The admiral was livid. José Prudencio Padilla, commander of the Gran Colombian fleet, read the surrender demand from his rival Spanish commander and glared at the officer who had delivered it. The rage in Padilla’s eyes told the messenger that, white flag or not, he would be lucky to survive the next few minutes. Frigate Lieutenant Pablo Llánez wisely kept his mouth shut. Padilla’s assembled staff officers did likewise. Padilla considered shredding the document and shooting the messenger. Instead, he sat down at a small table and began to write.
The Spanish commander who so enraged Padilla, Captain Ángel Laborde y Navarro, had written a message both saccharine and condescending. It concluded with an offer to transport the admiral and his men to territory controlled by Gran Colombia, provided he capitulate and turn over all his vessels and arms. Otherwise, Laborde would come for him. In his reply the admiral told the captain not to bother, for Padilla would come for Laborde. On July 24, 1823, the opposing commanders and their fleets did meet in a brackish strait leading to Lake Maracaibo in what today is the Republic of Venezuela.
Padilla may have assumed the condescending tone in Laborde’s demand stemmed at least in part from the captain’s personal disdain for the admiral. Padilla, after all, was not an Iberian Spaniard, nor even a Creole. Padilla was a pardo, a mulatto of Creole and African ancestry.
in La Guajira, a coastal department in the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Granada, José Prudencio Padilla was the son of Andrés Padilla, a humble boatwright, and wife Lucía, a woman of African descent. At age 14 José went to sea with the Spanish navy, rising from cabin boy to boatswain. Captured by the British at the Oct. 21, 1805, Battle of Trafalgar, Bolívar’s Spanish American wars of independence. The latter’s vocal opposition to slavery in the emergent republics was doubtless a factor in Padilla’s decision.
