“I got to know William Wilberforce when I went back to England from Trinidad. I admired him greatly. I thought of him as a philanthropist, a protector of the oppressed. I knew he wanted to talk to me about Negro slavery, but the first time I dined with him at Kensington we quickly got on to the subject of the Inquisition, and that led to a wide discussion about South American liberty. I felt I had to get him to understand the humiliations someone like my father had had to live with. And someone like poor Manuel Gual whom we’ve been talking about — after thirty-three years of service, only a captain in the Veteran Battalion, poor Gual, because higher ranks were reserved for Spaniards from Spain. About the constant, humiliating obedience in all matters required from us. Obedience to the Church, obedience to the king and his officials, the humiliation in which we felt we walked. I had to get Wilberforce to understand those things — they are not easy things to explain — and I felt that to go into the Negro question with him would have been to waste his interest in us. It would also have added an element of confusion to what I was telling him about South America. I knew how important Negro emancipation was to Wilberforce, and I made it clear that I accepted his views without question. But I felt he was talking about other places. I felt I was dealing with another matter altogether. I wasn’t the only one to think like that. You will know how badly Hislop wanted to leave Trinidad and serve the South American cause.
“And then many months later, when I remembered, I wondered what that very fine man Wilberforce would have thought if he had known that after the siege of Pensacola I had in a matter-of-fact way bought three Negroes as a speculation, and that just a few years later I had had to leave the Spanish service because I had tried to smuggle two boatloads of Negroes from Jamaica to Cuba.”
“There was that story,” Level says.
“It was true. But it isn’t a fraction of the truth about me. It occurred at the very beginning, thirty years ago. I was starting out. That was the world I found. There was a whole life after that. That later life was what I was responsible for. I didn’t feel I had defrauded Wilberforce. Though again, when I took Bolívar and the others to meet him, and he was so gracious, saying how fortunate he was to be in London just then, I wonder what he would have thought if he had known that my fear of Spanish jails and the Inquisition — and a lot of the politics I talked to him about — had begun with that smuggling incident. I would have had to do ten years in Oran in North Africa, if I hadn’t deserted.
“For many years after I deserted I visited jails wherever I went. It’s one of the things travellers in Europe do. But I was also testing myself. The jail at Copenhagen was the worst. Some of the prisoners were chained. Some of them were only debtors. The excrement wasn’t removed from the latrine for months. I was so frightened by that I wrote to the authorities about it. And now I’m here. So I suppose that score’s been settled all round.”
Level says, “Hislop and I talked a lot about your time in Trinidad. I myself felt when I was there that I was in Venezuela. Didn’t you feel at all when you were there that you had been given a glimpse of what lay on the other side of the Gulf?”
“Again, I knew it and didn’t know it. There were two moments when I knew, very clearly. The first was on the day I arrived, after Puerto Cabello and the Bacchus and the Bee. My homecoming, you might say. I heard some Negroes talking in the grounds outside in an African language, and I went to the window. We were all surprised, all momentarily lost. It was in the middle of the day, but it was raining and dark. The Negroes looked at me as though they had seen a ghost — my white hair and long pigtail. I saw it clearly in their eyes. I felt very far away from the world. The second moment came about two or three months after I had come back from the Coro venture. A man called Downie and a lady called Miss McLurie and some others took me on a little tour of the island. One of the places we went to was an Indian reserve. There were a few places like that where the Spaniards had settled the remnants of the Indian people. Little missions, clearings in the forest, with the Indians in carat-palm huts and the priest in a little wooden house, and the church sometimes of adobe. All very rough and depressing. The Indians had become alcoholic. Miss McLurie and Downie and the other English people in the party became very angry on my behalf when we were in this mission. They thought the Spanish priest was a scoundrel, using the Indians as very cheap labour, getting them to cut down cedar trees and saw up the timber, and making an extra profit out of them by selling them rum. They wanted me to make a scene. They wanted me to abuse the priest. I thought it was strange, their concern, and then I realized that they were treating the Indians as my own people. I had a glimpse of the place as from a distance and I felt I had trapped myself there and would never leave. But then I put it out of my head.”
“You had a bad time in Trinidad. I know. I talked to people. It could have ended for you there. People in that little place were so full of their own hatreds they hardly had time for you. If you had stayed for another year or so you might have lost the few protectors you did have. The amazing thing is that, having had the luck to get away, you so quickly decided to risk it all again and come back. I don’t know what Bolívar told you about the state of the country. I don’t think he could have told you that the royalists held both the east and the west.”
“He seemed to be using my own words. He made me feel that what I had been prophesying had come true. The trouble I had, to get permission to leave England! It was almost as hard as leaving Venezuela the first time. It was much harder than leaving Trinidad. The ministers didn’t want it. They didn’t want their Spanish allies in Cadiz to think that they were encouraging the break-up of the Spanish empire. In the end we compromised. I would leave England on a warship and they somehow wouldn’t notice. But they insisted that for appearances’ sake Bolívar and I should travel on different ships. So Bolívar went ahead with my papers. I tell you this so you would understand I had complete faith in him and his family. I had had my papers beautifully bound the previous year by Dulau. Sixty-three volumes in three new boxes, with a brass plate with my initials on each box.”
“If you had known that at the end the whole country was going to be against you, would you have come out?”
“After thirty years I couldn’t have stayed away. I had to see it through to the end. Even to that moment you talk about. I had to see all my ideas turned inside out, as it were. That became a kind of release, in fact, right at the end. For years I used to tell people that if I could be set down on the Venezuelan coast with two hundred men, or fewer, the whole country would come over to my flag of liberty. It didn’t happen like that to me. It happened to the other man, the rough naval officer the royalist authorities sent against me. He was blessed with luck. He landed with a hundred and twenty sailors and everybody began to go over to him. In twelve weeks he overwhelmed us. He could do nothing wrong. The Indians went over to him. The mulattoes, the pardos, the dark people, were with him. The mulattoes fought like demons at Valencia. Even when the white people surrendered they fought on. I had five thousand men. The mulattoes fought on even when there were only five hundred of them. For them, as you say, the question of the revolution was: ‘Who is going to rule over us?’ And they simply didn’t want to be ruled by the people on my side. I had to make two assaults on Valencia. Eight hundred people were killed in that little siege, and fifteen hundred people were wounded. I remembered, too late, what Hislop had told me about the free people of colour on the other side of the Gulf — and I had never begun to think that that might have anything to do with me.