with the officers of the troops, met in the house of Dona Manuela
Canizaries, the Madame Roland of Ecuador, and assigned to each the role
which he was to play in the _coup d'etat_. The officers went to the
barracks, led out the troops, and took possession of the government
buildings in the name of the revolutionist committee. The president and
those Spanish officials who proved recalcitrant were imprisoned, a
governing junta of nine with Juan Montufar as chief was appointed, and
an open cabildo summoned which confirmed these acts. The junta notified
the viceroys of Bogota and Lima that it had assumed the government, and
sent messengers to the provincial capitals demanding that they expel
their Spanish authorities, adhere to the new order of things, and
recognise the supremacy of the Quito junta. But the movement met with no
favourable response from the rest of the presidency. The governors of
Popayan, Cuenca, and Guayaquil immediately began to enlist troops to
defend themselves against an attack from Quito. The junta prepared for
war, but though plenty of ambitious young Creoles volunteered as
officers there were not firearms enough to go around. At last an
expedition set off to the north against Pasto and Popayan only to be
easily defeated by the hasty levies the Spanish authorities had made
among the sturdy Indians of those regions. Frightened by this defeat and
their hopeless isolation, the junta resigned under promise of amnesty
and in October Castilla returned to Quito and resumed the reins of
government. But his position was insecure, and rumors of a fresh
conspiracy soon drove him to repressive measures and the imprisonment of
leading Creoles. The feeling grew bitter and in August, 1810, a
desperate effort was made by the Creoles to get possession of the
barracks. Its failure was followed by a frightful massacre in which many
of the most popular men in the place were murdered.
Meanwhile, the supreme junta at Seville, anxious to pacify the
revolutionary disorders, had commissioned Carlos Montufar, a son of the
chief of the fallen Quito junta who then happened to be in Spain, to go
to Ecuador and reconcile the factions. Under his advice Castilla
resigned to a new junta the direction of affairs, taking, however, the
position of its chief member, and sent away his troops. In reality the
younger Montufar sympathised with his brother Creoles; the universal
indignation at the massacre of 1810 pushed him on to vengeance;
Spaniards travelling through the country were waylaid and assassinated;
and by the time Molina, appointed by the Spanish government in
Castilla's place, had reached Cuenca on his way north to Quito, the old
governor had again been deposed and imprisoned and open war existed
between Arredondo, the Spaniard commanding the troops who had retired
from Quito in accordance with the compromise, and the junta in the
latter city. The year 1811 passed without any material change in the
situation. The Spanish generals controlled Guayaquil and Cuenca in the
south and Pasto and Popayan in the north, practically isolating the
revolutionary government at Quito. As the troops of both sides became
better trained the war took on a more determined and cruel character.
Royalists and revolutionists both raised recruits among the sturdy
mountain Indians and half-breeds. In technical knowledge of their
profession the Spanish officers were superior to the revolutionary
leaders and could procure arms more readily. Their armies were usually
better disciplined and more efficient, although more liable to depletion
by desertion.
In this state of perpetual war, government rapidly became exclusively
military. On the surface the contest seemed only a struggle between two
sets of independent chiefs, in whose mouths "liberty" and "loyalty" were
mere catch-words, and who continually quarrelled among themselves even
when they nominally belonged to the same side. Early in 1812 Montufar
was overthrown by another Creole chief in Quito who thereupon undertook
an expedition against the Spanish general at Cuenca. But sedition among
the patriot troops gave an easy victory to the latter, and the Spaniards
took the offensive. Marching toward Quito, they dispersed the patriot
army at Mocha, and entered the capital in triumph.
Montes, the Spanish general who now became ruler of the presidency, was
a wise and moderate man, and spared no pains to conciliate. He soon
succeeded in so completely consolidating his power that during nine
years Quito and most of the presidency remained quietly submissive, and
became one of the centres whence Spanish expeditions went out against
the parts of the continent which still remained in revolution. An able
general, Samano by name, carried the successes of the Spanish arms to
the north, and although the patriots of Colombia obtained some temporary
advantages in the winter of 1814-15, they never penetrated south of
Pasto. In 1816 the tide again turned with the arrival of eleven thousand
Spanish veterans in the north of Colombia. The patriots were soon
everywhere defeated, Bogota itself taken, and a remnant of
revolutionists who attempted the invasion of Popayan and Pasto were
overwhelmed by Samano in 1816 at the battle of Tambo. The patriot cause
was at its lowest ebb in all South America. Resistance ceased in
Colombia; only a few scattered bands kept up a desultory warfare in
Venezuela; Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia were quiet; Spanish authority had
been re-established in Chile; Uruguay had fallen into the hands of the
Portuguese king; and Spanish armies were invading the Argentine, the
last refuge of the revolution.
San Martin's thunderbolt descent upon Chile and his victory at Chacabuco
changed the aspect of affairs. A fleet was improvised at Valparaiso
which obtained command of the Pacific coast, cutting off the Spaniards
in Ecuador from receiving supplies except overland from the Caribbean
ports. Bolivar took new heart for his tedious task of arousing the north
and driving the Spaniards from Venezuela and New Granada. In 1819 he
climbed the east side of the Andes to the neighbourhood of Bogota and by
defeating the Spanish army at Boyaca, freed most of present Colombia,
and even in Quito the patriots renewed their revolutionary plotting.
Meanwhile San Martin had completed the expulsion of the Spaniards from
Chile, and in 1820 he transported an army by sea to the neighbourhood of
Lima itself, opening communications with the anti-Spanish party all
along the coast. On the 9th of October, 1820, a successful revolution
broke out at Guayaquil, and little time was lost in sending an army to
the plateau. The Spaniards defeated it, but with Bolivar threatening
them from Colombia, their comrades in Peru fighting for their lives
against San Martin, the population of Quito on the verge of a revolt,
and the Pacific in the control of the patriots, they could not follow up
their advantage.
On June 24, 1821, Bolivar gained the crowning victory of Carabobo in
Venezuela. The Spanish position in the Caribbean provinces became
irretrievable, and the patriot general was thenceforth free to pursue
his plans for the expulsion of the enemy from southern New Granada and
Ecuador and their incorporation with Colombia. In the fall of that year
General Sucre, who shares with San Martin the honor of being the
greatest soldier of the patriot side, arrived at Guayaquil by sea,
bringing with him seventeen hundred Colombian and Venezuelan veterans.
Bolivar was to advance from Bogota, conquering Popayan and Pasto on his
way to Quito, while Sucre came up from the south. The latter at once
ascended the Andes to the plateau, but was badly defeated. Retreating to
Guayaquil, he reorganised his army, incorporating with it a
reinforcement of twelve hundred men sent by San Martin, and again
climbed the Andes. By this time Bolivar was advancing from Popayan to
Pasto and the Spaniards, thinking it best to concentrate their forces,
abandoned Cuenca and the southern provinces and allowed Sucre to advance
unopposed to the neighbourhood of Quito. There he outmanoeuvred them and
gained a commanding position on the slopes of the great volcano,
Pichincha, overlooking the city. His foes were forced to the alternative
of giving battle at a disadvantage or permitting him to effect a
junction with Bolivar, and overwhelming them by superior numbers. On the
morning of the 24th of May, 1822, the battle decisive of Ecuador's fate
was fought. The royal army suffered annihilation; four hundred dead lay
on the mountainside and two hundred wounded; eleven hundred men and one
hundred and sixty officers surrendered the following day. The only
troops who escaped belonged to scattered detachments not present at the
battle, who fled down the eastern slope of the Andes into the trackless
forests and finally made their way down the Amazon to the Atlantic.
CHAPTER IV
THE FORMATION OF ECUADOR
At the head of a victorious army of Colombians and Argentines, Sucre
could naturally do as he liked with Ecuador and an assembly of the
people of Quito accepted incorporation into the republic of Colombia.
Bolivar, meanwhile, had had some hard fighting with the stubborn
loyalists of Pasto, and the issue remained doubtful until news of the
victory of Pichincha was received. The Spanish commander surrendered;
Bolivar came on to Quito, and thence proceeded to Guayaquil. The
inhabitants of this important city were divided. Many wanted to be
independent; others preferred incorporation with Peru, to being tied up
with Colombia, a country whose capital could only be reached by months
of tedious travelling; others, however, were willing to maintain the
ancient political connection with New Granada. As a matter of fact,
discussion was useless, for Bolivar threw into the scale the weight of
his military power. Guayaquil and the adjacent coast region became a
department of Colombia, while the southern plateau provinces--Cuenca
and Loja--were also erected into a department of Bolivar's vast
confederation. This completed the division of the old presidency of
Quito into four parts--Pasto and the northern provinces, Quito and the
central, Cuenca and the southern, and Guayaquil with the coast, and in
all of them the influence of Bolivar's satraps was predominant.
Shortly after his arrival at Guayaquil Bolivar and San Martin had their
famous interview. The latter came up from Lima hoping to arrange plan of
joint campaign, but he quickly saw that Bolivar would never consent to
share the glory of driving the Spaniards from their last strongholds.
The great Argentine magnanimously determined to retire, and returning to
Lima, resigned the presidency of Peru. San Martin once out of the way,
Bolivar was eager to lead a Colombian army to Lima, but the Peruvians
declined his assistance. Alone, however, they had little chance against
the able Spanish generals, and, aghast at the progress of the enemy,
they soon sent to Bolivar begging his assistance on his own terms. The
selfishly ambitious liberator gladly accepted, and within a month Sucre
was on his way south at the head of a fine army of Colombian veterans.
Bolivar himself followed with reinforcements, and though hampered and
delayed by the revolt of the Callao garrison, Sucre's military ability
backed by Bolivar's tireless energy and large resources produced their
legitimate results. Bolivar in person advanced to the plateau and August
6, 1824, won the cavalry action of Junin which compelled the retirement
of the Spanish army to Cuzco. Bolivar returned to Lima leaving Sucre in
command, and on the 9th of December the latter annihilated the main body
of the enemy in the battle of Ayacucho--the crowning victory of the war
of South American independence.
Bolivar was supreme from the Caribbean to Potosi. As president of the
United States of Colombia he ruled Venezuela, New Granada, and Ecuador,
he himself was dictator of Peru, and his faithful lieutenant exercised
supreme power in Bolivia. The realisation of his cherished plan for the
union of all South America into one great confederacy, with himself as
life-president, seemed near at hand. But successful soldier though he
was--heroic, resourceful, and unwavering in reverse--his statecraft was
short-sighted and impracticable. The moment of his apogee marked the
beginning of his decline. He failed to appreciate that the spirit of
South America was profoundly democratic and local, and that the war of
independence owed its beginning and successful prosecution to a deeply
rooted impulse toward division, liberty, and anarchy among the Creoles.
To build a tower out of sand would have been easier than to create a
stable union between the recently liberated provinces of Spanish
America. Viewed in the light of subsequent events the wonder is that
territorial disintegration stopped where it did, and that South America
did not split into twenty instead of nine separate countries.
Bolivar's partisans in Colombia were unsuccessful in their intrigues to
replace the Constitution of Cucuta with one drawn up after the plan
their chief had imposed upon Bolivia and Peru. Neither leaders nor
people, army nor professional classes, showed any disposition to concede
him greater powers. His attempts to interfere in the affairs of
Argentine and Chile were repulsed, Peru became restless under his
dictatorship, Bolivia only waited a favourable opportunity to expel
Sucre, the very troops he had brought from Colombia to Peru became
mutinous, his pan-American congress at Panama turned out a fiasco. He
remained two years in Peru, until the news of a great uprising in
Venezuela made it necessary for him to hurry to the north. Hardly had he
left Lima than the military chiefs in Peru virtually disavowed his
authority. Under the leadership of their officers the Colombian troops
in Lima revolted, and the Peruvians, delighted to be rid of these
embarrassing guests, paid their pecuniary demands, and to the number of
over three thousand despatched them in ships for the north. They
disembarked in Ecuador, where one division took possession of Guayaquil
and another of Cuenca. Bolivar was so occupied with the troubles in
Venezuela that he could personally take no measures against this
defection, but General Flores, a Venezuelan whom he had appointed
commander of the military forces of the three southern provinces of the
old Quito presidency,--Guayaquil, Cuenca, and Quito,--proved energetic
and fortunate. His intrigues sowed discord among the officers of the
revolting troops. A counter-revolution occurred in his favour at Cuenca,
and after a short period of virtual independence Guayaquil also returned
to its old connection with Quito.
The movement against Bolivar from Colombia proper involved Pasto and
Popayan--the northern division of the old Quito presidency--while Quito
and the southern provinces were left largely to their own devices.
General La Mar, who had succeeded in making himself president of Peru,
conceived the idea of enlarging the limits of that country by the
acquisition of Guayaquil and Cuenca, and he was the more enthusiastic
because the latter was his native province. In 1828 war broke out
between Colombia and Peru. Peruvian ships blockaded Guayaquil, and in
January, 1829, forced the surrender of that place, while a Peruvian army
seven thousand strong invaded the Ecuadorean plateau and penetrated
beyond Cuenca. Flores and his rivals united in face of the common
danger, the Colombian veterans scattered through the country rallied to
the banner of Sucre, who came in person to take command, and the
decisive battle was fought at Tarqui in February. The Peruvians were so
badly defeated that they sued for peace, and agreed to surrender
Guayaquil and the greater part of the southern provinces.
[Illustration: GUAYAQUIL, ECUADOR.]
By this time, however, Bolivar's own position had become desperate.
Venezuela had already separated from the confederation, and when on the
12th of May, 1830, Flores proclaimed the Quito presidency independent,
it was little more than the announcement of an existing fact. He
attempted to disarm jealousy against Quito by christening the country by
the fanciful name of Ecuador, and by decreeing that each province should
have an equal vote in the legislative assembly. Flores was merely one
of a multitude of military chiefs who had been fighting among themselves
since the expulsion of the Spaniards. Though married to a Quito lady he
was a Venezuelan and could rely on few local friendships or sympathies,
and the Colombian veterans, who swarmed over the country devouring the
substance of the people and eager for pay and plunder, regarded him as
one of themselves and were ready to desert him for any chief who might
offer higher wages.
Now that Bolivar was overthrown and Sucre murdered on a lonely mountain
road by hired assassins, the sentiment of loyalty to their old chiefs
tardily revived among the fickle Colombian regulars. They received
Flores's declaration of independence with indignation; an insurrection
broke out among the garrison at Guayaquil; and the veterans marched to
the plateau. Flores had no force capable of making headway against them,
and was compelled to negotiate a treaty, agreeing to support Bolivar in
case the latter should remain in South America. On the other hand, the
troops consented to recognise Flores if Bolivar should go into exile.
Hardly had the treaty been signed than word was received of the lonely
death of the great Venezuelan at Santa Marta. Most of the veterans took
service under Flores, and he pursued the recalcitrants with relentless
and bloody severity. Pasto and Popayan, composing the province of Cauca,
the northern division of the old Quito presidency, wavered as to whether
they would cast their lot with Ecuador or New Granada. The government
at Bogota sent an army into the disputed territory, and Flores tried to
organise a force large enough to beat it, but he was hampered by
mutinies, conspiracies, and poverty, and after a year of expensive
though nearly bloodless operations withdrew and consented to a treaty by
which Ecuador gave up all claim to Pasto and Popayan, losing a third of
the territory and population of the old presidency of Quito.
[Illustration: COSTUMES OF NATIVES NEAR QUITO.]
Flores, however, managed to hold Guayaquil and Cuenca as well as Quito
and must therefore be regarded as the founder of Ecuador, though his
reactionary, absolute, and violent government was hated by all that was
young, intelligent, and liberal in the country. The Indian peasants
groaned under the burden of taxes imposed to subsidise a horde of
functionaries. Finances were in deplorable confusion; the public debts
left unpaid; population decreased, especially in the Andean region;
agriculture, industry, and commerce remained stationary, except in the
cacao districts on the coast. The lower classes had a hard struggle for
bare existence, and the parasitical ruling race was solely pre-occupied
with political war and intrigue. But it cannot fairly be said that
Flores or any other one man was responsible. The lamentable condition of
affairs resulted inevitably from the long struggle with Spain and from
the situation, character, and ideals of the people. But such a janizary
system of government was too burdensome, unwieldy, and wasteful not to
fall by its own weight sooner or later. The people were simply unable to
pay the taxes which Flores levied vainly trying to satisfy his troops.
Mutinies broke out among the latter, and the liberals were encouraged to
organise.
A revolutionary society was formed in Quito whose ramifications extended
among the enthusiastic youth in every part of the republic. In
Guayaquil, the wealthiest and most commercial city, the demand for
better financial administration became universal. In 1833 Vicente
Rocafuerte, the foremost of Ecuadorean liberals and the most
accomplished public man in the country, openly assumed the leadership of
the opposition to Flores. Elected a member of congress he bravely
defied the dictator, who sentenced him to banishment. But when he
reached Guayaquil the troops and citizens of that city arose to support
him. Flores led an army down the Andes and attacked and captured
Guayaquil, Rocafuerte and his partisans escaped and kept up the struggle
at different points of the coast, while sympathetic insurrections broke
out on the plateau in Flores's rear. Though the dictator finally
succeeded in capturing Rocafuerte, the only use he was able to make of
his victory was to secure better terms from the liberals. Rocafuerte and
he formed an alliance and together they pacified the country, the former
becoming president and the latter retaining command of the army. Ecuador
enjoyed her first real respite from civil war and tumult since 1809, and
Rocafuerte's inauguration in 1835 marks the beginning of civil and
constitutional government.
CHAPTER V
MODERN ECUADOR
President Rocafuerte was not only animated by revolutionary principles,
imbued with liberal ideas, and a student of the best political and
economic writers, but he proved to be a good administrator--practical,
cautious, and sure--and earned the title of the greatest of Ecuador's
reformers. His first step was to summon a constituent assembly which
divided the country into provinces and parishes, outlined a rational
scheme of administration, and made a substantial beginning toward
substituting civil for military government. Although he did not attempt
to carry into practice the dreams of radical liberals--impracticable
among a population nine-tenths Indians in semi-bondage, and in a country
where the clergy were dominant--he reformed the taxing system, set in
order the finances, so far as his means and knowledge would permit,
earnestly encouraged industry, agriculture, and commerce, repaired and
built roads, promulgated a new and humane criminal code, and established
schools. He set up the pyramids of the French geographers, showing that
tender regard for his country's repute abroad which is rarely absent in
statesmen of high character and noble aims. Under his administration
Ecuador assumed the payment of her proportion--twenty-one and a half per
cent., or one million eight hundred thousand pounds--of the debt
contracted by the defunct United States of Colombia during the war of
independence. However, this debt proved a burden too great for her
resources. Interest fell behind and the principal has been scaled down
repeatedly. Only in 1900 was an arrangement satisfactory to the
bondholders finally reached.
His efforts made Ecuador the second South American republic whose
independence was formally recognised by Spain. In religious matters he
proved true to his liberal convictions, and while never persecuting the
clergy always advocated religious freedom for the individual. But though
he set his country's feet in the path of progress, the steps were slow,
short, and uncertain. His alliance with the military element as
represented by Flores, and the religious and social conservatism of the
bulk of the people, hampered rapid progress. The radical liberals
conspired against him, but their plots were sternly stamped out.
Government remained essentially military and aristocratic, and active
participation was confined to the educated and military classes.
Nevertheless, a sort of equilibrium between the demands of the governing
caste and the capacities of the producing masses was reached, and a
certain degree of order replaced the indiscriminate exactions and
tyranny which the proletariat had endured ever since the first Spaniard
had landed. When Rocafuerte finished his term in 1839, Ecuador was at
peace and had recovered much of the material prosperity lost during the
long wars. On the plateau the Indians cultivated their wheat and
potatoes in security, while on the low coast lands the cacao industry
flourished, making Ecuador one of the chief sources of the world's
supply of chocolate and multiplying Guayaquil's population and wealth.
[Illustration: ECUADOR PEON'S HOUSE.]
Flores's command of the army insured him the succession to the
presidency. Though his return to power meant political reaction, the
beneficent effects of Rocafuerte's system had been too obvious to be
entirely ignored and hastily abandoned. Flores's first measures were
moderate, but his irrational ambition quickly led him into an expensive
and fruitless intervention in the Colombian civil war of 1840. His
financial difficulties and a return to military habits caused him to
adopt measures continually more arbitrary, and he went stubbornly ahead
with his schemes to make his dictatorship permanent. He forced the
adoption of a new Constitution lengthening the presidential term to
eight years, and caused himself to be declared elected in 1843. The
conflict with the liberals became acute; Rocafuerte protested and was
forced to fly for his life. The young radicals of Quito plotted the
tyrant's assassination, while the villagers of the plateau arose in
revolt against the gatherers of an obnoxious poll-tax. In 1845 a liberal
revolution broke out at Guayaquil. Flores descended from the table-land,
but the liberal army met and defeated him at the foot of the mountains,
and he accepted the offer of twenty thousand dollars in cash and a
pension to leave the country.
The better elements of the triumphant party were not able to keep the
upper hand. A new Constitution was hastily adopted and the mulatto Ramon
Roca installed as president. For four years he ruled while the gulf
between liberals and conservatives widened day by day, and factional
jealousies and ambitions within the dominant party became menacing. The
congress of 1849 quarrelled bitterly over the presidential succession
and was unable to agree on any one. Ambitious chiefs got arms and men
together, and after a year of uncertainty General Urbina, of Guayaquil,
issued a pronunciamento declaring Diego Noboa provisional head of the
government. A convention called for the purpose adopted a new
Constitution and elected Urbina's nominee president for the full term.
To the consternation of the liberals he recalled the Jesuits and gave
asylum to the defeated conservatives from Colombia, going so far as to
send troops to the frontier to aid in their restoration. But Urbina, to
whose command these forces had been entrusted, proclaimed himself
dictator and exiled Noboa. He promulgated a new Constitution--Ecuador's
sixth in twenty-two years,--persecuted the conservatives, and ruled for
four years as an ultra-liberal. At the expiration of his term in 1856 he
named his friend Robles as his successor, who maintained himself against
the conservative attacks until in 1859 his government became involved in
a war with Peru. When Robles and Urbina went to the Peruvian frontier
the conservatives rose behind them. As a matter of fact the country was
tired of the misrule of the military chiefs, miscalled liberals, whose
government was a compound of oppression for their enemies and license
for their friends. The clericals armed their adherents in the northern
villages and marched on Quito. The partisans of the administration at
the capital could oppose no effective resistance, and the insurgents
entered the city, and on May 1st installed a provisional government with
Garcia Moreno at its head. The latter at once pushed on south with a
small force, and, though defeated by Robles, he escaped to Peru, where
he received help for new operations. In spite of Moreno's temporary
reverse his friends retained possession of Quito, and the Peruvian
blockade of Guayaquil absorbed the president's attention. The forces
under Robles soon crumbled away, and he resigned and went into
banishment. Urbina, the real chief of the liberal party, had a small
body of troops in Cuenca with which he tried to maintain the unequal
contest, but his position soon became untenable and he followed Robles
into exile.
Moreno was now master of the whole Andean region. Guayaquil, however,
remained in the hands of a liberal chief; the Peruvian government had
tired of its bargain to support the Ecuadorian clericals; the blockade
was abandoned, and the Peruvian ships retired after making a treaty with
the Guayaquil authorities. This rid Moreno of an embarrassing
entanglement with a foreign power, although it left the Guayaquil
insurgents free to employ all their forces against him. Descending with
all the forces he could muster, his mountaineers defeated the coast
troops in every encounter, and on the 2d of September, 1860, Moreno
captured the great seaport, putting an end to open opposition in all
Ecuador. Every successful revolutionist in those days made his own
Constitution, so it is a waste of words to tell that Moreno summoned a
convention which promulgated a new fundamental law for the republic.
During the next fifteen years he remained the dominant personality in
Ecuadorian history. His biography is typical of the careers of the
higher class of Creole statesmen, and profoundly interesting to a
student of South American history as illustrating the difficulties with
which men of constructive minds and a passion for order have been
obliged to contend. A scion of one of the oldest and proudest Spanish
families, he had been proscribed in his youth, and spent the years of
his exile studying in the old world. He returned with his naturally fine
mind stored with the fruits of study and observation, but with his
prejudices of caste and religion unshaken. The clericals set all their
hopes on this brilliant young advocate, and his public life, his
opinions, and his personality resume the reactionary characteristics of
Ecuador. Nevertheless it is hard for an unprejudiced outsider to study
the history of his country during his time without retaining a strong
admiration for his abilities and force, even if not convinced that his
career made for the moral uplifting of the republic.
He found the finances in a wretched state. Salaries were unpaid,
the revenue amounted to less than a million pesos, and the government
was living from hand to mouth on twenty-per-cent. loans. He directed
his activity principally toward effecting urgent material
reforms--increasing the revenue by systematising taxation, suppressing
frauds and contraband, founding a mint and hospital at Quito, building
the great waggon-road from Quito to the southern provinces, and
connecting that remote and mountain-locked capital by a telegraph line
with Guayaquil. The whole of his own salary he devoted to the public
use, the laws were better enforced, life and property became safer, and
material prosperity increased. The government was centralised, the
semi-independency of the departments abolished, the Jesuits recalled,
the rights and privileges of the clergy restored and increased, and a
Concordat signed with the Holy See which virtually freed the Ecuadorian
Church from all secular control.
The Concordat was denounced throughout the continent as treason to South
American independence, and his relations with European diplomatic
representatives were so cordial and frank that rumours of his
willingness to accept a foreign protectorate or even annexation by Spain
were rife in the other capitals. The publication of his personal
correspondence with a French diplomatist raised such a storm against him
that other countries plotted his overthrow, and the democrats of
Colombia, victorious in the civil war of 1863, sent an army to the
frontier, proclaiming that their purpose was "to liberate the brother
democrats of Ecuador from the theocratic yoke of Professor Moreno." His
army was defeated in the battle of Cuaspud, but he stood firm and his
people showed no eagerness to accept Colombia's invitation and re-enter
that confederacy. Her army was unable to follow up its advantage, and
the danger quickly passed. When war broke out between Spain and Peru he,
like the Emperor of Brazil, refused to follow Chile's example and take
sides, against the mother country. In a word, his foreign policy was a
selfish but intelligent opportunism, and he was not influenced by vague
sentimental considerations and blind chauvinism.
In 1864 Urbina, with the countenance and assistance of Peru, invaded the
southern province, Loja, but the insurrection was promptly crushed. Next
year Moreno's term expired, and he named a disciple and friend to be
president in his place, but his own political preponderance was so
unquestioned and his prestige so enormous in the barracks, convents, and
pulperias that he continued the real ruler of the country. His
understudy did not please him and he demanded and received a
resignation. The incumbent next selected proved insubordinate and had to
be displaced by force. When Moreno declared himself provisional dictator
the Guayaquil liberals undertook an armed resistance, but by 1869 he was
firmly in the saddle once more. He kept his hold on the government,
apparently becoming more securely entrenched each year in the love and
confidence of the soldiery, the priests, and the common people. From the
safety of exile the liberals wrote crushing pamphlets against him and
his despotism, his favouritism toward the clergy, his steady, relentless
policy of conservatism and reaction. But their attempts at insurrection
were feeble and in 1875 he was re-elected as a matter of course. The
liberals, hopeless of ending his domination constitutionally or by open
war, had recourse to assassination. On the 6th of August a party of
young Creoles deliberately killed him at midday on the principal square
of Quito in the presence of the populace and the soldiery.
The murderers were executed and the vice-president succeeded to the
vacancy. However, no one appeared big enough to fill Moreno's shoes, and
his death made civil war inevitable. After a few months the
vice-president was deposed; then one of Moreno's ministers remained at
the head of affairs for a short time; but finally Antonio Borrero was
selected president in constitutional form. He proved not to possess the
resolution requisite to cope with the situation. General Veintemilla,
commander of the troops in Guayaquil, revolted in the name of the
liberal party, defeated Borrero, and went through the usual form of
summoning a convention, adopting a new Constitution, and having himself
named president. He held power insecurely and by the aid of a personal
party from 1878 to 1883, but neither conservatives nor liberals were
satisfied. The radicals attacked him furiously for not putting in
practice anti-clerical principles, and the conservatives never trusted
him. When his constitutional term expired, the army proclaimed him
dictator, but he soon fell before the combined forces of his enemies.
During the fighting Jose Camano came to the front, and now seized the
presidency. Alfaro, the principal liberal leader who had co-operated
with Camano in overthrowing Veintemilla, made war against his late ally,
but was defeated. The new president, once securely in his seat, formed
close relations with the clergy and the old partisans of Moreno, and
though the liberal chiefs kept up a guerilla warfare in the forests and
swamps, he finished out his term. In 1888 he was succeeded by Antonio
Flores, who followed his predecessor's policy in the main, and was in
his turn succeeded by another friend of Camano's--Luis Cordero. It was
not until 1895 that the liberals were able to gather their forces for a
formidable rebellion. Camano was then governor of Guayaquil, and the
immediate occasion of the outbreak was the charge that he had taken part
in the sale of the Chilean iron-clad, _Esmeralda_, to Japan, then at war
with China. It was claimed that Ecuador had acted as a go-between and
committed a wilful breach of the rules governing the conduct of neutral
nations. President Cordero's prestige was seriously compromised by this
incident. His forces were defeated in several actions and he resigned.
Alfaro, who had been in exile since 1883, returned, took possession of
Guayaquil, was proclaimed dictator, and finally completely overthrew the
conservatives in the battle of Gatajo. His election to the presidency
followed in 1897, and he was succeeded four years later by the present
incumbent, General Leonidas Plaza.
[Illustration: PRINCIPAL STREET IN GUAYAQUIL.]
The Ecuador coast is one of the most fertile and lovely regions on the
earth. It already furnishes a considerable proportion of those tropical
products of which the great nations of the temperate zone demand more
every year. Like a Luzon which has been stranded at the foot of the
Andes, its green shores refresh the eyes of the north-bound traveller
tired of the dreary desert that stretches from Valparaiso to the Gulf of
Guayaquil; it possesses the best harbour on the Pacific south of Panama
and one of the few in all South America which is not mountain-locked.
Between the Cordillera and the sea there is room for untold millions of
cacao and coffee trees. In spite of civil war and political upheavals
which have made her custom-house so often the prey of irresponsible
bandits, masquerading under the name of dictators, Guayaquil's
population and wealth have increased until she has outstripped the hoary
old capital, which, enthroned on a volcano side, overlooks a narrow
strip of cultivable land. Nevertheless the plateau is still predominant
in the Ecuadorian state, and supports a vast majority of the
population. Nine-tenths of the inhabitants of the Andean region are
Indians, mostly in a condition not far removed from bondage, by
circumstance and their own distrustful natures shut up within the narrow
limits of an existence which has no outlook over the mountains. None the
less, they are sturdy fellows, admirably suited to the climate of those
high altitudes, and though their numbers have been practically
stationary since the Spanish conquest, the failure to increase has been
rather due to lack of room than to misgovernment, vice, or the want of
the qualities that make for success in the struggle for existence. In
that day, now near at hand, when a great railway shall connect the
string of towns on the Ecuador plateau with Peru and Colombia, and when
branches shall run to the ports and take the place of the well-nigh
impassable trails down the tremendous, rain-soaked slopes of the Andes,
the mountain region of Ecuador may be transformed and revivified by new
systems of agriculture, and the artistic taste and remarkable ingenuity
of the people may find a market and a reward. The railway from Guayaquil
long stopped at the foot of the mountains, but within the last three
years the almost insurmountable difficulties of the ascent have been
overcome by American engineers, and the line is being rapidly built
along the plateau to Quito. Ecuador already supplies the world with
Panama hats, and other manual industries may flourish when unfavourable
transportation conditions are removed. Not only are the common people
patiently industrious, but they possess innate good taste and artistic
feeling. Such a people has special aptitudes, sure to give it a place in
that vastly complicated workshop into which the multifarious needs of
modern civilisation are transforming the earth. The plateau of Ecuador
does not, however, offer room for any considerable immigration, and its
wheat, barley, and potatoes do not and will not much more than suffice
for local consumption. Ecuador's great future lies in the beautiful and
as yet sparsely peopled Pacific plain, and in the vast and absolutely
unknown forests which stretch east from the Andes.
VENEZUELA
CHAPTER I
CONQUEST, SETTLEMENT, AND COLONIAL DAYS
On his third voyage in 1498 Columbus sighted the Venezuelan coast just
south of the Windward Islands. A year later, Alonso de Ojeda saw the
mainland at about the same place and skirted the coast for four hundred
miles west without finding any important break in a line of mountains
which rose almost directly from the sea to a height of three to nine
thousand feet, covered to their very tops with luxuriant vegetation. But
there was no such barrier as that made by the main Andes on the Pacific;
the passes were only half a mile instead of nearly three miles high; the
slopes were not dry and desolate as in Peru, or covered with a tangled
mass of forest as in Pacific Columbia and Ecuador. Just beyond the
harbour where Puerto Cabello now stands, the coast-line turned abruptly
to the north-west, leaving the mountains farther inland, but the
intervening plain was swampy and uninviting. Still following west, Ojeda
rounded Cape San Roman and turned south into the great Gulf of
Maracaibo. There he saw Indian villages of houses built on piles near
the shallow shores, and he called the place Venezuela--"little
Venice,"--a name shortly extended to the whole coast from the mouth of
the Orinoco west to the forbidding and uninhabitable peninsula of
Goajira, which forms the western promontory of the Gulf of Maracaibo.
There is no record that either Columbus or Ojeda effected a permanent
landing, and it was not until 1510 that some adventurers founded a
settlement on the small island of Cubagua, in the channel between the
large island of Margarita and the mainland. This was a mere nest of
pirates who persecuted the Indians of the shore, kidnapping and selling
them as slaves to the Spaniards on the Antilles, and it was shortly
abandoned. In 1520, on the coast just opposite, was founded the
settlement of Cumana, the oldest city on the South American continent,
which, though destroyed by the natives, was rebuilt in 1525, when
valuable pearl fisheries were discovered in the neighbouring waters of
Margarita. However, the place remained of little importance and did not
become a centre for the colonisation of the adjacent country, the
Spaniards attaching little value to this region because it contained no
gold washings.
The real colonisation of Venezuela began four hundred miles farther west
with the foundation in 1527 of the city of Coro on the narrow neck of
land which separates the Gulf of Maracaibo from the Caribbean Sea.
Thence there was easy access by water to the shores of the great lagoon,
or by land over the coast plain to the north-western slopes of the
Andean range which runs south-west to the giant plateau of Pamplona just
over the Colombian border. The Andean valleys were filled with gold, and
among the higher mountains lay fertile plateaux, cultivated by tribes of
semi-civilised Indians. Altogether the region was well calculated to
stimulate the cupidity of adventurers.
Charles V. granted the Venezuela coast to the Welser family of Augsburg,
the greatest merchants of their time and his heavy creditors. Under
their commission the first adelantado, Alfinger, took possession of Coro
and conducted various expeditions south-west along the Andes, perishing
near Pamplona about 1531. His successors continued these murdering,
kidnapping incursions into the interior, often being led to their ruin
among remote mountain fastnesses by tales of a mythical Eldorado, where
the rivers ran over silver sands, the palaces were of solid gold with
doors and columns of diamonds and emeralds, and the Indian king every
morning covered his body with gold dust and bathed in precious aromatic
essences.
Eighteen years, however, elapsed before the Spaniards established a
permanent settlement in the interior, and only in 1545 was the city of
Tocuyo founded in a beautiful Andean valley a hundred and fifty miles
south of Coro. But the cruelties of the proprietors' agents scandalised
public opinion. Charles V. declared their concession cancelled and a
governor, responsible directly to the government, was appointed in 1547.
Thenceforward the settlement of Venezuela proceeded more rapidly. Five
years later the city of Barquisimeto, fifty miles north of Tocuyo and
near the point where the Andes join the coast range, was established on
a secure footing after hard fighting with the Indians; in 1555 the
Spaniards penetrated east a hundred miles along the lovely plateaux of
the coast mountains, and founded Valencia. The following year they
settled Trujillo, fifty miles south-west of Tocuyo, and two years later
Merida, a hundred miles farther in the same direction and not far from
the Colombian frontier.
To the east of Valencia lay valuable gold washings, and to work these
the Spaniards fixed a camp at San Francisco in the Aragua Valley about
1560. This is the garden spot of Venezuela, and the warlike Teques
Indians, under their terrible chief, Guaicaipuro, massacred the miners
and defeated several expeditions from Valencia and Barquisimeto. It was
not until 1567 that the Spaniards succeeded in establishing their power
in the valley of Caracas, which, a hundred miles east of Valencia, lies
close to the shore, although three thousand feet above sea-level and
separated from the ocean by high mountains. The defensibility of the
site as well as the fertility of the soil pointed it out as the best
place for the seat of government. A city was founded which ten years
later replaced Coro as the capital of the province, and shortly
thereafter a port was opened at La Guaira giving direct communication
with Spain. The savage tribes fought more pertinaciously than the
civilised natives of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northern Chile and
Argentina, and a greater number of Europeans and negroes replaced those
who were slain. Finally, however, the majority submitted, and were
incorporated as peasants into the Spanish system.
By the end of the sixteenth century the Spaniards had obtained
undisputed possession of that lovely strip of mountainous country which
extends from Cape Codera west between two parallel coast ranges to
Barquisimeto and thence west-south-west nearly to the head of Lake
Maracaibo--a belt some four hundred miles long and fifty or seventy-five
wide. They also held the great peninsula east of Maracaibo Gulf, and had
established outlying settlements in the llanos south of the mountains,
besides the two isolated ports--Cumana on the eastern coast and
Maracaibo on the western. Notwithstanding the sack of Caracas in 1595 by
the daring British buccaneer, Amyas Preston, the colony prospered.
Unlike the Pacific coast, it had easy and direct communication with the
Antilles and Europe; the altitude was great enough to ensure a healthful
climate, while its fertile valleys could be reached from the sea in a
few hours over easy passes, far different from those formidable gorges
which are the only ways of reaching the table-lands of Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. The interior, instead of being a heavily
forested plain like that of the Amazon, practically inaccessible behind
tremendous rain-soaked declivities, was an open prairie into which the
mountains sank gently, and whose grassy expanses afforded pasture for
innumerable herds. These geographical and topographical features have
been determinative of Venezuela's development and history, political as
well as industrial.
In the early years of the seventeenth century the long-neglected Cumana
district on the eastern coast began to be developed. The city of
Barcelona was founded in 1617 near a magnificent body of grazing land
and in the best tobacco country in Venezuela, where the Indians had
grown the plant for untold generations. Barcelona soon became an
important centre of population, and the starting-point for missionaries
to the interior tribes. The gold placers which had attracted the first
adventurers to the mountains west of Caracas became exhausted within a
few decades. Nevertheless, the fertile lands, distributed among the
Spaniards in encomiendas, continued to be cultivated by Indian and negro
labour, but, although maize, bananas, potatoes, and in the higher
valleys even wheat, as well as the vine and olive, with the cattle
introduced by Europeans, furnished an abundant supply of food, to say
nothing of tobacco and sugar, Spain's blind colonial policy virtually
prevented export of agricultural products. The Spanish authorities
wanted nothing from their American dominions but gold and silver, and
when Venezuela's placers were exhausted the colony was neglected. It was
in spite of the prohibition of the Spanish government that cacao trees
were introduced, and the exportation which soon grew up--the first of
any importance from Venezuela--was mostly clandestine. Practically all
the goods legally imported had to be procured from the Cadiz monopoly,
and were sent to the Isthmus and there transhipped into coasting
vessels, paying enormous freight charges, profits, and duties. Tobacco
and salt were monopolised by government concessionaires, and not a
chicken could be sold in the markets without paying an exorbitant tax.
Education was completely neglected. It was not until 1696 that a
priests' school was established in Caracas, and when the city of Merida
asked a similar boon, it was denied because "His Catholic Majesty did
not deem it wise that education should become general in America." So
the Creoles grew up nearly as ignorant as the Indians around them,
although retaining all the fierce pride of their Spanish descent,
acknowledging no man as superior, and retaining very dim sentiments of
loyalty to the mother country. Nevertheless, the ancient municipal
forms, traditional among peoples of Spanish descent, survived,
furnishing the framework of civil government, while the priesthood
constituted a moral and intellectual tie binding the Creoles to their
Castilian ancestors.
The repressive regulations against commerce could not be perfectly
enforced. Although the arrival of a ship from Spain was a real event,
British, Dutch, and French traders frequented the coast, opening markets
with their swords, and often turning buccaneers and sacking a town when
not satisfied with their reception. But the burning of a few coast
hamlets was more than compensated by the advantages of practical
free-trade, and Venezuela owed much of the prosperity she enjoyed during
the seventeenth century to these semi-pirates. The settlements crept
along the Andean valleys to the Colombian frontier; the Creoles ventured
farther and farther into the wide plains of the Orinoco and their cattle
were soon roaming half-wild in the immense and luxuriant pastures
stretching south of the agricultural strip. From the mixture of the
Indians of the llanos with Europeans sprang a new race of men, the
semi-nomadic llaneros, whose hardiness, courage, horsemanship, and
prowess as hunters of big game have given them equal celebrity with the
gauchos of the Argentine, the cossacks of the Russian steppes, or the
Texas cowboys. The buccaneers and smuggling traders were especially
active in the latter part of the seventeenth century. In 1654 Frenchmen
were repelled in an attack on Cumana, but in 1669 the Britisher, Morgan,
sacked Maracaibo, and in 1679 the French pillaged Caracas itself. The
paralysis suffered by Spain during the war of the Spanish Succession
nearly destroyed Venezuelan commerce, and it did not recover with the
peace of Utrecht. Only five ships arrived in the first thirty years of
the eighteenth century, and from 1706 to 1721 not a single vessel sailed
for Spain.
The Spanish government determined to try if another system would not
bring a larger revenue into the royal treasury. The Guipuzcoa Company
was granted an exclusive franchise to buy and sell in the colony, and
the operations of this powerful corporation galvanised commerce into a
certain activity. In order to stimulate the receipt of hides, and
prevent the incursions of wild plains Indians, trading posts were
established in the llanos, and soon the prairies south of Valencia and
Caracas rivalled the Barcelona country in cattle, and the ranches
extended up the Apure, the great western tributary of the Orinoco, to
the foot of the Colombian Andes. Meanwhile expeditions penetrated up the
Orinoco from its mouth, and in 1764 the city of Angostura was
established four hundred miles from the sea. The operations of the
Guipuzcoa Company did not aid in establishing a more friendly
understanding between the home government and the Venezuelan Creoles.
The independent merchants constantly quarrelled with the company's
agents; the low prices for which they were compelled to sell their stock
outraged the ranch owners; the farmers resented the monopolisation of
tobacco and the restrictions on sugar-culture; exorbitant prices were
demanded for imported goods. Protests became so loud that special
commissioners were sent from Spain to investigate, but they gave
no satisfactory relief. Shortly after the foundation of the
Guipuzcoa Company, Venezuela had been raised to the dignity of a
captaincy-general. The increased efficiency of the administration
assisted the monopoly in suppressing clandestine trading, and the
feeling grew to such a height that in 1749 a Creole leader, named Leon,
menaced Caracas itself at the head of six thousand armed men, demanding
the suppression of the company and the expulsion of its factors. The
captain-general was forced to yield and the revolutionists dispersed,
but his promise was never redeemed. The active measures of the company
effectually shut off foreign trading-ships, and the ports were so
fortified that the British expeditions retired defeated from the
attacks they made in 1739 and 1743 on La Guaira and Puerto Cabello,
although in 1797 they captured the island of Trinidad and menaced the
entrance to the Orinoco. It was not until 1778, when the Spanish
government finally abandoned the monopolistic colonial system and opened
all the ports of South America to free commerce with each other and with
Spain, that the Guipuzcoa Company retired from business. Six years
before this the provinces of Maracaibo, Cumana, and Guiana--as the lower
Orinoco region was called,--all of which had heretofore been directly
dependent upon the viceroy of Bogota, were placed under the jurisdiction
of the captain-general of Caracas, fixing the modern boundaries of
Venezuela.
CHAPTER II
THE REVOLT
Venezuela's conditions during colonial times produced a people
possessing in the clearest and most accentuated form the characteristics
distinctive of the Spanish Creole. Not more than one per cent. of the
total population of over eight hundred thousand were native Spaniards;
fifteen per cent. were Creoles of pure European descent; sixty per cent.
were Indian, two-thirds of whom had an admixture of white blood; and
three-fourths of the twenty-five per cent. of negroes and mulattoes were
free. The majority did not consist of docile, inert, pure-bred natives
as in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Paraguay, though the white element was
not so large that the Creoles had ceased to occupy the position of a
governing and property-owning caste who lived upon the labour of the
half-breeds, Indians, and negroes. They regarded themselves as a
superior class, entitled by birth to exemption from manual labour, and
even considered commercial pursuits unworthy a gentleman.
[Illustration: ANCIENT INDIAN ROCK FOR GRINDING MAIZE.]
The Spanish government had concerned itself little with this purely
agricultural colony, and its hand was felt only in the collection of
taxes. The officials were comparatively few, the number of resident
Spaniards small, and neither mutual commercial interests nor a solid
administration existed to strengthen the flimsy ties that bound
Venezuela to the mother-country. So little had the interference of the
Spanish government been felt since the abolishment of the Guipuzcoa
Company that no well-defined and widespread sentiment in favour of
separation existed. There was a vague feeling of dissatisfaction among
the masses, but their ignorance prevented them from forming any rational
plans for the betterment of their condition. However, the Venezuelan
coast is so accessible that the fertilising and disturbing currents of
trade and ideas had really profoundly modified the people, and the
leaven of unrest was at work. The wealthier Creoles had imbibed radical
notions and were ambitious of trying their hands at governing. By
heredity, social custom, and environment indisposed to industry and
commerce, their unemployed activities naturally flowed into the channel
of politics, intrigue, and fighting.
The first outbreak owed its origin to events in Spain. In 1796 a
republican conspiracy was brought to light on the Peninsula, and several
of its leaders were exiled to La Guaira. In their prison they were
visited by many prominent Creoles, into whose minds they inculcated
their republican principles, and it was not long before the existence of
an extensive republican plot among the Creoles of La Guaira and Caracas
was denounced to the captain-general. Many persons were arrested, and of
the two principals, Espana expiated his treason on the scaffold, while
the other, Gual, escaped into exile. But the seed of revolution had been
planted, and many leading Creoles entered into correspondence with the
British authorities on Trinidad, who promised aid in arms, munitions,
and ships. Francisco Miranda, a native of Caracas, who had fought under
Washington, and distinguished himself at Valmy and Jemappes as a soldier
of the French republic, planned an invasion with the avowed purpose of
achieving Venezuelan separation from Spain. With three ships manned by
American filibusters he sailed from New York early in 1806, and
attempted to land at Ocumare, near Puerto Cabello. But the Spanish
authorities had been warned and he was beaten in a sea-fight where he
lost sixty prisoners. Ten North Americans were condemned by
court-martial and shot in Puerto Cabello, and their names are inscribed
on a monument recently erected in the principal square of the town. The
captain-general offered thirty thousand dollars for Miranda's head, but
the latter retired to Jamaica, where, with the help of the British
authorities, he organised a force of five hundred foreigners. Three
months later he made a descent on Coro, effected a landing, and took the
city. But the population remained inert, and the indifferent or hostile
attitude of the region forced him to withdraw.
Though the western provinces received Miranda so coldly, among the
Creoles of the upper classes at Caracas aspirations for constitutional
government, autonomy, and even for independence had made headway in the
ten years since the suppression of the conspiracy of Gual and Espana. In
1808 French commissioners arrived bringing the news of Ferdinand's
expulsion. They were empowered to receive the allegiance of the colony
for Joseph Bonaparte, but the captain-general hesitated and asked the
advice of leading citizens, who proved unanimous against recognising the
French regime. The captain-general's vacillation gave the Creoles of the
cabildo a predominance in governmental councils. Although in the middle
of the following year it was decided to recognise the Seville junta as
supreme, pending Ferdinand's return, this decision was reached only
after many debates, and a numerous party among the Creoles saw no
reason why Venezuela should not establish a junta of her own. The news
of the frightful cruelties perpetrated by Goyeneche in suppressing the
junta at La Paz excited great indignation among Creoles; the
anti-Spanish feeling grew rapidly; and when, on the 19th of April, 1810,
the captain-general summoned an open cabildo to receive the news that
the French armies had overrun nearly the whole of Spain and that only
Cadiz remained faithful to Ferdinand, the electors had no sooner met
than, excited by suggestions of ambitious persons, they turned into a
mob howling for the resignation of the captain-general and the
establishment of a Caracas junta. Accordingly a junta was named which
exiled the Spanish functionaries and sent messages to the provincial
capitals demanding their adhesion. The cities of the mountain strip
extending from Cumana to the Colombian Andes responded favourably and
sent delegates to Caracas, while Maracaibo, Coro, and Guiana refused. As
a matter of fact the masses as yet took little interest. The Caracas
revolution was effected by a few determined spirits, and the adhesion of
the mountain provinces was given by Creole municipal authorities who saw
in the change an opportunity to better their personal fortunes. Nor was
the resistance of Coro and Maracaibo so much inspired by love of Spain
as by the presence of the resolute, clear-headed Jose Ceballos, who
gathered troops and sent emissaries into the revolted provinces. The
Caracas junta responded by raising an army which marched toward Coro,
and the civil war was on.
The news of the massacre of the Ecuadorean revolutionists at Quito in
August, 1810, warned the junta Creoles that they had engaged in no
child's play. A commission went to London to solicit the intervention of
the British government in reaching an accommodation with the patriot
authorities in Spain, but the Seville junta declared the Caracas
revolutionists traitors. The commissioners fell under Miranda's
influence and he convinced them that an open declaration of independence
was the only course left. Meanwhile the troops sent to conquer Coro had
been defeated by Ceballos. Threatened by the royalist arms, unable to
count on the support of any considerable proportion of the rural
population of even their own provinces, the Creoles of the ruling
coterie proceeded to extreme measures. A congress met in March and on
the 5th of July, 1811, adopted a declaration of independence,
proclaiming the seven provinces of Cumana, Barcelona, Caracas, Barinas,
Trujillo, Merida, and Margarita free and sovereign states. Venezuela
was, therefore, the first independent republic in Spanish America.
Congress adopted a Constitution full of the most radical reforms and
advanced ideas, and a handful of political theorists and advanced
radicals took the direction of affairs, and imposed their crude theories
on a bewildered and reluctant population. The ruling clique issued fiat
money in immense quantities, and the resulting disorganisation of
business increased discontent.
Miranda, who had come from Europe to take command of military
operations, warned them that the fabric was not strong enough to
withstand the shock of battle, but the eager young reformers persisted.
The clergy and the native Spaniards were the first to react. Though an
outbreak of the Spaniards in Caracas was bloodily suppressed, the
priests stirred up the people of Valencia, and that city--the second in
the republic--declared against the Caracas government. Miranda succeeded
in reducing the place only after costly fighting. The ruling clique did
what they could to raise and equip troops to meet the approaching
attacks from Coro and the West Indies, but their efforts were hampered
by loyalist risings. In February, 1812, Monteverde, a Spanish leader,
marched with a small detachment south from Coro, and northern Trujillo
welcomed him. Defeating the patriot forces wherever he met them and
refusing quarter to his prisoners, he prepared to advance eastward on
the centre of the revolution. The junta was already trembling, when, on
the 26th of March, a terrific earthquake devastated the revolted
provinces. The solid ground rocked with such violent oscillations that
in less than a minute the cities of Caracas, Barquisimeto, and Merida
were mere heaps of ruins. Twelve thousand persons perished in Caracas
alone. The loyalist provinces escaped injury, and the priests preached
that the earthquake was a punishment sent by God upon impious rebellion.
The people of Barquisimeto joined Monteverde, and he marched east,
slaughtering the raw recruits with which the patriot leaders tried to
block his way. Merida, Trujillo, and Barinas declared for the king, and
an expedition sent from Caracas to the lower Orinoco was destroyed.
Monteverde entered Valencia unopposed and only the coast from Caracas
east to Cumana remained to the republic. In despair the politicians made
Miranda dictator, but, though the army numbered five thousand, he had no
confidence in his men. He signed a capitulation and tried to fly while
his army dispersed or joined the loyalist forces. On the 30th of July
Monteverde entered Caracas and the first Venezuelan revolution ceased to
exist.
Among the volunteer officers who had been entrusted with positions of
confidence by Miranda was a young Creole, named Simon Bolivar. Heir to
some of the largest estates in Venezuela he had been left an orphan at
three years of age, and was educated by a tutor who filled his
marvellously impressible mind with a crude political philosophy, and
under whose teachings he evolved original theories of government which
all the wars, debates, and revolutions of his stormy life failed to
modify. Preoccupied with his own ideas, he gave no heed to the counsels
of others, took no thought of obstacles, and, victor or vanquished,
stubbornly followed his own way, always confident of infallibility and
persevering in the face of difficulties that would have appalled a
rational man. From his earliest childhood a little feudal lord, owing
obedience to no parent, with hundreds of slaves at his orders, his
precocious intelligence the object of that ruinous admiration with which
thoughtless strangers and servants spoil a rich and lonely child, his
naturally strong will uncurbed by any discipline, he grew into
manhood--arrogant, uncompromising, solitary, suspicious, a deep thinker,
wildly ambitious, marvellously brilliant, though lacking steady
common-sense, blindly confident of his own moral and intellectual
infallibility, firmly convinced that he was destined for vague great
things, inordinately fond of honours and praise, and absolutely unable
to distinguish his desires of gratifying selfish ambitions, and his
yeasty notions of regenerating mankind. At sixteen he went to Spain to
complete his education; his wealth procured him an entrance into the
aristocratic families of Madrid; and he even penetrated the precincts of
the ceremonious court and had the honour of playing ball with the lad
who afterwards became Ferdinand VII. When only eighteen he married a
beautiful girl, who died shortly after he brought her back to Caracas.
For the rest of his life he remained without family ties. Again he went
to Europe and wandered through England, France, and Italy, falling more
and more under the spell of the mighty spirit of Napoleon the Great. At
the age of twenty-three Bolivar returned to his native country and took
up his life as a rich slave-owner. When the revolution broke out in 1810
he took no part until the junta requested him to go to England on the
embassy previously mentioned. There he became acquainted with Miranda,
and, appreciating that the South American revolution must be decided by
arms, made up his mind that only as a soldier could he put himself at
the head of affairs in Venezuela. His first essays in the military art
were not successful, and it was he who lost Puerto Cabello, giving the
first revolution its _coup de grace_. But a situation in which others
saw no hope he regarded as an opportunity, and he resolved to devote his
life to South American independence.
Bolivar went to Cartagena in Colombia and offered his sword to the
patriot junta which ruled that city. Given a small military command on
the Magdalena River, he embodied a few militia and surprised two posts
which were obstructing the navigation of the river. Delighted at these
successes, the Cartagena junta sent him reinforcements, with which he
captured Ocana, an important city lying east of the Magdalena and not
far from Pamplona and the Venezuelan border. The loyalists had collected
a considerable force in the Venezuelan province of Barinas, with which
they proposed to advance into Pamplona. The patriot chief of this
Colombian province appealed to Bolivar and this suggested to him the
Napoleonic plan of relieving Pamplona and reconquering Venezuela. On his
own responsibility he dashed with only four hundred men over the Andes
in front of Ocana, descended into the plain north of Lake Maracaibo,
took the royalists on their march to Pamplona by surprise, and routed
them. Joined by the patriots from Pamplona, he received formal
authorisation to drive the Spaniards from the Venezuelan provinces of
Merida and Trujillo. His movements among the mountain valleys were like
lightning flashes, and though the Spanish forces were more numerous
their commanders were demoralised by his attacks made in defiance of all
the rules of prudent warfare. Within fifty days there was not an enemy
left in the two provinces, and Bolivar's army had been trebled by
enlistments. The New Granadan government ordered him to pause, but he
paid no heed. Issuing a proclamation that no quarter would be given, he
crossed the mountains south-west into the province of Barinas,
annihilated the Spanish forces there, and rushing to the east caught
another army of a thousand men near Valencia and destroyed it.
Monteverde had no time to concentrate his scattered forces, and the news
of this last defeat caused him to flee to the protection of the
fortifications of Puerto Cabello. Bolivar occupied Valencia and Caracas
without resistance. In a campaign of ninety days, with a handful of New
Granadans and mountaineers from western Venezuela, he had defeated and
dispersed over four thousand royalists, and conquered the country from
the Andes to the capital.
Only the lower plains of the Orinoco and the coast provinces of
Maracaibo and Coro remained royalist, for while Bolivar had been
overrunning the west, another young Creole, Marino, had led a small
expedition from the island of Margarita, captured Maturin just east of
the mouth of the Orinoco, and with the military stores found there armed
the inhabitants of Cumana province, made ripe for revolt by the
cruelties of Monteverde. The Spanish attempts to recover Maturin by
assault were repulsed with great slaughter, and Marino followed up his
success by besieging Cumana. By the time Bolivar reached Caracas the
place was in the last extremities of starvation, and Monteverde's
flight was a signal for its surrender. There were therefore two
dictators in Venezuela, and Marino sent to Bolivar to treat about the
form of government, but the latter had determined on a centralised
administration with himself supreme. Marino refused to agree, and only
the activity of the loyalists prevented a war between him and Bolivar.
Monteverde held out in Puerto Cabello, and when reinforcements arrived
from Spain resumed the offensive. Though Bolivar won a victory at Las
Trincheiras, and was greeted on his return to Caracas with the title of
"Liberator," reaction had in fact begun. Reports of loyalist movements
came from all sides; Bolivar's power was confined to the towns; the
terrible Boves roused the llaneros and gathered the nucleus of a
formidable army of horsemen. Ceballos sallied out from Coro and captured
Barquisimeto, utterly defeating Bolivar when the latter attacked him.
Difficulties, however, only stimulated this remarkable man to fresh
exertions. The patriot leader, Campo Elias, overthrew Boves's horsemen
near Calabozo on the llanos south of Caracas, killing the prisoners and
butchering every man in the town because it had helped the loyalists.
This cruel deed decided the llaneros for the Spanish side, and though
Bolivar, with the assistance of Campo Elias's troops, won the pitched
battle of Araure from Ceballos, Boves had escaped to the plains there to
recruit another army of llaneros, which was destined to expel the
Liberator.
Bolivar was soon reduced to the possession of Caracas and its
neighbouring valleys, with a feeble reserve at Valencia. Marino had
thirty-five hundred men, and Bolivar finally agreed to recognise him as
dictator of the eastern provinces as the price of his help. But their
union only put off the evil day. Boves crushed Campo Elias at La Puerta
and advanced on Caracas. Raging like a trapped wild beast, Bolivar
ordered the wholesale assassination of eight hundred and sixty-six
Spaniards confined at La Guaira. His desperation inspired his followers,
and when Boves attacked the entrenchments outside Caracas and rushed the
patriot magazine, the young Granadan who was in command, seeing that the
place could not be held, ordered his men to fly, but when the loyalists
triumphantly rushed into the building they found him in the act of
throwing a match into the powder. In the explosion eight hundred of the
assaulting column were blown into the air and the survivors desisted.
Marino was coming by forced marches from the east along the plains, and
Boves retired to cut him off, while Ceballos also abandoned the siege of
Valencia. Marino eluded Boves and beat off one attack. If the Liberator
had concentrated his forces and united with his colleague the patriots
would have stood a chance, but he sent most of his own troops to recover
the west, joining Marino with only a few men. At La Puerta on the 14th
of June, 1814, the battle decisive of the second Venezuelan revolution
was fought. The desperate charges of Boves's llanero horsemen
overwhelmed the patriots, and more than half their number were left dead
on the field. Bolivar fled to Caracas, gathered all the money and
jewels, and, encumbered by a great multitude of fugitives, retreated
east. But at Aragua the patriots were driven out of their trenches with
terrific slaughter. The Liberator took ship at Barcelona with the
intention of making a last stand near the mouth of the Orinoco, but his
comrades had had enough of him. He was declared a traitor and Rivas put
in command. The remaining patriots managed to repulse one attack of the
royalists, but in a second they were defeated, and in a third Boves
slaughtered them nearly to the last man, although he himself was killed
in the melee. Only a few scattered bands on the plateaux of Barcelona
and the plains of the upper Orinoco kept up a resistance. The detachment
which Bolivar had so imprudently sent west before the battle of La
Puerta escaped into New Granada, while the Liberator went by sea to that
country and took service under its government.
The revolution headed by Bolivar and Marino had been crushed by Boves,
Morales, and Ceballos with troops recruited in Venezuela itself.
Monteverde's defeat and Boves's death left Morales master of Venezuela,
and virtually independent of outside control. But by 1815 Ferdinand was
securely on the throne of Spain, and absolutism had replaced the
Constitution established by the popular leaders of 1812. The Spanish
government determined to suppress the revolutionists who still
maintained themselves in New Granada and the Argentine, and to reduce
the semi-independent royalist chiefs to a more exact obedience. In
April, Morillo, Spain's ablest general, arrived near Cumana at the head
of ten thousand veteran regulars. Morales sailed out to meet the Marshal
and place his troops at his orders, but the regular officers gazed in
astonishment at the dark-skinned llaneros, wearing only a hat and a
waist-cloth, who were the pillars of royal authority in Venezuela. At
first the Spaniards accepted the aid of these half-savage allies, but
Morillo lost no time in establishing a military despotism in which the
llanero chiefs had no place. Even more unpopular was his leaving three
thousand Spaniards to garrison Venezuela while he impressed an equal
number of native troops to accompany him on his expedition against New
Granada. Nearly a third of the latter deserted rather than embark, and
the attitude of the Spanish officers who were left behind to rule the
country roused the native instinct for independence.
Meanwhile the scattered bands of patriot guerillas on the western
headwaters of the Orinoco, near the Granadan border, had been uniting
and increasing in strength. Jose Antonio Paez, a mixed-blood, only
twenty-six years old, who could neither read nor write, but of herculean
strength and skill in the use of lance and sword, proved the leader for
the occasion. A small corps in which he was a simple captain was
threatened by the Spanish governor of Barinas at the head of fourteen
hundred men. His own commander wished to retreat, but Paez persuaded
five hundred reckless fellows to follow him in a night assault. Leading
his men in a furious charge he bore down the enemy with a rush, killing
four hundred and taking many prisoners, whom he treated so well that
they all joined him. The fame of his success spread through the llanos
and the rough plainsmen, dissatisfied with the discipline and routine of
the regular Spanish officers, flocked to the banner of this new
chieftain, and he began the organisation of the army of the Apure,
destined to be the principal instrument in the redemption of Venezuela.
Meanwhile the guerilla chiefs farther down the Orinoco made headway
against the Spaniards, and the whole plain turned to the patriot side.
Hearing of these successes, Bolivar resolved to return to Venezuela. He
landed near the mouth of the Orinoco, but was soon driven thence and
took ship for Ocumare, near Puerto Cabello. From this point he sent a
small expedition inland towards Valencia under the command of MacGregor,
who achieved some successes against isolated bodies of loyalists, was
joined by many llaneros, and finally made his way to the plains of
Barcelona, while Bolivar was compelled to re-embark and flee to Hayti.
MacGregor took the city of Barcelona, and then with the assistance of
the negro chief, Piar, who had been besieging Cumana, repulsed Morales
himself at the battle of Juncal. By the end of 1816 the patriots had
gained so many advantages that Morillo thought himself obliged to return
to Venezuela at the head of huge reinforcements. However, the patriot
cause needed a head. The chieftains were rude and ignorant men with a
talent for fighting and nothing more, while Bolivar was a man of wide
and varied accomplishments. In spite of his failures he retained great
prestige among the Creole officers. He was agreed upon as
general-in-chief, and in December landed at Barcelona. But Piar had led
his victorious army over to the Orinoco, and notwithstanding Bolivar's
entreaties the llaneros persisted in their refusal to return to a
country where cavalry could not manoeuvre to advantage. When Bolivar
arrived at Piar's headquarters near Angostura he appreciated that the
true theatre for a successful war had been found. In those plains the
llanero cavalry, which formed the bulk of the patriot force, was
invincible. Morillo also realised that the coast would not long remain
tenable if the line of the Orinoco were in the hands of the patriots,
and he sent a regular force of three thousand men under La Torre down
the Apure and Orinoco to Angostura, while he himself quickly made an end
of the few insurrectionists who stubbornly refused to retire from the
coast to the llanos. During one of Bolivar's absences, La Torre offered
Piar battle, and at San Felix, in April, 1817, the plainsmen annihilated
the Spanish infantry.
[Illustration: THE PASS OF ANGOSTURA, BOLIVAR CITY.]
Bolivar now went vigorously to work to secure complete command of the
river and soon had quite a fleet. His ascendancy over his officers
increased daily, and when Piar conspired against him he was strong
enough to have the negro hero arrested and shot as a traitor. Before the
end of 1817 the patriots were in command of the whole line of the rivers
except the fortress of San Fernando, near the junction of the Apure and
Orinoco, and Morillo could do nothing against them because the plains
were flooded. When the waters fell in early spring the royalists
achieved some successes, but Bolivar joined Paez, established a blockade
of San Fernando, and surprised Morillo himself near Calabozo. Against
Paez's advice he now insisted on making a campaign for the recovery of
Caracas, but was badly defeated by the marshal at La Puerta--a spot for
the third time the scene of a patriot downfall. Though Paez had captured
San Fernando his expedition into the mountain country was no more
successful than Bolivar's, and the two retreated to the river to raise
fresh troops. Morales followed the patriots to the Apure, but was in his
turn repulsed by Paez, giving Bolivar a breathing spell.
The Liberator's position was desperate; his infantry had been destroyed;
his cavalry reduced in numbers; his men were nearly without arms; his
ammunition exhausted. Ill-considered movements had turned the brilliant
situation in which he had found patriot affairs a year before into the
gloomiest sort of an outlook. On the other hand, a defensive campaign in
the llanos could be kept up indefinitely, and though Morillo had twelve
thousand men in the populous mountain provinces north of the plains, he
also was without money, arms, and supplies. As he reported to the
Peruvian viceroy: "Twelve pitched battles in which the best officers and
troops of the enemy have fallen, have not lowered their pride or
lessened the vigour of their attacks." With that indomitable energy
which more than compensated for his inferiority as a strategist, Bolivar
set to work to create a new army. Cavalry of the most admirable sort
could be recruited in sufficient numbers among the llaneros, but bitter
experience had convinced him that against Spanish regulars the native
infantry stood little chance. The cessation of the Napoleonic wars had
left thousands of European veterans without employment, and Bolivar
contracted for a few thousand Britishers and Irishmen, paying a bounty
of eighty dollars per man on enlistment and promising five hundred
dollars at the conclusion of the war. Some of these troops arrived
opportunely late in 1818, and, few as their numbers were, no soldiers in
South America could stand against them.
In October Bolivar issued a proclamation foreshadowing the union of
Venezuela and New Granada. In the midst of defeat, with all of both
countries except the thinly populated Orinoco plains in possession of
the Spaniards, he was confidently planning the creation of a great
empire. Morillo opened the campaign of 1819 by advancing with over six
thousand men against Paez on the upper Orinoco. The Creole's four
thousand were mostly cavalry, and he had learned better than to risk a
pitched battle. The Spanish columns were harassed beyond endurance by
his light horsemen, and after weeks of heartbreaking marches Morillo had
to retire, having accomplished nothing.
From Bolivar's erratic genius now emanated a great stroke of strategy.
West of the plains of the Apure and Casanare, tributaries of the upper
Orinoco, rises the giant range of the Cordillera and on its top lay the
fertile plateaux of Socorro, Tunja, and Bogota, the populous heart of
New Granada. For three years the Spaniards had been in secure possession
and all except three thousand troops had been drafted for service in
Venezuela and Peru. A small Spanish force came down from Tunja to attack
the patriot guerillas in Casanare, and was repulsed. Where the enemy
could go he could follow, reasoned Bolivar. Paez's cavalry had proved
itself amply able to hold the llanos, so no risk to Venezuela would be
incurred by temporarily withdrawing part of the infantry. With two
thousand natives and five hundred British the Liberator followed up the
Orinoco, Meta, and Casanare to the latter's sources at the foot of the
Paya pass, which leads directly into the fertile valley of Sagamoso, the
heart of Tunja province. This pass is high and very difficult, although
the distance to be traversed was only eighty miles. The road was a mere
track leading along precipices, crossing and recrossing mountain
torrents, and the rain fell incessantly as the patriots struggled up the
slippery path. When they reached the higher regions a hundred men
perished with the cold, and not a horse survived. The army arrived at
Sagamoso in a pitiable condition, but without seeing an enemy except an
outpost, which was easily dislodged.
Not knowing Bolivar's numbers, Barreiro, the Spanish commander, dared
not attack, and the Liberator thus obtained a much-needed opportunity to
rest his men and gather horses for his dismounted cavalry. As soon as he
got his army in hand he outmanoeuvred Barreiro and by a rapid march
captured the city of Tunja, where he found a good store of arms and
material. This movement also placed the patriot army between the
Spaniards and Bogota. Barreiro, seeing himself cut off from his base,
made a desperate dash for the capital, but Bolivar knew the enemy's
route and took up a position directly across his path on the right bank
of the small river Boyaca. Though the patriots were only slightly
superior in numbers, the Spaniards had to attack at a disadvantage, and
fled completely defeated after losing a hundred men. Practically their
whole force was dispersed or made prisoners. Small as were the numbers
engaged and easily as it was won, Boyaca was the most important battle
fought in northern Spanish America. Central New Granada, the wealthiest
and most populous part of the country, fell into Bolivar's hands without
a further blow. Its revenues relieved his financial difficulties and
among its sturdy inhabitants he recruited a new army. Morillo, now
isolated in Venezuela, must expect an attack from the llaneros,
reinforced by the Granadan mountaineers.
[Illustration: ROAD NEAR MACUTO.]
During the Liberator's absence from Venezuela he had been branded as a
traitor for abandoning his country without the authorisation of
congress, and Marino made commander-in-chief. But the news of Boyaca
fell like a thunderbolt among the disaffected, and his return in
December quelled them utterly. No opposition was made when he announced
that Venezuela and New Granada were united into a single republic, the
United States of Colombia, with himself as president and military
dictator. The year 1820 passed without any decisive campaign. Bolivar
occupied himself principally in recruiting and refitting his armies.
Twelve hundred Irish mercenaries arrived and were incorporated with an
army which was sent by sea to threaten the Spaniards in Cartagena, and
co-operate with the New Granadans on the lower Magdalena. A strong
division of Venezuelans was sent against Quito. Paez with the main army
of the Apure was, however, repulsed in an advance into Barinas. In spite
of this success Morillo could only lie inactive south of Caracas. His
forces were not numerous enough both to retake New Granada and to hold
northern Venezuela. But word came that Ferdinand was preparing an army
of twenty thousand men which would shortly sail from Cadiz for America,
and with this reinforcement the marshal believed he could destroy all
the patriot armies. The revolution which broke out in Spain in 1820
against Ferdinand's absolute government overturned his hopes. The
expedition never sailed, and the new liberal government showed itself
disposed to make terms with the revolted colonies. In November a six
months' armistice was arranged pending the despatch of peace
commissioners to the mother-country, and Morillo resigned in favour of
La Torre.
Bolivar's lieutenants respected the armistice only where convenient, and
shamelessly continued warlike operations, wresting the New Granadan
coast from the Spaniards, beginning the siege of Cartagena, and
encouraging a revolt in the province of Maracaibo. When La Torre
declared the armistice at an end late in April, 1821, Bolivar had
twenty thousand men in the field disposed in five armies. Montilla was
besieging Cartagena with three thousand; one Granadan army held the
valley of the Magdalena; another was operating against Ecuador; Bermudez
with two thousand men threatened Caracas from the east; and Bolivar and
Paez at the head of nine thousand men were ready to advance directly
from the Orinoco on Valencia and Caracas. To these forces La Torre could
only oppose nine thousand troops besides his garrisons. The moment the
armistice was formally terminated Bolivar started straight for La Torre.
The latter had made the fatal mistake of dividing his forces, and had
only about three thousand men drawn up on the wide plain of Carabobo, at
the northern foot of the passes which lead through the mountains from
the llanos to the Valencia plateau. Bolivar's six thousand captured the
passes, but he could not deploy his infantry on the flat ground in front
except at the risk of having them cut to pieces. On June 23, 1821, he
detached the British legion of one thousand men and fifteen hundred
cavalry under Paez around to the left to take the Spaniards in flank.
The charge of the llanero horse was driven back by the musket fire, but
the pursuing Spaniards were checked by the steady Englishmen, who stood
in their tracks and withstood the fire of the whole Spanish army. Their
ammunition was soon exhausted; no help came from Bolivar; all seemed to
be over with them; a second cavalry charge was as unsuccessful as the
first; and the surviving Britishers made up their minds to carry the
enemy's position or perish. Their commander had fallen; the colours
changed bearers seven times; still they kept their formation as steadily
as if on parade, and bayonet in hand rushed on the Spaniards, who
outnumbered them four to one. For a brief time the struggle was fierce
and the result doubtful, but cold steel in the hands of such a
desperate, forlorn hope was too much for the Spaniards. They began to
give ground and at last broke and fled. The llanero horse rode them
down, and only a remnant escaped to the shelter of Puerto Cabello.
Bolivar entered Caracas acclaimed--and this time justly--as the
liberator of his country.
Meanwhile the constituent congress of the new republic of Colombia had
met at Cucuta, a town near the limits of Venezuela and New Granada. It
was composed entirely of civilians and lawyers and proved to be
radically republican and opposed to Bolivar's anti-democratic theories.
Though a centralised government was adopted, congress rejected the life
presidency and hereditary senate, and abolished the military
dictatorship by providing that the commander-in-chief, when on active
service, should leave his political functions in the hands of the
vice-president. Bolivar made a pretence of declining the presidency, but
yielded to the importunities of congress and continued in command of the
army on the terms proposed, stipulating, however, that he be allowed to
organise as he saw fit the provinces he might conquer in the rest of
South America.
The Spaniards now held only Puerto Cabello and Cumana, but no progress
was made toward driving them out of these positions during the remainder
of 1821, nor until after Bolivar had, early in 1822, left for the south
to co-operate with Sucre in the conquest of Quito. In October Cumana
surrendered to Bermudez, but from Puerto Cabello Morales led an
expedition which reconquered Maracaibo and Coro. He was unable to hold
them and the defeat of his squadron on Lake Maracaibo in July, 1823,
forced him to surrender. On the 8th of November Puerto Cabello was taken
by assault and the long war for Venezuela's independence was over.
CHAPTER III
MODERN VENEZUELA
In 1822 Bolivar departed bent on the conquest of Ecuador, Peru, and
Bolivia, leaving a New Granadan vice-president as ruler of the great
Colombian republic, of which Venezuela was merely one division. The
massacres and sackings of ten bloody years had depopulated and
impoverished Venezuela, and the cost of maintaining the army and aiding
Bolivar in his foreign contests drained its exhausted resources. The
educated Creoles, especially powerful in the agricultural regions near
the coast, saw no place for themselves in Bolivar's centralising system.
They wanted to control the offices in their own localities, and did not
relish the establishment of a bureaucracy in which appointments and
promotions would be settled at Bogota. The predominant radical French
ideas added force to the sentiment of local independence. The theorists
were offended by Bolivar's manifest predilection toward aristocratic
forms and the favours which he granted the clergy. Most dangerous of
all, jealousy of the Liberator was rife among the generals.
Paez had been left at the head of military affairs in Venezuela and soon
after the capture of Puerto Cabello he became involved in quarrels with
the municipal authorities. The llanero general recked little of the
arguments of the lawyers, and carried things with a high hand. In 1826,
when the Bogota government sent an order for the organisation of
militia, he filled the measure to overflowing, and the municipality of
Caracas made a formal complaint to the central government. A decree for
his suspension was issued, but a riot in the streets terrorised the
cabildo and he was replaced in power as a sort of dictator. This
amounted to a destruction of the influence of the central Colombian
government in Venezuelan affairs. Many cities raised the standard of
rebellion and made themselves virtually independent. Bolivar hastened
back from Peru to reduce his old companion in arms to obedience. He
cajoled Paez into temporary co-operation, subdued most of the revolted
cities, and, seeing that his system could not be sustained without
coercion, assumed a dictatorship. But the news that Peru had revolted
destroyed his dream of a continent-wide dominion, and the demand for
local autonomy continued so strong throughout Venezuela and New Granada
that he was forced to call a national assembly to amend the Constitution
on the basis of a compromise. In spite of Bolivar's intrigues nearly
half the elected delegates staid away, and a majority of those who
presented themselves at Ocana, in March, 1828, though chosen under the
pressure of his influence, opposed his measures.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE OF PUERTO CABELLO IN 1870.]
The minority who favoured him withdrew at his suggestion, leaving the
congress without a quorum. It dissolved and the Liberator visited
Caracas, Cartagena, and Bogota, calling popular assemblies whose
deliberations were directed by bayonets and which obediently besought
him to save the country from anarchy in his own way. He issued a decree
virtually abolishing the Cucuta Constitution, but a conspiracy to
assassinate him was formed at Bogota in the fall of 1828, and he was
saved only by the devotion of his mistress, who stood in the way of the
midnight assassins, giving him time to jump from a window and escape. He
took a fearful vengeance on the conspirators and banished his worst
political enemies, but the incident failed to turn public sentiment in
his favour, and it was in vain that he exhibited himself as a martyr.
His old friend, General Cordoba, headed an unsuccessful insurrection in
the province of Antioquia; insurgents rose in Popayan and Rio Negro, and
towards the end of 1829, in Bolivar's native city, Caracas, an assembly
of one thousand generals, public functionaries, and prominent citizens
announced that Venezuela would shortly separate from Colombia and called
upon Paez to assume a dictatorship. The Liberator struggled vainly
against the rising tide of federalism; the country was at heart opposed
to Caesarism and union; he had been unable to convince the Creoles of the
advisability of providing a strong centralised government; and his only
supporters were personal ones. Bitterly protesting that he was falsely
charged with aspiring to mount a throne, and insisting that his real
ambition had been only to secure the perpetuity of the Colombian union
and establish an ordered government, he offered his resignation.
Congress, however, contained many of his friends and hesitated at coming
to an open breach. He was re-elected and made one last effort to enforce
the obedience of Venezuela. But the troops he raised in New Granada did
not dare to attack Paez, who with superior forces was waiting in an
impregnable position near the frontier. Sick and discouraged, the
Liberator renewed his resignation--this time in earnest--and retired to
the seacoast, where a few months later he died of a wasting sickness at
the early age of forty-seven. Though his courage, energy, and sublime
persistence and self-confidence had been the chief factors in securing
South American independence, those qualities proved utterly inadequate
to hold in check the unruly ambitions of the Creoles. He died clearly
foreseeing the decades of anarchy which lay before the northern
countries of the continent. "I blush to admit it," he said to congress
on the eve of his fall, "but independence is the only benefit we have
achieved, and that has been at the cost of all others." On his death-bed
he wrote: "Our Constitutions are books, our laws papers, our elections
combats, and life itself a torment. We shall arrive at such a state that
no foreign nation will condescend to conquer us, and we shall be
governed by petty tyrants."
The Venezuelan federalists had not waited for Bolivar's death to
complete the formal separation from Colombia. In May, 1830, a
constituent congress assembled which named Paez dictator and notified
Bogota that the country regarded itself as absolutely independent. But
Bolivar had partisans and the ruling clique enemies. The eastern
provinces refused to recognise Paez's authority and the whole country
was soon under arms. But Bolivar's death and the virtual recognition of
Venezuela's independence by New Granada brought about a treaty between
Paez and Monagas, the chief of the insurrection. The Creole aristocracy
came to a working understanding with the generals, and little cliques in
each city supported the central government as long as they were
recognised as dominant in their own localities. Naturally the ignored
outsiders were dissatisfied and plotted to overthrow these oligarchies.
In May, 1831, a revolution broke out in Caracas which menaced nothing
less than the extermination of the property-holding classes, but it was
suppressed and its leaders executed. On paper the form of government was
most liberal, congress abolishing the tobacco monopoly and many odious
taxes inherited from Spanish times, proclaiming religious freedom, and
adopting a Constitution very similar to that of the United States. But
in practice the conservative cliques had things their own way. Though
ambitious chiefs headed insurrections from time to time, they were all
bought off or defeated, and Paez continued president until 1835, leaving
the country in a condition of comparative order and prosperity.
Doctor Vargas, a civilian, succeeded him, but against him the generals
revolted, declaring Marino dictator. Carujo, the soul of the
insurrection, said, in the act of making the president and his ministers
prisoners, "Doctor Vargas, the world belongs to the strongest," and the
latter nobly replied, "No, the world belongs to the just," resumeing in
a word the conflict between force and law, between unbridled ambition
and the necessity for order, which has desolated Venezuela to this day
and which will last until the selfish elements learn that their own true
interests would best be served by promoting the prosperity of the whole
people--by relying upon their own industry rather than on chances to
despoil the producing classes. The government party appealed to Paez,
and the llanero general accepted the command. His prestige with the
common people and the army enabled him to gather forces with which he
overcame the revolted generals after eight months of bloody civil war.
Vargas was recalled from exile, but after a short time refused to
continue in the presidency, and his place was taken by the
vice-president, Doctor Narvarte. In 1839 Paez was again made president,
and was succeeded in 1842 by General Soublette, another of the heroes of
the war of independence. Until 1846 there was comparative tranquillity
in Venezuela. The population had decreased by a fifth during the Spanish
wars, being estimated at six hundred and fifty thousand in 1825, but
within the succeeding twenty years it grew to a million and a quarter.
Cacao, coffee, and sugar became important articles of export and made
the landed proprietors rich. With the cessation of warlike operations on
the plains, cattle rapidly multiplied, the first waggon roads were
built, and a bank was established.
In 1846 an anti-Creole insurrection broke out among the men of colour,
and Paez was again invested with dictatorial powers. When he had
completed his work he installed Monagas as president. Popular irritation
against the ruling conservative coterie was, however, profound and
Monagas quarrelled with congress, and sent his soldiers to break up its
meetings. Paez took up arms again and tried to expel his nominee, but
was defeated, and for the next nine years Monagas and his brother
alternated in the presidency. Though raised to power by the conservative
party they abandoned it and before 1850 had thrown themselves into the
arms of the liberals, or federalists. Extravagant powers were granted
to the states; the provincial coteries ran their localities to suit
themselves; the ties binding the different parts of the country together
were weakened; an elaborate and confused set of taxes, national,
provincial, and municipal, well-nigh choked commerce out of existence.
More and more liberty was conceded to the states and municipalities,
and, on paper, to the individual also. Slavery was abolished in 1854.
Revolutions broke out from time to time, and finally, in 1858, the
so-called conservatives overthrew the Monagas regime. But they
immediately divided into warring groups, and their new Constitution
proved too centralising to suit the Creole politicians. The liberals
hoisted the banner of federalism and several provinces rose in revolt.
Under the leadership of Pedro Gual the conservatives were, however,
victorious, but they again split to pieces, and Gual himself went over
to the liberals. A revolution in Caracas brought back old General Paez,
who assumed a dictatorship and tried to re-establish the power of the
central government. But it was impossible. Many disappointed
conservatives had turned federalist. No politician seemed willing to
submit to any administration unless he was a member of it. The struggle
had degenerated into a mere selfish contest for power, and the terms
liberal and conservative, federalist and unitarian, had ceased to have
any real relation to the opinions of the persons who bore these
appellations. General Falcon, with Guzman Blanco as lieutenant, led a
successful insurrection in Coro and made himself undisputed master of a
considerable portion of the country. The province of Maracaibo formally
declared itself separated from all connection with Caracas. For three
years civil war raged, when finally Paez gave up and Falcon assumed
direction of the exhausted country. On only one thing had the rapid
succession of dictators, provincial and national, been agreed,--the
increase of taxes. Import duties had been raised to such a point that
commerce could stand no more. But in spite of the enormous sums wrung
from merchant, producer, and consumer, the treasury was empty, for the
local chiefs openly took possession of the receipts of the custom-houses
in their respective districts, and diversions of public funds to private
use were the rule among all ranks of officials.
[Illustration: VENEZUELAN SOLDIER OF 1870.]
Falcon's success meant the definite triumph of unrestrained federalism.
The twenty states into which the seven old provinces had been divided in
the effort to provide enough offices to go around, became in law
sovereign; the presidential term was reduced to two years; absolute
liberty of the press was permitted, and the right of meeting for any
purpose guaranteed. Imprisonment for debt, the death penalty, and
religious instruction in the schools were all abolished. During the five
years that Falcon was the chief political figure affairs in Venezuela
grew worse and worse. State after state burst into revolution. Falcon
sometimes whipped the insurrectionists and sometimes bought them off,
but more often was unable to secure even a semblance of obedience
except by conceding everything. National penury reached the limit, the
states collected and pocketed the dues in most of the custom-houses,
officials were in regular partnership with smugglers, and finally the
feeble ghost of a federal administration simply flickered out of
existence because it could pay nobody.
A chief of the so-called unitarian party was declared president in 1868,
but Guzman Blanco, now the undisputed head of the federalists, retook
Caracas in 1870 and installed himself as dictator. He proved the
strongest and most tenacious man who had yet come to the front. With a
terrific insurrection raging against him, he concentrated all powers in
his own hands, suppressed the peculations of his agents, and
relentlessly dragged the half-breeds and negroes into his armies. He
finally put down all his enemies and in 1873 was installed as
constitutional president. Until 1889 he virtually reigned over
Venezuela. Though occasionally he might allow some one else to be
elected president, after a short interval he would find a pretext for
intervention and oust his nominee. Though the Constitution was left
substantially unamended, he interpreted it as he pleased. He organised a
regular machine through which he governed the "sovereign" states, taking
care that none but his creatures should become governors and that the
members returned to congress should be docile. To all intents and
purposes his will was the law of the land, for the legislative and
judicial departments were his instruments, and his executive decrees
covered nearly every imaginable subject. The minutest details of
commercial and social life were regulated, the clergy owed their
positions to the dictator, and even private property was not safe if
Blanco took a fancy to it. But in the main his tyranny was intelligent.
The country escaped the desolating outbreaks of local chiefs, with
forced loans wrung from property owners and merchants, the seizure of
cattle and coffee for "war purposes," and the lassoing of peons to serve
in the armed bands. Though the taxes imposed by Blanco were enormously
heavy, the marvellous productive forces of the soil could stand almost
any burden provided its amount were certain and its collection regular.
Though the dictator withdrew millions for his private use, depositing
them in Paris against the evil day of his expulsion, indiscriminate
exactions by subordinates were suppressed. Large sums were spent on
public works and buildings, and the beautification of the city of
Caracas, one of the handsomest and best-built cities in America, dates
from Guzman Blanco's time. Nearly five hundred miles of railroad were
constructed. The country was given and has retained the inestimable
blessing of a stable currency, and the coffee and cacao businesses
increased enormously. The number of cattle, which the civil wars prior
to 1870 had reduced to one million four hundred thousand, increased
sevenfold in fifteen years.
But Blanco's system was anomalous and rested on no secure foundation.
The commercial and property-holding classes abstained from politics, the
people became tired of his busybody tyranny, the peons were still an
inert and ignorant mass, harmless by themselves, but furnishing a
tempting recruiting ground for ambitious revolutionists. Nor had the
Creole politicians changed their nature. There were plenty of talented
adventurers whose mouths fairly watered seeing the immense fortune
Blanco was accumulating, and who only waited a favourable opportunity to
conquer a share in the spoils. The successful outbreak came in 1889,
headed by Rojas Paul. His success was a signal for other chiefs to
imitate his example. Resolute leaders hastily organised bands of peons,
and the old story of pronunciamentos, kidnappings of peaceful peasants,
attacks, surprises, forced loans, and all the demoralising and
disintegrating horrors of civil war were repeated. Paul was overthrown
by Andueza, and in 1892 Crespo got to the head of affairs and held power
long enough to accumulate a respectable fortune. Andrade succeeded
Crespo, but had to divide the spoils with his predecessor. The
disturbances did not become of a character to injure seriously
Venezuela's commerce and production until 1896, but there then began a
rapid decline in the value of her exports. The government's revenues
diminished a third and amounted to less than half the expenditures. The
debt grew to alarming figures and the guaranteed interest on foreign
capital employed in building railroads was allowed to fall into arrear.
In 1899, Castro, a man hitherto unknown in politics, started an
insurrection against Andrade in the western state of Los Andes. Marching
from one town to another his army grew like a rolling snowball by
forced enlistments, and though the sturdy hillmen did not know what they
were fighting for and would gladly have been at home, they showed all
the stolid bravery that seems inborn in their race. The government
troops could not stand against them, and Castro finally entered Caracas
in triumph. Though insurrection after insurrection has broken out
against him, the dauntless courage with which he leads his men has
enabled him to maintain himself. The successful South American
revolutionist must be willing to risk losing his own life, for so long
as he leads he will be followed, but his cowardice or death means a
rapid dissolution of his forces.
[Illustration: VENEZUELAN GUERILLAS.]
Though the solidity acquired by the Venezuelan commercial and financial
structure during the long years of Blanco's reign has prevented the
country from reverting into the anarchy which prevailed before 1873, and
though the spirit of federalism is not so rampant and the chieftains
aspire rather to a control of the whole country than to power confined
to their own localities, the recent civil wars have disorganised the
finances. Internal production has been hampered and external obligations
have been deferred--the latter with serious consequences. Anti-foreign
sentiment, already raised to a threatening height by the boundary
dispute with British Guiana--a long-standing matter which was happily
settled by arbitration after menacing a serious rupture between the
United States and Great Britain,--was further exacerbated by the
blockade of Venezuelan ports and the destruction of the Venezuelan navy
by the joint fleets of Germany, England, and Italy in 1902--measures to
which the European governments had been incited by the failure of
Venezuela to settle claims of their citizens. In the face of this
foreign war the civil conflicts were interrupted, and President Castro
empowered the American minister to negotiate for the submission of the
claims to arbitration. To the weight of the sentiment that international
money claims should not be enforced by warlike measures was added the
existence of a current of opinion in the United States which favoured
arbitration as in this instance certainly the best method of adjustment.
The temporary occupation of ports on American soil by European powers
might give the latter a military hold in the western continent which
would embarrass and complicate more important relations. The submission
was quickly and amicably arranged, the claims of the citizens of other
countries are to be ascertained at the same time, and the matter is now
before The Hague international tribunal.
[Illustration: ECUADOR COLOMBIA AND VENEZUELA]
By a resolution of congress General Castro is empowered to hold the
office of president for six years from 1902. Bitter and costly as have
been the experiences through which Venezuela has passed during the last
twelve years, the vast majority of the intelligent and property-holding
classes realise more clearly than outsiders possibly can that internal
stability will alone ensure the commercial development of the country;
that Venezuela united is far more likely to prosper than if separated
into always jealous and often warring provinces. The mass of the people
are industrious and peaceable. Real progress has been made since the
time of Bolivar in the almost impossible task of adjusting republican
forms and procedure to a people who by inheritance and tradition knew
nothing of the difficult art of self-government. It cannot fairly be
said that Venezuela as yet sees her way clear to a solution of the
problem, but her commercial statistics for the last thirty years prove
that her people have acquired industrial capacity, and the history of
other Spanish-American countries shows that the power for evil of the
turbulent military class may perish once for all with startling
suddenness when the right stage in national development is reached.
COLOMBIA
CHAPTER I
CONQUEST AND SETTLEMENT
When Alonso de Ojeda coasted along the Venezuelan shore in the spring of
1499 he stopped short just west of the Gulf of Maracaibo, near the
present boundary between Venezuela and Colombia. The following year
Rodrigo Bastida doubled the Goajira peninsula and pursued his voyage to
the west, catching sight of the giant snowclad mountains of Santa Marta
and of the low land which lies between them and the sea. Coming to the
mouth of a great river on the day sacred to Saint Magdalene, he named it
the Magdalena, and farther to the south-west found the fine harbour
where the city of Cartagena now stands. At the head of the Gulf of
Darien he came to another great river, the Atrato, and here his
explorations stopped.
More than a year later the great Columbus himself, on his fourth and
last voyage, sighted the Central American coast at Cape Gracias a Dios,
near the present boundary between Nicaragua and Honduras. Thence he
sailed south-east along a pestilential shore for eight hundred miles,
finally arriving near the point where Bastida had left off his
explorations. It is said that Bartholomew Columbus founded a settlement
on the Atlantic shore of the Isthmus, but it was soon destroyed by the
neighbouring Indians. The long stretch of coast was unfit for the abode
of Europeans, but the Indians had gold in abundance, and the Spaniards
were satisfied that the interior was full of mines. Hundreds of
fortunate adventurers had accumulated fortunes in the placers of Hayti,
and with a view of repeating their successes on the mainland, Alonso de
Ojeda solicited and obtained from the Spanish Crown the grant of the
territory from Goajira to the Atrato, while Diego de Nicuesa was given
the coast from the Atrato to Cape Gracias a Dios. In 1510 one of Ojeda's
lieutenants founded a town called Sebastian on the eastern shore of the
Gulf of Darien. The Indians soon destroyed it, but Antigua was
established across the gulf. This place was in fact on the Isthmus of
Panama, and not much more than one hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean,
of which the Spaniards then knew nothing. Among the military adventurers
who had followed Ojeda to Darien were Nunez de Balboa and Francisco
Pizarro. In 1511 the former went a short distance into the interior
looking for gold, and fell in with an Indian chief who told him that
only a few leagues south lay a great sea whose shores were inhabited by
numerous rich and civilised nations. Two years later he headed an
expedition from Antigua which resulted in the epoch-making discovery
which has immortalised his name. As the band of Spaniards approached
the line of hills from which the natives told them they could see the
mysterious ocean, Balboa hastened ahead of his men and was the first to
catch a glimpse, but in the headlong rush for the honour of first
touching its waters he was beaten by Alonso Martin and that lean and
tireless soldier who was afterwards to conquer Peru--Francisco Pizarro.
The Pacific side of the Isthmus proved to be more healthful and
habitable than the marshy shores of the Atlantic, and the settlers at
Antigua were soon driven by fevers and dysenteries, torrential rains and
sweltering heat, to the more healthful region of Panama. Nicuesa
likewise had been able to do nothing with his long stretch of Isthmian
and Central American coast. Nombre de Dios, not far from the present
site of Colon, was the only town which he succeeded in establishing, and
that maintained itself only as landing-place on the way to Panama. To
this day the Caribbean coast from the Atrato delta as far as Gracias a
Dios is practically uninhabited by white men; on the site of Antigua
there is left not a trace; the Indians in its neighbourhood are still
independent savages; and the north shore of the Isthmus has been a
hospital and a grave for successive generations of white men during four
hundred years. Only its position at the strategical gate to the great
South Sea has induced men to go to its noisome shores.
The Isthmian settlements were, as they remain, separated from the
continent of South America by the deep and broad valley of the Atrato,
where the rainfall is the greatest known, and whose dense tropical
forests are uninhabitable and practically impassable. No land
communication exists between Panama and Colombia proper. However, the
coast east of the Atrato delta is dryer, and at Santa Marta, beyond the
mouth of the Magdalena and at the foot of the great outlying mountain
mass of Colombia's north-eastern peninsula, was founded in 1525 the
first permanent settlement in Colombia proper. It was nothing more than
a kidnapping station, whence expeditions scoured the interior for slaves
to be sold to the Haytian gold mines. Meanwhile from Coro, established
two years later, on the eastern side of Maracaibo Gulf, murdering and
slaughtering expeditions were sent across the gulf, returning to
Venezuela after making a circuit among the mountains lying south of
Maracaibo Bay. Later these expeditions from Coro penetrated over these
mountains, reaching the llanos of the Apure and finally the plains of
Casanare lying east of Bogota, which now belong to Colombia.
[Illustration: OLDEST FORTRESS IN AMERICA, AT CARTAGENA.]
The exploring parties from Santa Marta and Coro, and information picked
up along the coast, gave the Spaniards a pretty fair idea of the
geography of the interior, and the existence of immense quantities of
gold and of civilised nations living on the high plateaux was verified
from many sources. The conquest of the fertile and salubrious interior
of Colombia was effected from three distinct centres,--Cartagena and
Santa Marta on the Caribbean coast, and Quito on the Ecuador table-land.
Serious colonisation began with Heredia's foundation of Cartagena in
1533. The new leader set vigorously to work to establish himself firmly
on the magnificent harbour and seek for gold. Cortes' and Pizarro's
marvellous successes had brought a multitude of adventurers to the new
world, all of whom were eager for a share in the spoils of the yet
independent Indian kingdoms. Heredia found the rocky hills which rise
not far south of Cartagena full of profitable gold washings, and the
Indians reported that only a short distance in the interior, where the
mountains rose higher, there was a region called Zenufana which produced
the precious metal far more abundantly. Their story was true, and
Zenufana was none other than the present state of Antioquia, which has
produced hundreds of millions of dollars of gold. No time was lost in
starting on the search. Heredia's first expedition penetrated to the
headwaters of the river Sinu, which flows into the Caribbean not far
south-west of Cartagena, and though successful in finding gold he was
unable to force his way over the high sierra of Abibe, the most northern
bulwark of the great Maritime Cordillera, which barred his way into
Antioquia and the valley of the Cauca. In 1535 the town of Tolu was
founded between the mouth of the Sinu and Cartagena, and the expeditions
skirted the northern end of the Andes until they reached the river Cauca
where it debouches into the Magdalena. In 1537 Spanish expeditions
succeeded in crossing the formidable Abibe Mountains, and penetrated
east into the coveted mining country. Up the Cauca they followed for two
hundred miles, passing the rapids which place an almost inexpugnable
barrier between the upper and lower river. Not far from the present city
of Cartago they found traces of white men, and learned that while they
themselves had been pushing south the indomitable companions of Pizarro
had extended their explorations and conquests more than a thousand miles
north from their landing-place on the Peruvian coast. The men from
Cartagena went on to Cali, where the conquerors of Popayan had their
headquarters, and there an expedition was fitted out which, under the
leadership of Jorge Robledo, returned down the Cauca and conquered
Antioquia after much bloody fighting with the Indians. It is said that
each of Heredia's men received a larger amount than the conquerors of
Mexico and Peru. Certain it is that the founding of Cartagena resulted
in putting the Spaniards in possession of the valley of the Cauca and
the wonderful gold mines of Antioquia as far south as the 5th degree.
Benalcazar, one of Pizarro's lieutenants, after conquering Quito in
1533, had proceeded north along the Andean plateau between the two
Cordilleras. A hundred miles from Quito he entered the high region of
Pasto, inhabited by vigorous, semi-civilised Indians much resembling
those of Ecuador. Near this point the Andes, heretofore massed in one
great chain, split into three parallel ranges. The western and central
chains are separated from each other by the valley of the Cauca and near
the Caribbean dip down to sea-level. The eastern range bears off a
little to the right, with the Magdalena valley between it and the
central mountains, and six hundred miles north turns north-east and
enters Venezuela just south of Maracaibo Bay. Benalcazar went straight
north from Pasto and entered the region where the Cauca gathers its
headwaters. This was Popayan, a lower country than Pasto, but still high
enough to be healthful, pleasant, and densely populated. In rapid
succession the tribes inhabiting the whole upper Cauca valley were
conquered, and Benalcazar's officers only stopped when they met their
countrymen coming up from Cartagena. The city of Cali was founded in
1536, Popayan in 1538, Pasto and Anserma in 1539, and Cartago in 1540.
This beautiful valley is one of the most isolated regions on the globe.
To the east and west the high walls of the Quindio, or central, and of
the western Cordillera shut it off from the Magdalena valley and from
the Pacific, and the rapids near Cartago make communication with the
Caribbean almost impossible.
Benalcazar himself had returned to Quito and it was not until 1538 that
he was able to undertake the conquest of the upper Magdalena and those
lovely plateaux and rich kingdoms which nestled on the broad top of the
eastern Cordillera. In the meantime he had been forestalled by an
expedition coming from the Caribbean. In 1536 Jimenez de Quesada sallied
forth from Santa Marta with eight hundred men and one hundred horses.
Avoiding the swampy delta of the Magdalena, he passed through the
Chimilas mountains which lie east of it, and reached the solid ground of
the foothills that approach the river banks some three hundred miles
above its mouth. Along these he made his way through incredible
difficulties and hardships, months being consumed in the journey, and
his men perishing by scores from fatigue, starvation, and continual
fights with the savage natives. When he reached the river Opon, he
determined to climb to the plateau, near the site of Velez, where he was
told that the mountain top was inhabited by a civilised race. After
fighting his way through the unconquerable savages of the Opon valley he
found himself in the centre of a series of lovely table-lands, many of
them the beds of ancient mountain lakes whose alluvial bottoms were
inexhaustibly fertile, where the climate was perfect and all the
products of the temperate zone grew luxuriantly. The plateaux,
interrupted by valleys and ridges, stretched from Pamplona to beyond
Bogota--a distance of more than two hundred miles. This region was then
and remains to this day the populous heart of Colombia, the principal
seat of power, wealth, and national civilisation. However, it is so
isolated that it has never constituted a nucleus around which the widely
separated provinces of Colombia could unite into a well organised
nation. To reach Tolima, Bogota's nearest neighbour in the upper
Magdalena valley, it is necessary to descend thousands of feet of steep
mountainside, along which the sure-footed mule can hardly climb. To
reach Cauca, not only must the Magdalena valley be crossed but the
enormously high Quindio range must be climbed, and before getting to
the Pacific, still another mountain chain intervenes, while the populous
gold regions of Antioquia can only be reached by following down the
Magdalena and up the Cauca. Weeks of the most difficult journeying are
required to get to the seacoast or any of the other states, and Panama
might as well be on the other side of the globe so far as practical
communication goes.
[Illustration: TRAVELLERS DESCENDING A MOUNTAIN ROAD]
Quesada had lost three-fourths of his men in reaching the promised land,
but once there he encountered fewer difficulties than any of the other
great Spanish conquerors. The numerous nation of the Chibchas inhabited
the southern plateaux, who acknowledged allegiance to the zipa of
Meuqueta. But their so-called empire possessed no military force or
cohesion, although they had carried agriculture to a high degree of
perfection. They manufactured cotton cloths, mined gold and emeralds,
worked artistic ornaments, had a circulating medium and a calendar,
lived in houses, built splendid temples, and had tools hard enough to
carve stones into elaborate sculptures. Their government was absolute;
crimes were severely and relentlessly punished; the caste of priests
wielded great power. Altogether they appear to have reached a stage of
material civilisation not much inferior to the aztecs of Mexico, the
caras of Ecuador, or the incas of Peru, but in efficiency of
governmental and military organisation they fell far below those great
peoples. Spanish chroniclers have amused themselves with recording
traditions of great wars in which the Chibchas had assembled armies of
hundreds of thousands not long before the conquest, but the fact
remains that less than two hundred Spaniards overcame them and reduced
them to unquestioning obedience within a few months and without serious
loss. Indeed, Quesada's successors had more difficulty with the smaller
nations who inhabited the northern plateaux of Tunja, Socorro, and
Tundama, and the most serious resistance was made by the semi-savage
tribes of the upper Magdalena, who fought nearly as desperately as the
Indians of Antioquia and the Caribbean coast.
Quesada chose the site of the ancient Chibcha capital for his city and
there Bogota was founded on the 7th of August, 1538. It lies on the
eastern border of a magnificent level plain, the bed of the largest of
the prehistoric lakes, thirty miles broad and sixty long, and nearly
nine thousand feet above sea-level. One hundred and fifty thousand
people live on that plain to-day, and the population in Chibcha times
was probably even larger. The same year Benalcazar reached the
neighbourhood of Bogota, having come down the valley of the Magdalena
from Quito and Pasto, and at the very same moment arrived an expedition
from Coro in Venezuela, which had crossed the mountains south of
Maracaibo and followed south along the llanos lying at the eastern base
of the Colombian Andes, thence climbing the sierra to Bogota. Remarkable
as it may seem, these three bands of indomitable Spaniards, starting
from widely separated points on the coast, met each other in the remote
interior of the continent, brought to the same place by the fame of the
fertility and riches of the Chibcha kingdom. The Venezuelans under
Federmann, and the Ecuadoreans under Benalcazar, accepted the bribe
which Quesada offered them not to interfere with his conquest, and the
three chiefs, laden with gold, returned to Spain in the same ship.
Quesada left his brother in nominal command of the colony, but each of
the conquerors was a law unto himself. When the governor of Santa Marta
came up to Bogota they refused to recognise his authority. Tunja and
Velez were founded in 1539 on the plateaux north of the capital, and a
year or two later Quesada's brother wasted a great part of his forces in
a fruitless expedition to the mountains of Pasto in search of the
Eldorado. Meanwhile, in 1539, the Portuguese Geronimo Mello had
succeeded in entering the mouth of the Magdalena, making his way for a
considerable distance upstream. The great river proved to be perfectly
navigable from the sea to a point nearly as far south as Bogota, and the
Spaniards immediately utilised it as a route to Santa Marta and
Cartagena far preferable to the track through swamps and foothills which
Quesada had followed. Each of the plateau provinces lying on the
mountains which follow its eastern bank had its own paths down the
slopes to the river, and a practicable though tedious and expensive
communication with the Caribbean was developed.
[Illustration: NATIVE BOATS, MAGDALENA RIVER.]
In 1542 Lugo, an adventurer who had successfully intrigued against
Quesada, arrived with a commission as adelantado and considerable
reinforcements. New cities were founded among the gold mines of the
upper Magdalena at Tocaima, Ibague, and Neiva, as well as at Pamplona at
the northern end of the plateaux. The tribes of Bogota, Tunja, Velez,
Socorro, and Pamplona submitted without appreciable resistance, and
their fertile fields were divided into great estates among the
Spaniards. But the more savage tribes in the gold-bearing valleys of the
Upper Magdalena and Cauca and in Antioquia struggled hard to escape
impressment into the mines, and war almost exterminated them. The same
thing happened on the plains of the Caribbean coast, although in that
region some tribes maintained their independence. To work the mines and
plantations negro slaves had to be imported, with the result that black
blood predominates in the lower regions of Colombia, while the
descendants of the aborigines are in a majority on the eastern plateaux.