General Miranda's Wars: Turmoil and Revolt in Spanish America, 1750-1816

By Denis Smith

Napoleon called him “a Quixote who was not mad... a man who has a sacred fire in his soul.” President John Adams said his plan to liberate Spanish America was “as visionary as an excursion to the moon in a cart drawn by geese.”
For 30 years the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda plotted to free Spain’s colonies in the New World. Miranda lived a fabled life as an adventurer and mercenary soldier, supported by powerful patrons in England, France, the United States, and Russia. He was paid and protected by William Pitt of Britain and Catherine the Great of Russia, fought for France as a revolutionary general, was tried for treason in France, attempted to invade New Spain in 1806 with two hundred raw recruits, and for a few months in 1812 was the first dictator of an independent Venezuela. Betrayed by his deputy Simón Bolívar, Miranda was taken prisoner and died in a Spanish dungeon as Bolívar renewed his war for independence.
In this work of creative nonfiction, award-winning Canadian author Denis Smith tells a compelling story of intrigue and misadventure, posing questions about empire, diplomacy and the quest for freedom which continue to resonate today.
"I enjoyed General Miranda's Wars immensely. The perfect book for me at this moment. Of course I knew the British characters and their dilemma over Spain's colonies, particularly after 1808 when Spain became its major ally against Napoleon, but I had no idea of the extent of Miranda's attempted influence and manipulation over such a long time and all his other European adventures. He certainly was one of the great adventurers in an age of them and you tell the story very well. The light fictional device is brilliant in holding together the great number of documents from many sources and the inevitable gaps in them. Being so tied to the evidence, the device would never have occurred to me. I can't imagine that there could be a better evocation of Miranda."
--Dr. Neville Thompson, Author of "Canada and the End of the Imperial Dream" Oxford University Press

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bev Editions
• Release date: Jul 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781927789124

Denis Smith

Bleeding Hearts... Bleeding Country: Canada and the Quebec Crisis (1971) Gentle Patriot: A political biography of Walter Gordon (1973) Diplomacy of Fear: Canada and the Cold War 1941-1948 (1988) Rogue Tory: The Life and Legend of John G. Diefenbaker (1995) The Prisoners of Cabrera: Napoleon’s Forgotten Soldiers 1809-1814 (2001) Ignatieff’s World (2006) Ignatieff’s World Updated: Iggy goes to Ottawa (2009)

Book preview

General Miranda’s Wars

Turmoil and Revolt in Spanish America, 1750-1816

By Denis Smith

ISBN: 978-1-927789-12-4

Foreground: Portrait of General Francisco de Miranda by Martin Tovar y Tovar

Background: Francisco de Miranda's Return to Venezuela by Johann Moritz Rugendas

Copyright 2013 Denis Smith

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Denis Smith is the author of seven previous books, winner of the University of British Columbia Medal for Canadian biography (twice), the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize (twice), and a recipient of the Spanish Orden del Mérito Civil for his book The Prisoners of Cabrera: Napoleon’s Forgotten Soldiers, 1809-1814. He is a retired professor of politics, editor and university administrator who lives in Ottawa, Canada.

A short guide for the reader

What is fact and what is fiction in this tale? How much of the testimony, the correspondence, the eyewitness accounts, comes from the historical record? Is this a novel or a biography?

To ease your way, here are some signposts. The narrator, Peter Turnbull, was a real person, as were all the other participants. The only facts I can swear to about Turnbull are that he discovered Francisco de Miranda imprisoned in Cádiz in November 1814, and that he was the son of John Turnbull, Miranda’s loyal patron over the quarter-century from 1785 to 1810. Turnbull’s narrative is imagined, but the story he tells is as close to truth as I can divine it.

As far as I know, there is no account of any testimony delivered by Francisco de Miranda to Peter Turnbull in the cells of La Carraca in 1815-16. But what he says here is closely based on Miranda’s reports in his own immense collection of diaries and papers, or elsewhere in the record. Miranda’s final reflections are my imagined reconstruction of what he really told a prominent Venezuelan who visited him while he was a prisoner in Morro Castle, Puerto Rico, in 1813.

All the letters, documents and press reports quoted in the text are authentic.

At times Miranda either had no opportunity or no desire to confide in his diaries and letters. The story for these periods relies on the published recollections of other participants in the events.

So here is the tale: creative non-fiction, novelistic history, what-you-will. A true story.

Table of Contents

I Don Giovanni

II A Bomb Ready Charged

III A Man of Republican Virtue

IV Mr. Pitt’s Man

V An Excursion to the Moon in a Cart Drawn by Geese

VI Egmont

Author’s Note

I Don Giovanni

1

Turnbull! What a miracle to see you, the old man exclaimed as I entered his cell. I had no hope. No one in London wants to know me anymore. But I rejoiced at your letter last week, saying you were here in Cádiz.

He rose from his bed and embraced me. His eyes filled with tears.

My letters – my appeals – to Vansittart, to Wellington, to Wellesley, to your father, were never answered. But here you are! What news do you bring? Have you come to release me? Will I be free at last?

I replied that I could comfort him only with my presence. I had no influence with the prison governor or the Spanish ministry.

He sagged to the bed, and sighed.

But you must tell me everything, I urged, so that I can let London know what has happened since Spain imprisoned you all those months ago. Then, perhaps, we can use our good offices to help you.

Yes, you must do that! You know as well as I do that Britain rules Spain today. Downing Street could arrange my release at the snap of a finger! Once the order is given, I could be at home with my family in London within a week. Please make that happen.

He told me a little about his daily life in La Carraca prison, and showed me the precious volumes he kept on his bookshelf. He was distraught. I saw that he needed time to compose himself, as I needed time to consult my father about what to do next. He embraced me again, and I left him, promising to return as soon as possible to hear his tale and bring him news of my efforts to free him.

2

Let me introduce myself: my name is Peter Turnbull, and I can tell you this tale because I grew up in Gibraltar. My father, John Turnbull, a merchant banker trading out of London and Gibraltar, took our family from London to the Rock in 1775. I was ten years old, and thrilled by our move to this imperial fortress at the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, clinging like a great barnacle to the southern edge of Europe. We lived above the shop in a handsome row house on Gunners Lane, just up the hill from the parade square. From there, my schoolmates and I explored every street and alleyway from the bustling port to the bare rock looming over us where, after 1779, military tunnels were cut through the limestone and the black snouts of six-pounders appeared out of blast holes high along the precipitous north face.

For four years, from 1779 to 1783, we were at war, threatened by Spanish and French troops advancing from San Roque to the north, saved from the enemy only by the deadly British cannon fire aimed downwards on their heads. During the great Siege, those booming guns meant Gibraltar was secure. The harbour was crowded with fighting ships of the Royal Navy, redcoats were everywhere, and in town there was pride and exhilaration. From Gibraltar, our fleet commanded the Mediterranean.

For me and my young friends, the siege was a marvelous adventure. My fascination with war and diplomacy grew out of it, though perhaps my interests were awakened even earlier, when Spain and Britain were still at peace.

Before the war, my father travelled often in Spain, doing business in Algeciras, Cádiz and Seville. He had a talent for companionship, and made many Spanish friends. When visitors arrived in Gibraltar, he wanted to meet them and often invited them to our home.

Above all, I remembered one unusual traveller who arrived in 1777. His name was Francisco de Miranda. I did not know then that he would occupy so much of my life. As a young Spanish soldier – a captain – he came to Gibraltar from Cádiz to examine British fortifications and study British military policy. He was in his late twenties, a charming and handsome man in his officer’s blue waistcoat, white breeches and shining leather knee boots. He had a flattering eye for the prettiest ladies on the Rock. Spanish military officers were uncommon in Gibraltar, and Miranda was the only one I can recall from those years. My father accompanied him about the town, and encouraged his admiring interest in British politics and institutions.

Francisco de Miranda, my father told me, was a man of vision who would make his mark in the world: You should remember him: he will be a famous soldier or he will die bravely on the barricades!

Miranda was a Creole from Caracas in Spanish America, educated in European languages, philosophy and military science, a man of boundless energy and ambition. He was inspired by all the blossoming possibilities of Europe’s reawakening.

After their first encounter, my father visited Miranda in Cádiz, and supplied the Spaniard with English books on many subjects. But when war came, their communication ceased, and when Spanish soldiers advanced towards Gibraltar across the isthmus, we wondered whether he might be among them, leading his troops as they were blasted to pieces under the devastating cannon fire from the heights. This possibility struck me, at the age of fourteen, as a cruel joke of fate.

Before the war ended in 1783, our family returned to London. Later that year, at the trading house of Turnbull, Forbes & Company, my father received a letter from Miranda, mailed from Philadelphia in the newly independent United States of America. Fortunately, he had never served in the armies decimated at the siege of Gibraltar; instead, he had been sent to the Americas, where he fought successfully against Britain in Florida and the West Indies. He was now a colonel in the Spanish army, but for reasons unexplained, he had defected to America and was on his way to England. He was eager to renew his acquaintance.

When Miranda arrived in London in January 1785, I went with my father to meet him at his hotel in Pall Mall. He greeted us heartily and plunged into an account of his recent experiences – and his astounding dreams – in his lightly accented phrases. But he remained in London for only a few months and then, supported by a loan from my father’s firm, he departed on his Grand Tour of Europe with a North American friend.

An objective witness would have called Miranda a military deserter in flight from his pursuers, though he insisted that he was not. He told us that Madrid would someday recognize his record and honour his accomplishments. For my father, Miranda offered an exotic personal friendship and, it seemed, some obscure promise of services to Turnbull, Forbes & Company which I could not yet understand. For me he was simply an object of romantic fascination, an adventurer.

Miranda spent the next four years in Europe, writing to my father from time to time with accounts of his travels and further requests for funds. I spent those years reading ancient history at Oxford. In July 1789, as France fell into revolution, we both returned to London. I joined Turnbull, Forbes & Company as an apprentice banker and Miranda committed himself to his life as a conspirator and revolutionary.

How he conducted that life was revealed to me in La Carraca prison when he encouraged me to record his extraordinary tale and when, as a student of history and my own times, I was compelled to test the truth of his account from sources beyond its walls. It may seem to you that the man became an obsession for me. I could do nothing to free him. London and Madrid remained indifferent to all our appeals for mercy. What I did instead was to offer him the companionship of a friend. I returned often to the cells of La Carraca, and as the months passed he told me how he had become Spain’s neglected prisoner rather than the father of Venezuelan independence, a role claimed instead by his betrayer Simón Bolívar. If I was able, in the end, to offer him any rescue and vindication, they can be found in these pages.

3

Francisco de Miranda y Rodríguez was born in Caracas, in the Vice-Royalty of New Granada, in 1750, or 1754, or 1756. (The baptismal record confirms his date of birth as March 28, 1750.) The confusion, which came later, arose because the records of his younger brothers were consulted carelessly by those in search of his origins as he became notorious. And because Francisco, as he grew older, chose to be younger than he was.

The Miranda family – of immemorial nobility, as they said – could be traced to Soria, in Old Castile. Francisco’s father, Sebastián de Miranda y Ravelo, arrived in Caracas from the Canary Islands in the 1740s, and soon after married Francisca Antonia Rodríguez Espinosa. She bore him three daughters and four sons. Sebastián was a merchant dealer in fruits and linens and a landholder too; but as neither a peninsular Spaniard nor a Creole born in the colony, he was regarded with condescension by the local colonial aristocracy. Nevertheless he prospered in Caracas, where émigrés from the Canaries and their descendants were the largest part of the population.

In 1762 Sebastián purchased his ample house near the cathedral of Caracas for five thousand pesos. In 1764 the military governor of the province appointed him captain of a militia company recruited locally among merchants from the Canary Islands. Five years later, on his retirement as captain, the governor granted him the privilege of continuing to wear his uniform. The Creole council of Caracas objected and warned him of imprisonment, but Miranda would not let the matter rest. He had been insulted. He protested that he was of pure peninsular lineage, demanding his rights both of service and heritage in a colonial society frozen and inhibited by infinite gradations of caste, race and clan. Both his record and his ancestry made him at least the equal of the self-righteous town councillors of Caracas. They had no just reason to deny him his uniform.

The military governor referred the dispute to the King of Spain, who decreed in 1770 that the city council had no control over military appointments, and that Creoles had no exclusive right to local public office and its benefits. King Charles III confirmed Sebastián de Miranda’s retirement with enjoyment of all distinctions, exemptions, privileges, and military prerogatives of his rank as well as permission to carry a baton and wear the uniform of a retired captain of the new battalion of militia of this province. Without any cause for complaint against him, I command that perpetual silence be observed with respect to the inquiry concerning his quality and origin. Further, I threaten dismissal and other severe penalties for any soldier or member of the council of Caracas who censures Miranda in speech or writing or who does not treat him in the same respectful manner he previously received.

Sebastián de Miranda’s vindication pleased him, but the dispute and its settlement were unnerving. They caused friction in Caracas and isolated the immigrant’s family from many of his neighbours. Forty-five years later, in his prison cell, Francisco de Miranda recalled his father’s troubled feelings (and his own) from that affair. His resentment had lasted through the decades.

I was young and relatively fortunate, Miranda told me. But I was beginning to see that we were all victims of the colonial regime, hemmed in, blinkered, endlessly restricted, forced against one another in petty dispute. It was difficult to recognize the real source of our frustrations.

His father’s troubles came as Francisco was reaching maturity, and they sharpened his desire to escape, to leave Caracas for the greater world. While Sebastián de Miranda suffered the restrictions of colonial life, the young Miranda heard murmurs of the great European awakening, encouraged by the circulation of forbidden books even in the torpid society of Caracas. Francisco longed to learn more than Spanish America would permit him: in Caracas, he was destined to remain half educated and half free. The royal edict suggested that fairness and justice and opportunity could be found more easily at the centre of empire than on its fringe.

Miranda’s father understood the young man’s dissatisfaction and offered his eldest son an income to travel and make his life in Spain. They agreed that Francisco should educate himself there for entry into the Spanish army as an officer. Who could say what doors that journey might open?

His course was set. He would go to Spain to prove himself a free man and a worthy son.

In January, 1771, at the age of twenty, Francisco de Miranda formally notified the military governor and the vicar general of the cathedral of Caracas that he wished to serve the King of Spain according to my inclinations and talents. The young Miranda swore to his own good behaviour and his legitimate lineage and drew attention to the King’s decree in support of his father’s honour. He sought permission to travel to Spain in one of the ships then docked in La Guaira harbour.

Permission was granted, and three weeks later, ambitious, ripe for adventure, chest held high and chin thrust forward as he peered beyond the distant horizon, Francisco de Miranda took passage on the Swedish frigate Prince Frederick, outward bound for Puerto Rico and Spain.

4

The place of Francisco de Miranda’s final imprisonment was the place where his hopes first took wing.

The ancient city of Cádiz was Spain’s gateway to the New World, home to the Spanish trading fleet, a rich and cosmopolitan community. On March 1, 1771 Francisco rose before dawn to stand on deck in the fresh morning air as the Prince Frederick sailed into the Bay of Cádiz, passing the slim peninsula of the city to reach its bustling harbour. He stepped ashore carrying generous letters of introduction and credit arranged by his father.

His heart quickened. I am free! he exulted, I am free! I can do whatever I wish!

He gathered his belongings and hurried to make his introduction to a local trader, who welcomed him into his home and promised to honour a letter of credit from his father for the substantial sum of two thousand pesos.

The young Miranda’s destination was Madrid, but before departing for the capital he indulged himself and savoured his new life. For a few days he explored the streets of Cádiz, absorbed all he saw, drank generously in the taverns, made new friends, visited the booksellers, tasted the brothels, and bought an elegant wardrobe.

He kept accounts in his notebooks. Four yards of blue cloth for a cloak, 288 pesos; gold braid, 215 pesos; a pair of silk stockings, 64 pesos; a silk handkerchief, 27 pesos; 2 black hats, 108 pesos; a silk umbrella, 88 pesos; 4 pairs of shoes, 88 pesos; and a hair net, 10 pesos.

Miranda’s host quickly sold a shipment of Venezuelan cacao that his father had sent with him in the hold of the Prince Frederick, adding a hundred and fifteen pesos to his treasury; and at mid-month he crossed the Bay of Cádiz to Puerto de Santa María to take the regular stagecoach to Madrid.

He made the long journey north at a comfortable pace. There were pauses in Jerez de la Frontera, Córdoba, and Andújar (time enough there, he recalled, to bed a complacent chambermaid), delay in the snowy pass through the mountains of the Sierra Morena, escape from winter into the uplands, and a leisurely passage across the open plains of La Mancha to Madrid.

The young man took rooms and settled in. He explored the capital and its province and dedicated himself to the study of French, English and mathematics with private tutors. All this, he knew, would prepare him for a military career. He bought more clothes, an atlas, a globe, a celestial sphere, a second flute, and books – always books – as well as sturdy cedar cases to store both books and instruments. For eighteen months he educated himself. He read endlessly: the ancients again, as he had in college at Caracas, and the forbidden moderns Rousseau, Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and more.

The newcomer also gathered legal documents from the royal archives testifying to the purity of blood and honorable distinction of his father’s family in civic, military and ecclesiastical offices in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and New Spain. These things could be bought (and embellished to order) at substantial cost. Even St. Thomas Aquinas made an appearance in the record as a distant relative. Miranda’s illuminated genealogy, of one hundred and forty folio pages, included descriptions of the family coat of arms and the polished steel helmets worn into battle by his (reputedly) famed ancestors.

The Madrid notary who received these impressive records swore to the many honours, favours, privileges and exemptions granted to the Miranda family, testifying above all that Don Sebastián de Miranda had armed and supplied an entire militia company in Caracas at his own expense with brilliance, splendour and skill (an achievement, the notary emphasized, already confirmed in a rare royal decree).

The notary’s summary testament was sworn and signed by Francisco de Miranda in November 1772. For the official record, he was no ordinary Canarian Creole from the Spanish Main, a colonial unworthy of distinction. Spain would have to take note.

Armed with his certificates, his new learning, his father’s money, and his own self-confidence, in January 1773 Francisco de Miranda negotiated and purchased a captaincy in the Princess Regiment of the infantry of Spain at a price of 8,500 reales. He was sent for garrison duty with his new regiment to the distant outpost of Melilla on the North African coast, where he expected to rise quickly in the officers’ corps.

But Melilla was insufferably dull. The imperial enclave was an isolated trap where an officer’s duties were menial, repetitive, tiresome. Members of the garrison were imprisoned behind its walls, unable to make contact with the community within their view. Officers tested each other’s nerves, challenging and insulting one another in their boredom.

After a long year in the colony, the young soldier requested transfer to Spanish America. He did not ask himself whether his petition might be impertinent or insubordinate. It was an act of bravado. He put himself forward for promotion and transfer, despite his youth and short service, "more