Bolivar: American Liberator Read online

  Rodríguez’s house was neither spacious nor comfortable, nor could the teacher possibly have kept Simón in sight at all times. The place was, in sum, unremitting bedlam. For ten days, Simón complained bitterly, begging his sister and brother-in-law to rescue him. Finally, the Clementes filed another petition on Simón’s behalf, prompting an investigation. A court-ordered inspection of Rodríguez’s house revealed that its five bedrooms were home to nineteen people: the teacher; his wife; the teacher’s brother, sister-in-law, and their newborn baby; a boarder and his nephew; five male students entrusted to Rodríguez’s care; two of Rodríguez’s wife’s siblings; three servants; and two black slaves. The conditions were shabby, the disorder constant, the fare necessarily meager. In order to humor his new ward’s tastes, Rodríguez arranged for Simón’s every meal to be delivered from Don Carlos’s kitchen. All the same, the boy was inconsolable.

  Three days later, Rodríguez reported to the Audiencia that Simón had disappeared. A search team was organized, but before it could set out into the streets of Caracas, a priest appeared with the boy in tow. It seemed Simón had run off to argue his case with the archbishop: a letter from the eminence himself requested clemency for the child.

  Within two months, the misery of being separated from his childhood surroundings radically changed Simón’s mind. On October 14, 1795, he retracted all the negative things he had said about his uncle Carlos. Through his sister, he requested that the Audiencia return him to “the harbor” of the Palacios house, where he pledged to behave and focus on his studies. The Audiencia agreed, with a stipulation—since the uncle was often away from Caracas—that Don Carlos “hire a respectable teacher, if possible a priest, who can be a constant companion to the boy and give him the best education possible.” Within three days, Simón Rodríguez had quit his post to be Bolívar’s tutor.

  Simón Bolívar would hardly be the model student—he was too fond of games, too fidgety a boy for desks and pencils—but for the next three years, he managed to receive a largely private education under the tutelage of some formidably bright minds. Rodríguez was in charge of reading and grammar. Andrés Bello, who later became a towering figure in Latin American letters, tutored him in literature and geography. Padre Francisco de Andújar, the priest who had taught him in Sanz’s house—a scholar praised by no less than the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt—taught him mathematics and science. He is said to have studied history, religion, and Latin with a number of other esteemed Caracans of the day. But for all the claims some breathless biographers have made about his early brilliance and education, Simón Bolívar was well past childhood before his thirst for learning was awakened. It was his irrepressible instinct for adventure—his highly developed sense of curiosity—that taught him most during those stormy years.

  THE TEACHER WHO MOST UNDERSTOOD that irrepressible nature was Simón Rodríguez. He was not a particularly skilled pedagogue, and too many writers—including Bolívar himself—have exaggerated his abilities. But Rodríguez had a broad and agile mind, as well as a keen instinct for adventure. His most important contribution to the education of Simón Bolívar was that he understood the boy’s eccentricities and allowed him to be himself.

  Rodríguez certainly didn’t broadcast it openly at the time—the penalties for advocating liberty and egalitarianism were too severe—but he was a keen admirer of Rousseau, Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. Which is to say he was a staunch supporter of Enlightenment notions of self-determination. Not for him the paralyzing strictures of the Spanish church and colonial law; he subscribed instead to a very modern wave of French encyclopedism. He was a believer in science as opposed to religion, the individual as opposed to the state.

  He had been born in Caracas in 1771, birthed in secret and disposed of in secret by parents who very well may have been Mantuanos. The note they tucked into the infant’s blanket when they left him to fate and a doorstep said he was a bastard son of whites. He was adopted by Doña Rosalia Rodríguez and later by the priest Don Alejandro Carreño. From these two benefactors he took his name, Rodríguez Carreño; eventually, however, in a fit of pique against the Church, he dropped Carreño altogether.

  Indeed, most of Rodríguez’s life tended toward fits of pique. He was irascible, libidinous, unpredictable, peripatetic—a compulsive talker whose basic teaching method was to impart his private passions. Coarse in manner, slight in frame, he was hardly an attractive man. His features were grotesquely out of proportion: ears too big, nose too hooked, mouth a grim line when it wasn’t in motion. He was the antithesis of Andrés Bello, the fair-faced scholar—barely two years older than Bolívar—who was hired to expose the boy to good literature. Whereas Bello was reserved, cool-headed, and grasped immediately that he would never be able to win Simón to a formal education, Rodríguez took the opposite tack. He showed genuine interest in the boy’s caprices; he encouraged his adventuresome spirit, taught him outdoors, on horseback, in the wild. Much is made of the fact that Rodríguez’s bible was Rousseau’s Émile, the story of an orphan whose classroom is the natural world. More of a treatise on education than a true work of fiction, Rousseau’s novel describes the ideal teacher as one who allows the child to imagine himself as master, while guiding his physical and mental progress with a firm hand. Rodríguez’s freewheeling, exaggerated approach—his ability to make learning come alive—was precisely what an overactive boy needed. For the first time, a teacher was communicating something Bolívar understood. He may not have learned to spell as well as he should have, or write with true proficiency, but Rodríguez helped the boy lay a foundation for his love of ideas. A lifelong pursuit of liberty would take root in it.

  If young Simón did not immediately understand how Rousseau’s, Locke’s, and Voltaire’s ideas on liberty worked in the world, he soon got a notion of it in 1797, when another bold bid for independence was attempted in Venezuela, this time by established whites. The movement had begun in Madrid as a coup against the king, organized by Freemasons. A Spanish writer and educator, Juan Bautista Picornell, was charged, arrested, and sentenced to prison in the Venezuelan port of La Guaira. There, in shackles, he made contact with two dissident Creoles: retired military captain Manuel Gual, whose father had once fought alongside Colonel Juan Vicente de Bolívar; and José María España, a landowner and local magistrate in the seaside town of Macuto.

  Gual and España’s carefully planned plot against the Spanish overlords in Caracas was eventually betrayed to authorities and the two fled for their lives through a number of ports in the Caribbean. When the courts went through their papers, they learned what their revolution had in mind: total control of the army and government, the freedom to grow and sell tobacco, elimination of the sales tax, free trade with foreign powers, the end of gold and silver exports, the freedom to establish an army, absolute equality between people of all colors, eradication of the Indian tribute, and the abolition of slavery.

  As the colonial government went about rounding up anyone—barbers, priests, doctors, soldiers, farmers—who had the slightest involvement in that brash conspiracy, it came upon evidence that implicated Simón Rodríguez. It isn’t clear whether Rodríguez had told his pupil that he was colluding with Gual and España, but it is very probable that the fourteen-year-old Bolívar attended Rodríguez’s trial, since his childhood mentor, the lawyer José Miguel Sanz, argued the teacher’s defense. With Sanz’s help, Rodríguez escaped conviction, but the court ruled that it would drop charges only if he would leave the colonies forever.

  Rodríguez set sail for Jamaica without so much as a goodbye to his wife, his brother, his former associates, or to his impressionable pupil. In Jamaica, he adopted the name Samuel Robinson, then went on to the United States and, eventually, Europe, where many years later he would meet Simón Bolívar again. The boy was left to slog ahead with tutors who were far less interesting to him. But Carlos Palacios had his own ideas of what his nephew now needed to do. In order to satisfy the conditions of his inheritance, Do
n Carlos enrolled Simón as a cadet in the elite militia corps, the White Volunteers of the Valley of Aragua, which Simón’s grandfather Juan de Bolívar had founded and his father, Don Juan Vicente, had commanded. Simón spent a year in “military” training—an obligatory rite of passage for Mantuano boys—during which he studied topography, physics, and doubtless learned very little about martial arts. Nevertheless, he was promoted to second lieutenant and, in the process, admitted to a coveted inner circle.

  “I keep worrying about the boys,” Esteban Palacios wrote Carlos from Spain, “especially Simón.” Once Simón turned fifteen, the two uncles decided they should round out his education with a period of study in Madrid, under Esteban’s supervision. Don Juan Vicente de Bolívar had always wanted it; Doña Concepción, too; it was simply Simón’s grandfather’s stubbornness—and perhaps his unwillingness to part with money—that had kept the two brothers at home. In January of 1799, Simón sailed for Cádiz with the understanding that his brother, Juan Vicente, would follow. All too mindful that the boy’s vast inheritance might slip through the family’s fingers, Carlos wrote to Esteban, “Keep a good eye on him, as I have said before, first because he will spend money without discipline or wisdom, and second because he is not as rich as he thinks. . . . Talk to him firmly or put him in a strict school if he does not behave with the requisite judgment.”

  As Simón was boarding the ship San Ildefonso in La Guaira, José María España—one of the Gual-España co-conspirators—was making his way back to Venezuela in a canoe, secretly reentering the colony after almost two years in flight. España managed to dodge the authorities for months, slipping from village to village, until he finally took shelter with a black family. Simón was halfway across the Atlantic when Spanish troops surprised España in his hiding place, arrested him, and then convicted him of high treason. He was tied to the tail of a mule and dragged to the main square of Caracas. There he was hanged, dismembered, his head and limbs taken to far corners of the colony. Once again, people were made to witness the iron cages, the vile putrefaction of flesh, the ravening vultures, in the event they needed to be reminded: Spain had no patience for revolutionaries. Within a year, Spanish spies tracked down Manuel Gual on the island of Trinidad. A vial of poison handily dispatched him.

  FOR AS LONG AS HE could remember, Simón had begged his uncles to send him to Spain, so he boarded the San Ildefonso on January 19, 1799, in high spirits, anticipating his life adventure. His cabin mate was Esteban Escobar, an exceptionally bright thirteen-year-old who was headed to Spain on a scholarship to study at the military college in Segovia. Having grown up with similar backgrounds, the two boys became friends.

  Their ship was a fleet, agile man-o’-war, built in the port city of Cartagena. It was originally part of a flotilla of six that had fought in many a Caribbean and Atlantic skirmish and would meet a bitter fate five years later at the Battle of Trafalgar. With seventy-four cannon and the capacity to transport six hundred, it was one of the finest battleships in the service of the Spanish crown. But traveling the seas in a ship built for combat was a perilous business. The last time the San Ildefonso had taken passengers from America to Cádiz, its twenty-six-ship convoy had run up against the English in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. It was a measure of Spain’s ruined economy that warships were now being employed to haul passengers and goods.

  The San Ildefonso was far from comfortable—the accommodations were cramped, the food substandard, the company rough and rude—but the boys were given special quarters and privileges above deck, far from the bilge and vermin. As they plied north, across the crystalline blue waters of the Caribbean, they grew accustomed to life at sea.

  From the start, the ship’s commander was generous to his two young passengers. It’s safe to assume that they learned much under his tutelage: intelligence that Bolívar later would find vital to a revolution that spread well into the sea. But the captain’s munificence could not mask the hazards of their expedition or the nervousness of the time. The San Ildefonso was known to carry precious metals—it had shipped mercury and silver to Cádiz before—and so it was potential prey not only to the British enemy but to pirates who had terrorized Caribbean waters for centuries.

  The trip was dangerous for another reason: the fledgling United States Navy was locked in a fierce “quasi-war” with French privateers who preyed mercilessly on American trading ships. During the American Revolution, France and America had been allies, but the French Revolution and subsequent trade wars had soured the friendship. The jockeying at sea threatened to become a full-scale conflict. Indeed, allegiances were shifting constantly during this volatile period; it was hard to know whether an approaching ship was friend or foe. Spain, which only years before had allied with Portugal against France, was now allied with France against England. And, in the course of Simón Bolívar’s boyhood, the United States had gone from fighting a bitter revolution to becoming England’s major partner in trade.

  For all the attendant peril, the San Ildefonso arrived as scheduled in Veracruz, Mexico, on February 2, fourteen days after its departure from La Guaira. After loading seven million silver coins into the convoy’s holds, the captain had expected to lift anchor and head east for Cádiz via Havana, but he was informed that a British blockade had impeded all travel in that direction. The San Ildefonso remained docked in Veracruz for forty-six days.

  Simón took advantage of that numbing delay to borrow 400 pesos from a local merchant and travel by stagecoach to Mexico City. His uncle Pedro, the youngest of the Palacios brothers, had furnished him with a letter of introduction from the bishop of Caracas. As he rode into that splendid city—the jewel of New Spain, the pride of the Spanish colonial empire—he was struck by the sheer opulence of the city. “The city of Mexico reminds one of Berlin,” wrote Alexander von Humboldt, “but is more beautiful; its architecture is of a more restrained taste.” It was a time of general abundance in that bustling capital of the viceroyalty—a golden age in which each aristocrat’s palace was built to surpass its neighbor. The grand avenues, the extravagant homes, the spacious parks, the spirited commerce: these represented a pinnacle of grandeur that Mexico would never reach again, and Bolívar marveled at it.

  He spent a comfortable week in the magnificent home of the Marquis of Uluapa, a stay that was arranged by Mexico City’s chief justice, the oidor Don Guillermo Aguirre, a nephew of the bishop’s whose letter he carried. Under Aguirre’s guidance, Simón mixed with Mexico’s high society and was presented to the powerful viceroy Asanza. Much has been written about Simón’s conversation with the viceroy and his supposedly plucky and incendiary references to revolution, which may or may not have been made. It is hard to believe that the Mexican sovereign would have engaged in political debate with a fifteen-year-old. But there is no doubt that they did speak and that the subject of their brief exchange was the blockade that prevented the San Ildefonso from setting sail. For all of Spain’s empire, for all the gold and silver of Mexico, the British had reduced Spanish trade to a standstill. Simón’s presence alone—a direct result of the blockade—was proof of Spain’s relative powerlessness. That thought cannot have been far from anyone’s mind.

  Along with Simón’s heady introduction to the Mexican society, it is said that he had his first romance while he was there. He had been known to flirt with pretty cousins in Caracas, had learned from his musical uncle, Padre Sojo, to dance, and he had turned into something of a dandy in his frilly lace collars and handsome waistcoats. But after twenty-five days of boredom and idleness in the port city of Veracruz, Simón was given an opportunity to act on amorous impulses.

  She was María Ignacia Rodríguez de Velasco y Osorio, a married woman of twenty-one. She was flaxen-haired, blue-eyed, the daughter of aristocrats, and she had been introduced to Simón by his hostess, the Marquesa of Uluapa, who was her older sister. His romance with María Ignacia was instantaneous, ephemeral, wedged into a brief eight-day dalliance, but as the two were very much at home in the m
arquesa’s house, they managed to snatch a few private moments in a narrow staircase of an upper floor. “The blond Rodríguez,” as she was called, already had quite a reputation in Mexico City. Married at fifteen, this indefatigable voluptuary would scandalize Mexico with a string of husbands and scores of lovers, among them the Mexican emperor Agustín de Iturbide and Baron Alexander von Humboldt, who proclaimed her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. It’s impossible to know whether this romantic encounter was a first for Simón Bolívar. Certainly, it was the first time he had engaged with a woman as a fully independent male, free from the oversight and encumbrances of family.

  Simón finally returned to Veracruz and departed for Havana when the blockade lifted, on March 20. Soon, his ship joined an even larger convoy and headed north, making its wary way past the Bahamas toward the Chesapeake Bay. The captain of the convoy had decided to follow the North American coast until his ships were well past danger, risking a longer trip and the possibility of exhausting their supplies. In Havana, they had taken on cattle, goats, sheep, chickens—enough food and water for sixty days. The trip would take seventy-two. Caught in a violent storm as they approached Cádiz, the fleet scattered; the San Ildefonso tossed alongside the coast of Portugal, toward northern Spain. By the time it pulled into the Basque port of Santoña, it stank of rancid cheese and a pestilential bilge of the blood of animals. Burned by relentless sun, buffeted by angry winds, the sailors were a ragged lot. As they squinted through rain at the gray huddled houses of Santoña, they must have felt great weariness and hunger. But they had evaded war.

  SPAIN HAD BEEN AT WAR for six long years, and it would be at war for twenty-six more, until its strength was sapped and its standing as one of the most powerful nations in the world was ancient memory. King Carlos IV had become a laughingstock in his own country. A man of shallow abilities and a weak will, he had relinquished all power to his prime minister, Manuel de Godoy, who had been cuckolding him for years. At seventeen, Godoy had come to the king’s palace as a royal bodyguard, and, before long, his virile good looks had caught the eye of the queen. For all her plainness of face and ruined complexion, Queen María Luisa had a formidable appetite for good-looking young men. Godoy soon became her lover. The queen rewarded his sexual favors with greater titles and responsibilities, marrying him off to disguise their entanglement, persuading her dull husband to appoint him head of state in 1792. That same year, the queen gave birth to her fourteenth child, who, it was rumored throughout Europe, looked shockingly like the new prime minister. As the king whiled away the hours in his palace workshop, fiddling with furniture and polishing swords, Godoy commandeered the throne. It was Godoy who disastrously declared war on England, initiating Spain’s precipitous financial decline; and it was Godoy against whom the population of Spain had turned in an avenging fury. It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the French king and queen had been marched to the guillotine just a few years earlier. Trying to regain approval, Queen María Luisa appointed a new prime minister, the physically frail Francisco Saavedra, who had been in the New World and had helped the Americans defeat the English at the Battle of Yorktown; and, ever flighty where sex was concerned, she set her sights on another man.