more juice, both politically and, of course, militarily, than Vice President Sayah did. So after getting fired, Marino began conspiring with the aforementioned General Ars Mendi, and that conspiring took real shape when the rumors came round that Simone Belivir was dead. Marino and Aris Mendi decided to overthrow Saya, which turned out to be not. not too hard at all. All they had to do was roll into Angostura and have a very frank chat with the members of Congress about the future of the Republic. If the Libar is dead, we cannot trust ourselves to this old man who controls no armies, has fought no battles, and spilled no

blood. And the members of Congress agreed. They voted to depose Seya from office. Artesmendi was elected the new vice president, and Marino went from being fired to commander-in-chief of all the Eastern armies. After this simple little coup, Marigno returned to his base up along the north coast to reorganize the army to his own specifications, while Aras Mendi remained in Angostura to cement the new order of things. Then in early December 1819, Aris Mendi rode out on a military inspection tour of his own, so he was not around when a ghost rode into Angostura in the middle of the night. At three o'clock in the morning, on December the 11th, 1819, the Liberator, Simone Belivar, returned. Not dead, very much alive. The people of the city

were thrilled, and even though it was the middle of the night, word got out that the Liberator was coming back and they flocked to greet him. Exhausted from his journey, though, which had taken him from Bogota to Angostura in just 64 days, Belivar spent the next two days hold up in his house recuperating and taking interviews with men and women who could fill him in on what had happened in his absence. And then he visited the deposea to get his version of events. Ardismendi, meanwhile, was alerted that Belivar had returned, and I have to imagine he went a little bit white when he got the news. But he mounted his horse and rode straight for Angostura to try to head off what may turn out to be dire consequences. But when Ardismendi arrived, Belivar did

not greet him with fireballs of wrath, but instead welcomed him with open arms and told him, You've done a good job. It sounded like things got very confused and maybe even a little dangerous. And you did what you thought best to preserve the Republic. Isn't that right? Isn't it? And Ars Mendi was like, uh, yeah, that's absolutely right. And Belivar said, well, now that that's all cleared up and everything's fine, you'll be happy to return the vice presidency to Seya, right?

And Aris Mendi recognized the face saving out Belivar was handing him on a silver platter. So Aris Mendi announced that, yes, of course, immediately I will resign now that the Liberator is home. And he did. Santiago Marino, meanwhile, continued to face no consequences for his own repeated insubordinations. Although, when Belivar goes out for his next major campaign, he will make sure Marino joins his staff and will not let him out of his sight. With all that settled, Belivar convened the Congress of Angostura on December the 14th to deliver a form of report. New Granada has been liberated. Bogota is in Republican hands, and the time has come to make good on the grandiose proclamations we made when the Congress first convened back in February. We must unite

and form Grand Columbia for real. On December the 17th, the Congress agreed and voted that the union would go into full effect. Belivar was given the title Liberator President, and Saya was confirmed as vice president of the whole republic. But then they also created two junior vice presidencies. Santander was elected vice president of the Department of New Granada and a guy named Juan German Roscoe, who was a minor figure in the grand scheme of things, but for the record was one of the signatories to the original declaration of Venezuelan independence back in 1811. He was elected vice president of the Department of Venezuela. Then the Congress voted to convene a new constitutional convention in Cucatah on January 1, 1821, to work out the details of a joined government now that both New Granada and Venezuela would be able to both fully participate.

The government hopefully now back on the right track, Belivar turned back to his last military problem. General Pablo Muriel and the 7,000 or so royalist soldiers who still occupied the critical northwestern. coast of Venezuela. And though Murillo was hemmed in, Belivar had learned back in the summer of 1818 that it was not wise to just go launching a full frontal attack, especially because retaining soldiers in the Republican Army was becoming nearly impossible. The wars of independence had been going on for nearly a decade now, and the Grim Reaper had already harvested half a generation's worth of young men, and it was hard to convince the rest to stay in the army, especially when they were never paid or fed, what they had been promised, they would be paid and fed.

It seemed like for every man recruited into the army, two more would slip out the back of the tent. Not that there were tents. That's just a metaphor. So supplying and paying the army became Belivar's overriding concern. And Belivar was eventually furious with Sayah, for example, when he discovered that rather than directing cattle meat from the Janos to the army, Zaya had been selling it to merchants from the United States.

and then, and I'm not making this up, after facing a shortage of meat in Venezuela, buying meat from the United States, and losing money on the deal. It was pretty amateur hour stuff, to be honest, and Belivar started to suspect that maybe Seya was not actually the man for the job. Ever on the move, though, Belivar departed Angostura again, almost as soon as he had arrived, back to inspect what trips he had, and then really to make his way all the way back to New Granada to recruit men to serve in what he hoped would be the final campaign to liberate Venezuela. After all, we liberated you. It's time for you to return the favor. So he rode and rode retracing the

journey he had just made, because, I mean, they don't call him iron ass for nothing. He was soon riding back up into the mountains and back through the cities of New Granada on his way to Bogota to check in with Santander. But the recruitment effort was disappointing, as were. We're reports from Santander that the tax receipts were not as robust as they needed to be. When Belivar reached Bogota, he and Santander conferred over what to do. Belivar told him, first of all, to just squeeze the provinces for money. Voluntary patriotic contributions were not going to get the job done. But Belivar also raised a subject that would help drive a wedge between the two men. After being converted to the cause of emancipation by Alexandra Petyon, Belivar had not waited.

in his commitment to freeing the slaves. And he told Santander now that when the Constitutional Convention met in Cucotta, that emancipation must be written into the fabric of the Republic of Columbia. And beyond the moral dimension, there was a very simple military dimension that the newly freed black citizens must be given the opportunity to show their loyalty and fight in the army. It simply isn't fair that they haven't been given the chance to fight for their own freedom. But Santander balked and would continue to balk at emancipation. He did not think it wise to upend the few money-making plantations left in the country, and he agreed only that if emancipation came, that it would have to be done slowly and carefully.

The fate of the slaves would remain a point of contention between the two for the remainder of their revolutionary partnership. After just three weeks in Bogota, Belivar moved out of the capital again, and set up a base of operations in Cucuta, which was the most centrally located city in Republican hands. And from there, he could keep his eye on Bogota, the Magdalena River, the ongoing siege of Cartagena, the Venezuelan Ghanos, and, hopefully, be ready to strike at Murillo and Caracas if the Republican Army could get its act together. So through the whole first half of 1820, a tense stalemate settled in everywhere. Marillo obviously had no intention of making any offensive moves until he could get some reinforcements,

which he had been told for quite a while now were on their way, but never seemed to be on their way. Meanwhile, Belivar for once did not risk losing everything by launching an offensive campaign before his army was really ready. Both commanders made limited moves, but mostly just to mask their respective weaknesses from each other. But in June of 1820, word of a major, major, major development back in Spain leaked that would change everything. It was information that was by now months old, but, you know, that's how it goes with cross-Atlantic communications, especially cross-atlantic communications that are supposed to remain top secret. So to grasp the magnitude of this development, we have to hop back over to Spain for the first time in quite a while. Now, when last we checked in, it was back in episode 5.12, the desired one, when we covered the return of King Ferdinand the seventh, aka the desired one, to the Spanish throne.

If you will recall, Ferdinand's return spelled the end for the regency government that had ruled in his absence and through the entirety of the peninsular war and the liberal constitution of 1812 that they had ratified. But though the Spanish population in general wanted to reject the very first, French-sounding ideas lodged in the Constitution of 1812, I don't think anybody really wanted it to go back to how it had been before the abdications of Bayonne. There had to be some reforms, and Ferdinand was encouraged by many petitioners to call the original version of the Cortes, the medieval version, with the clergy and nobility and commons coming together to work out an understanding of how the restored monarchy was going to work going forward. And Ferdinand said, yeah, sure, that sounds great. Okay, I'll let know, and then nothing. He never called the Cortes, and he and a small group of loyal ministers

went about trying to bring back the absolutus ASEAN regime in its entirety, and it did not take long for the desired one to not be very desirable at all. So there's no need to get into the thickets of the high-handed incompetence of Ferdinand's government as it affected Spain itself. What we need to focus on is their American policy. And when it came to the rebellious colonies, the regime's policy was, full pacification, and the reestablishment of the old order. To turn the clock back to 1807 and pretend like nothing had ever happened. That had been the basic set of instructions the king had given General Murillo when the great Armada had set sale for Venezuela in February 1815. And for a long while, the reports coming back across the

Atlantic confirmed the viability of this strategy of uncompromising reconquest. Mario made a clean sweep through Venezuela and New Granada, and after capturing Bogota, was preparing to move on Peru. But then the news took a sharp downward turn. Now, Morillo's report said, Venezuela has re-revolved, so instead of going to Peru, I'm going to have to go back to Venezuela. And these new reports were always accompanied by Morillo's request to be relieved of duty. And then news came in that a rebel army led by the defector Jose de Saint-Martine had crossed the Andes. captured Chile and now threatened Peru. So instead of a grand royalist army parading into Lima to complete the reconquest, it now appeared that the rebel scum were poised to attack the most lucrative

colony in the whole empire. So Ferdinand's ministers made plans to send reinforcements to Murillo in Venezuela, but even more importantly to send a second armada to the Rio de la Plata, to follow in the footsteps of San Martin and undo everything he had done. But even, even Even as this new invasion was being planned, there seemed to be a clear change of direction coming out of the ministry by the beginning of 1818. One guy in particular, who had been put in charge of all this, a senior minister named Jose Pissado, started pointing out that they might be spitting into a hurricane here, that at a minimum, negotiating with the Americans was probably going to be more effective than reconquest.

Pizarro said, look, you can save it all by compromising. You can dig in your heels and maybe save some of it, like Peru, but most likely continuing down this uncompromising path is going to lose us everything. So in June 1818, Pizarro produced a massive pile of recommendations, an all-encompassing plan to keep the Americas in the Spanish orbit by conceding the end of Spanish absolutism. Pizarro recommended that the Spanish Americas be open not just to foreign trade, but also foreign settlement to rebuild the population and revitalize the American economy. He recommended increased participation of the Crioyo in their own government, an end to the trade monopolies, the works everything basically that the Americans had been asking for. But the king did not want to

hear it. After mowing it over with his closer advisors, Pissarro and anyone associated with him were dismissed in September 1818 and told to vacate the capital immediately. The king then got back to the business of uncompromising reconquest. In the end, that uncompromising reconquest did not die in the Americas, but right there in Spain. To begin with, the Spanish Navy was hardly a navy at all. All the good ships had gone off with Maria with the first armada, and not much had been built up in the meantime. So the king had personally authorized the purchase from Russia of a small fleet of ships, but when these ships arrived, they turned out to be lemons. scraps from the junk heap that were barely seaworthy. I mean, basically Russia ripped him off,

and there was nothing he could do about it. But still, the king persisted, and over the course of 1890, men were transferred to Cotty's to muster for the expedition, and ultimately, they would number 14,000 men. But when these men arrived, they just sat there. And despite the something like 400 million pesos that had been spent so far on the expedition since it had first been dreamed up back in 1816, whereas ill-fed, ill-supplied, and ill-paid as any of the troops in the Americas, rebel or royalists. The soldiers were reduced to begging food and supplies from the Cadi's merchants, and then to top it all off, a little epidemic of plague swept through town, decimating the ranks of soldiers and civilian alike. Now, as is often the case, the men had not been told

why they were all being reassigned to Cotties. They did not know what this was all about. out, certainly not that they were going to be sent to the Americas. But when the final preparations were being made in September 1819, the final destination leaked out, and the soldiers were dismayed and furious. They had heard plenty about the bloody, disease-ridden chaos of the Americas. They knew from their brothers who had gone over with Murillo what they could expect. Nothing good. Probably just a grim death. And on top of that, this fight is to what? Reconquer the Americas, that meant nothing to them personally. I mean, it was one thing to suffer and die to expel the French from the peninsula, but to go across the Atlantic to put down some

provincials who are probably on the right side of history anyway, I mean, forget it. The men started talking amongst themselves, and they agreed that, no, we are not going to do it. They can't make us. The leader of this brewing mutiny was a guy named Colonel Rafael Del Riego, commander of one of the ten battalions that composed the expedition. Riegoo, was, like everybody else, a veteran of the peninsular war, but he was also a strong liberal, and he had always begrudged the king for nullifying the Constitution of 1812. The return of the desired one in Riego's mind had been an unmitigated disaster, and it had sent Spain right back under the yoke of ignorant, backward repression. Riego looked around and decided that he might be able to

convince the 14,000 disgruntled soldiers in Cades to turn their backs on the planned invasion of the Rio Leila Plata, and instead march on Madrid. On January 1st, 1820, Riego and his fellow conspirators staged a mutinous revolt. They seized the commander of the expedition and declared themselves defenders of the Constitution of 1812. They demanded the king acknowledge the constitutional monarchy. Now, at first, Ferdinand scoffed at these demands, and he tried to blow off the mutiny as just unhappy soldiers who would soon be sailing across the Atlantic anyway, so there's no point in giving it all too much credence, except that the mutiny in Cadiz set off a string of similar mutinies in garrisons across Spain, and the civilian population was ominously sympathetic.

Basically, the Spaniards had been willing to give Ferdinand the benefit of the doubt in 1814. But having been given the benefit of the doubt, King Ferdinand had blown it, and they were all now ready to say, uh, maybe the constitutional monarchy of 1812 is actually worth another look. So through January and into February 1820, the mutinous revolt spread out, and soon it was knocking on the king's doorstep in Madrid. Ferdinand tried his best to keep his head lodged firmly in the sand, and this is all going to blow over, I don't have to give in, I'll just hold out a few more days. But by March, the noose had been tied, placed around the king's neck, and was now tightening, even if the king didn't quite realize it yet.

Finally, on March the 6th, the king and his ministers decided. decided they might be able to buy themselves some time by officially calling for the Cortes, which they had been avoiding for so long, but that only bought them a few days. On March the 9th, 1820, in the midst of popular agitation consuming Madrid, the king was forced to go out onto the balcony of the royal palace and announced to the crowd that, yes, I accept the constitution of 1812. The six years of restored bourbon absolutism was dead, and the dawning of a new liberal era. was at hand.

Now, what this means for the wars of Spanish-American independence is that the expedition that was supposed to invade the Rio de la Plata never sailed. And instead of the next chapter, beginning with a huge army arriving in Buenos Aires, the next chapter started with nothing at all. The Rio de la Plata would never face reconquest. Jose de Saint-Martin never had to break off his approach to Peru and go back to rescue them. Because this army never showed up, The royalists in America were just going to have to make do with what they had on hand,

and that was never going to be enough to stave off independence. So it's all pretty much just an inevitable run from here on out. Now, probably the Americas wind up breaking away anyway, even with the influx of 14,000 new soldiers, because they probably would have just staved off that inevitability. I mean, eventually, it was just not going to be worth the men and resources to try to hold an entire continent in bondage against its will. That had kind of been Juan Pissarro's ultimate point.

So probably the Spanish eventually decide that they're going to stop sending armies across the Atlantic, no matter what. But instead of that coming in the future, it's coming right now today. In Venezuela, and still awaiting his allotment of reinforcements, General Murillo did not get word that all of this unrest in Cadiz really was a really real problem, until May of 1820, when the stunning news came of the king's capitulation and acceptance of the Constitution of 1812. Oh, also, by the way, you are not getting any reinforcements. And you can imagine just how deep Marillo must have sunk into his chair when he read all this. But the kicker was that his new orders were to spread the good news to the Americans, that they were all now equal citizens in a liberal kingdom and they can lay down their arms

and go back to being happy and productive subjects of the Spanish crown. Murillo positively exploded at the stupid ignorance of this order. No one in Spain obviously had the first idea what is going on over here. These people are not going to accept that they are going to be happy subjects of the crown again. Not now. Not after all this. It was over. And Murillo knew it.

General Murillo sat on the information as long as he could, but by June he was stuck, because he couldn't keep it under wraps. forever. Just as he was about to announce what had happened back in Spain to Caracas, Belivar spies intercepted a letter from the king to Murillo, spelling out everything. And as deeply as Murillo must have sunk into his chair when he heard the news, you can imagine how quickly Belivar must have sprung out of his, or whatever he happened to be sitting on, probably a cattle skull or something. All that was left in all of Grand Columbia standing between Belivar and Independence with 7,000 Spaniards clinging to the coast without hope of

reinforcement. You beat those guys, just those guys. And it's all over. It had to be. And once word got out, General Murillo didn't really do anything to pretend otherwise. On July the 6th, 1820, messengers arrived at Belivar's headquarters in Kukuta, bearing a request for a summit with Murillo to discuss a ceasefire. Now, it took months of negotiations to arrange this summit, as both sides were very cautious about the intentions of the other. But they finally agreed to meet in the city of Trujillo at the end of November. And on November the 21st, 1820, representatives from both sides met and formally agreed to a ceasefire that would last for six months. The royalists would recognize Belivir as president of this thing called the Republic of Columbia,

and the particulars of the cessation of hostilities and the terms at prisoner exchanges were all worked out. With the details finalized, it finally became time for the two commanders to meet face to face for the first time. On November the 27th, 1820, at the tiny village of Santa Ana, the two generals finally laid eyes on each other. Marillo arrived first, decked out in his best uniform, and accompanied by 50 splendid cavalrymen. Then he saw Belivar's little party arrive, consisting of just 15 men. And Murillo was shocked when Belivar was pointed out to him, because Belivar was riding a donkey and wearing the uniform of a common soldier. Not wanting to be outdone in chivalry, Murillo ordered most of his cavalry to depart, and then he dismounted to greet Belivar, and there, on the side of the road, the two men embraced. Then both sides retired to a small house to share a celebratory lunch that involved more.

multiple toasts to each others, as professional soldiers do, to the valor and heroics of each other. And in the midst of all this, and probably quite drunk, they all agreed to build a great pyramid on the spot in the road where the two generals had embraced to forever mark the peace. And they went out, they found a big rock and plopped it down to mark the spot where the foundation needed to be laid. The toasting and drinking then continued into the night, and so eventually, rather than go their separate ways, Murillo and Belivar each strung up a hammock in the same room, and they slept that night side by side. In the morning they awoke, they returned to the big rock that they had left on the side of the road, probably now quite

hung over, and embraced again. Then each rode off in their separate directions, never to meet again. If the world was a better place, that would have been the end of it. The fighting and the killing would have stopped there at Santa Ana. But unfortunately, the world is not a better place. And when we return to our story, it will sadly turn out that the armistice would not even last its prescribed six months. Talking their way to independence was never going to work. If the Americans wanted to be free, they were going to have to decide the issue on the battlefield. But the climactic battle of Cotabobo is going to have to wait because, as I said, our production schedule is getting a little dicey for the rest of 2016. And what that means right now is that there is not going to be a show next week.

And then when I come back in two weeks, it's still going to be for a shorter supplemental episode that I still think you're going to find thoroughly entertaining because it's going to be all about the highly colorful con artist slash revolutionary Gregor McGregor. And then after that, though, I'm going to take another week off. So it's going to be a while before we get back on track to the main story. But in the meantime, I will be finishing the transcript of the book. But also, remember, I will be producing five, count them five. new supplementals for the history of Rome that will be available when the new fundraiser launches at the end of this month. So I do hope that you are looking forward to all of that when it's done. And until then, I will see you in two weeks for the life and times of Gregor McGregor.