The World полностью

The delirious dreamer was not some tripping pre-hippy but Simón Bolívar, El Libertador, the thirty-nine-year-old president of the vast Republic of Gran Colombia, who in the most extraordinary career of his time had liberated much of south America and was now focusing on Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. He had conquered a million square miles, an area larger than Europe, mastering jungles, deserts and mountains, freeing millions from slavery. Few, other than an Alexander, a Genghis, a Napoleon, had experienced such triumphs, but Bolívar was more sensitive, less coarse, more aesthetic than the others.

Born into luxury, Bolívar, five foot six, wiry with burning eyes and skinny legs, was exuberant, passionate and boundlessly confident: he had tempered his slight body in order to compete with hardened cowboys, once mounting his horse with his hands bound behind his back and another time riding into a river with both his hands tied to show his virtuosity: ‘Don’t think this sort of thing isn’t useful in a leader.’ He had given away his money; he lived on horseback with the roughest gauchos. ‘What?’ cried a Spaniard who wanted to see the Liberator. ‘That little man … riding the mule?’

After each victory, Simón was mobbed by female admirers who dressed in white to greet the Liberator as he took each town, every victory celebrated with a ball. ‘There are men who need to be alone and far from the hubbub to think,’ he said, but ‘I deliberated best when I was the centre of revelry, amid the pleasures of a ball.’ He never doubted his destiny. ‘A strong man delivers a single blow,’ he wrote, magniloquently, ‘and an empire vanishes.’

Bolívar’s father, Juan Vicente, bitterly resented the corrupt direction of their Spanish masters. ‘Injustice,’ whispered the colonials, ‘means Revolution.’^* Juan begged his friend, the radical Francisco de Miranda, to lead a revolution against Spain, a dangerous enterprise.^*

Simón Bolívar lost both parents young, leaving him a wealthy orphan, raised by a black slave Hippolyta, educated by Enlightened scholars and running wild with street children. Bolívar ‘thought of little else’ other than liberating Latin America: ‘I was fascinated by stories of Greek and Roman heroes,’ while ‘Washington awoke a desire in me to be just like him.’ Many creoles were restrained by fear of race war: one in ten Venezuelans were enslaved. Yet Bolívar was proud of a pedigree that included an enslaved girl. ‘Our people are nothing like Europeans or North Americans,’ he mused, ‘we’re more a mixture of Africa and America.’

At fifteen, Bolívar sailed to Madrid, where he met Queen Luisa because her latest lover was a Venezuelan – this was when he hit the crown prince with his racket. After a spree of love affairs, Bolívar married a young Caracan mantuano, but his wife soon died of yellow fever. She was the love of his life, ‘but had I not become a widower’, he wrote, ‘I’d never have been General Bolívar, El Libertador. The death caused me early in the road of politics to follow the chariot of Mars.’

In 1807, Napoleon’s drubbing of the risible Spanish king broke the fear necessary for the survival of empires: the Caracas grandees set up a junta loyal to the king, sending Bolívar to London where he pleaded in vain for support from Marquess Wellesley and met his ageing hero Miranda. The pair joined forces, sailing home to launch revolution, but Generalissimo Miranda, now sixty, offended everyone and was outmanoeuvred by the Spanish. Bolívar probably betrayed the eclipsed dictator, arresting him just before the Spanish swooped. Miranda died in a Spanish jail, and Bolívar took command of a rebel army.

Like the French in Haiti, the Spaniards fought differently in the colonies: they massacred 12,000, flaying rebels, wearing their ears on their hats. ‘Spaniards, count on death,’ declared Bolívar, ‘even if you’ve been indifferent. Americans: count on life even if you have been guilty!’ In August 1813, he took Caracas, but the llaneros, the mixed-race cowboys of the plains, backed the Spanish. Their Army of Hell routed the rebels. Bolívar escaped Caracas with his family, mistress and beloved manumitted nurse Hippolyta. Executing 1,000 Spaniards on the way, he made his way to Haiti, where President Pétion – the Papa Bon Coeur of the Haitian revolution – befriended him. ‘I could feel his greatness,’ said Pétion, who demanded nothing except the liberation of all slaves.

‘European ambition forced the yoke of slavery on the rest of the world,’ agreed Bolívar, already an abolitionist, ‘and the rest of the world was obliged to answer.’ He never forgot that ‘Pétion is the true liberator.’