THE ANTECEDENTS OF LORD COCHRANE'S EMPLOYMENTS IN AMERICA.—THE WAR
OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE SPANISH COLONIES.—MEXICO.—VENEZUELA.
—COLOMBIA.—CHILI.—THE FIRST CHILIAN INSURRECTION.—THE CARRERAS
AND O'HIGGINS.—THE BATTLE OF BANCAGUA.—O'HIGGINS'S SUCCESSES.—THE
ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CHILIAN REPUBLIC.—LORD COCHRANE INVITED TO ENTER
THE CHILIAN SERVICE.
(1810—1817.)
To an understanding of Lord Cochrane's share in the South American
wars of independence a brief recapitulation of their antecedents, and
of the state of affairs at the time of his first connection with them,
is necessary.
The Spanish possessions in both North and South America, which had
reached nearly their full dimensions before the close of the sixteenth
century, had been retained, with little opposition from without,
and with still less from within, down to the close of the eighteenth
century. These possessions, including Mexico and Central America, New
Granada, Venezuela, Peru, La Plata, and Chili, covered an area larger
than that of Europe, more than twice as large as that of the present
United States. Through half a dozen generations they had been governed
with all the short-sighted tyranny for which the Spanish Government is
famous; the resources of the countries had been crippled in order that
each day's greed might be satisfied; and the inhabitants, who, for the
most part, were the mixed offspring of Spanish and native parents,
had been kept in abject dependence and in ignorant ferocity. There
was plenty of internal hatred and strife; but no serious thought of
winning their liberty and working out their own regeneration seems to
have existed among the people of the several provinces, until it was
suggested by the triumphant success of the United States in throwing
off the stronger but much less oppressive thraldom of Great Britain.
That success having been achieved, however, it was soon emulated by
the colonial subjects of Spain.
The first leader of agitation was Francisco Miranda, a Venezuelan
Creole. He visited England in 1790, and received some encouragement in
his revolutionary projects from Pitt. He went to France in 1792, and
there, while waiting some years for fit occasion of prosecuting the
work on which his heart was set, he helped to fight the battle of the
revolution against the Bourbons and the worn-out feudalism of which
they were representatives. During his absence, in 1794, conspiracies
against Spain arose in Mexico and New Granada, and, these continuing,
he went in 1794, armed by secret promises of assistance from Pitt, to
help in fomenting them. They prospered for several years; and in 1806
Miranda obtained substantial aid from Sir Alexander Cochrane, Lord
Cochrane's uncle, then the admiral in command of the West India
station. But in 1806 Pitt died. The Whigs came into power, and with
their coming occurred a change in the English policy. In 1807, General
Crawfurd was ordered to throw obstacles in the way of Miranda, then
heading a formidable insurrection. The result was a temporary check
to the work of revolution. In 1810 Miranda renewed his enterprise
in Venezuela, still with poor success; and in the same year a fresh
revolt was stirred up in Mexico by Miguel Hidalgo, of Costilla, a
priest of Dolores. Hidalgo's insurrection was foolish in design and
bloodthirsty in execution. It was continued, in better spirit, but
with poor success, by Morelos and Rayon, who, sustaining a serious
defeat in 1815, left the strife to degenerate into a coarse bandit
struggle, very disastrous to Spain, but hardly beneficial to the cause
of Mexican independence.
In the meanwhile a more prosperous and worthier contest was being
waged in South America. Besides the efforts of Miranda in Venezuela,
which were renewed between 1810 and 1812, when he was taken prisoner
and sent to Spain, there to die in a dungeon, a separate standard of
revolt was raised in Quito by Narinno and his friends in 1809. After
fighting desperately, in guerilla fashion, for five years, Narinno
was captured and forced to share Miranda's lot. A greater man, the
greatest hero of South American independence, Simon Bolivar, succeeded
them.
Bolivar, a native of Caraccas, had passed many years in Europe, when
in 1810, at the age of twenty-seven, he went to serve under Miranda
in Venezuela. Miranda's defeat in 1812 compelled him to retire to New
Granada, but there he did good service. He improved the fighting ways
and extended the fighting area, and in December, 1814, was appointed
captain-general of Venezuela and New Granada, soon, however, to be
driven back and forced to take shelter in Jamaica by the superior
strength of Morillo, the Spanish general, who arrived with a
formidable army in 1815. In 1816 Bolivar again showed himself in the
field at the head of his famous liberating army, which, crossing
over from Trinidad, and gaining reinforcements at every step, planted
freedom, such as it was, all along the northern parts of South
America, in which the new republic of Colombia was founded under his
presidency, in the neighbouring district of New Granada, and down to
the La Plata province, where he established the republic of Bolivia,
so named in his honour. With these patriotic labours he was busied
upon land, while Lord Cochrane was securing the independence of the
Spanish colonies by his brave warfare on the sea.
As the cause of liberty progressed in South America, it became
apparent that it had poor chance of permanence, while the
revolutionists were unable to cope with the Spaniards in naval
strife or to wrest from Spain her strongholds on the coast. This was
especially the case with the maritime provinces of Chili and Peru.
Peru, held firmly by the army garrisoned in Lima, to which Callao
served as an almost impregnable port, had been unable to share in the
contest waged on the other side of the Andes; and Chili, though
strong enough to declare its independence, was too weak to maintain it
without foreign aid.
The Chilian struggle began in 1810, when the Spanish captain-general,
Carrasco, was deposed, and a native government set up under Count de
la Conquista. By this government the sovereignty of Spain was still
recognised, although various reforms were adopted which Spain could
not be expected to endorse. Accordingly, in April, 1811, an attempt
was made by the Spanish soldiers to overturn the new order of
things. The result was that, after brief fighting, the revolutionists
triumphed, and the yoke of Spain was thrown off.
But the independence of Chili, thus easily begun, was not easily
continued. Three brothers, Jose Miguel, Juan Jose, and Luis Carreras,
and their sister, styled the Anne Boleyn of Chili, determined to
pervert the public weal to their own aggrandisement. Winning their way
into popularity, they overturned the national congress that had been
established in June, and in December set up a new junta, with Jose
Miguel Carrera at its head. A dismal period of misrule ensued, which
encouraged the Spanish generals, Pareja and Sanchez, to attempt the
reconquest of Chili in 1813. Pareja and Sanchez were successfully
resisted, and a better man, General Bernardo O'Higgins, the republican
son of an Irishman who had been Viceroy of Peru, was put at the
head of affairs. He succeeded to the command of the Chilian army in
November, 1813, when a fresh attack from the Spaniards was expected.
At first his good soldiership was successful. The enemy, having come
almost to the gates of Santiago, was forced to retire in May, 1814;
and the Chilian cause might have continued to prosper under O'Higgins,
had not the Carreras contrived, in hopes of reinstating themselves in
power, to divide the republican interests, and so, while encouraging
renewed invasion by the Spaniards from Lima, make their resistance
more difficult. Wisely deeming it right to set aside every other
consideration than the necessity of saving Chili from the danger
pressing upon it from without, O'Higgins effected a junction with the
Carreras, hoping thus to bring the whole force of the republic against
the royalist army, larger than its predecessors, which was marching
towards Santiago and Valparaiso. Had his magnanimous proposals been
properly acted upon, the issue might have been very different. But
the Carreras, even in the most urgent hour of danger, could not forget
their private ambitions. Holding aloof with their part of the army,
they allowed O'Higgins and his force of nine hundred to be defeated
by four thousand royalists under General Osorio, in the preliminary
fight which took place at the end of September. They were guilty of
like treachery during the great battle of the 1st of October. On that
day the royalists entered Rancagua, the town in which O'Higgins and
his little band had taken shelter. They were fiercely resisted, and
the fighting lasted through thirty-six hours. So brave was the conduct
of the patriots that the Spanish general was, after some hours'
contest, on the point of retreating. He saw that he would have no
chance of success, had the Carreras brought up their troops, as
was expected by both sides of the combatants. But the Carreras,
short-sighted in their selfishness, and nothing loth that O'Higgins
should be defeated, still held aloof. Thereupon the Spaniards took
heart, and made one more desperate effort. With hatchets and swords
they forced their way, inch by inch and hour by hour, into the centre
of the town. There, in an open square, O'Higgins, with two hundred
men—all the remnant of his little army—made a last resistance. When
only a few dozen of his soldiers were left alive, and when he himself
was seriously wounded, he determined, not to surrender, but to end the
battle. The residue of the patriots dashed through the town, cutting
a road through the astonished crowd of their opponents, and effected
a retreat in which those opponents, though more than twenty times as
numerous, durst not pursue them.
That memorable battle of Rancagua caused throughout the American
continent, and, across the Atlantic, through Europe, a thrill of
sympathy for the Chilian war of independence. But its immediate
effects were most disastrous. The Carreras, too selfish to fight
before, were now too cowardly. They and their followers fled.
O'Higgins had barely soldiers enough left to serve as a weak escort
to the fourteen hundred old men, women, and children who crossed the
Andes with him on foot, to pass two years and a half in voluntary
exile at Mendoza.
During those two years and a half the Spaniards were masters in
Santiago, and Chili was once more a Spanish province, in which the
inhabitants were punished terribly in confiscations, imprisonments,
and executions for their recent defection. Deliverance, however,
was at hand. General San Martin, through whom chiefly La Plata had
achieved its freedom, gave assistance to O'Higgins and the Chilian
patriots. The main body of the Spanish army, numbering about five
thousand, had been stationed on the heights of Chacabuco, whence
Santiago, Valparaiso, and the other leading towns of Chili were
overawed. On the 12th of February, 1817, San Martin and O'Higgins,
with a force nearly as large, surprised this garrison, and, with
excellent strategy and very little loss of life, to the patriots at
any rate, it was entirely subdued. Santiago was entered in triumph on
the 14th of February, and a few weeks served for the entire dispersion
of the royalist forces. The supreme directorship of the renovated
republic was offered to San Martin. On his declining the honour, it
was assigned, to the satisfaction of all parties, to O'Higgins.
The new dictator and the wisest of his counsellors, however, were not
satisfied with the temporary advantage that they had achieved. They
knew that armies would continue to come down from Peru, the defeat
of which, even if that could be relied upon, would waste all the
resources of the republic. They knew, too, that the Spanish war-ships
which supplied Peru with troops and ammunition from home, passing the
Chilian coast on their way, would seriously hinder the commerce on
which the young state had to depend for its development, even if
they did not destroy that commerce at its starting-point by seizing
Valparaiso and the other ports. Therefore they resolved to seek
for efficient help from Europe. With that end Don Jose Alvarez,
a high-minded patriot, who had done much good service to Chili in
previous years, was immediately sent to Europe, commissioned to borrow
money, to build or buy warships, and in all the ways in his power to
enlist the sympathies of the English people in the republican cause.
In the last of these projects, at any rate, he succeeded beyond all
reasonable expectation.
Beaching London in April, 1817, Alvarez was welcomed by many friends
of South American freedom—Sir Francis Burdett, Sir James Mackintosh,
Mr. Henry Brougham, and Mr. Edward Ellice among the number. Lord
Cochrane was just then out of London, fighting his amusing battle with
the sheriffs and bailiffs of Hampshire; but as soon as that business
was over he took foremost place among the friends of Don Alvarez and
the Chilian cause which he represented. With a message to him, indeed,
Alvarez was specially commissioned. He was invited by the Chilian
Government to undertake the organization and command of an improved
naval force, and so, by exercise of the prowess which he had displayed
in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, to render invaluable service to
the young republic.
He promptly accepted the invitation, being induced thereto by many
sufficient reasons. Sick at heart, as we have seen, under the cruel
treatment to which for so many years he had been subjected by his
enemies in power, he saw here an opportunity of, at the same
time, escaping from his persecutors, returning to active work in
a profession very dear to him, and giving efficient aid to a noble
enterprise.