Still, Amaru and Bastidas vowed to fight on and sought refuge from a trusted ally at Langui. Outwardly Colonel Ventrua Landaeta urged the couple on, pledging to fight beside them with a large number of reinforcements under his command if they would stop running and turn and fight the Spanish. Inwardly, Landaeta, like so many others, had determined that the rebellion was finished. Everywhere around him he saw repression and reprisals as the Spanish chased their quarry through the country. The suffering, Landaeta determined, would only stop when the leaders of the revolt had been captured. So, while the unsuspecting couple paused for lunch in Langui, Landaeta organized a party to arrest them. As Landaeta approached, his intentions now clear, Amaru and Bastidas and their extended family tried to flee, but were seized and imprisoned. Tupac, Micaela, and their children were placed in separate cells, dejected and alone, prevented “from saying good-bye to each other forever, as they would not see one another nor would they be together before eternity, except on their day of execution, to their very great sorrow.” In joyous Cuzco, where their fate awaited, the bells tolled for hours.21
In Cuzco, Bastidas was interrogated. For Spanish officials, the guilt of her husband was cut and dried. But for the paternalistic Spanish authorities, Bastidas’ role in the rebellion was as yet rather murky. In her interrogation, Micaela did her best to fulfill Spanish stereotypes of female weakness. When asked why she was in jail, she answered, “because her husband killed the Corregidor” (Arriaga) and deftly side-stepped follow-up questions about her role in the rebellion. She claimed not to have known beforehand that her husband planned to arrest Arriaga, stated that he had only ever spoken of a desire to abolish the repartimiento, taxes, and customs, and insisted that she would have left the rebellion and fled to Cuzco had it not been for her husband’s threats of violence and constant supervision. When asked to identify the leaders of the rebellion, she said to ask her husband, she did not know. When confronted with evidence that she had sent myriad orders directing the rebellion, she answered that while she had indeed issued such commands, she had sent them out in complete ignorance of their contents as she could neither read nor write. It was a canny attempt to escape blame for her role in the revolt, but from other sources the Spanish authorities were well aware of her active importance for the movement. She was charged with taking up arms “jointly with her husband,” of helping to plan the arrest and execution of Arriaga, of remaining “in charge, giving orders to rally people, even leaving” Tungasuca and riding out on “a horse with her weapons in order to recruit people in the Provinces, to whose pueblos she directed repeated orders with an audacity and boldness that is rare, even authorizing edicts with her signature.” This, despite her best efforts to appear the subordinate, submissive wife, was the true Micaela Bastidas, an active, able, inspiring, formidable woman at the very heart of the revolution.22
On May 18, 1781, Micaela Bastidas, Tupac Amaru, and their children were finally reunited. It was hardly the venue any of them would have chosen. Chained and shackled, they had been shoved into bags and dragged into Cuzco’s central plaza by a team of horses. There, surrounded by soldiers and a throng of spectators noticeably without any Indians, the condemned family gathered one last time at the foot of the gallows. Micaela Bastidas and Tupac Amaru had been sentenced not only to die, but also to watch as their family was mutilated and executed before them. As an eerie silence descended on the square, they watched four of the leaders of the rebellion, including Micaela’s brother Antonio and the slave who had been forced to execute Arriaga, hang. Next it was the turn of Tupac’s uncle Francisco and the couple’s son Hipólito. They were hanged as well but had the added indignity of having their tongues torn out before their bodies were thrown down the stairs of the gallows. Mother then followed son, with Micaela taking Hipólito’s place. While her husband watched, as she stood in her son’s blood, Micaela Bastidas tongue was cut out and a special garrote wrapped around her neck. As befitted her character, she did not go quickly or quietly. As one eyewitness recalled, “she was put to death through the garrote from which she suffered immensely as her neck was long and thin and the spindle could not strangle her, forcing the hangmen to tie ropes around her neck and pull every which way while kicking her in the stomach and breast to finish her.” She would have been relieved to be spared the sight of her husband’s execution, pulled apart by four horses, beheaded, and quartered while a fierce storm broke out overhead as if in anger at Spanish cruelty. The heads and limbs of Micalea Bastidas and Tupac Amaru were sent across Peru as a symbol of Spanish vengeance and the price of rebellion. What was left of their bodies was burnt, their ashes scattered in the wind, commingling together as they had in their rebellion. “This was the end,” a contemporary wrote, “of José Gabriel Tupac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas, whose loftiness and arrogance led them to declare themselves kings of Peru, Chile, Quito, Tucuman and other places . . . with other insanities of this same tone.”23
The fires of rebellion were not entirely quenched by the blood spilled in Cuzco. Tupac Amaru’s cousin Diego had escaped capture and now declared himself heir to the Inca throne. From the highlands of Bolivia, Diego carried out a guerrilla campaign, increasingly targeting Europeans in a more explicitly racialized conflict. In Bolivia, Diego joined forces with Tupac Katari, the leader of an independent revolutionary movement in the region of Lake Titicaca that was inspired by Tupac Amaru’s earlier rebellion. With a force of 40,000, Katari laid siege to La Paz, the regional capital. Ten thousand of the cities inhabitants died in the failed attempt to starve La Paz into submission. In November 1781, Katari was betrayed, captured, and executed, but Diego held out until January of 1782, when he at last accepted an offer of amnesty. Sporadic violence would sputter on across 1782, but the rebellion was effectively over, at least in the Andes.24
While Tupac Amaru and Micaela Bastidas fled for their lives from the failed siege of Cuzco, in New Granada (modern Colombia), the specter of rebellion was just beginning to emerge. On March 16, 1781, Manuela Beltrán, a grocer from Socorro, ripped down official edicts announcing new taxes on the people of New Granada. Like many, Beltrán was outraged by the series of reforms designed to alter the relationship between Spain and its empire and to ensure funding for Spain’s war with Britain. The year before, Gutierrez de Piñeres, Visitor-General of New Granada, had introduced jarring changes to the administration of the colony. In an effort to increase revenues that closely mirrored reforms elsewhere in the Spanish and British empires, he levied new taxes, cracked down on smuggling and the contraband trade, and reordered vital monopolies on key commodities (brandy and tobacco). At the same time, Creole judges and officials were replaced by Spanish administrators, fundamentally upending the more autonomous relationship that had existed between metropole and periphery. To make matters worse, the cost of the war with Britain necessitated new taxes, and a “voluntary” donation that required every adult male to pay a fee to support the Spanish war effort.25
In North America, similar reforms, passed in pursuit of similar ends, had led to protest and revolt, and New Granada followed suit. Manuela Beltran’s attack on Spanish edicts sparked riots, which spread throughout the towns of New Granada, eventually reaching into the countryside. Local leaders banded together and created committees to lead an organized protest movement to push for change. A small government force was sent to put down the riots, but it was easily defeated, inspiring further, more aggressive action, including a march on Bogota, the regional capital. There was little that could be done to stop the riots from morphing into full-scale rebellion. Spanish forces were already occupied elsewhere: in Peru, where troops had been sent from New Granada to help confront Tupac Amaru; in the Caribbean, where Spain still struggled with the British in Guatemala and Florida; and in Cartagena where the Viceroy of New Granada was stationed, preparing the coast for the British attack he was certain would come. Indeed, there were only seventy-five professional soldiers available in Bogota to confront an approaching army of 20,000 armed rebels. With
the Spanish Empire on the very point of collapse, and with no hope of defeating the rebels, in June 1781, the authorities in New Granada were forced to agree to the rebels’ demands, including the abolition of the new taxes and monopolies, the end of tribute taxes paid by Indians, and a virtual “creole monopoly of offices” in New Granada, creating an almost completely autonomous colony. The crisis, at least for now, had been averted.26
If Micaela Bastidas, Tupac Amaru II, and their followers had hoped for British aid, and Britain hoped to exploit unrest in the Spanish Empire to divide and conquer, they would all be disappointed in the end. It was reported in Havana and North America that “three English ships of force have arrived in the south sea, with arms, etc. for the use of the revolted natives,” but, in reality, the British expedition had failed to seize the initiative, stalled miles from the Pacific at Fort San Juan. The initial excitement at the arrival of Kemble’s reinforcements in April had faded rapidly in the shadow of the conquered Spanish fort. On July 7, Kemble and a force of 250 soldiers embarked upriver toward Lake Nicaragua. By now even the fresh arrivals had spent more than two months in the boiling heat and incessant rain, and it began to show. The illness that forced Nelson’s retreat had spread rapidly among the British and their allies. Soon there were not enough healthy soldiers to build shelters, bring up supplies or care for the ill. Soldiers in parties of ten, twenty, even as many as seventy, had to be dispatched to the coast to recuperate, only to be replaced by reinforcements who arrived already ill. By June, Kemble, now incapacitated himself, recorded that “the Officers have been, to a man, almost all sick. The men’s tents so bad that they keep no water out. My intention to build huts, but have not the men to do it, and Provisions very scarce, so much so as to alarm me. Relapses certain the moment a soldier does any duty. The Troops so sickly that some corps have not a man fit for duty.” The constant rain and “close moist weather” sapped the men of strength, caused boxes held together with glue to fall apart, and brought wave after wave of illness to soldiers without shoes, blankets, or clothing other than the shirt on their backs. The illness returned to the camp so frequently that the surgeon himself was “quite dispirited” and eventually taken ill as well.27
British numbers were further depleted when Polson was forced to release most of the volunteers from the British Black River settlements after Spanish raids against the territory necessitated their return. Britain’s Mosquito allies began to abandon the cause as well, further depleting Kemble’s force. They had been convinced to join the expedition by promises of revenge against the hated Spanish, but also by promises of easy plunder. But when Fort San Juan fell, they had been prevented from looting the fort, and from seizing any of the 200 Spanish prisoners to sell as slaves. This breach of trust, however humane it may have seemed to the British, combined with rampant illness among Mosquito, angered the allies and led them to quit the expedition in large numbers. This was a serious blow to the expedition, not only a depletion of numbers, but a loss of vital local guides and the boats and canoes best suited for travel and transport on the river. Kemble seized some of the Mosquito boats by force, but without the Indians themselves, he had few men capable of piloting them upriver.28
Still, Kemble was determined to make it to Lake Nicaragua, even if the force that accompanied him on July 7 was limited to 250 men, 100 of whom were already too weak with illness to do much but enjoy the ride. The final blow came when Kemble learnt that the Spanish on Lake Nicaragua had been warned of the British approach by prisoners from the fort who had escaped from captivity. With his forces decimated and dispirited by illness, his allies evaporated, and the Spanish well prepared, Kemble finally abandoned the dream of the Pacific and returned to fortify Fort San Juan. But conditions for the soldiers at Fort San Juan did not improve. Illness continued to wrack the British expedition, forcing Kemble to send the majority back to the coast to recuperate, leaving Despard and a small contingent to hold the fort. On the coast, the hoped-for recuperation failed to materialize. When Kemble arrived he found an apocalyptic scene. Corpses lay strewn across the sand in every direction,
the Sick in Miserable, shocking condition, without anyone to attend them, or even to bury the Dead who lay on the beach shocking to behold; the same mortality raging among the poor Soldiers on board ship, where Accumulated filth made all air Putrid; officers dying daily, and so wore down with disorders . . . that they are even as filthy and regardless of where they lay as the Soldiers, never stirring from their Beds for days . . .29
With death and decay all around him, when news arrived that the Spanish were likely to attack British settlements on the Black River, Kemble at last ordered Despard to destroy the fort and abandon the position. On January 23, the last of the British expedition sailed back down the San Juan River, leaving the remnants of the fort and hundreds of their dead comrades behind. It had been an unmitigated disaster, with the worst losses of any British campaign in the entire war. It is estimated that the British lost 2,500 men to the climate, combat, and disease, with as few as 130 of the soldiers who joined the expedition living to return to Jamaica, the rest consigned to a shallow grave in the jungle or on the sandy Mosquito shore.30
Back in Kingston, the full fury of the British ministry fell down upon the expedition’s prime mover. In a letter to Governor Dalling, Lord Germain lamented “exceedingly the dreadful havoc Death has made among the troops . . . especially as from the entire failure of the expedition no public benefit has been derived from the loss of so many brave men.” It had been a doomed affair from the start, Germain concluded, a poorly conceived, poorly executed expedition, the “desultory enterprise of adventurers.” Nelson had come out of the disaster with his career, if not his health, unscathed. In his official dispatch of April 30, 1780, which was soon printed in London’s newspapers, Polson singled out Nelson for special praise, writing, “I want words to express the obligations I owe that gentleman. He was the first on every service whether by night or day. There was scarcely a gun but was pointed by him or Lieutenant Despard.” Dalling too commended Nelson’s role, urging Lord Germain to bring Nelson’s conduct to the attention of the king, and, in a note to Nelson himself, attributing to the young sailor “a great measure” of the expedition’s initial success. As ever, Nelson was bluntly forthright in his own assessment of his role, claiming to be “a principal cause of our success.”31
In June 1784 Horatio Nelson returned to the familiar waters of the Caribbean. Much had changed in the four years since he had been ingloriously forced from the field of battle by illness. The Spanish and French, who had once seemed poised to sweep the British from the Caribbean, had been humbled at the Battle of the Saintes in April 1782, frustrating Franco-Spanish hopes of denting British naval supremacy and ensuring that Britain would retain the dominance of the seas in the years after the war. The crushing British victory ended Spanish hopes for an invasion of Jamaica, and re-set the balance of power between Britain, France, and Spain, ensuring that when peace came in 1783, British concessions in the Caribbean were minimal, and French and Spanish gains almost non-existent. Britain had managed to secure its lucrative West Indian colonies despite Franco-Spanish designs against them. Planned invasions of Jamaica and Barbados came to nothing and smaller islands that had been conquered returned to their former rulers. Britain had emerged from the war with its position in the Caribbean largely unchanged, in some ways even strengthened by the costly failures of its imperial rivals. The French and the Spanish, on the other hand, had ample reason to rue a missed opportunity to shift the balance of power in the region. Though peace now prevailed, it was thus an exceedingly tense Caribbean that Nelson reentered in 1784.
The peace had also transformed Nelson’s role. After serving out the war in Canada, where he patrolled the coast in search of American privateers, he was now stationed in the Leeward Islands, at English Harbour in Antigua, commander of the 28-gun frigate Boreas, charged with protecting Britain’s vital West Indian Trade. The enemy, however, was no longer French
men-of-war or American privateers. Instead, Nelson and the Boreas were charged with preventing illicit trade between Britain’s Caribbean colonies and the newly independent United States. Independence had put America outside of the British Empire, and measures had been taken to ensure that the former colonies felt the sting of their exclusion. In July 1783, the Fox–North government issued Orders in Council declaring that henceforth trade between the British West Indies and the United States would be restricted to British subjects operating British-owned and British-built ships. The policy was designed to protect Britain’s trade and punish America’s, but it proved deeply unpopular on the ground. Britain’s West Indian colonies had long relied on provisions from North America for their survival. The single-minded focus on the production of sugar and other cash crops on these islands meant that they could no longer grow enough food to feed themselves.
Despite the importance of their trade connections with North America, the West Indies had remained steadfastly loyal to Britain throughout the war, even when the disruption of trade brought them to the brink of utter ruin. With provisions scarce and crops ruined by a series of devastating hurricanes, suffering was intense, with as many as 15,000 slaves dying in Jamaica alone. British West Indians had paid dearly for their loyalty and greeted the coming of peace with a sense of relief. They were thus understandably distraught about a post-war trade policy that threatened to sever their much-needed commercial ties with America, the key to their recovery. There were riots against the new policy in St. Kitts in 1784 and 1785, and in Barbados, where several protesters were killed when troops fired on the crowd. In one incident a customs official was even tarred and feathered in what must have seemed to be a worrying homage to the tactics of Patriots further north. As protests spread and petitions flooded in from across the Caribbean, it must have seemed as if history was repeating itself.32
To Begin the World Over Again Page 22
