“For years I had believed — and people like Gual and Caro and Vargas had encouraged me to believe — that when I landed the people would flock to my colours. No one came now. I thought they had been threatened by the authorities, and I thought I should deal with the situation in a Spanish or Venezuelan way. That side of my character took over. I felt that, having appeared with such a naval force, I should speak very loudly. I issued a proclamation. I said that Spanish rule had ceased, that all officials should come forward and declare their loyalty to me or suffer the consequences, and that all able-bodied men should enrol under my colours. It was a wrong thing to do. No one came forward, and my authority with my own men was further undermined. I sent out small parties to the villages round about to reassure the people. I found the Spaniards had forestalled me. They knew how to fight this war. For weeks the priests had been preaching against me. Everyone who helped me was to be excommunicated. The bishop of Mérida had declared me a heretic.
“For the next ten days the Spaniards who had withdrawn from Coro shadowed us, fifteen hundred of them to four hundred of us. No question of engaging them, no question of making a march over the hills to Caracas. The strain began to tell on our volunteers. Their discipline began to break. One day there was an incident between the two groups, the French and the Americans. Three more men wounded, a cook killed. This greatly alarmed me. I thought we should make our way back to the coast. We had no carts, of course, for the wounded and the sick, or horses or mules. We had to use litters, changing the carriers every half hour or so. It slowed us up. I felt I had walked into a Spanish trap. I felt that at any moment the Spaniards might fall on us. I drove the litter-bearers hard. At one stage I threatened to shoot some of them with my own hand. They haven’t forgiven me. I am not staying in Government House, and now they shout abuse at me in the streets.
“Late one night we re-embarked’. I didn’t know what to do. I had waited so many years for this moment. I wrote to the British governor of Jamaica for help. It was foolish. Of course he couldn’t send troops to me. I waited six weeks to hear that, our supplies running out, food very scarce, people getting sick and mutinous. And then a message came from Admiral Cochrane, telling me he couldn’t help any more. London had forbidden it. His help to me was to be limited to protection from a naval force of the enemy, to prevent enemy succours being landed, and to secure my re-embarkation. In short, it was finished. I had thought of Cochrane as an avaricious man, easy therefore to handle. Now the style of his letter, so precise and pointed, like instructions on the battlefield, spoke to me of the capacity that had made him an admiral, and of a power that I had never possessed.
“This was the mood in which, after beating eastwards against the wind for five weeks, that wind like the wind of my misfortune, I returned with my ragged force to Trinidad, and on the very day of my return had to show Hislop a good face, and then, like a man still only a step from power, had to sit in the Council while the contraband traders debated my future.
“Cochrane shows me honour still, in a way. He has arranged for me to stay in the house of Lieutenant Briarly, RN. Briarly is so far correct. He lives in greater style than Hislop, but as the leading Navy man here he does run something like a parallel government. He enforces the Navigation Acts here. His command is only a dismasted hulk in the harbour, but when he is aboard that he is outside Hislop’s jurisdiction. Such is the power of this Navy. The Navigation Acts have to do with trade. This means that Briarly is a kind of customs officer. This means that he splits with the contraband traders and the ship’s captains and offers protection to others. He is making a fortune. He knows to the last shilling how much he is worth, and I have already been made to know it too. I know that this Port of Spain house where I am staying is worth ten thousand dollars (and he keeps on saying he can sell it any day), and I know that in addition he has a large country estate worth fifteen thousand pounds, with eleven mules and thirty-three Negroes. He is forever writing down the names of these thirty-three on little scraps of paper, and putting numbers next to them, as though he wants to count his Negroes and add up their value all the time.
“The Spaniards and Venezuelans here, the traders and the peons, still hiss me in the street. They did it the morning I arrived. I thought they would have stopped by now. They do it in a way that always takes me by surprise. They don’t look at me, so when the sharp hissing sound starts I can’t tell where it’s coming from. It is a terrible sound. It would cut through a military band.
“A defeated man has to put up with criticism, and I thought at first that they were mocking me because I had failed. Then I thought it might have been because of the American malcontents from the Leander, who make endless scenes in the streets and are dunning me for money I don’t have. Terrible stories have been spread, too, about our retreat to the coast and my threatening of the litter-bearers. Then I thought they were hissing me simply for being alive, after so many men had died. I know now that almost on the day we left for Coro the Venezuelan agents here began to spread the story of the executions at Puerto Cabello, the hanging and the burning of the men in white gowns in A white caps, the twenty-five-pound chains for the living, with the beds of stone and pillows of brick. And then I thought it was quite simple. I felt that I had let them down because I had failed. I thought that because I had failed I had exposed them as South Americans to ridicule.
“This was so wrong. It is vanity on my part to think like that. I am assuming that these people look on me as their liberator, look to me to restore their dignity. I am assuming they look on me as I look on myself and have been looking on myself these past twenty years. The opposite is true. The peons here look on me as a heretic and traitor. They are happy that I have been, defeated and the men from the Leander are in rags. The Venezuelan agents have taken good care to circulate the bishop of Mérida’s proclamation against me. I am an atheist, a monster, an enemy of religion, leading a gang of scoundrels from the United States and the islands against my country.
“I have never these past twenty years, in the United States and England and Europe, had to defend myself against that charge, and I don’t know how to do so here. I don’t know how my life has been so twisted that this distorted picture of my character can be thrown at me. This has caused me much distress, Sally, as much distress as the defeat and the humiliation and the idleness I have to endure here. I begin to feel, not only very far away, but also that I am losing touch with things.
“I don’t know how to say to the peons here, what the world knows, that since I left the Spanish service I have held no job and had no idea other than that of South American independence. That is how I define myself in the will I made just before I left London. You will remember I say there that I have known no people anywhere else so worthy of a wise and just liberty. What means do I have of making them understand that here? The six thousand books you look after in Grafton Street have been left, in that same will, to the University of Caracas when freedom comes, and I leave the books in memory of the literary and Christian values the university taught me. My sons were both baptized before I set foot on my native land, and when we were coming south in the Leander I never stayed on deck when on Sundays Captain Lewis read prayers. The Spaniards have taken all the accidental things in my life, the wild things I said in the United States and Russia when I first felt myself a free man, and the fact that I now need all the volunteers I can get, the Spaniards have taken these accidental things and created a picture of me that I do not recognize. I know that I have followed a straight path, and I am very clear in my own mind about what I want. But I have no means of making myself clear to these people. And, worse, everything I do now confirms their picture. I have written to London for four thousand men. Rouvray has gone with the request. That, too, will add to this picture of the traitor and atheist.