A Way in the World

8. In the Gulf of Desolation: An Unwritten Story

AT ONE time I thought I should try to do a play or a film — a film would have been better — about the Gulf. I saw it as a three-part work: Columbus in 1498, Raleigh in 1618, and Francisco Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary, in 1806: three obsessed men, well past their prime, each with his own vision of the New World, each at what should have been a moment of fulfilment, but really near the end of things, in the Gulf of Desolation. Separate stories, different people, changing style of clothes, but the episodes would have developed one out of the other, as in a serial.

Raleigh in 1618, an old, sick man, waiting in the Gulf for news of the gold mines which he had never seen and which he no longer believed in, was like Columbus in 1498, complaining in his journal about his bad eyesight and bad health and bad luck, pleading in advance for the sympathy of his sovereigns. As he picked his way along the indentations of this strange Gulf, partly salt, partly fresh, he saw himself sailing between the island he called The Trinity and another island (really the South American continent) which he called the Land of Grace. He was offering place-names as prayers, and exaggerating the wonder of what he saw. He had already almost lost his dream of the New World; he knew that things had gone very wrong with the little Spanish colony he had left behind on the island of Haiti. And at the end of this third journey he was to go back in chains to Spain. Just as Raleigh in 1618, when there was no longer anything to wait for, went back to the Tower and execution.

There is this kind of madness and self-deception — followed by surrender — in the later career of Francisco Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary who came before Bolívar. Miranda is not as well known as Columbus or Raleigh. His career is just as fabulous and original, but (for a reason we will come to later) he has no historical myth, and it is necessary at this point to establish his story.

In 1806 Miranda is fifty-six. He has been out of Venezuela for thirty-five years. For more than twenty of those years, in the United States, England and France, he has been touting around an idea of Spanish-American liberation. Technically, he is a deserter from the Spanish army. This means he has been cut off from such family wealth as he has in Venezuela; and he has been living on his wits. The South American revolution — and his potential place at the head of it — is his only asset. In 1805 he panics; he feels that the French under Napoleon might invade the South American continent and that there might be no revolution for him to lead. He leaves England and goes to the United States. With money from a merchant (who is willing to speculate in the revolution) Miranda buys a small ship, recruits two hundred mercenaries, and decides to invade South America.

It is a long, slow journey south. He quarrels with the captain, he quarrels with his recruits, and the invasion is a disaster. In a simple forty-minute action a Spanish ship cuts off and detains the two unarmed schooners that are being used to land fifty-eight of the invaders. Miranda, who has last seen action twenty-five years before, turns and flees in his own ship.

He is succoured by the British authorities in Barbados and Trinidad. His unpaid, mutinous American recruits are brought to heel; he recruits more men from among the French in Trinidad; and he starts on a fresh invasion. Like Columbus, like Raleigh, he has a sense of history. He issues a proclamation: “The Gulf that Columbus discovered and honoured with his presence will now witness the illustrious action of our gallant efforts.”

His proclamations are of another sort when, with covert British naval help this time, he lands without opposition in Venezuela. Local officials who do not give up their allegiance to the Spanish authorities, he says, will be treated as enemies. His idea of revolution is as simple as that. No one comes over to him; people run away from him.

He makes no effort to ransom or to rescue or to bargain for the fifty-eight men he had lost earlier. Ten of them are hanged and quartered, their heads spiked, their remains ceremonially burnt. The others are all shut up in dreadful prisons. Miranda never talks about them or expresses sorrow for them. They were mercenaries, gamblers. If the invasion had come off, they would have had a lot of loot. As it is, they lost; nothing is owed them.

He isn’t strong enough — or skilled enough or confident enough — to move inland. After ten days he re-embarks. For some weeks he waits indecisively off the Venezuelan coast. British naval support, never officially authorized, is finally withdrawn; and there is nothing for Miranda to do but return to Trinidad.

For a whole year after this Miranda stays in Trinidad, and he is like a man marooned.

Until nine years before Trinidad was part of Venezuela and the Spanish empire. Now it is a British territory. Most of the island is forest, but it is empty forest: the aboriginal population has almost ceased to exist. Twenty years before, on the site of the old Indian shore settlement of Cumucurapo, the Spaniards had laid out a small Spanish-style town of regularly intersecting straight streets. Most of the residential plots away from the main square are empty and overgrown. Right at the end of the unfinished town, and going back to the hills and the forest on three sides, are the new slave plantations — newer than the town — set up on land that had remained bush for two hundred years, after the disappearance of the aboriginal people.

The planters are refugees from Haiti and the other French-speaking islands to the north. The planters are not all white. There are many mulattoes and blacks among them, and they are known, in the caste language of the time, as “free people of colour”; they are not called Negroes. An unusually high proportion of the slaves in Trinidad are “new Negroes,” freshly imported from Africa.

The island now lives by and for these plantations, and away from them there is almost no life. Travel is controlled. There are no wanderers, no floating, free population. There is no place here for a metropolitan man like Miranda. There must have been times during the year when — waiting on developments, and at the mercy of the British government — he would have felt like a prisoner, and wondered whether he would ever get out, leave what had once been part of his native land, and go back to London, to his house and family.

After a long, idle year he does go back. This is where his story should have ended, with this escape from what had once been part of his native land. That would have been irony enough. But he isn’t allowed to go out on a dying fall. He is too famous, has been active for too long, has talked too much. Another fate has been prepared for him.

Three years later the real revolution in Venezuela is started by Bolívar and others. They call Miranda out from London. They think they need him. Miranda is the most famous South American or Spanish American of his time; he knows important people in England and the United States. The revolutionaries also believe they need Miranda’s military skill: the word among South Americans is that in military matters he is second only to Napoleon. (For eleven years he had been a captain in the Spanish service in Spain, North Africa, and the West Indies. Fleetingly, before he deserted and went to the United States, he was a colonel. But when he got to France he encouraged the French to believe that he had been a general in the American War of Independence; and, in the early days of the French Revolution, he had served for seven months as a general in the revolutionary army, until he was arrested for incompetence.)

So, unexpectedly, after the rout and disgrace and idleness of three years before, there is this complete triumph for Miranda. He lands in Venezuela to a ready-made revolution (such as he has been predicting for twenty years), and is received ceremonially as its leader and hero. For a while everything goes well. The Venezuelan revolution is triumphant, and Miranda as general secures its victories — though his engagements are particularly bloody, and the revolutionary who talks about civil liberty turns out to have a brutal, too assertive side. This brutality is one of the things that make people question the revolution.

Miranda had left Venezuela when he was twenty-one, and in 1810–11 he had been away for nearly forty years. And just as in that time he had made himself over many times — becoming a lover of liberty among the Americans; a revolutionary among the French; a Mexican nobleman and a count among the grandees of the Russia of Catherine the Great; a ruler in exile among the British, a man who could open up a whole continent to British manufactures — so in his projections Venezuela and South America had been steadily adapted to the fantasies of late eighteenth-century European thinkers. The people of the continent deserved the best. Both whites and Indians were worthy of Plato’s republic. And then, in a further version of this fantasy, both whites and Indians somehow became Incas, as pure and as noble as the philosophers had judged such people to be.

But the Venezuela in which Miranda now finds himself isn’t like that at all. Venezuela is more like the Trinidad Miranda was lucky to escape from three years before. Venezuela is a colony in the New World, with slave plantations, and it has all the divisions of that kind of place: Spaniards from Spain, who are the officials; a creole Spanish aristocracy; creole Spaniards who are not aristocracy; mulattoes; the Negroes of the plantations; the aboriginal Indians. This kind of place is held together only by a strong external authority. When that external authority goes, people can begin to feel they are sinking. Freedom for one group can mean slavery or oppression for another group.

So the Venezuelan revolution, as it progresses, deepens every racial and caste division in the country, encourages every kind of fear and jealousy; and the revolution begins to fail. The ordinary people of the country begin to go over to the other side, the side of old authority, and the reverences and law and religion they know.

Miranda appeals to the slaves to join him. They don’t listen; in fact, as the area controlled by the revolutionaries shrinks, the slaves of Barlovento rebel, and there is a moment when it seems they might capture the capital, Caracas. And now, to buy peace, or at any rate to buy time, some of the very men who had called Miranda out from London, to lead their revolution, decide to hand him to the Spaniards. They wake him up one night and march him to the dungeon of a coastal fort.

That is where it ends for Miranda: the fate he has feared ever since he deserted nearly thirty years before. This fear has grown through all his life as a revolutionary. He fears Spanish prisons as only a former Spanish officer can fear them; he fears the legal-religious cruelty and vengefulness of Spanish punishments as only a man who has dealt in these things himself can fear them. In the recent Venezuelan wars he has had men hanged; he has had heads spiked.

He is sixty-two now. He has four more years to live. All these years will be spent in jail; some of the time he will be chained. He will never see London and his family again. He will move from the jail in Venezuela to the jail in Puerto Rico, to the dungeons of Cadiz. The dungeons of Cadiz are infamous. But when the captain-general of Puerto Rico, who handles Miranda with honour throughout, comes to tell him that orders have come for him to be taken to Cadiz, Miranda embraces the captain-general and thanks him. As though he is content at the end to lay aside the fantasies of thirty years — fantasies of an immense Spanish-American republic of Colombia stretching from the source of the Mississippi (all the land west of the river) down the length of the continent to Cape Horn, fantasies of Incas worthy of Plato’s republic, fantasies which (like Columbus’s ideas about the New World, and Raleigh’s) also contained a dream of a fabulous personal authority.

THROUGHOUT HIS adult life Miranda was particular about his papers. He kept everything he considered important, sometimes even printed invitations. He did so at first as a traveller, one of the earliest South Americans out in the greater world; later he kept things out of a sense of history and personal destiny. If he isn’t well known now it isn’t only because he achieved little, and because the South American revolution doesn’t have the universal appeal of the three great revolutions — the American, the French, and the Haitian — that came earlier. It is also because on the day he was betrayed he was separated from his papers — the sixty-three leather-bound folio volumes he had brought out from England two years before — and the papers were lost for more than a century. When the papers were recovered the South American revolution had receded, its history had hardened, and, as with the corpses at Pompeii, where Miranda should have been there was a void.

For Venezuelans Miranda is the Precursor, the man before Bolívar. And when I first read about Miranda and began to look at his papers, I too, but in my own way, thought of him as a precursor. I saw him as a very early colonial, someone with a feeling of incompleteness, with very little at home to fall back on, with an idea of a great world out there, someone who, when he was out in this world, had to reinvent himself. I saw in him some of my own early promptings (and the promptings of other people I knew).

I feel now that I was carried away by a private idea of an ancestry, and overlooked too much of what was obvious. There is something in the idea of colonial incompleteness, and his political cause cannot be denied. But Miranda was also, right through, from the time he left home, something of a confidence man. It was too easy: he was the first South American of culture (and often the first South American) people outside had met, and he found he could tell them anything about who he was and the place he had come from. He could tell the president of Yale, for instance, during a discussion of Mexican writing, that he had studied law at Mexico University.

This is the man we will see arriving — in latish middle age, thirty-five years after he had left South America — in the Gulf in 1806. And it is necessary now to go back and understand a little more of Miranda the confidence man.

He was born in Caracas in 1750. His father was a Canary Islander and a linen merchant. That is, neither a proper Spaniard from Spain, nor someone accepted by the creole Spanish aristocracy. But a rich man, rich enough to pay eight thousand pesos — a large sum — for a captain’s commission for his son in the Spanish army; and rich enough to get a notary in Spain to prepare a genealogical account of the Mirandas, proving their Castilian purity and nobility through seven generations.

It is to take up this commission that young Miranda leaves for Spain in 1771. In Spain he is enthusiastic for the sights, the wine, the prostitutes; he notes down everything. To cover some of his expenses (and this might be his merchant father’s idea) he has brought four hundred and fifty pounds of cocoa beans — no doubt grown on the slave estates in the valleys north of Caracas. The cocoa fetches a hundred and fifteen pesos. This — to give an idea of the extravagance of the metropolitan life Miranda is hoping to enter — is what he pays for a silk handkerchief and a silk umbrella. And these are only two items in a long list of expensive dress things which he acquires on arrival.

A year later he receives his commission. He quarrels with people all the time. It is his nature; he is at once too assertive and — no doubt as a Venezuelan and Canary Islander — too easily slighted. However, the years begin to pass; there is a period of service in North Africa. As he settles into regimental life — he is imprisoned at least twice for insubordination — his assertiveness begins to show in other ways. On the parade ground one day he uses his sword to hit a soldier about the head and he damages the man’s hearing; then he has the man taken down to the dungeon, stripped naked and beaten. He also begins to steal the regiment’s funds. The practice is not unusual among officers who have bought their commissions and have in various ways to make their money back. There are complaints, delayed enquiries, rambling written excuses — much of the rest of Miranda’s military life will be like this.

There is now the American War of Independence. Miranda very much wants to go, and he does. He is with the Spanish force at the siege of Pensacola. After the outnumbered British forces surrender, Miranda does some shopping. He buys three Negro slaves and a large number of valuable books. He buys the slaves one at a time in the course of two weeks and keeps the three receipts among his papers; the receipts are proof of his title. He also says that a British prisoner made a gift to him of a Negro man called Brown. These four slaves will be taken as contraband (no doubt on a Spanish military transport) into Cuba or some other Spanish territory and sold at a profit. There are pickings of this sort for Spanish officers in this war.

More is to come. The governor of Cuba cooks up a scheme. Miranda will be gazetted a colonel and sent to the British island of Jamaica to arrange the exchange of British and Spanish prisoners. The mission is genuine enough; but Miranda will also (after squaring the British authorities) buy two ships in Jamaica, load them up with Negroes and British china and linen, and take them back to Cuba. There everything (including the ships: a master stroke) will be traded. Miranda will be set down at the port of Batanabó with his harmless personal luggage (including the many fine books he has bought in Jamaica); the contraband ships and their cargo will make their own roundabout way to Havana. Miranda will take all the risks. The governor of Cuba, the patron of the scheme, will keep his hands clean.

It is a stupendous fraud, hard to keep secret, and there are Spanish officials who are outraged by it. Almost as soon as Miranda leaves Batanabó, with his six trunks in three carts, he is arrested and quite deliberately roughed up by excise officers. No respect is shown to his uniform or to his official passport. His excuses are ingenious, as always, but they don’t help. The officials are implacable; even the governor is bypassed. The case — developing over twelve months — goes to the king of Spain, and the news that gets back to Cuba is so bad that Miranda decides to run. With the help of the governor he gets a berth on an American sloop and slips away to the United States. And that is just as well. The king of Spain’s decision, six months later, is that Miranda is to be stripped of his commission and sentenced to ten years of garrison duty in Oran in North Africa.

By this time Miranda, in the United States, is mingling with the highest in the land. The governor of Cuba has played fair with him; he has given him a letter to the Spanish minister to the United States, and the Spanish minister diligently introduces Miranda to distinguished people. For the first time in his life Miranda finds himself of interest as a South American and a cultured man, as a man in his own right; no one in the United States in 1783 would know or care what a Canary Islander or a Venezuelan creole is. And delicate gifts of social manoeuvre come to Miranda; it is as though he has been educating himself for this moment. At one gathering he says that the military man he has modelled himself on is General Wolfe. It just happens — and no one is more surprised than Miranda — that the man he says that to knows highly-placed friends of the general. Miranda is passed on to those friends; they pass him on to others. And so it goes on for a year and a half.

At some stage the idea gets around that Miranda’s interest, or long-term cause, is an American-style freedom for Spanish America. The idea adds to Miranda’s dignity; and he doesn’t reject it. So when word arrives that Miranda is really a deserter from the Spanish service, it does him no harm. When he leaves the United States to go to England he has a letter of introduction to the secretary to the Treasury in Whitehall. He has moved very fast. Just eighteen months before, in colonial Havana, he was a contrabandist and a deserter; now, already, in London, he has become a kind of negotiator in the South American cause. And twenty years or so later Venezuelans, with colonial pride and exaggeration, will add a further gloss to Miranda’s time in the United States: they will make him a general in the American War of Independence, standing shoulder to shoulder with Lafayette and Washington.

Miranda’s travels continue, year after year: this has almost become his career. There is always someone willing to provide the would-be liberator with money. As for passion, there are constant brutal passages with chambermaids, servant women, prostitutes. There are also constant quarrels with servants. They often seem to sniff out his fraudulence or dependence, and he, with his Venezuelan-colonial ideas of authority, often roughs them up. At the upper level there continue to be introductions, onwards and onwards. The farther away from home he goes the easier it gets.

In Russia he becomes a colonel again, a Mexican nobleman, and a count. Catherine the Great herself becomes worried about what the Inquisition might do to him if he falls into Spanish hands. When he tells her that the Spanish ambassador has been challenging his right to call himself a colonel, she makes him a colonel in the Russian service. She gives him money; she tells him that the Russian embassies in Europe will always be open to him.

His reputation now feeds on itself; his failures no longer matter. When he goes back to England he enters into serious negotiations with the British government. The negotiations drag on for years, and nothing happens. But when he goes to France they make him a general in their revolutionary army. That ends in a military disaster at the siege of Maastricht, his imprisonment and trial. That doesn’t do him any harm in England; in fact, he goes back, quite legitimately, as a general. For years, then, until he is fifty-five, British plans for the invasion or liberation of South America expand and contract and expand again around General Miranda. Once there is even a plan for a conquest of the continent with ten thousand sepoys from India.

Through these years of waiting and disappointment Miranda doesn’t dwindle. He grows; he becomes more and more educated. Experience, knowledge of the world, and the acquaintance of great men have taken him far from the contrabandist captain of twenty years before. He handles himself as the head of a government in waiting. At the beginning he might have talked moralistically of the broken promises of ministers who have kept him dangling. But now he knows that men are linked by interest and he knows what he has to offer. A British invasion without him would be resisted by the people of Spanish America. Someone like him is needed. And it is only when he fears that he will lose his role, when he sees himself useless in London in old age, that he commits himself to his absurd one-ship invasion.

THIS IS the man who comes to the Gulf in 1806, after the failure of his first invasion. He should be ridiculous, but he isn’t. There will be a new invasion soon, this time with the help of the British fleet in the Caribbean. The generals and admirals are all for Miranda. They want the great estates in South America that Miranda’s victory will bring.

A British warship brings him from Barbados to Port of Spain. This is partly to protect him from the mutinous American mercenaries on his own ship, the Leander. They haven’t been paid for the whole of the year, and they have no faith in Miranda’s leadership.

Miranda is welcomed on the pier by the Trinidad governor, General Hislop. Hislop is a man of jangled nerves. He is forty, and fading. His last military service was twenty years before, in Gibraltar. He has been ten years in the West Indies in semi-administrative posts and drinks too much. He has been governor of Trinidad for three years, and he hates the island and the people.

Hislop has just had to deal with what he thought was a slave rebellion. That gave him a fright, and now he is nervous about the legality of what was done then — the hangings and the mutilations — and what has been done in his name since he became governor. He feels that everything he has done or presided over can be challenged, because since the British conquest there has been no agreed system of law. No one knows whether Spanish law operates or English law, and there are no proper lawyers to give advice about either system.

Miranda is without power. He lives on subventions from merchants in London and now New York, and on uncertain grants from the British government. He depends now on British support for his second invasion attempt. Hislop is the representative of the British power. But at their meeting now Hislop is the suppliant, Miranda the man with the thing he can grant. Miranda recognizes that Hislop is a suppliant, and he knows that the request, when it comes, will be something like this: “General, should you have room in South America at some time for a military man, please do not hesitate to call on me.”

They drive up through the wretched little town. Away from the principal square, near the pier, many of the building plots are empty and overgrown. The streets of the Spanish-laid-out town have now been given British names, of royalty and military men: King, Queen, Prince, Duke, George, Charlotte, Frederick, St. Vincent, Abercromby. It is the rainy season, and the dirt roads are muddy and the air is warm and moist.

Government House, where Miranda is to stay as a guest of the governor, is to the north, at the foot of the hills.

The two men talk about the invasion force.

Hislop says, “We can’t give you any of our own troops, of course. But the Americans on your ship will have to go with you. Some of them are saying they will stay here, but I will let them know that they are allowed to be here only as members of your force. I have identified the ringleader among the Americans.”

“Biggs.”

“That’s it. We can deal with Biggs. The Spanish authorities are another matter. They have been spreading the word that the island will go back to Spain when the peace comes. This means that none of the Spaniards here will volunteer. They are also spreading the rumour that you will set all the slaves free. This is to discourage the French volunteers. Rouvray has got about a hundred and ninety French volunteers. They will want to hear from you that you will secure property rights in slaves. That’s what it always comes down to in this part of the world, as you know. Land and slaves. As governor of this place there are times when I feel I am just a jailer for the planters.”

Miranda says, “I asked for letters to be sent here.”

“You have quite a few. Some have been sent on from Tortola, some from the Leeward Islands station. And Mr. Turnbull has sent me boxes of leaflets and samples for you. You are to distribute them when you land in Venezuela. With your recommendations. Some people have a very simple idea of military operations.”

Government House is in need of repair. Hislop apologizes. He says the Treasury of the island is empty. The previous administrator had very grand ideas of the style in which he and his family and his secretaries should live. He stayed for only six months, but he left a hole. After that there was the expense of fortifications, some of them now abandoned. The few public works Negroes that are now employed about the Government House grounds — mud-stained, in ragged brown linen clothes: the standard slave wear: Miranda has seen it on Negroes during the drive through the town — have been bought from the dealers on credit.

“They are not carpenters or craftsmen,” Hislop says. “A carpenter would have cost a hundred pounds. These cost sixty. And they’re new Negroes. From Africa. No good for anything except in a field gang, and they don’t speak English or French. The story is that the trade is going to be stopped next year, so the merchants are bringing in as many new Negroes as they can now. That’s creating its own problems. If you stay here long enough, that’s all you start thinking about. Negroes and land.

“It will be no surprise to you, General, that you are in demand here. Miss McLurie wants to meet you. She’s one of our ladies. She came in 1802 and is suffering from the lack of society. She wears a transparency. That’s what she calls it. It shows her bosom. Apparently it’s the latest fashion. She wants to hear from your very own lips about Lady Hester Stanhope and Catherine the Great. These stories have preceded you. That’s the way it is with famous people, and you are the most famous man to have come here. Before you came, I suppose Commodore Samuel Hood was the most famous man we had here. Nelson’s second-in-command at the Battle of the Nile.”

Miranda says, “I met Hood before he came out here.”

“And Be’nard wants to see you. He has been very pressing in the last week.” Hislop pronounced the French name in an English way, making it sound like “Bennard.” “He is a planter, courtesy of de Gourville. He is married to de Gourville’s daughter. This makes him a relation by marriage of Baron de Montalembert. Be’nard doesn’t let you forget it. The baron is one of our biggest planters. He will be a good man to get on your side. He came here from Santo Domingo five or six years ago. His estate is just around the corner from here. Just after he came here he lost a hundred and twenty of his Negroes by poison. It is a famous story. I am sure Be’nard will tell it again. He is going to call very soon.”

“Bernard. I knew a Bernard in Paris. He later came to London. I sent out a Bernard here from England seven years ago. To keep an eye on things for me. He came and I never heard a word. Not a word. Will this be the same man? Worried that I’m turning up? Or deciding that there is something I can do for him? What do you think, General?”

“General Miranda, you asked just now about your letters. They are in your room. But there is another. It was thrown into the sentry box yesterday morning. It is anonymous. It may be abusive of me. It is what I’ve had to live with here. I am not Sure that honour applies here, but I pass that letter on to you as a matter of honour. My request is that you will handle it in the same way. You have been the object of calumny and persecution yourself, General. It is very easy to be vilified in a place like this.”

The men separate. Dinner is to be at three. Miranda goes to his section of the house, henceforth his headquarters. He sees the satchels with the Tortola and Leeward Islands mail. And the folded dingy anonymous letter Hislop mentioned.

The room is at the back of the house. The grass and trees outside are wet from the recent rain. A hill rises up not far away. The air is damp, and the very smell of rain and earth and dead leaves brings back to Miranda the smell of the cocoa valleys to the north of Caracas, and reminds him of the sacks of cocoa beans his father had sent with him on the Prins Frederik in 1771, to be changed for money in Cadiz.

The room is full of small, yellowish lizards; their droppings are everywhere. There is a muslin canopy over the bed, to protect it from dust and termite wood-dust and things like lizard droppings. The canopy is discoloured and in its folds or wrinkles grey with old dust; it sags in the damp air.

Outside there is movement, talk. The slaves are not speaking Spanish or French or English, but an African language.

He begins to shape a letter in his head: “My dear Sally, this is a kind of homecoming for me, after thirty-five years. It is quite amazing: I know this rainy-season smell. Soon I suppose the rain and the wind will bring the smell of the vanilla vine. I feel I know this place very well. It is my own. It exists in my mind. But it is now full of strangers. I don’t like the sensation. I feel a great gap. Without the thought of you I would be quite lost.”

He opens the Tortola satchel and soon, among the official, secretary-written letters, sees the broad, irregular, awkward handwriting he has been looking for.

“27 Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square, London. April 15th. My ever dear General, I embrace this opportunity of writing to you my dear Sir for wile I am a night and the two babies are asleep it seames as if I am talking to my dear Friend Himself and can hear his own voice. Leander has set down his drum and sword and gun, we have had a fair in the Road, and he makes such a noise my dear Sir saying Mamy I am going to the war to fight for the General—”

Miranda thinks, partly framing his reply, “Querida. My dear Sally, I love every misspelt word you write and every mistake you make. These words you wrote four months ago come to me now with your own voice. I can see my house and the library and the books again. I think without you, my dear Sally, I would become quite dizzy here, in this place I don’t know any longer, and try not to see too clearly or find out too much about, where the Negroes talk in an African language, and I can still smell the cocoa estates all around …”

“Leander sleeping is the picture of my dear Sir. My uncle from Yorkshire is with us to keep us company and to get some London portrait work. He sets Leander down in the G’s library, I must tell you I light a fire there one day every week winter and summer, and my uncle draws his picture but he doesnt set still a moment. And I am very flatter that everybody says he has the Wisdom of twice his years. My dear Sir I have followed all your Instructions and I now propose to give you the regular Budget of news Mr. Rutherfurd says I should give you to keep your Spirits up in all your trying circumstances. I talk in my mind every night to my dear G, but I don’t have news every day.

“My dear Sir your second son and mine Francisco was born on the 27th of February. All that day my thoughts were of you and your danger on the High Seas. You wished this son to have your own name, and Francisco and Leander were both of them Baptised as agreed on the 23rd of March. Mr. Rutherfurd came in the morning with Mr. Longchamp and they took us to St. Patrick’s Soho Square in a Coach. Mr. Longchamp responded for both babis. Father Gaffey wrote Mr. Longchamps name wrong in the Register and had to scratch it out both times. I give here the copy of the Baptismal Certificate for Francisco that Father Gaffey gave me for my dear Sir it’s all in Latting so the G. must forgive errors. Die 23a Martii 1806 baptisatus fuit Franciscus filius Francisci Miranda et Sarae Andrews. Natus die 27a Februarii praecedentis. Patrinis juit Joannes Michael Jean du Longchamp. Per Daniel Gaffey.

“When we went back to Grafton street Mr. Rutherfurd told me that not a few Eyebrows had been raised by the Roman Catholic Baptism with certain people we well know saying that you said one thing but in your heart of hearts were another. But I kept my peace about my dear Gen’s intentions, and I thought hard of him and his dangers that day and the next when as agreed I knew that after the Baptism of our sons my G would be making his Officers swear to serve the people of South America and their new Flag. I think about that Flag my dear Sir the hours I spent making it here in Grafton Street spreading it out sometimes on the floor of the library, with Leander tied to the table leg so he couldn’t get too close—”

“Sarah, I will never find the courage to tell you. The flag that carried so much of you was lost five weeks after you wrote that, when the Bee and the Bacchus were lost, with all the landing party. I waited until the 12th of March before I took the flag out of my trunk and showed it to the men on the Leander. I thought that Francisco would have been born by then. I know now that he was two weeks old. The Bee and the Bacchus were both unarmed sloops. The other ships we were expecting all the way down never came. After that long voyage, with those unruly, mocking Americans, butcher boys, I had to try to land. I couldn’t just go away without doing anything. The Spaniards will dishonour that flag. They will find special ways …”

“First of May 1806. I wait for news of my dear Sir and try to guess what other people know. Mr. Holland the print-seller sent to my uncle for a Picture of the Gen, and my uncle sat down all morning at the small library table and drew one of my dear Sir in Profile with his long white queue hanging down his back tied up at the end with a little ribbing and with his silk cravat below his chin, all in Profile, very serious and stern, and my uncle says that in the Print the Engraver will show clouds and a Crown above the Gen’s head. I thought this was a good sign, because as my uncle says Mr. Holland wants to sell his prints and he knows when to expect good news. But then Mr. Turnbull came and walked through the house in a way he wouldn’t have dared if my Gen was here. Standing up in the library and Ex-Claiming when are those Volumes going to be paid for, they cost Thousand’s, the booksellers and binders are sending their bills to the firm of Turnbull and Forbes, I never authorized that. Walking through the house as though I wasnt there, no bowing and no my good lady now, Leander and Francisco and their mother not much thought of now that you are not here. My dear Sir they are all snake’s in the Grass as long as I live I will encourage Leander and Francisco to look for their Deseat. I was mighty sick after he left and my heart allmost broke. Take yourself out of their power my dear Sir, I nightly pray in the silence of the house for you soon to claim your own, and for that Crown to be sett on your head.”

THERE WAS a disturbance outside. A number of men talking at once, an irregular hollow stamping on the ground, the sounds of harness, more talk, shouts, and then a slow, heavy crash.

Miranda was roused from the sound of Sarah’s voice, from the flow of his own unspoken reply, from thoughts and pictures of his library, his sleeping sons, the London night, the silence of his house.

It was darker in the room than he had thought, as though time had shifted with his thoughts and it was nearly night here too. It was only the rainy-season weather of the estuary and the Gulf: one brief, violent downpour recently over, a remnant of its drizzle still about, another downpour about to come.

He went to the window. It was in the local style, the shutter roughly jalousied, hinged at the top (the better to keep out the rain), and propped open with a stick. Water dripped from the sloping sides of the shutter. The paint had long ago peeled, the timber had weathered grey; the sill had begun to rot.

The grounds at the back of the house were a mess of mud and rubble and bush, like a clearing in the forest. To one side — near the separate little cook-house, whitewash fallen off grey, soaked boards, smoke coming out of blackened open windows: dinner for the governor and his guest being got ready — there were old compacted mounds of kitchen ash.

In the mud directly in front, a mule had been unharnessed from a cart. The badly distributed load of rubble had fallen forward, breaking the front flap of the cart and pressing the shafts into the mud.

The three or four mud-stained black men around the mule and cart were talking in a language Miranda had never heard before. He supposed it to be a language of Africa.

If the men had been talking English or French or Spanish Miranda would not have noticed them as he now did. He would have seen only Negroes and he would not have been able to recognize them later. But the strange private language, and the whole internal, unknowable world it implied, made him consider the faces of the men.

They noticed him, too, almost at the same time, the old man with the long white pigtail appearing below the sloping jalousied shutter against the darkness of the window. For a while, waiting for they knew not what, looking at him, they stood still, and for those moments it was as if in their bewilderment — men who seemed not to have any idea what they were doing or why, or even where they were — Miranda saw something of his own disturbance, called away from London and his house and Sarah and her panic, to focus all at once on that piece of bush and those men.

He noticed their frailty. It was strange in people expected to do physical labour, but (and this was plantation lore, in Venezuela as well) the sturdiness of the plantation worker was grafted on to this kind of stock over later generations. Many Africans when they arrived were as frail as these men. A certain number were expected to die in the first year, from the water, the food, the new insects. On the established plantations there were ways of “seasoning” new arrivals and seeing them through their dangerous first year. These Africans in the grounds of Government House looked neglected. In the hollow red eyes of one man could be seen signs of a rainy-season fever. He was doomed, and so perhaps was one of the men with him.

That idea of doom, of another kind of life, coming to Miranda even while he was looking at the eyes of the Africans, re-established distance between him and the men he saw, and returned him to himself and the setting: the downpour coming, the wet, rotting window sill with disagreeable drifts of black-and-white lizard droppings in the eaten-away parts of the wood: the lizards now seen to be active everywhere around him, pale yellow creatures, almost transparent, like little crocodiles but with enormous lidless eyes.

He saw in a corner of the room now the three new deal chests, like seamen’s chests, with the Turnbull and Forbes samples General Hislop had mentioned. The chests were painted with a style of lettering — thin horizontals, very thick verticals — that brought back the signboards and street signs of London: Brig.-Gen. Thos. Hislop, Headquarters, Trinidad. For General Miranda. From Turnbull and Forbes, London.

He didn’t go back to Sarah’s letter. It was an hour or so to dinner, time enough to consider other correspondence. The heavy roaring rain that came soon, beating on the ground and trees and the roof, helped his concentration.

Not long after the rain stopped a servant came and told him he had a visitor.

He went out to the verandah. He recognized his visitor as Bernard, last seen seven years ago in London. There was a mud-spattered calash with a wet black coachman in the drive. Though the rain had stopped, the drive was running with yellow water that came off the surrounding hills and made a general gurgling noise all around.

The calash made a good first impression; but then Miranda saw that the hood, which was up, was cracked and worn in the folds, the bodywork was dented and scratched, and the emblem on the low door was crudely painted. The wet coachman was wearing alpargatas, peon’s footwear, a cheap kind of slipper with a very thin leather sole with woven cotton straps for the toes and the heel. The heel-straps of the coachman’s alpargatas had long ago been flattened below the man’s heel.

The verandah was wet and every little breath of air felt chill. The rain had blown in on three sides.

Miranda didn’t ask Bernard inside. Both men remained standing in the verandah.

Bernard said, “General.”

Miranda didn’t speak.

“I never wrote. I know.”

“There are so many letters,” Miranda said. “You never wrote at all? Are you sure?”

“I put it off and put it off. Year after year. And then it was too late. Governor Hislop would have told you that I’m married. My wife is the daughter of the Chevalier de Gourville. Dupont Duvivier de Gourville. He’s a relation of the Baron de Montalembert. No finer connection is possible in these parts. It wasn’t something I would have thought possible for myself. I had to set aside thoughts of the revolution. You’re a man of the world, and I feel I can offer you this explanation. I won’t call it an excuse.”

Miranda said, “I’ve heard of the baron. He came here in 1801 with a hundred and fifty Negroes, and he lost a hundred at one blow.”

“A hundred and twenty. In the first month. After losing everything in Santo Domingo and Martinique. And there’s no bitterness in him. He simply started up again. General, I don’t want to take up more of your time. I thought it was my duty to make this call on you, to see you as soon as possible, and to declare myself. Times change, General. And though at one time I had to set aside thoughts of the revolution, I have these past few months been serving you in ways you don’t know. I think it is important for you to know that. Of course, French people of standing here know of our old connection, and I have been able to reassure them — especially those who have volunteered for your new expedition — that there was never any political quarrel between us. Friends and foes have spread all kinds of stories about you here, General. The stories haven’t been all about the court of Catherine the Great. Some have been about the French Revolution. You were a general in the army of the Revolution. But I’ve always told people that you will honour property rights in land and Negroes, that there is nothing to fear. People worry about these things here, and you can’t blame them, after recent history. I hope you think I’ve done well.”

“You’ve done well.”

“Now I must go.”

“Your calash?”

“My wife’s. What you see on it are the Gourville arms. Roughly done, but it was painted by a Negro born and bred in Martinique and — you wouldn’t believe — trained as a pastrycook.”

“Pastrycook! The things you can get people to do these days!”

Bernard began to go down the steps. Miranda (never forgetting, with a remnant of shame, how, thirty-five years ago, eight fanegas, four hundred and fifty pounds, of Venezuelan cocoa had been converted in Cadiz into nothing more than a silk handkerchief and a silk umbrella) noticed how carefully, even with all the rain, the chevalier’s son-in-law had dressed for the occasion: the pale yellow pantaloons, the white ruffed shirt, the blue silk jacket. Before he got to the bottom of the broad, semi-rotting wooden steps (the driver of the calash getting ready, shaking the wet off the reins), he turned and looked at Miranda. It was the moment Miranda — wondering about the purpose of the call — had thought would never come.

Bernard said, “General. The clerk of the Council died last week. Did Governor Hislop tell you? It means there is a vacancy. The fees are small. Over a month they wouldn’t purchase you a dinner in London. But it’s a position of some local dignity. It matters to me, to be something in my own right. You’ll understand. I hope you’ll feel able to recommend me for it.”

AT DINNER Hislop said, “I know what he wants. You don’t have to tell me. So far, when the messages have come I’ve pretended not to hear. Let’s leave it like that. Let’s have some wine now, to celebrate your homecoming. Because that’s what it is: a homecoming after thirty-five years. And that’s what I hope it will turn out to be in a lasting way.”

Miranda said, “No wine for me, General. Just sugar and water. It’s all I’ve had for years. It’s what we used to drink in Caracas as children.”

“Almost the only commodities we’re not short of here. But sugar-and-water isn’t the kind of story we hear about you.”

“It’s strange about those stories. I started some of them, or at any rate encouraged them. Now they’re like stories about someone else. When I went to Spain in 1771, wine was one of the things I was travelling to know. It was something the poets wrote about. The wine of Europe, not the brackish church stuff we had in Caracas. I thought a lot about wine on the Prins Frederik. I expected nectar. As soon as I got to Cadiz I started to make notes about every wine I had, as I made notes about the women, the churches, the pictures. I don’t know now how much I was acting for the sake of my journal. Acting being a man of culture. I was twenty-one.”

“So the chevalier’s son-in-law came in his calash. A famous calash. With its shop-sign coat of arms. I hope he was friendly.”

“I don’t know. He threatened me. He said I had a revolutionary past. He said he knew more about that past than anyone here, and some people might easily be made to feel that property wasn’t safe with me.”

Hislop said, “Unfortunately, he’s right. It could be very damaging. The Spaniards have also been spreading rumours. The local Spaniards are already keeping out, and unless these stories are checked, your French volunteers might also drop away. They’re refugees from the islands, aristocrats without money, and they’re going into this business for the sake of property. Land and Negroes. To re-establish their fortunes. We all know that. I wish it were otherwise, but in this part of the world it always comes down to land and Negroes, as I told you. We have to take Be’nard’s threat seriously. I’ll find ways of letting him know that you’ve spoken to me, and that I’ve agreed to let him have the clerkship, but that I won’t be making the appointment for a month. That should keep him out of mischief and give you enough time. Ah, the calash! Be’nard will feel it did the trick again.”

“I couldn’t really afford the money I gave him when I sent him out here in 1799. And yet when I saw him this morning I had to pretend to be stiff with him. It was strange. I felt no animosity towards him. And right at the end, as he was going down the steps and he turned and I saw how carefully he had dressed, my heart went out to him. He looked so vulnerable, so easy to hurt. It would have been so easy to call his bluff, to laugh at the calash and the barefoot Negro driving it. And simply because it was so easy I didn’t want to do it. There’s always a touch of pathos in someone like that. He’s so exposed. I felt I was looking at a younger version of myself.

“I too had a coat of arms at one time. You need one to get a commission in a Spanish regiment. There are people in Spain who do these things. The man my father employed was called Zazo y Ortega. Zazo’s method was simple. He linked the Mirandas of Caracas and the Canary Islands to the twelfth-century Mirandas of Old Castile. And although I knew precisely who I was, and was proud of my father, and very proud of our money, I also passionately believed when I got on the Prins Frederik at La Guaira that I was another kind of person, and that I was travelling to Spain to claim my rightful inheritance, of which the coat of arms was a part. The Prins Frederik was a Swedish frigate. It was utterly foreign. It helped me to feel that I had undergone a transformation. For years I lived like this, knowing who I was and at the same time believing myself to be somebody else. Holding those two different ideas in my head at the same time, even drawing the Miranda arms on the expensive books I bought.

“I will tell you something even more absurd. When I was twenty-five — just two weeks after my twenty-fifth birthday — I wrote to the king of Spain asking to be invested with the red cross of the Order of Santiago. This is a very grand order. The king himself appoints a commission to look into the nobility of your descent. The painter Velázquez was admitted to the order when he was sixty, and at the height of his reputation. I knew who we were, what we had come from in Caracas and the Canary Islands. I knew exactly how Zazo had gone about creating that genealogy for me. But I also thought quite seriously with another part of my mind that Zazo had turned up the truth, and I was worthy of the king’s investigation. I thought there was something wonderful within me, and I felt that the king would discover this. I was twenty-five, a captain in the Princess Regiment in Africa.

“Later I became ashamed of all of this. I was glad there was no reply from the king. I even forgot about it, until the other day. And now I can look back on that whole business with calm. But I can still see the logic of the young man and understand why he did what he did. Something of that came back to me when I saw Bernard go down the steps, about to splash his delicate shoes and to spot his very expensive silk jacket with the drips from the old calash hood.”

Hislop said, “It’s easy to look back at the past. It’s not so easy to be clear-sighted about the present. We don’t always know what we are doing now. We can just get dragged along.”

“General, you’re frightening me. Of course I know it’s strange to be going on a campaign of liberation with these French aristocratic adventurers who only want land and Negroes. But that’s looking at it from the outside. I know the logic of what I’m doing. I know how I’ve got here. You know. You and I know all the twists and turns of events that have brought me here.”

“I was thinking of myself. I intended no rebuke to you. I am a military man. That has been my ambition since childhood. My last active service was in Gibraltar. That was twenty years ago. I have been becalmed in these parts for ten years. I still think of myself as a military man, still think I have a future. But really I no longer know what I’m doing. They put you in a place called Government House and they call you the governor, but you’re really only a jailer for these planters. I would much rather be with you. There, General. I’ve said what’s been on my mind these many months. I have longed for this meeting. For the last four months I have been learning Spanish. Learning Spanish one hour a day, and for the last year or two I’ve been dreaming of an elegant society, with fine houses and polished floors and beautiful Spanish ladies, where I might one day practise this Spanish. I have not seen action recently. But I could be on your staff. I could smooth things for you with our admirals and generals. I know many of them. I know their characters. I would know the words to use. The correct words are important with military people. That could be of value to you.”

It grew dark, and the rain came again beating on the ground outside and the roof and making conversation difficult while the first onrush lasted.

Hislop said, “This is the kind of weather that can carry you off. Make you a banquet for the blue crabs, as they say here. Put on a jacket and you start sweating. Take it off and you shiver. After ten years in these parts my health has broken down. I dream of a June day in England. But to get to England in June a lot of planning is necessary. You have to be in Tortola in the Virgin Islands by March, for the convoys. I don’t want to land in England in November.”

“Caracas will be better for you. The seasons don’t matter there.”

“General.”

“The Caracas valley is known as the land of eternal spring. The flowers have a deeper hue and the fruit are sweeter and bigger.”

Miranda showed the anonymous letter that Hislop said had been thrown into the sentry-box. The seal was still unbroken. He put the letter to one side and said, “I thought it would be better to read it in your presence. Not now. A little later.”

Hislop was moved. He said, “General.”

The servants began to bring in the dinner, stamping with bare feet on the solid planks, bringing with them a smell of rain and leaf-mould, woodsmoke and charcoal fumes, from the kitchen hut Miranda had seen.

Hislop said, “No banquet, General. It’s like living on a ship here. We’ve got twenty thousand Negroes working on the plantations from five in the morning to six in the evening, six days a week. But the scarcest thing here is food. All they do on the plantations is cocoa and cotton and sugar-cane and coffee. The Negroes in their free time grow some ground provisions, cassava, yams, sweet potatoes. But they’re not allowed to sell anything. The peons — the ’pagnols, as they call them here — bring in a little wild meat from the forest sometimes, and some of the free people of colour sell a little poultry when they have it. But we’re nearly always close to a famine. Nearly everything we eat here is smoked or salted and comes in a box from Canada or the United States. Beef, mackerel, salmon, cod, herring. Even tobacco comes in a box. Butter is orange-red with salt and costs six shillings a pound. No one thinks of churning it locally.”

“You don’t have to apologize, General. I know this food. I’m at home, remember. What’s happening in your grounds? Do those men know what they’re doing?”

“I doubt it. As a military man you must know that if you can’t gauge what a group of men are doing, it is because they themselves don’t know. They’re just doing as they’re told. We’re trying to make the land slope away from the hills, to take off the flood water. At the same time we’re digging in drainage trenches, with rubble at the bottom. It should have been done years ago, when they made this house Government House. You dig a ditch, you put in the rubble, and then you cover it up. It’s to prevent water stagnating. As soon as water stagnates here you get mosquitoes. If you get mosquitoes, you can’t live here. I tell the commandeur of the gang what to do, and he pretends he knows, but he doesn’t really know why I am asking him to bury stones. Plantation people would have some idea, but these new Negroes know nothing about anything. I don’t think they even know that they’re working, doing something called work. They probably just think they’re being punished. These Negroes believe that during the day they’re in hell. Literally. Did you know that? A strange kind of hell, where it doesn’t matter what they do or what is done to them. When the sun goes down the real world begins for them. Everything changes then. As soon as night falls, and you know that in these parts night comes in five minutes, things balance out for them. We become ghosts. They become kings and queens and dauphins and grand judges. They wear the crowns and have the whips. That’s what their sorcerers tell them. And it’s what they believe. It doesn’t matter what you do to them or how much you try to break their spirit. They believe that in the night the power is theirs. It was one of the things that came out at an enquiry we had earlier this year. You live in a place for ten years, you think you know it, and then you find out that all the time you’ve been standing on quicksand.”

“In Venezuela we always knew that the Negroes liked dressing up and playing games. They were great mockers. I don’t remember anyone thinking of holding an inquiry into it.”

“We had to. I don’t know whether they told you in Barbados, but last December we had a scare here. We were very close to a full-scale rebellion. They were all in it.” He jerked his chin towards the servants. “Everybody’s Negroes were in it, whether they belonged to white people or people of colour. It had been building up over some years, under our noses, and we didn’t know. One day they were going to kill all the white people. And then, when there was only one colour — that was the way they talked at the enquiry — they were going to go to church to take communion and then they were going to eat pork and dance. That was as far as they had thought in three years. They were going to eat pork and dance and live happily ever after. You might say it’s a game, but they were going to kill people and burn the houses and fields. Before, I never looked at a Negro. You know what I mean. I don’t want to look now, but I find I do all the time. And I am not sure what I am seeing. Anyway, in a month or two all this is going to change. These people in the grounds will go to the galleys and proper public works, and other people will be working on the grounds here. No one here knows as yet. We have to keep it secret. We are getting some Chinese.”

“From China?”

“Not strictly. From India, from Calcutta. But they’re going to be the first Chinese ever in this part of the world. It was such a desolation around Government House when I came here three years ago. I thought we should have a botanical garden. They have them in the other islands. It isn’t something the Negroes know about, and the planters wouldn’t like it anyway. They don’t want Negroes to do any agricultural work away from the estates. I wrote to London about the Chinese, and the wheels slowly began to turn. It’s all taken nearly two years. The East India Company recruited the Chinese in Calcutta. You won’t be here when they arrive, and I must say that I have lost interest. Mi cama aquí …”

“General!”

“Let me practise my Spanish, General. Mi cama aquí …”

“My bed here … Your accent is very good.”

“… no ha sido …”

“… has not been …”

“… una de rosas.”

“… one of roses. ‘My bed here has not been one of roses.’ It has not been a bed of roses for you.”

“Absolutely. I was hoping the Chinese would also grow vegetables. The Negroes don’t really know, and the planters won’t allow them to sell anything they grow. They say that after Haiti they don’t want their Negroes to get any ideas. But I think they just want to grind the Negroes down, and they don’t know where to stop. In my three years here I have seen more of human turpitude than in the rest of my life.”

Miranda said, “Turpitude. I know the word. But I’ve never heard anyone use it in conversation.”

“I suppose it’s because I’ve spent three years framing that sentence. I constantly speak it in my mind. It comforts me. The French aristocrats we’ve assembled here have tainted everybody. You’ve been to France, you’ve been a general in their army. I am not telling you anything you don’t know. The French aristocracy don’t come out well, General. I can’t understand them. They feel rich only if everybody else around them is in rags. They feel secure and well-bred only if everybody else is degraded. I understand now why they had the revolution in France. Then they had the same revolution all over again in Haiti, but a much nastier one. And now they’ve almost had one here. And they’ve involved me in it.” Hislop struck his breast, and then struck it regularly as he spoke. “I had to get the troops out at midnight and go around picking up the ringleaders. If there is an investigation I will have to bear the responsibility. I and I alone. That’s what Gourville and Montalembert and Luzette and the others think. They think they will simply stand aside, as they did with Picton. But I don’t intend that to happen. I’m a military man. I’m responsible for the defence of this territory and for public order. I know nothing about the management and care of Negroes. I am not required to know anything about that. Garrow, the London lawyer, made it pretty clear at the Picton trial. I have the full transcript. I have studied it. An official who exceeds the law, Garrow said, is responsible for his action. So the planters of the Council and the jailer and everybody else have to take their share. They don’t like what I am saying, but I have made my position clear. If you stay here long enough, General, you will find that I am not the most popular man on the island.”

Miranda said, “Is there going to be an investigation?”

“Who can tell? There may well be. The news from London has been very strange.”

“Is there a lot to be investigated? Was it very bad?”

“Three hanged. The heads spiked, the bodies hung in chains in the square.”

“The bodies of pirates hang from gibbets on both banks of the Thames, half-way up to London.”

“A lot of people mutilated. It’s what they do in the islands.”

“How do you mutilate them?”

“You cut off the ears. I’ve seen it in other places. In some of the very small islands they slit the nose, but here they just do the ears.”

“I never saw that in Venezuela. But I can’t trust my memory now. But if a punishment is customary, it’s customary. You’re too nervous, General. A rebellion is a rebellion.”

“It’s what I tell myself in my better moments. And Lord Castlereagh, the colonial secretary, sent his approval. He said he knew that that class of the community had to be watched. But if there’s an investigation, what’s that approval worth? If I am asked to state what law I was following when those men were given a hundred lashes and had their ears cut off, I wouldn’t be able to say. All I would be able to say is that I followed the Council and the planters, and the jail staff seemed to know what to do. I never looked for the laws. I don’t even know what laws we are operating here. The territory was Spanish until nine years ago. It might go back to Spain at the end of the war, or it might be given to the French in exchange for something somewhere else. No one knows. If you say that the laws should be Spanish, there is no one here to tell me what those laws are. The lawbooks and the lawyers are all on the other side of the Gulf. A military governor can only follow the advice of responsible citizens. That’s what Tom Picton did, and that’s what I did after him. And you know the full bill against Picton. Thirty-seven charges. Execution without trial, false imprisonment, torture, burning alive. Bail set at forty thousand pounds. The man ruined, his life darkened these last three years.”

“You’ve been here too long, General. You’re too jumpy. You can’t compare yourself to Picton. He was notorious. And most of those charges related to the regiment. The others were thrown out. There was a charge of using torture against a young mulatto girl in a case of petty theft. But that’s going to be thrown out too.”

“General, didn’t they tell you in Barbados? The trial came up at the end of February, before Lord Ellenborough. General Picton was found guilty.”

“At one time I would have liked to hear that. I thought that Picton had done me much harm and I thought I had a score to settle with him. But I don’t think like that now. You can waste too much time settling scores. You can forget what you really have to do. He’ll appeal, of course.”

“He’ll appeal. But he’s ruined. And the planters who sat in the jail and had the people tortured, and devised ways of burning people alive — they’re free men. Picton didn’t build the jail. It was there when he came, with the jailer and the torture chambers, the special hot rooms. The planters had set it up. They paid the jailer fees for torturing or flogging Negroes. For the torture of the mulatto girl the planter who was the chief magistrate at the time paid the jailer sixty reales, about six dollars and sixty cents. Nobody’s been investigating that planter, or the others. They’ve not been on forty thousand pounds bail. They’re loyal to no one except themselves, those French aristocrats. If you stay here long enough your mind begins to go. You lose faith. You lose your way.

“I’ll tell you. We had an invasion scare here last year. First it was the French. Then it was the Spaniards. The Spanish admiral Gravina appeared in these waters with quite an armament. I don’t have to tell you how small our military establishment is, and how vulnerable we are to any sustained assault. We clearly can’t defend the whole island — two or three hundred miles of coastline, some of it very difficult, and so much of the island is uninhabited anyway — so I thought we should decide in the Council what we were going to try to defend. I thought it made more strategic sense to defend the naval harbour at Chaguaramas. It’s a small area and it’s very defensible. If you defend the ships, they live again to fight another day. The planters said no, the duty of our military establishment was to defend property.

“Now, General, you have been following the debates about slavery and the slave trade in England. And I don’t have to tell you that when planters talk about ‘property’ and ‘the free transfer of property’ and ‘a free supply,’ they are simply finding a way of not saying ‘Negroes’ or ‘slaves.’ They are not even talking about land. Most of them got the land free when they came. The Spaniards, to develop the island, offered a settler sixteen acres for every Negro he brought in. A white settler got thirty-two acres for himself, a free man of colour sixteen acres. Many of the people who came in, to put themselves under Spanish law, were running away from debts they had in other places under other flags. Many of the Negroes they brought in were mortgaged up to the eyes.

“So these refugee aristocrats were saying, in fact, while a big war was going on, that it was my duty as governor to prevent them from losing their Negroes. And they had powerful friends in London. So, after spending seventy-five thousand pounds on fortifying the harbour at Chaguaramas, I had to stop and think about fortifying the city and the plantations around it. That is why the Treasury is empty, and my servants and soldiers are in rags. I thought of enrolling a company of Negro Rangers, faithful and well-disposed ones, it goes without saying. The planters said they didn’t want to lose their Negroes. I said, ‘We’ll have them fairly valued. You will be recompensed if they are lost or damaged.’ They said that after Haiti they didn’t want their Negroes to handle guns. I said, ‘Very well. At least lend me some of your Negroes to work on that hill fort we are building west of the city.’ They said they couldn’t spare them. So where were we? What was the point of doing anything?”

“But you built your fort?”

“I had to. That was my duty as governor. I used Negroes owned by people of colour. The people of colour didn’t like that at all, and the whites crowed over them. And now, of course, since the news about Picton’s conviction, some of those people of colour are after me. One man of colour is already suing Picton for forty thousand pounds for wrongful arrest. I wait for something like that to be done to me. Night and day I cast my mind back over things that have been done in my time. I accuse myself, I defend myself. It’s like a sickness. Those Negroes whose ears were cut off last December and January — they were also given a hundred lashes. In the Spanish time the limit was twenty-five. Picton raised that to thirty-nine — and that was under the influence of the French. Why did I let those planters tell me that those men should be given a hundred? After fifty lashes a man is half dead.”

“General, General. A domestic misdemeanour is quite distinct from rebellion against the state. You are tormenting yourself needlessly.”

“You think so? One man whose ears they cut off was a free man of colour. They were very down on that man. They said that a free man of colour associating with the Negroes was the most dangerous kind of man. They decided he was to be returned to slavery. They cut his ears off and sold him out of the island. It’s what they do in the islands. As a punishment it is one step down from hanging, because that man’s life isn’t worth living afterwards. How could they do that to a free man? I should have asked them to show me the laws. Now the investigator will ask me that question. The laws of England wouldn’t like that, making a free man a slave and cutting off his ears and selling him cheap to somebody outside who is going to work him to death. That is all you can do with a Negro whose ears have been cut off. You can’t sell him.

“And I had actually forgotten about that until the Picton news came. Now I think about it five, six, ten, twelve times a day. When my time comes and I am asked about that man all I would be able to say is that the planters at that enquiry last December got me thoroughly alarmed and told me this was what had to be done. Of course I also tell myself that the poor man is now in no position to get in touch with London lawyers. He is not going to live long. You see, General. Having done that injustice to that man, or allowed that illegality to be done to him, I now wish for his death. I want to be free of this place, General. I feel I am sinking here. I feel I can no longer see my way. I told you a while ago that it is easy to see the past. My life up to ten years ago is absolutely clear to me. But now I am clouded. I no longer know why I do things. Ideas of obedience to my lawful superiors no longer answer. Those were the ideas that as a military man I was bred up in.”

“It isn’t the Picton case that’s worrying you. I think it’s the weather. I think it’s your inactivity. As you say, you’ve been a jailer for too long. You are fighting phantoms.”

“General. I haven’t told you. There is a case that stands absolutely foursquare with the Picton torture case. It happened three and a half years ago, almost in the week I arrived. The chief magistrate, a planter, came right here late in the afternoon. My boxes were still being unloaded from the carts. He was in a little frenzy, the magistrate. He said they had discovered that a free mulatto had had dealings with a Negro sorcerer. The mulatto had been pestering a Negro woman, somebody’s house servant, to sleep with him. She had turned him down. He had then offered his hand in simple friendship. She had taken his hand, and he had scratched her palm with his fingernail. She had right away started to have spasms, and her hand and arm had begun to swell. She screamed, and the other Negroes in the street became very frightened. Negroes here are always frightened of poison. Some of the Negroes ran for an alguazil and an alguazil came and took the mulatto off to the jail. The old jail, the one of Picton’s time, with the hot-house torture rooms — we pulled it down two years ago.

“The magistrate went as soon as he could to the jail, to investigate. The mulatto said he hadn’t poisoned the woman at all. He had only scratched a love potion into her palm. He had got the potion from an old plantation Negro. The potion, mixed with grease and quicksilver and nail-clippings, had already made two women love him madly. This time, he said, he had probably made the dose too strong. The Negro who had made up the potion for him had told him that there was this danger. The magistrate didn’t find the story funny. He ordered the jailer to take the mulatto up to the attic, for torture. It was the place where, oddly enough, they kept white people. There was an Italian sailor there. He saw everything. The torture there was the piquet, the old cavalry-regiment torture. You tie a man’s leg back, right leg to left arm, say, to convert him into a dead weight, and you suspend him by the left wrist until he can just rest his toe on the tip of a sharp piquet.

“Under torture the mulatto gave the antidote. Rum and asafoetida, I think it was. Of course it didn’t work — it’s amazing the magistrate thought that there could be an antidote. The woman remained swollen, and she kept on screaming, getting everyone thoroughly frightened. Old Vallot, the French jailer, strung the mulatto up again, and this time the mulatto fainted and lay for a while in a pool of cold sweat. When he recovered he changed the story about the plantation Negro. He said he had got the potion from a Negro sorcerer who had been banished from the island. I know today that as soon as a planter hears about sorcery he panics. I didn’t know that then. It was my first week. The magistrate insisted we should get the mulatto off the island right away. He wanted the man banished there and then.

“And it was done just like that, right here. No papers, nothing. I didn’t actually forget about the case. But what I remembered more was the love potion and the asafoetida and the rum, not the sorcerer. And now I have had to dig it up from my memory, all the details of the conversation that day with the magistrate. Because since Picton’s conviction they’ve all reappeared — the mulatto, and even the Italian sailor. Somehow they’ve all made their way to London, somehow they’ve found people to get them lodgings and pay their expenses, and somehow they’ve all been put in touch with lawyers. And all the people who supported the Picton prosecution are now behind them.

“The free people of colour are passionate about it. There are six thousand of them here. They can raise money. What is upsetting to me is that I’ve always been a friend to the people of colour, like Tom Picton before me. He was always against the legal humiliation of the people of colour, in spite of what you hear. He wrote many letters to London about that. Because that legal humiliation is what people intend when they speak, as you will hear them speaking, about the need for British laws and a British constitution and representative government here. We use words in a special way here, and what they mean is that they want to be their own legislative council and executive council and to set up their own laws.

“I’ll tell you what some of those laws are going to be. They want to prevent people of colour from owning Negroes. That’s pure malice. You make it illegal for a man of colour to have Negroes and you impoverish him at a stroke. There is no way he can run a plantation or make a living on his own in this kind of place. People do everything for themselves with their own Negroes. We have no free journeymen. The only respectable thing a free man of colour can do, if he has no Negroes, is to become an alguazil for the Council, a kind of general watchman. As in the Spanish time. He keeps an eye on the docks and the Negro yards in the town and he looks out for Negroes breaking the curfew. Sometimes he lends a hand in the jail. He isn’t allowed to own Negroes, and for good reason. There would be all kinds of abuses — kidnappings and disappearances of new arrivals, and so on. There are only six alguazils here, anyway. It’s all the Treasury can afford. And there are six thousand free people of colour. If it becomes illegal for a man of colour to own Negroes, he will have to sell those he has for what he can get, or they will be confiscated. Either way there are some people here who are going to make a great profit. At least half the Negroes here are owned by people of colour. So we are talking about a lot of money. And we are talking about a great deal more if, as is almost certain, the African trade is stopped next year, and ‘supply,’ as our friends say, becomes purely local.

“There is something else the Du Castellets and the Montignacs and the Montalemberts are planning. They want to prevent people of colour from buying houses. It’s a piece of antique French legislation from the islands. Where do they expect the people of colour to live? And what is their definition of a house? Do they mean an estate house, or a house in the town? I will tell you: it will mean what they want it to mean. It will become a simple means of persecution. You take away people’s livelihood. You plunder them of their little capital, and then you degrade them.

“There is something else. It’s so terrible you won’t hear about it while you are here. The French are not going to tell you, and the people of colour are too frightened and ashamed to talk about it. The white planters are letting them know, very quietly, that when British laws come in, they, the people of colour, will be liable to be whipped for misdemeanours. Only Negroes are whipped now. So the people of colour, who are now free men and proprietors, will be indistinguishable from Negroes. They will have no money, no resources, and many of them will certainly be enslaved again. And all this will be done in the name of law and the rights of man and the clemency of a British constitution.

“They know I’m against it. So they’ve blackened my character in London and up and down the islands. I’m a tippler, a sot, too fond of the pleasures of the table at Government House, dead to the world after dinner. Too little dignity for a governor. The pleasures of the table — red, salty butter, no vegetables, and this ship’s food.

“You will see now that the worst thing I could have done was to have allowed that man’s ears to be cut off. A free man reduced to slavery, and treated as the worst kind of Negro. It’s really what the French want to do to all the free people of colour. They infected me at the time of the enquiry. They talked to me about Martinique and Haiti. They talked to me about having to burn Negroes when they became too steeped in sorcery and magic. One man told me that a friend of his in Martinique had had to burn four of his Negroes. They told me that a free man of colour who habitually mixed with Negroes was very dangerous. They made me want to hurt the man very badly. After all the evidence at the inquiry, after hearing those simple-looking people talking very calmly about murdering people as though it was a continuation of their king-and-queen play at night, I saw the island and the town going up in flames. I never asked to see the laws. I never saw the man or what they did to him in the jail or asked how they sold him out of the island. I wonder now whether I would have even thought more about it if the Picton conviction hadn’t occurred. The turpitude, General. The turpitude I’ve lived with these past three years.”

Miranda said, “These people are my volunteers. I have no other now.”

“Your volunteers. Not your masters. As a military man I have been bred up in the virtues of obedience to my lawful superiors. I’ve never knowingly — as a military man — done an illegal or wrong or insubordinate thing. Most military men can say the same. It is particularly galling to me now to live with the prospect of being dragged before the public as an oppressor. Especially as the oppressor of people whom I’ve considered it my duty to protect. If there is an investigation or enquiry or trial, I wouldn’t know how to defend myself. To defend myself, I will have to put myself on the side of people whom I consider infamous. The people of colour have said, after the Picton conviction, that they intend to make an example of me. They are not nice words to hear. And I have reason to believe that they are being encouraged by the French, of all people, just to do me down. Nothing is clear to me now, General. I have become clouded.”

“Your bed has certainly not been one of roses. Claro que su cama no ha sido una de rosas, como ha dicho.”

“I feel I need to make a fresh start.”

“You certainly can do that in Caracas.”

“General.”

“But you’ll be on the same side as the French volunteers.”

“That will be accidental. I will have the clarity of your own purpose and vision.”

Miranda said, “Let me read this letter from your sentry-box. It might be from one of your mulatto friends, you think? Please, General. Allow me that joke. The letter’s not in French. It’s in Spanish. A scrivener’s hand. So at least it’s formal. I’ll skim. It may be nothing. It may just be standard abuse. It begins politely. Too politely — a bad sign. Sure enough, it soon becomes very passionate. I recognize the manifesto style of certain Spanish official pronouncements. It’s a letter from the Spanish authorities. It’s very serious. It warns me of the fate of Tupac Amaru. Tupac Amaru was the Inca name taken by the leader of a very big Indian rebellion in Peru in 1780. He was horribly tortured when he was caught. His tongue was cut off while he was still alive, and then, while he was still alive, he was quartered by four horses pulling in different directions. The four quarters of the mangled body were placed in four specially prepared leather cases and sent to different places in Peru. Every officer in the Spanish service knew about the fate of Tupac Amaru. I was in Jamaica at the time, a newly brevetted colonel, negotiating an exchange of prisoners with the British. The idea of people preparing the four leather cases for a man who was still living was particularly upsetting to me. I think it was one of the things at the back of my mind when I decided to desert two years later. When I was in the United States there was another rebellion. Another man took the name of Tupac Amaru, and was killed in the same dreadful way. But let me read the letter more carefully.

“Esteemed sir: Liberty is the watchword of our times, in all continents. As Spaniards, in a land which has been ours immemorially, we have aspirations like your own. Our purpose is to tell you, always with the respect due to a distinguished compatriot, how we have fared under your British patrons since the British conquest of our island. Picton, the first British military governor, who is now in London expiating his crimes, sought simply to cut off the Spanish head. He expelled nearly all Spaniards of culture and breeding and professional attainment. You will not hear from your convivial host, Hislop, how he has dealt with the peon remnant of your compatriots, the keepers of grog-shops, the boatmen and huntsmen, the charcoal-burners, the hawkers of tallow and dried horse-meat, simple people like those you surely would remember from your childhood, people who do not know fine words and in their current humiliations are protected only by their faith and pride. Hislop — who in his craven way has not dared to touch the French of family, holding their very Negroes inviolate, exempt even from the corvée — has made militia service compulsory for all Spaniards. This entails a charge of one hundred dollars for uniform and equipment. Hislop himself has fixed this charge. Very few of our peons can pay this sum, so most will have to leave the island or take to the high woods, abandoning in either case what little property they have to Hislop’s Treasury. So, in less than ten years of British rule, we have become runaways and outlaws in our own land, and our language is judged to be a servant’s language.

“And now you come among us. On both sides of the Gulf we have got to know the prospectuses of your London sponsors, Turnbull and Forbes. They offer many desirable modern manufactures at a fair price, but it cannot be a surprise to you if in the eyes of some of us you appear less a liberator and a lover of freedom than a Caracas man who has remained true to his origins, and has returned as the factor of a British commercial enterprise that seeks to reduce the people of the continent to peonage, as has happened to people in large parts of Asia, and as has happened here.

“Since the British conquest you and Picton between you have used the language of liberty and revolution to seduce many good people away from the fear of God, the sentiments of humanity, and the no less sacred duties of religion and society. You have lured these people to this island, your base for subversion, and you have kept them here like caged wild animals, to be released at your whim on an innocent populace. These misguided people have been ready to give everything to you and your cause. You have given them nothing. Your revolution, because it is baseless and finds no echo in the souls of good men, because it has degenerated into a personal enterprise and is without nobility, has never come. And when these proud Spanish spirits, recognizing their error, have rebelled against their betrayal by you and Picton, ways have been found of silencing them. Think of Juan Mansanares, for some time so loud and boastful in the grog-shops of this town, and flush with English money, then mysteriously dead at the age of thirty-six; old Manuel Guai, at first hidden away by Picton, then cruelly poisoned with pills of opium mixed with crushed glass; his friend José España, driven by his despair back across the Gulf, betrayed in his own hearth, beheaded, his fair body quartered, his head displayed in an iron cage at the Caracas Gate of the port of La Guaira; Andrés de España, languishing for years in the infamous jail here; Juan Caro and Antonio Vallecilla, both dead, their graves unknown. Think of these men, and all the others whose life and passion you and Picton ate away month by month and year by year, and wonder that you felt so little trepidation at setting foot on this bloodstained soil. Wonder that you never thought that your fate might be like theirs, and that this usurped island might also become your prison and grave.

“Whatever encouragement Hislop gives, his word is worthless. He is a soldier; his honour lies in obedience. He will feast you today; he is famous as a good host. He will turn his back on you tomorrow, if he is required to do that. You may discover, as we have done, that he has claws. Justice approaches for the fifty-eight men you abandoned off the coast. Justice approaches for you too. You are more alone and unprotected here, in what used to be your homeland, than you ever were in London. Six copies have been made of this letter. At least one will get to you, and you will think of TUPAC AMARU.”

Hislop said, “General, General. I shouldn’t have shown you the letter on your first day. It has unsettled you.”

“It has, I know Spanish hate, but it’s always a shock whenever I am reintroduced to it. This is a letter of hate. You were talking earlier of the hatred the people here got you to feel for the free man of colour whose ears they wanted to cut off. They made you look at him. They told you he believed in his own powers. They showed you hell in his eyes. They made you feel you didn’t have just to punish the man, you had to destroy what was inside him. Spanish hatred is like that. It’s never far away, and it’s mixed up with ideas of faith and truth and retribution. As a punisher you’re in the right. You’re in the place of God.

“I know about this hate because it’s in me too, after all these years. I have dealt in it myself, and I know that what I’ve done is partly responsible for this letter. Hate against hate. I’ve said things about Spain and the Spaniards I shouldn’t have said. I said foolish things, wounding things. I know how to wound them. When I left Caracas in 1771 Spain was the centre of the world for me. History, culture, elegance. The United States didn’t exist — the American colonies were poorer than we were — and the French Revolution was twenty years away. I’m ashamed to tell you how much money I spent on clothes in my first month in Cadiz. It was some years before I saw that the ideas I had had about Spain and its position in the world were exaggerated. When I deserted from the Spanish service and went to the United States in 1783, at the end of the war, I found for the first time I could say things about Spain that I had grown to feel. And it actually did me no harm. I saw that. And then there was the execution of the second Tupac Amaru. That affected me more than the Americans I was with. I began to say things I shouldn’t have said. The president of Yale rebuked me one evening. He said the Spaniards had a higher regard for law than I allowed. I said I knew about Spanish legalism: I had graduated in law from the University of Mexico. I made that up on the spur of the moment. It came out very easily, and it silenced him.

“It was much worse when I went to Russia. I felt I was so far away that it didn’t matter what I said about Spain or myself. I made full use of the freedom, I should tell you. And the empress and her nobles were so interested, so protective. I was dazzled. I felt it was what I was born for. I had never felt so safe. I said things about Spain to please them, dreadful things about the Inquisition and superstition and Spanish ignorance and degeneracy, dreadful things about the Spanish king and his son, the Prince of Asturias.

“I was in demand. One night at a gathering in St. Petersburg a fine gentleman I hadn’t met, as soon as he caught sight of me, came right across the room towards me. I smiled and bowed, getting ready for his Russian French, expecting him to be hampered by the language but friendly and interested and as anxious to invite me to his house as so many of the other Russian noblemen I had met. It wasn’t French that came out of this fine gentleman’s mouth, but Spanish, the Spanish of Spain, spoken in a tone and with the forms you would use with a servant. He was the Spanish chargé d’affaires, Macanaz. He wanted me to produce — there and then, almost — the Spanish patents which made me a colonel and a count. That was my style in Russia. It did no one any harm, and it gave the Russians pleasure. I was staggered by his contempt. It was the contempt of the well-born Spaniard from Spain for the South American. I felt shabby, caught out. It was like being pushed back to the Caracas of twenty years before. I was about to say that I had served for some time in the Princess Regiment and had retired from the service as a colonel. But at the last moment I changed my mind, and the crudest street-corner obscenities of Caracas came out of my mouth. In any other setting he would have had to draw his sword. But in that room he had to digest the insult. He didn’t forget, of course. He wrote to the ambassador, and the ambassador wrote around to other people about me. I thought about that incident quite recently, when the Bee and the Bacchus were cut off. It was very strange. I was leading an invasion, something I had talked about for years, and then with the memory of that far-away St. Petersburg room I thought, ‘And now you’ve put yourself within their reach.’ ”

Hislop said, “What will happen to those men?”

“No question. The Spaniards will treat it very seriously. The officers, Donohue and Powell and the others, will be executed. The men will all be imprisoned. I always told them. Tell me — this is about something in the letter — why do you think all the agents I sent out here failed me, or went bad? You know about Bernard. I know about the others.”

“They got tired of waiting. They lost faith. Like Picton. In spite of what people say about him, he didn’t come here to buy estates. He never wanted to be a planter. He is a military man, and he came here hoping for action. They promised big things in South America, but the alliances kept changing in Europe, and the politics kept changing in London. The invasion was postponed and postponed. You can’t ask a man to wait and wait. Not everyone has your steadfastness, General.”

“Steadfastness. I don’t know. Perhaps there has never been an alternative. No second possibility ever came up. No one has ever offered me a second idea.”

“No one would ever think of doing that, General.”

“There was a time when I used to talk against Picton in London. I thought he was destroying my agents and destroying the revolutionaries from across the Gulf. I was wrong. Old Manuel Gual and the others who were killed here were killed by a Venezuelan I now know about; Caracas recruited him and gave him the famous glass pills. The one man of mine Picton expelled and sent back to Europe turned out to be a fraud. My bad judgement again. The man could write me a witty letter about the unreliable revolutionaries of France, and then, almost on the same day, write a tearful letter to the king of Spain, begging to be forgiven. Picton expelled him almost as soon as he saw him. I was enraged when I heard, but he did me a service there.

“Actually there was another reason why I talked against Picton. But I couldn’t admit it to anyone. In 1798, without knowing anything about me or my past or all the work I had done for the revolution, he wrote to London about me. He said they might find me useful, but I shouldn’t be told too much. The actual words were much worse. I can’t forget them. They were reported back to me by my friend Rutherfurd. Those words did me much harm with the ministers. I know them by heart. ‘There is a native of Caracas now in London who might be useful on this occasion, not that he possesses a great local knowledge, or has any considerable connection, being the son of a shopkeeper of Caracas …’ This was nearly thirty years after I had left home. I had done so much, established my cause and my character, taken so many risks. He had ignored all that. And he himself had done nothing.”

Hislop said, “He was only repeating what the Caracas people had put in his way, to damage you.”

“I know that. I knew it then. And things like that don’t worry me at all now. But I couldn’t forgive him then. I always talked against him. So much so that when the ministers in London decided to replace him by commissioners and to have him investigated, the news was brought to me as good news, and I was asked to send out one of my own people with the new commissioners. I thought I should send the most reliable man I knew, to re-establish my credit generally. I couldn’t have chosen anyone worse. Bernard, you know, came out and never wrote me a word. This man wrote all the time. His name was Pedro Vargas. Every two or three weeks, when the mail ships arrived from Barbados or the Leeward Islands station, the people in Whitehall would send me bundles of letters from the first commissioner’s office, from my man Pedro Vargas. Every word was false. I should have spotted it. The language was rhetorical, in the Spanish manifesto style. Vargas was a master of that. I was a messiah, a redeemer. Everyone in Venezuela and New Granada was waiting for me, ready to give their lives and property to the cause.

“One letter made me lose my head. He said that he was writing in great excitement. For various reasons the moment for action had absolutely come. We shouldn’t wait. If necessary the two of us alone should start the revolution. Once we landed, at any spot on the coast, people would flock to our banner. I took the letter to ministers. I showed them what Commissioner Vargas — giving him this false title — had written. I nearly caught myself out, with that exaggeration of the dignity of Pedro Vargas. I told the ministers I would be willing to forego the allowance I had from the British government if they would give me a ship and equipment and allow me to go to Trinidad and raise a force from among the black troops there. Fortunately they refused. I don’t know whether othey knew more about Vargas than I did. Can you imagine what would have happened if I had turned up here and asked for black troops to invade the continent? You hardly have enough men to defend this little town. And the planters wouldn’t have given me their Negroes. I would have had to go back to London and ask them to give me my allowance again.

“I later discovered that Vargas hadn’t even embroidered some little incident or some piece of local gossip. He had written that letter just to give a little variety to his reports. He had attached himself to the suite of the first commissioner as a kind of secretary and assessor in Spanish law. He would sit in the first commissioner’s house — this very house — and every few days write me a fairy story. He was getting an allowance from me, ten shillings a day. He was getting a good deal more from the first commissioner. He had been a revolutionary at one time. He had been part of a conspiracy in New Granada and had exposed himself to real danger and had suffered. But what mattered to him now was getting that regular money from the first commissioner.”

Hislop said, “It was Vargas’s evidence that condemned Picton at the trial in February. I’ve read the transcript. Vargas was called as the Spanish legal expert. He was the only man in England — if you would believe it — who had the relevant Spanish lawbooks. He said that there were very old Spanish laws that permitted torture, but no modern ones. And that was it. Strange that all the bigger charges of hanging and burning should have been thrown out, and this case of petty theft should have brought Picton down. Signing the order that the very respectable magistrate brought him for the torture of the young mulatto girl. And Picton is tried, and the magistrate is untouched. And very strange that Picton should have been ruined by this man you sent here who let you down. He has opened up the possibility of all those charges against me now. The mulatto and the love potion, the very first week I came here. Every night in my head I work out my defence in the Court of King’s Bench. I wonder who I’m going to call as a witness, and how I’m going to prove that the Spaniards do torture. And then I think it’s a waste of my life, all this worrying about something I had almost nothing to do with.”

Miranda said, “Even when I was enraged by Picton, I didn’t want him brought down like this. He would despise the lie and he would despise us for it. I certainly didn’t want him brought down all these years later by someone like Pedro Vargas.”

“MY DEAR Sally, all goes well. You see, you are too nervous. With Hislop’s help we have brought the Leander Americans round. There are still days when they get drunk and make a racket, but discipline gets better and better. We drill them and the French every day at the local barracks. Count Loppinot de Lafresillière refused absolutely to serve under an American, and we have decided it is better to keep the two groups apart. This time we will make a little armada of ten ships. The British are helping unofficially with the ships, and I can gauge the strength of my support in London from the attitude of people like Admiral Cochrane and General Maitland and Hislop here. These men court me. I can see regard in their faces. They still think I am the man who can do things for them, and I thank God for that. Hislop thinks I can give him a good job, and Maitland and Cochrane (his immense greed makes him easy to manage) expect me in due course to grant them vast estates on the continent.

“It is wrong, querida, for you to think of these men as snakes in the grass. When I was young I used to complain in that way. I was wrong. You must not encourage Leander and Francisco to expect more from men than they should expect. You must not talk to them about snakes in the grass. These men, Cochrane, Maitland, Hislop, owe me no loyalty. A mutual interest draws us together. When there is no interest, we will pull apart. There will be no immorality or disloyalty in pulling apart. If you don’t start thinking like that, querida, you will eat yourself up. You will be in a perpetual moral frenzy in which you will condemn everybody except yourself, and people would start wondering what it is about you they don’t like. It is something I’ve talked to you about. I think it is most noticeable in your attitude to certain members of your family.

“As for Turnbull, he is my oldest friend. We met more than thirty years ago in Gibraltar, when he was a young factor and I was a captain, and we have been friends ever since. Whatever happens now, he will have regard for me afterwards, and I for him. I will not find people like Turnbull and Rutherfurd again. The time for that kind of friendship is past. If Turnbull gets impatient with me, I get impatient with myself. A friend doesn’t have to watch his words always. Don’t be suspicious of him. Don’t be unhappy about him. I write this only because, as you know, I am worried about your nerves.

“My serial letter, or my letter-journal, never stops. I speak to you constantly in my mind. I report everything to you, sometimes very small things, because I love your love. You have almost become my waking mind. But not everything I speak I will write.

“We are about to go now. The ships are ready. I will not be on the Leander. I will be on H.M.S. Lily. This is Cochrane’s idea: he thinks that if there is a battle the Spaniards will go for the Leander, which flies American colours and is known to be my ship. The men are as prepared as they will ever be. But — this is something I wouldn’t write, and want no one to know — my spirits are low.

“A second Spanish letter was thrown yesterday in the sentry box here (and Bernard later sent a copy of the same letter that had been left at the Council room). This one is about the big thanksgiving service they held in the Metropolitan Church of Caracas for the capture of the Bee and the Bacchus, and about the sentences at Puerto Cabello on the fifty-eight men. Sixteen days ago they were all taken out in ankle fetters to the prison yard and made to kneel down while their sentences were read to them. The ten officers were to be hanged. All the others were sentenced to eight or ten years in prison with hard labour. They are to sleep on beds of stone, with pillows of brick, and they are to wear twenty-five-pound chains. The ten executions took place seven days ago. I know that the Spaniards would have hurried through the legal process so that all this news could get to me before this second attempt.

“It would be nice if the details were exaggerated. But I know they are not. The scaffold was outside the prison gate. The ten men, in white gowns and white caps and in leg-irons, were led out to it. After each man was dropped the hangman, a Negro, slid down the rope and sat on the shoulders of the hanged man. The bodies were then decapitated and cut into quarters. The quarters were heaped together with the uniforms and arms of the dead men, covered with the torn-up scraps of my Colombian flag, and set alight. I knew that they were going to do some special dishonour to the flag you made in Grafton Street, Sally. But I won’t tell you.

“The atmosphere of the Inquisition, my revolution treated as heresy — it is more undermining than I would have thought. If I, at one time, knew how to wound them, they still know how to trouble me. One of my first thoughts, when I read this letter, was that I had done the right thing to have the boys baptized. When I was thirty-five or so, and after just fifteen years abroad, when I was in the United States and then when I was in Russia, the whole world of my early years in Venezuela seemed very far away, seemed to be part of another life. I felt I had forgotten so much. Now it’s as though I’ve never left, as though 1771 was last year.”

• • •

“MY DEAR Sir, We are in such a State here. My uncle has just brought back six copies of your Picture from Mr. Holland the Printseiler. My uncle says the engraver should have done better but these people have to do too much and they cut corners and they don’t try to understand the work they are copying, before they finish one job theyre looking for the next one. The picture shows the Crown in the Clouds above your head and my uncle says it is poor work that crown, badly drawn but people don’t care. He says the picture is in Mr. Holland’s window and people stop and look at the crown and wonder so perhaps Mr. Holland knows his business. But the deseat of these London tradesmen my dear Sir they give no Credit to my uncle for the picture which he did at the small table in the Front Library. They say it is done from the life by their artist with the Navy in the Barbadoes my Uncle says it’s the kind of thing they always say. Below your picture they have engraved the names of the ships of your little fleet My dear Sir. What a fleet my dear Gen I never had the least idea. We daily wait to hear good news. What pretty names your ships have Lily Attentive Bulldog Trimmer Mastiff. I cannot tell you how Excited Leander is that one ship has his name, he pulls his toy ship on its wooden block all over the house and he says Mamy I will take my ship, and go to the Genl. When I tell him that the ocean is very big and his ship wouldnt sail very far he says Mamy I will buy a bigger ship and go and fight for the G. He reads his book well and he promises not to trouble little brother who is now sleeping and is as pretty as your picture My own dear General. These are their happiest days my dear Sir.”

“OH, SARAH. We are separated by more than the ocean. We are separated by time, by three to four months. You write about things here as they were four months ago, and what I write now you will read in two months. I don’t know what will have happened by then. It’s failed, Sarah. The whole thing failed. You were right. The people in London let me down at the last moment. They withdrew their support. And I’m back in Trinidad.

“I am not at Government House. Officially I have no position here. I have no headquarters. I am a private person, and while I am here I must give up all attempts to revolutionize the continent. On the morning I arrived I went to call on Hislop. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t know me, but he behaved as though he knew nothing about what I had been doing. When I asked for permission to stay, he said it was out of his hands. He said the merchants didn’t want me to land. They had made a petition to him. They said that for six months they had been cut off from trade with the Main because of me, and they were being ruined for nothing at all. The petition was going to be debated that very morning in the Council. Hislop thought I should attend the meeting. I suppose that was friendly advice. If I hadn’t gone, perhaps Bernard wouldn’t have spoken up for me as he did, and if Bernard hadn’t spoken up, the vote would have gone against me. Hislop would have been full of regrets, of course, but I would have had to leave. Heaven knows where I would have been now.

“And things seemed to be going so well in the beginning, Sally. Ah, those good beginnings! I’ve had so many of them. How they encourage, and at the same time how they unsettle! We sailed without interference to the town of Coro. We fired at the fort. There was some return fire and then the Spanish soldiers withdrew. We landed and entered the town with no trouble. Just three men wounded. Then we found there was nothing to celebrate. We had entered an empty town. Not a soul. The Venezuelan agents in Trinidad had done their work well. They knew our strength, and exactly where we were going to land, and they knew that the British were only going to support us from the sea.

“For years I had believed — and people like Gual and Caro and Vargas had encouraged me to believe — that when I landed the people would flock to my colours. No one came now. I thought they had been threatened by the authorities, and I thought I should deal with the situation in a Spanish or Venezuelan way. That side of my character took over. I felt that, having appeared with such a naval force, I should speak very loudly. I issued a proclamation. I said that Spanish rule had ceased, that all officials should come forward and declare their loyalty to me or suffer the consequences, and that all able-bodied men should enrol under my colours. It was a wrong thing to do. No one came forward, and my authority with my own men was further undermined. I sent out small parties to the villages round about to reassure the people. I found the Spaniards had forestalled me. They knew how to fight this war. For weeks the priests had been preaching against me. Everyone who helped me was to be excommunicated. The bishop of Mérida had declared me a heretic.

“For the next ten days the Spaniards who had withdrawn from Coro shadowed us, fifteen hundred of them to four hundred of us. No question of engaging them, no question of making a march over the hills to Caracas. The strain began to tell on our volunteers. Their discipline began to break. One day there was an incident between the two groups, the French and the Americans. Three more men wounded, a cook killed. This greatly alarmed me. I thought we should make our way back to the coast. We had no carts, of course, for the wounded and the sick, or horses or mules. We had to use litters, changing the carriers every half hour or so. It slowed us up. I felt I had walked into a Spanish trap. I felt that at any moment the Spaniards might fall on us. I drove the litter-bearers hard. At one stage I threatened to shoot some of them with my own hand. They haven’t forgiven me. I am not staying in Government House, and now they shout abuse at me in the streets.

“Late one night we re-embarked’. I didn’t know what to do. I had waited so many years for this moment. I wrote to the British governor of Jamaica for help. It was foolish. Of course he couldn’t send troops to me. I waited six weeks to hear that, our supplies running out, food very scarce, people getting sick and mutinous. And then a message came from Admiral Cochrane, telling me he couldn’t help any more. London had forbidden it. His help to me was to be limited to protection from a naval force of the enemy, to prevent enemy succours being landed, and to secure my re-embarkation. In short, it was finished. I had thought of Cochrane as an avaricious man, easy therefore to handle. Now the style of his letter, so precise and pointed, like instructions on the battlefield, spoke to me of the capacity that had made him an admiral, and of a power that I had never possessed.

“This was the mood in which, after beating eastwards against the wind for five weeks, that wind like the wind of my misfortune, I returned with my ragged force to Trinidad, and on the very day of my return had to show Hislop a good face, and then, like a man still only a step from power, had to sit in the Council while the contraband traders debated my future.

“Cochrane shows me honour still, in a way. He has arranged for me to stay in the house of Lieutenant Briarly, RN. Briarly is so far correct. He lives in greater style than Hislop, but as the leading Navy man here he does run something like a parallel government. He enforces the Navigation Acts here. His command is only a dismasted hulk in the harbour, but when he is aboard that he is outside Hislop’s jurisdiction. Such is the power of this Navy. The Navigation Acts have to do with trade. This means that Briarly is a kind of customs officer. This means that he splits with the contraband traders and the ship’s captains and offers protection to others. He is making a fortune. He knows to the last shilling how much he is worth, and I have already been made to know it too. I know that this Port of Spain house where I am staying is worth ten thousand dollars (and he keeps on saying he can sell it any day), and I know that in addition he has a large country estate worth fifteen thousand pounds, with eleven mules and thirty-three Negroes. He is forever writing down the names of these thirty-three on little scraps of paper, and putting numbers next to them, as though he wants to count his Negroes and add up their value all the time.

“The Spaniards and Venezuelans here, the traders and the peons, still hiss me in the street. They did it the morning I arrived. I thought they would have stopped by now. They do it in a way that always takes me by surprise. They don’t look at me, so when the sharp hissing sound starts I can’t tell where it’s coming from. It is a terrible sound. It would cut through a military band.

“A defeated man has to put up with criticism, and I thought at first that they were mocking me because I had failed. Then I thought it might have been because of the American malcontents from the Leander, who make endless scenes in the streets and are dunning me for money I don’t have. Terrible stories have been spread, too, about our retreat to the coast and my threatening of the litter-bearers. Then I thought they were hissing me simply for being alive, after so many men had died. I know now that almost on the day we left for Coro the Venezuelan agents here began to spread the story of the executions at Puerto Cabello, the hanging and the burning of the men in white gowns in A white caps, the twenty-five-pound chains for the living, with the beds of stone and pillows of brick. And then I thought it was quite simple. I felt that I had let them down because I had failed. I thought that because I had failed I had exposed them as South Americans to ridicule.

“This was so wrong. It is vanity on my part to think like that. I am assuming that these people look on me as their liberator, look to me to restore their dignity. I am assuming they look on me as I look on myself and have been looking on myself these past twenty years. The opposite is true. The peons here look on me as a heretic and traitor. They are happy that I have been, defeated and the men from the Leander are in rags. The Venezuelan agents have taken good care to circulate the bishop of Mérida’s proclamation against me. I am an atheist, a monster, an enemy of religion, leading a gang of scoundrels from the United States and the islands against my country.

“I have never these past twenty years, in the United States and England and Europe, had to defend myself against that charge, and I don’t know how to do so here. I don’t know how my life has been so twisted that this distorted picture of my character can be thrown at me. This has caused me much distress, Sally, as much distress as the defeat and the humiliation and the idleness I have to endure here. I begin to feel, not only very far away, but also that I am losing touch with things.

“I don’t know how to say to the peons here, what the world knows, that since I left the Spanish service I have held no job and had no idea other than that of South American independence. That is how I define myself in the will I made just before I left London. You will remember I say there that I have known no people anywhere else so worthy of a wise and just liberty. What means do I have of making them understand that here? The six thousand books you look after in Grafton Street have been left, in that same will, to the University of Caracas when freedom comes, and I leave the books in memory of the literary and Christian values the university taught me. My sons were both baptized before I set foot on my native land, and when we were coming south in the Leander I never stayed on deck when on Sundays Captain Lewis read prayers. The Spaniards have taken all the accidental things in my life, the wild things I said in the United States and Russia when I first felt myself a free man, and the fact that I now need all the volunteers I can get, the Spaniards have taken these accidental things and created a picture of me that I do not recognize. I know that I have followed a straight path, and I am very clear in my own mind about what I want. But I have no means of making myself clear to these people. And, worse, everything I do now confirms their picture. I have written to London for four thousand men. Rouvray has gone with the request. That, too, will add to this picture of the traitor and atheist.

“Briarly, regularly counting his Negroes and adding up his fortune, has begun to sense my solitude and friendlessness, my loss of direction, my floating state here. He has so far been correct with me, treating me as the colleague and friend of his admiral. But now I get some feeling of a change, and this might mean that the ministers in London have given Cochrane more urgent things to attend to. I am nervous of the ruffianly gang of midshipmen who serve Briarly. They have been corrupted by their licence as young officers, tormentors of ordinary seamen, and enforcers of the Navigation Acts, and they take pleasure in chasing and beating up unsuspecting people. They don’t touch Negroes, who would have the protection of their owners. But they can give poor white people and free people of colour a rough time. The other day, in daylight, they chased an Englishman through several city yards. They said he was an informer. He ran into somebody’s yard and they ran in after him. They pulled the poor man from under a bed in a Negro hut at the back of the yard — it was an enormous joke to them that he was hiding there — and to complete the joke they tarred and feathered him, and Hislop’s alguazils could do nothing.

“I’ve been reporting my doubts about Briarly. His attitude to me has changed. I know it now.

“At dinner yesterday he said, ‘I’ve had a run-in with Biggs the American, the man from the Leander. He’s not exactly friendly towards you. You haven’t paid him or anybody else for six months. He’s told me a lot of other things. He says he’s going to write a book about this whole business of yours.’

“ ‘I know. I’ll have to take what comes.’

“ ‘Let me be blunt. Why is it that whenever you’ve been put to the test as a military man, you’ve let people down?’

“I did well in North Africa. At Melilla. But that was thirty years ago.’

“ ‘Exactly. I was thinking of the siege of Maastricht when you had bluffed your way into command of the French.’

“ ‘There was a trial in Paris. I was cleared of all charges. Biggs should have told you.’

“ ‘And Puerto Cabello in April, and now.’

“I suppose you can say I had bad luck.’

“I have good luck.’

“As sometimes happens when I am in an unequal relationship with a man in authority for whom I have no regard, I began to exaggerate the side of my character that was opposite to his. It can look like irony to some, but it really is a form of unhappiness. I became soft, over-cultured. I said, ‘Cicero says good luck is one of the four qualities of a successful military man.’

“ ‘What are the other three?’

“ ‘Talent, military knowledge, and prestige. The words have very wide meanings.’

“ ‘Don’t you think it would have been different at Coro if you had had a man of luck at your side? A man who believed in his luck wouldn’t have been so much on the defensive. He might have shown you some way of cutting off the Spanish force that was shadowing you, squeezing them between you and the ships, and then marching on Caracas.’

“I had no faith in the men. They had begun to fight among themselves.’

“ ‘How are you going to pay them off? And settle the master of the Trimmer? He’s going to sue you. He says you hired his ship in Barbados. Why don’t you sell the Leander? It will fetch a good price. You will pay off everybody if you sell it well.’

“ ‘Who will buy it?’

“‘I will buy it. That’s not charity. It’s a business deal. I will refit the ship in Antigua or Barbados, get it up to Admiralty standards, and sell it to the Navy. The Navy needs ships. I know exactly what they need.’

“He said no more, and now to some extent I wait on his decision. He knows that, and for some days he has not mentioned the Leander. I feel uneasy, because it seems too easy, and because I’m not sure now what’s coming from Lieutenant Briarly.

“I got to know today.

“He said abruptly at dinner, ‘I think before you sell, the Leander should make one last run under American colours. Up the river to Angostura. That’s where you should have gone in the first place. The river is narrow, the town is not well-protected. I know the place. As a good Navy man, my first thought when I look at a town from a river or the sea is, “What’s the best way of attacking this place?” It’s a mental exercise for me. And the Venezuelan ship captains bring me information all the time. I know exactly what to do at Angostura. An hour’s hot work by good Navy gunners would deal with the military barracks and such fortifications as they have. We could then move up and down at will, covering you. We could hold the town for quite a while. You could land and proclaim your republic. If it works you stay. If not, in five days you are back here.’

“I know it’s an act of piracy he’s proposing. That’s the idea he has of me and my cause. It’s the idea the Venezuelans have spread, and it’s exactly the way some of the Leander men used to talk at the beginning. And, of course, I would be completely in his power. He could withdraw his force, he could hand me over to the Spaniards, he could do anything. But the insult! The insult!

“Two days later. Nothing said in the interim. Now: ‘Have you thought it over?’

“ ‘Angostura is better fortified than you imagine. An attacking force coming upriver would be very vulnerable.’

“ ‘So your answer is no?’

“ ‘I fear so.’

“He was enraged, icy. He said, ‘The commandeur of my property here has been complaining to me. You have been making far too free with the mules and the Negroes. To the general prejudice of the place. The commandeur says he is not able to get on with his proper duties.’

“I said, ‘You offered the facility. I have been transferring supplies from the Leander to a warehouse. You know that.’

“ ‘I gave permission for one day. I didn’t give permission for a week. I think you should leave. I have in fact drafted a letter to Admiral Cochrane telling him that I feel compromised in my dealings with Spaniards and others by your continued residence here. In the circumstances you will understand that I have to decline your offer of the Leander. I think you should leave as soon as possible.’

“I left the next morning. I was relieved to get away from the house. But I was sorry about the Leander. He had encouraged me to think that the deal was all but struck.

“I went to McKay’s Hotel. It is next door to the military barracks, where for four weeks or so I drilled my men. Downstairs, McKay’s is a tavern with a billiard table for merchants’ clerks. Upstairs there are four or five rooms overlooking the parade ground.

“McKay came here just after the British conquest. He had heard from someone that the island was empty and they were giving away land. He found when he came that they were indeed giving away land, but only in large acreages and only to people who could bring in a large enough Negro atelier. He said as a joke to the chief magistrate one day, ‘Suppose I start clearing five acres of forest for myself, what will happen?’ The chief magistrate said in the same spirit, ‘Vallot’s jail and Negro’s punishment, thirty-nine lashes.’ Vallot was the jailer at the time, a Frenchman from Martinique, a figure of terror to the Negroes. It is a tavern-keeper’s story, the way McKay tells it now, and of course he has done well with the billiard table and the dubious rooms upstairs, and has a few Negroes of his own. About the billiards: McKay says every table pays a tax, and the money goes straight to Hislop as part of his official fees as governor.

“I have written down that story about McKay for you, Sally. What I will not write about is my mood. The fact is I don’t know what to do now about anything — not even about the Leander people — and I don’t see there is anything I can do. I have simply to wait until I hear from Rouvray in London. That will be three months at least. I know how to wait. It’s the one thing I have learned in the last twenty years. What I don’t know is how well I will get on here. I am among people who don’t really know who I am. They have their own ideas. They are ready enough to go by the regard of people like Hislop and Cochrane, but when that regard isn’t there they don’t know what value to put on me. I am not like anyone they know.

“It’s strange, but I have never been in a situation like this before. In Caracas I was the son of a rich and prominent man. Even as a child I was known. I grew up feeling famous. Later in Spain I was an extravagant colonial, and then I was a captain in the Princess Regiment. I suppose I floundered for a while when I left the Spanish service and went to the United States. I had to pick my way, and I had to improvise all the time. But at the end of my time in the United States I had given myself a character that well-placed people could recognize. In England, France, Russia, I became known for my political cause. It is a very special cause. I have always been somebody. Here now, so close to home, I see no kind of recognition in people’s eyes, and I feel as though I am losing pieces of myself.

“And then, Sally, after all that worry, I didn’t have to stay at the hotel. I was rescued. McKay’s people were bringing my boxes up when Bernard came, running up the rough plank steps in his heavy boots. He was in his planter’s working clothes, and looked quite different from when I had last seen him, on the verandah at Government House. He was in his London clothes then.

“Bernard said he had just heard about Briarly, and he had come to take me to his estate house. My boxes were to be taken down again — he gave the orders. He spoke generally with great authority. We were to leave at once. I would be comfortable in his estate house. I would be looked after. I was not to worry about Briarly. I had lost nothing by the quarrel. No one cared much for Briarly and his ruffianly gang of midshipmen. The wonder was that I had stuck it out at Briarly’s for so long.

“He had come in his calash, with the Gourville arms. I didn’t want to notice its condition now, didn’t want to look at the coachman’s alpargatas. I appreciated the style. I had been so cast down — for so many of those days at Briarly’s, as I now realized — that the regard I saw in the eyes of McKay and even the sickly young billiard-playing clerks downstairs was like balm.

“Bernard’s estate was in one of the valleys to the north. So we had to drive right through the town, from south to north. It was like a public display of my worth, in streets where the Leander Americans still made trouble and the Spaniards and Venezuelans still sometimes remembered to hiss. And I knew that other people as well (in spite of what Bernard said) had begun to be uncertain about me.

“It was an act of pure friendship on Bernard’s part. There is now nothing I can do for him. Friendship like this wasn’t something I had ever looked for from him, and I felt it was a correct instinct that had prevented me from treating him roughly when he came to see me at Government House. I had seen something like pathos in him: he had dressed with such care. My heart had gone out to him. Such emotions are often reciprocal, and it occurred to me as we drove that perhaps at that same moment six months ago, when my position here was unquestioned, when my headquarters were at Government House (not far away now) and my authority exceeded Hislop’s, Bernard had seen a similar pathos in me.

“We left the town. We entered the narrow winding valley road. After a mile or so, we began to pass a new estate. It was Bernard’s, or perhaps the Gourvilles’. Cocoa and coffee grew together, and young shade trees, samaan and immortelle, perhaps no more than fifteen years old, both now in flower, rose above the low cocoa woods. The red-and-yellow immortelle flowers on the ground looked like bright paint. Heavy cocoa pods, all the colours from green to yellow to red to purple, grew directly out of the young black trunks and boughs and hung by short thick stems.

“I got the very smell of damp earth and dead leaves of the cocoa valleys to the north of Caracas. But no vanilla. Instead, an acrid smell of fermenting fruit, which became more pronounced near the house: like the smell of maturing casks or vats of wine.

“Bernard said he was so used to the smell he hardly noticed. He thought I was smelling the tonka bean, an acid, pulpy fruit used to give flavour and body to cocoa. Then he said no, he knew what it was: they were ‘sweating’ the cocoa beans in the cocoa house. We went out to the cocoa house and he showed me. Cocoa beans grow in a pulp inside a cocoa pod. When the pods are cut open, beans and pulp have to be sweated or fermented for a week or so until the pulp rots. Fermentation gives the cocoa bean its flavour; and that is why some people say chocolate has a slight narcotic effect. I used to hear as a child that certain people in the bush drank their cocoa cold and bitter.

“I said, I always thought I knew about cocoa beans. And I’m sure I did at one time. I knew there were many processes, as with so many ancient foods. But I’d forgotten about the sweating. When I left from La Guaira in 1771, my father made me take eight fanegas of cocoa beans.’

“Bernard said, That’s a lot of cocoa beans. Most of a cocoa pod is pulp.’

“ ‘The beans were an extra form of currency, if all else failed. It was no trouble to me. The carts brought the cocoa from my father’s warehouse to La Guaira. The sailors stowed it in the hold of the Prins Frederik, and Aniño, our agent, took charge of it in Cadiz and some time later sent me the money. I don’t think I actually saw or smelled the beans.’

“A little way from the sweating shed I saw a strange sight. About twelve women or girls moving very slowly, and in silence, hardly bending their knees, on four raised platforms. There were three girls on each platform. At the side of each platform was a pitched roof of wooden shingles that looked as though it had slipped away from its platform. The fully sweated cocoa beans were drying on those platforms. They took some days to dry. At the slightest sign of rain the seemingly slipped roofs were to be lifted over the platforms; the beans would rot if they got wet. From time to time the drying beans had to be turned over. That was what the twelve girls were doing. They were ‘dancing’ the cocoa, moving slowly, toes pressing down, through the beans. ‘Dancing’—that was the word used here, Bernard said. At the end of the dancing, after some days, the dried beans would have a slight shine. The girls were not all moving in the same direction, and the slowness, and the different positions of the girls on the raised platforms, the seeming self-absorption of each girl, did suggest a strange, subdued dance.

“One girl was lame. I asked Bernard about her.

“He said, ‘Marie Bonavita. She was one of the queens when they were planning the rebellion last year. At night she was a queen. She would take one of the estate mules and ride off to their meeting place. When she was there she was not allowed to walk. She was carried everywhere. Her courtiers wore wooden swords painted blue and yellow. Her king was Samson, a carter on Luzette’s estate. He had his own uniform, with blue facings. Once she had a big loaf baked here in our oven, and she gave a piece to all her followers. They paid two bits each for that. People were very upset when they heard about that mock communion.’

“ ‘Marie Bonavita. Mary of the Good Life, Mary the Pure.’

“ ‘My wife gave her the name, and always cherished her. After they had killed everybody, she was going to be one of the Negro queens. It came out at the enquiry. Quite a few of these girls were in it. Most of them got away with a whipping. Twenty-five lashes. Marie Bonavita got a little more than that, and she has to wear that ten-pound iron ring on her right ankle. The blacksmith made it for her. She is all right now. She’s not dangerous. She’s calmed down. She always asks after my wife.’

“ ‘How long will she have to wear the ring for?’

“ ‘Forever.’ ”

“MY EVER dear Genl, Your rebuke gratefully accepted, your good words about friendship striking straight into my Heart. Mr. Turnbull heartbroken by your news, after all the High Hopes, and he came here to sit in the Little Library for a quiet half hour he said and to think of his old dear Friend far away. He exprest Sorrow and Regret for the unkind Words he had passed in my Presence. He said he had since gone into the matter and only three booksellers Accounts not paid up Dulau, White, Evans, and he had told them that if they pressed Gen M too hard their Goods wld be returned to them without any Thanks. He said there was still Hope, all the Manufacturing Towns of England were ready to send supplies to my dear G for a new attempt. But this time with an adequate force of reliable men. So my Gen must be patient.

“Both Mr. Turnbull and Colonel Rutherfurd are keeping an eye on the politics here with the new ministers. My Gen can imagine the to-ing and fro-ing, and Mr. Rutherfurd says that being on the spot as my dear Sir is and ready to move is more than half the battle. Mr. Turnbull sends a messenger with fifty pounds the first of every month from the money you left with him I never have to ask. It was Mellancolic my dear Sir the old greyhaired man angry with the Gen when things were going well and now grieving for my dear Sir’s misfortune. Colonel Rutherfurd came with Colonel Williamson in a post chaise, such a commotion in Grafton Street, Leander thought it was his Father coming home as he continuly dreams and he was Overjoyed. He stared all the time at Colonel Williamson and the colonel said he was affected seeing the face and actions of my Gen in the boys every movement. I find much Conciliation in my boys in the absence of my dear Sir who must learn to find Patience as we do here.”

“AFTER ALL these weeks Bernard is still friendly and protective. His estate is like a private domain, and the Leander people and others have to keep their distance. No one hisses me here. I haven’t heard from Rouvray in London. I don’t know what the new politics are like there now. I am ready to wait. It is something I have learned, but I have less to do here than I have ever had, and it is hard to be idle in the middle of this very busy estate routine. Bernard is on his feet from morning till night.

“Bernard’s wife sometimes has dinner with us. There is something wrong with her bones — Bernard doesn’t say what, and perhaps no one knows. She doesn’t move easily, and it is a strain for her to sit with a stranger and make conversation. She has a pretty young-woman’s face on an old, heavy body. Bernard is devoted to her. They have no children. He loves serving her and looking after her. He loves everything about her — her name, her estate, her fragility, her old-fashioned French. When I first met Bernard in Paris he was a firebrand. That was why I thought him good for my purpose. I never thought of him as a tender person. The tenderness I have seen in him here has probably been brought out by this lady.

“I have not seen any member of the lady’s family in the house. Nor have I seen anyone like the Baron de Montalembert. The story here is that Bernard’s head was turned by these people of title and he didn’t press at the time of the marriage for all that he might have got. They say that among the Gourvilles he is a kind of subordinate, hardly more than the manager of his wife’s estate. There is more to his position than that, but there is nonetheless something in the story.

“The people who tell me these things are people to whom Bernard introduced me. Bernard would think of such people as his friends. I don’t think they can see the effect they are having on me when they tell me these stories. I cannot conceal from myself — and I wish the idea hadn’t occurred to me — that through my association with Bernard I have fallen among the second rank of people in this place. That’s not my judgement alone. That’s the way they judge themselves. They instinctively put themselves in the second rank. So far as they are concerned, Hislop and Cochrane and even Briarly are people of authority, way above, out of reach. They tell bloodcurdling stories about Briarly and Cochrane and absurd stories about Hislop’s gluttony, and they think they are being very frank and critical. But, really, they never question the authority of these people.

“The people they try to damage are people like themselves. As soon as they get you alone — and you have just met them — they tell stories against their friends. So I am nervous of their welcome now. They are so very warm when they meet you; and then you see the other side so soon. I feel that when they offer friendship it is a way not only of claiming me, but also of pulling me down, and when they appear to be sympathizing with my misfortunes they are speaking as good and proper people who have never got above themselves.

“I feel they will soon start telling stories about me. Sometimes when I am with them I find it hard to remember that when I first came here, and was staying at Government House, I looked upon Hislop as a minor local official.

“I have been out of touch, on a tour in the countryside, but have now come back and still find no news from London. It was a month-long tour of English-owned estates with Colonel Downie and Miss McLurie and some others. It was good to get out for a little. It was Downie’s idea — he has hopes of serving in my army when the time comes, and his interest makes me feel that things may not be as hopeless in London as I sometimes think. The English are very recent immigrants here, and some of the newer places we went to were very rough. In one place on a Sunday afternoon the whole atelier were mustered in clean brown-linen clothes in front of the house and they sang English hymns. I couldn’t of course show any interest and this caused a certain amount of bad feeling.

“When I was on the Leander coming south from the United States I made a point of not showing myself too often to the men, for the sake of discipline. On this small island you see the same people all the time. It is like being on a ship, and I began to feel half-way through the tour that I had shown myself too often here and was getting a little too well known. I felt that my reputation was dwindling, and that people were already criticizing me, as they criticized their friends.

“At the end of the tour, at a dinner at Miss McLurie’s, Colonel Downie presented me with the journal he had made of the tour. I was touched by the gesture — I had grown so melancholy towards the end of the tour, yet never able to show anything — but as soon as I opened the roughly bound book I saw that the journal was the work of an uneducated man. I saw that I had been taken in by Downie’s manner and accent, having very few British people of quality here to set him against.

“I looked up. Miss McLurie (who was in her famous transparency, showing her bosom perfectly) was waiting to catch my eye. She said, ‘You know, of course, that he’s not a colonel.’ I didn’t know — I had been cherishing him because of the shine he gave to my own hopes. And I had always thought that he and Miss McLurie were special friends. And he was right there still, one of the guests, at the other end of the table.

“I asked him later. He said Miss McLurie was right: he wasn’t a colonel. He had called himself that after he had come to the island; he had military ambitions and was looking for an opening somewhere. I said he had misled me, and this could have been damaging. I had suffered enough from the Leander people, who had thought that service with me was only a matter of rations and plunder. My venture was likely to have its desperate passages. After my recent reverses I needed men not only with military experience but also with a record of proven luck: he should have known that.

“He hung his head and said he was sorry. But he didn’t think he had done worse than other people I knew, and no one criticized them. It was well known, for instance, that Archibald Gloster, the local attorney-general — another person I keep meeting all the time in various houses — wasn’t a lawyer. He had simply bought a lawyer’s licence from the Council secretary in the time of the first British governor, Picton.

“Bernard later told me it was true about Gloster. It was no secret that the attorney-general wasn’t a lawyer at all. And there was a further story about that, Bernard said. It came out during the enquiry into the slave rebellion that had nearly happened.

“Gloster had a personal servant called Scipio. People here often give their Negroes the better-known classical names — Hercules, Hector, Cupid, Caesar, Pompey, Agrippa, Cato, Scipio. At night — this was in the months during the preparing of the rebellion — Gloster’s Scipio would leave his quarters at the back of Gloster’s yard in the town, and go the five or six miles to the seaside village of Carenage. The Negro known as King Edward had his court at Carenage, and Scipio’s loyalty at night was to the convoi or regiment of King Edward. Edward’s courtiers had wooden swords painted white and green.

“When Scipio first joined the regiment, King Edward offered him a sword and a title: ‘My Lord St. John.’ Everybody who joined a regiment got a title which he had to use at night. Scipio said no, he didn’t want to be My Lord St. John. It didn’t mean anything. He wanted to be attorney-general, like his master. Edward said that wasn’t a proper title for a courtier in his regiment. In the end they decided that Scipio was to be clerk and secretary — the job Bernard now has in real life — and at night, at Carenage, while King Edward’s dauphins and dauphines and princes and princesses drank white rum and sang and danced and ate things that had been cooked for the party in the various estate kitchens during the day, Scipio sat in the light of a flambeau and turned over the pages of one of Gloster’s lawbooks and then for ten or fifteen minutes at a time made a pretence of writing. As secretary, though, he had a serious enough job: he became one of the organizers of the rebellion. He was one of those who got a hundred lashes and lost their ears.

“After he told me this story Bernard said, ‘Somebody out there is studying me. And somebody is studying you as well, I’m sure. At one time I used to think it was harmless. After what nearly happened to all of us, the mockery seems horrible.’

“So the world shrinks around me while I wait, Sally. I no longer want to go out. There is very little to go out for. I have heard everything they all have to say. I feel that, as the world around me gets smaller, I dwindle with it. I hope I don’t have to wait here much longer, and I hope the waiting has been worthwhile. I cannot hold on to large ideas in this setting. My instinct now, my passion, is to get away, just as it was in Caracas in 1770, thirty-seven years ago. It’s as if after half a lifetime I have made a circular journey back to what I was — though I do not remember Caracas being as small as this. The people cannot be blamed. The merchants mix only with their fellows in the very small town, and people like Bernard are tied to their estates. And it is Bernard now who, after his Council meetings, comes back in his calash with news of the bigger world both for his wife and for me.

“At one end of the front verandah of the estate house there is a projecting room, jalousied on three sides. On hot days Bernard’s wife moves there for the air, from her inner room, and she gets a girl to sit with her. As I read and write in the verandah — decorated down the length of its inner wall with a simple, bright pattern of flowers and curling ribbons, the work no doubt of the pastrycook who did the coat of arms on the calash — I sometimes hear Bernard’s wife talking to the girl with her.

“I hear intonations rather than words, the intonations of someone lying on her back. She is really trying to talk herself asleep, and the girl with her regularly says a few words to show that she is still there. The girl’s words are clearer, because she is sitting, and the girls — there are different ones — are amazingly affectionate. It isn’t always madame. It can be mamselle, mama, dou-dou, ma ’mie, mon enfant, ma petite. It is very strange and lulling, and on a hot day, in the wine-cask smell of sweating cocoa beans, I can listen to the rhythms of the talk and watch the long-tailed cornbirds weaving the long, sock-like pouches of their nests on the samaan or immortelle trees. Often the girl falls asleep before the mistress.

“One day I thought, This is practically all the society Bernard’s wife has.’

“Every day before nightfall, at about six or just before, Bernard goes and locks the mule sheds. He doesn’t want the Negroes to go wandering about on the mules at night, as they did before. And often, even after this, he gets a feeling that things are not right outside. It’s just a feeling, but it eventually makes him go and check the mule sheds and the Negro houses. He has said more than once to me, There are so many of them, and there are only two of us.’

“In the morning he is up very early, to check the yard and the houses and the stores and the kitchen, and to unlock the mule sheds. After morning tea — there are three estate meals: tea, breakfast, dinner — he has to give out the work in the cocoa sheds and cocoa woods, and after breakfast he has to go and check the work, and he often has to show how everything is to be done, because some of the people who did a job quite well the day before will now say they have forgotten how to do it. The recently arrived Africans, or new Negroes, as they are known here, are especially difficult that way. They believe that if they do their tasks badly often enough they won’t have to do them at all, and might somehow even be sent back home.

“So Bernard is as tied as any Negro to his estate. If he didn’t have the secretaryship of the Council he would be quite immured here.

“After the recent trouble he can take nothing for granted. Every morning when he makes his round he is hoping he isn’t going to find a corpse — a poisoning or a suicide. Even while I have been here Negroes have been poisoned or have committed suicide on estates quite close by. There have been a number of suicides on the La Chancellerie estate, which is another estate owned by a woman, Rose de Gannes de la Chancellerie, Marquise de Chaurras. They commit suicide by eating dirt over many days. The eating of dirt is something the new Negroes rather than the creoles do, and those suicides come in batches. They give encouragement to one another.

“When something like that happens, or when news of it comes to Bernard, I can see it on his face. He doesn’t like talking about it. He would prefer to keep it from his wife, but he knows that it’s something she will hear about from the girls when they go to sit with her in the room with the jalousies on three sides. Perhaps something has even happened here in the last few months. If it has, Bernard wouldn’t want me to know. When I hear the women talk, I hear only maman or madame or whatever, and the rhythm of their patois. Perhaps without knowing it I have been hearing the women talk about a death in one of the little houses.

“I don’t remember that it was like this in Venezuela. Was it because I lived in the town? When I visited the plantations or estates of friends, they seemed easygoing places. I took it for granted that they would have their own rules and customs; everywhere had its own rules. Of course, it was a long time ago, before the great revolutions, and perhaps there were things I would think differently about now.

“Twenty years ago, when I was in Russia, I went and spent an hour in a public bath. This was in Moscow, in 1787, in the early summer. A Russian I had got to know told me it was something I should do. It was one of the sights for visitors. I found when I went that you could see the women from the men’s area. They were completely naked and you could see the lacerations and whip-marks on their bodies. The bath attendant allowed me to walk among the women. No one paid me any attention. It wasn’t arousing. The indifference and the damaged bodies were things I couldn’t ignore. I don’t think my Russian friend saw it like that. I kept my thoughts to myself, and very soon allowed myself to forget what I had seen.

“No one can ever read the eyes, Bernard says. There is no way of knowing who has begun to eat dirt or who has laid by a store of poison. A few years ago the poisoner on Dominique Dert’s estate, on the western boundary of the town, was the commandeur himself. He had formed a strong attachment to his master. Bernard says this often happens with trusted estate servants. The commandeur poisoned his fellows whenever he thought they were getting too close to Dert. When the commandeur was found out, he had the atelier assembled — as though he was still commandeur—and the story is that he made quite a speech to them. He became quite exalted. They didn’t know, he said, but for months he had had it in his power to poison them all. Then he spoke directly to Dert. ‘I could have poisoned all these Negroes of yours at any time. In one night I could have ruined you.’ That speech was the big moment of his life. It was like something he had been living for. The master, the atelier, the estate — this was his complete world. Nothing existed outside. A few days later he took some of his own poison.

“The poisoner on St. Hilaire Begorrat’s estate in one of the valleys to the west was the nurse in the estate hospital. This was a famous case, Bernard says. Begorrat was an early immigrant from Martinique, and he is very much like one of the old Venezuelan marquises of cocoa and tobacco, as we used to call them. Though Begorrat is a good deal more educated than they were.

“At the time of the hundred and twenty poisonings at Montalembert’s some of Begorrat’s people were also poisoned. The old marquis of cocoa didn’t like this at all. He thought it showed disrespect. Montalembert was a newcomer. He, Begorrat, was the senior planter in the place. He had established the style of the place, and even some of the institutions. Everyone deferred to him on estate matters.

“He pretended to be very angry. He lined up everybody on his estate, had one of the corpses brought out, and said he intended to find out who the poisoner was. The estate doctor cut the corpse open and he and Begorrat began to look at it very closely.

“It was too much for the poisoner, who was the hospital nurse. Her name was Thisbe. She broke from the watchers and ran through the cocoa woods to the neighbouring estate and asked there for sanctuary. Bernard tells me that this is what they do in certain parts of Africa: people from one village can claim sanctuary in another village nearby. She was handed back. Begorrat had pack thread tied around her thumbs and she was suspended by the thumbs until she gave the names of about twenty poisoners and sorcerers on other estates.

“It frightened people that there were so many. That very day they were all picked up and taken to Vallot’s jail in the town. They were kept apart from one another. They were chained or put in irons and some were shut up in the special hot chambers below the roof. Some of them were chained so that they couldn’t move. Some of those in the hot chambers quickly became demented. They were fed on plantains and water and over three weeks they were examined and examined in the jail by Begorrat and a poisoning commission of planters. Thisbe was repeatedly tortured. When it came to the judgements the planters followed Spanish forms. The people judged to be poisoners and sorcerers were heavily chained and made to kneel to hear their sentences. Some of them were hanged and decapitated. The new Negroes among them were first baptized; Africans are considered infants by the Church, and can be baptized without instruction. One man was burned alive. Thisbe was hanged and decapitated. Her body was burned and her head was staked on a pole in Begorrat’s estate.

“Begorrat tells Thisbe’s story like a story he has told many times. The pole on which Thisbe’s head was staked is still there, facing the Negro houses, almost on the spot where the corpse was cut open.

“He said with a smile, ‘There’s nothing there now. But they see the pole all the time and they know what they’re seeing. It’s magic against magic. I’ve told Bernard many times. It’s the only way. Here it’s my magic against theirs.’

“He told this story in the little grotto he has created in the hillside, and his current favourite — Bernard says he has had several — threw himself about with laughter whenever Begorrat smiled. He smiled often. He smiled especially when he talked about opening the corpse and pretending to look carefully at it, like a Roman reading the entrails, and when he said it was his magic against theirs.

“His lips are soft, but his speech is precise, biting and witty. The elderly cocoa marquis is much better educated than most people here, and he knows it. The people who defer to him tell you behind his back that when he came here from Martinique all those years ago he was bankrupt. All the Negroes he brought with him were mortgaged in Martinique; so the big tract of valley land he got free from the Spanish administration, sixteen acres for each Negro — the land that is today his little kingdom — was fraudulently obtained. I am sure he knows the stories. I don’t think he minds in the slightest. He has calculating, merry eyes. He is like a man who knows he can afford to laugh.

“It isn’t only Thisbe’s head-pole that’s still there at Begorrat’s. The old jailer Vallot is also there. He is the man who tortured Thisbe and many others. He would like to go to the United States, to Louisiana. He says he has relations there, and he might get a job. There is nothing for a free man to do here. But Hislop is not giving him a passport. It was Vallot who tortured the free man of colour in Hislop’s first week as governor here — the man of colour who used a love potion to get the black woman to sleep with him, and got people frightened all over again with thoughts of poison and sorcery. This is the case that has been tormenting Hislop ever since the Picton conviction last year. The free people of colour have raised a fund and retained a lawyer in Red Lion Square in London and are pressing the matter hard. Hislop is determined that if the case comes up, Vallot will bear responsibility as an official who exceeded his duty.

“Vallot is an elderly, pasty-faced Frenchman from Martinique. He came here in the Spanish time and acted as jailer for thirteen years. He has had no job for some years now. The local people decided to get rid of him at the time of Picton’s arrest. He has used up his savings and is dependent on Begorrat’s charity. He lives on slave rations in a Negro hut among people like those he used to flog and mutilate. Apparently they accept him. And he, curiously, has no feeling of humiliation or danger. Bernard says that no one at Begorrat’s will poison Vallot. Poison is a weapon only against the master. The man who is almost certain to be poisoned is Begorrat’s current favourite, and everyone knows it.

“Vallot doesn’t know anything about me — he doesn’t know much about anything outside the island. They had told him I was a general, and he had put on quite good clothes (possibly pawned in the old days by a prisoner, or offered instead of the jail fees) to come and tell me his story, and to ask for my sympathy and help. He talked a lot about the illness of his wife. She has a lovely name: Rose-Banier. He says that she used to serve all the paying prisoners with her own hand and used even to make coffee for them in the mornings. She was up and down the three floors all day, he said. Now she is old and ill and can hardly look after herself and their one-room hut.

“And all the time old Begorrat, in his pantaloons and buckle shoes, in this cool cocoa valley that is his kingdom, smiled with his soft lips at Vallot’s tale of hardship, and his favourite laughed and rolled about the floor of the grotto.

“There have been great revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. There is a war in Europe that will further change the world. Great admirals and generals and new inventions are constantly altering the nature and scale of war. Even Mr. Shrapnel’s recent invention will in time be part of the general change; when it is taken up there will have to be new battlefield tactics. But here we might be on another planet, or in another age. Here they have their own heroes and histories and mythical events and sites: the hot chambers of Vallo t’s jail, the dismissal of Picton, the commandeur’s last address to the atelier, the poisonings at Montalembert’s, the opening of the corpse at Begorrat’s, Thisbe’s running through the cocoa woods to ask for sanctuary, the spiking of her head. Here they attach different events to years as they pass; it is almost as though, like the Indian nations of the continent, they have another kind of calendar.

“I dwindle, Sally. I sit in Bernard’s verandah and look at the cornbirds’ long straw nests hanging from the samaan and immortelle branches, and hear the women talk in the jalousied room, and I write essays about the liberation of South America for future publication, and compose this journal-letter to you.

“I mentioned Shrapnel in this letter yesterday. His name simply came to me as I was writing, one of the hundred London names I carry in my head. You will remember that four years or so ago he wrote to me at Grafton Street about his invention and asked me to a demonstration in some fields somewhere. It is strange to be where I am and to think about reading Shrapnel’s letter in the library at Grafton Street and arranging with others to go to his demonstration. It is as though it hardly happened, or happened to another man. I feel — with Vallot — that there is no room for me here. I have no function. I lose touch with myself, even with my ambitions.

“It was just a week ago that I met Vallot. Today — would you believe? — when Bernard came back from the Council meeting he brought me a letter from a Swedish sailor in the new jail in the town. Not the old jail — that was pulled down four years ago by the Council, to prevent anyone seeing what Vallot’s old arrangements really were like. You have to ask and ask before they even show you where it was. The Swede is in jail for disorderly behaviour — that means drunkenness. They feel here that drunken — or ‘disguised’—sailors are bad for local discipline. ‘Disguised’ is the word they use. The alguazils get a small payment for every disguised sailor they pick up, and they are very eager.

“The Swede says he can’t pay the jail fees, and he is being kept on bread and water. He appeals to me as a friend of liberty to rescue him. That is easy enough to do. But his letter also makes me think of the day thirty-six years ago when I went aboard the Swedish frigate, the Prins Frederik, at La Guaira, and for the first time felt myself a free man. I had to get so many permits and certificates, from the Church and others, before I was allowed to leave Venezuela. There had been months of little worries and setbacks, even with my father’s influence, and I didn’t feel I was leaving until I was actually aboard the Prins Frederik. I can go back easily to that moment now: the hills behind the little town of La Guaira were like the hills I see here, and I can give this ever present wine-vat smell of Bernard’s estate house to the eight fanegas of cocoa beans in the frigate’s hold.

“And now, and now, Sally, after all these months, letters come from you and others that tell me plainly what I have always felt in my bones: that I have been wasting my time here. I used to be told that it was half the battle to be here, on the spot, and that I had to be patient. Now you write, and Rutherfurd writes, and Turnbull writes, and a few other people write as well, that I should get back to London as soon as possible. Things have changed, ideas have grown. An immense military action with a great commander is being planned, to seize the South American continent before the French do. This is the very idea I have been putting to British ministers these past few years. It has been taken up now, and I am so far away. All the letters agree — and they are already two months old — that if I am not in London at this stage of the discussions there may be no room for me in what is finally decided.

“So I stand to lose the fruit of a life’s dedication. Oh, Sally. I have been dwindling here; I have shown myself too often to these people. I have been dwindling in London as well; I haven’t shown myself to people there. You might think that a man carries his personality, his soul, within him. But here — like a man in prison, I suppose — I have grown to feel removed from both the world and myself. I have to discover myself again. It may take me time to be what I was, and I may discover that I have changed.

“Today Bernard, as secretary of the Council, brought back news from Hislop for Mister Miranda. Hislop says he is unwilling to give Mr. Miranda a passport. He thinks that to do so might expose him to criticism and perhaps to legal action because of Mr. Miranda’s dispute with the Leander men, who claim their wages, and the master of the Trimmer, who claims his fee for the hire of his sloop. He says also that there is a directive from Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, that nothing that can be construed as official British support is to be offered Mr. Miranda.

“Bernard said, ‘That’s what he has to say. That’s what will go on the record. But he really wants to talk to you. He has an idea that something is afoot in London and he wants to know what you can do for him. I think you should go and see him. He can’t actually detain you here, but he can delay you for many months. A letter to London for advice — six weeks. Another six weeks for a reply. A further six weeks for a letter seeking certain clarifications, and so on. Time is valuable to you. He can help there, and perhaps you can think of something to offer him.’

“This was Bernard’s last service to me, making it easy for me to deal with Hislop. I began to feel I was leaving, and I began to feel I was escaping, and lucky, as I had felt thirty-six years before when I had got all my permits and certificates and could go aboard the Prins Frederik at La Guaira.

“Bernard, whom I had sent here some years before, when he was the dependant and I the patron, was staying. He would never leave. He had nowhere else to go. I felt for him then all that I had felt when I had seen him in his London silk at Government House. I felt afresh all his pathos and anxiety, and the fragility of the life he had made for himself with his wife.

“We were standing after dinner in the verandah, looking across the narrow valley. This was what Bernard would always see or, if his circumstances changed, grieve for.

“His hand was resting on the banister of the verandah. I put my hand on his and told him, ‘I don’t know what would have happened to me here if you hadn’t come to see me that day a year ago at Government House.’

“He looked at me, considered me. Tears came to his eyes. He said, ‘I hope it goes well for you, General. I am sure it will.’

“Hislop will not refuse what I offer, Sally. I have something quite important to offer him. The ways of the world are returning to me already, and Leander might see his father even before you read this letter.”

WHERE THERE had been Africans in the grounds, speaking an African language, there were now Chinese. They were small, shrunken men with bony faces. They wore conical straw hats and long black pigtails. Their sun-browned arms were stringy and looked very thin in the very wide short sleeves of their cream-coloured tunics. Their wide, slack pants, in material of the same colour, came down to just below the knees. They looked very old; their eyes looked pulpy and vulnerable.

Some minutes after the servant had taken in Miranda’s name, Hislop came out to the verandah. And it was there, standing, that they talked. The rain and sun of a year had further darkened the pine floorboards, eaten away a little more of the soft wood between the ridges of the hard wood.

Hislop said, “I’ve got your letter, Mr. Miranda, but you will understand that my position is not easy. Be’nard will have told you about Lord Castlereagh’s directive.”

Miranda said, “The directives of ministers are variable, because they do not always remain pertinent. Lord Castlereagh sent his congratulations about the way you dealt with the slave conspiracy. But that has not prevented the free people of colour agitating this past year about one of their number whose ears were cut off. That is potentially a serious matter, and I think you will find that if it goes much further, Lord Castlereagh will distance himself from the action. In fact, I want to talk to you about legal matters. What I have to say will interest you.”

“That was what you said in your letter.”

“I campaigned against Picton when he was governor here, and to some extent I am responsible for his dismissal. Afterwards I sent out an agent here, Pedro Vargas. He didn’t attend to his obligations to me. The reports he sent me were dangerous lies and nonsense. He attached himself to the commissioner who was investigating Picton’s rule. He was described as an assessor in Spanish law and as such he became one of Picton’s accusers. His evidence at the trial condemned Picton. He said that Spanish law didn’t permit the torture of free men. This is nonsense, as we all know. But Vargas was the only man in London with a copy of the relevant Spanish lawbooks, and in a time of a great war it wasn’t easy to get another expert in Spanish law.”

Hislop said, “I’ve spent many nights wondering how I could prove in a London court that the Spanish practise torture.”

“Vargas was a brave man at one time. He took part in a dangerous conspiracy in New Granada. He was imprisoned and tortured. Somehow afterwards he made his way to England. This was in 1799. He turned to me for help when he arrived. He wrote me a long letter full of circumstantial details of his torture. This letter, if produced in a court of law, will destroy the evidence he gave at the Picton trial. The case against Picton will disappear. And so will the case the free people of colour are preparing against you about the man of colour who used a love potion and was tortured by Vallot.”

“You never told me this. We sat in this house a year ago and talked about this matter.”

“I had forgotten. I was reminded of it only a few weeks ago when a sailor wrote me from the jail here. I began to think in my idleness of all the appeals and the begging letters that had been sent me. I don’t think I remember the names of those people. I’ve already forgotten the name of the Swede. And I don’t think that, apart from the details of the torture, the Vargas letter could have been much good. It would have been full of rhetoric, like the nonsense he wrote me from here. There is another reason. All of us who are political exiles and have dealings with the government have secret names that are used in correspondence. Vargas’s secret name was Oribe.’ That was how he wrote me, and that was how I remembered it. My secret name, as you know, is Mr. George Martin.”

“This letter is among your papers in London?”

“The papers of thirty-five years. They are in thirty cardboard boxes and two leather portfolios. I have a rough idea where to look. It would be impossible for anyone else to find. The Picton appeal is coming up soon.”

“It might be useful for you to be there beforehand.”

“Important things are preparing, General. A big force, and General Wellesley. I think you have an idea. If I don’t get to London in time, there may be no room for me in the plans now being made. And there may be no need for me to have a staff. If I were to have a staff, I would need someone who has a knowledge of Spanish and would know how to deal with British military people at the highest level. I know very well it’s not been a bed of roses for you here.”

“General.”

“As far as the Spanish government is concerned, they need only know that I am leaving this place, abandoning my enterprise, leaving my ship behind, my supplies, and going back to London. Lord Castlereagh will not be embarrassed in any way. And success, you know, General, wipes out certain things. Of course, since I am going back to London I have no further need of my ship. The ship can be sold or in some way disposed of. There is solid value there. I will leave you as my agent. You will do me that service. I am sure that, between you and Briarly and the master of the Trimmer and the disgruntled Americans of the Leander, certain matters can be adjusted.”

“Something can be done. About Briarly, I think I should tell you that I sent him to the jail for a while.”

“Did you, did you?”

“He complained from the jail about the stench and the filth. I handled his complaint with perfect correctness. I passed it to the provost-marshal. The jail is his responsibility. He collects a portion of the jail fees. The provost-marshal said the jail was as clean as a jail could be kept. It was washed down every day. I passed that message back to Briarly in the jail. I don’t think it did him any harm. He had really become quite impossible. He seized the ship that brought the Chinese from Calcutta. It’s an East India Company ship, but he claimed there had been some irregularity. We are still wrangling about that. Nobody’s sure who’s paying for the ship and the Chinese. Our Treasury here is quite empty. We don’t know whether we are supposed to be paying the Company, or the London government is paying. Until that is cleared up we don’t have a ship to send the Chinese back. They didn’t work out. I feel that when the East India Company people in Calcutta were told by London to send Chinese to us, they just went out and emptied the first opium houses they found. I don’t believe these people ever planted a tree in Calcutta or grew a vegetable or hoed a weed. They are city people. And nobody in London or Calcutta thought about women. These Chinese wouldn’t look at Negro women. And no free mulatto woman would look at the Chinese. So they have just gone mad over the year they’ve been here. They’ve been here for as long as you, General. They hate being stared at, and there are still people who want to come and look at them. They’ve been keeping going only on the opium. Many of them have died. I want to send the rest back as soon as possible.”

“A six or seven months’ journey back. The same time to come over. A year or more here. I wonder what memories the survivors will take back to Calcutta of this part of their lives. Will they know where they’ve been? How they stare!”

“They’ve gathered to look at you. I think it’s because of the long white pigtail you have. It’s unusual here. It’s longer than the Navy pigtail, and you are older than most Navy people. They probably think you are one of theirs, come to take them back home. A passport will be made out for you, General. The British Queen will be leaving for Tortola in the third week of October. That gives you enough time to order your affairs here. In Tortola you will join the convoy for England. That will leave in mid-November. The flagship will be the Alexandra. I think they will find a cabin for you. You will be in London before the end of the year.”

The Chinese looked silently at the two men as they talked, and when Miranda began to go down the verandah steps they came a little nearer to consider him.

Miranda said, “Will anyone in Calcutta believe them when they tell this story? Will they believe it themselves, after a while?”

“General. The active years that remain to me are few. This makes them all the more important to me. My principal aim is, of course, to be creditably employed, but naturally without prejudice to my private interests. General, I think we should understand one another. Service with you will be a privilege, but I should find it hard to accept any rank lower than major-general. It is not from vainglory, I assure you. It is more for the sake of others. I have certain obligations, and I will not be able with a full heart, at this stage of a life with more than its share of hardships and cheated hopes, to accept anything less than I have said.”

“General, you need say nothing more.”

WE JUMP six years. Venezuela is in turmoil, a land of blood and revenge after three years of revolution, and Miranda is a prisoner of the Spaniards, in Morro Castle in Puerto Rico. He is waiting to make his last journey across the Atlantic, to Spain, to the dungeons of La Carraca in Cadiz. Cadiz was where the Prins Frederik took him in 1771. It was the first city he saw in Europe. It was where he bought his silk handkerchief and silk umbrella, and it will be where he will spend the last three years of his life, sometimes chained.

THERE HAD in the end been no major British invasion of Spanish South America. Such an invasion, though, was being seriously planned when Miranda went back to London from Trinidad. General Wellesley (who two years later became the Duke of Wellington) was assembling a large invasion force in Ireland. Miranda — as a South American who would have given legitimacy to the British action — would have had an important place in his army. But then, as so often with Miranda, plans had to be changed. Almost at the last minute the French occupied Spain; Spain all at once became an ally of Britain’s in the war against Napoleon; and the British army that should have gone to occupy Spanish South America went instead to the Iberian peninsula to fight a war of liberation.

Miranda was fifty-eight, white-haired. It might have seemed now that after all the years of waiting there was nothing left for him to do. But then, two years later, Venezuela declared its separation from Spain. The twenty-seven-year-old Simón Bolívar came to London to get help for his country, and Miranda went back to Venezuela with him.

He must have thought he was going back to a revolution that had been accomplished. He found a country split into all its racial and caste groups, a civil war beyond any one man’s managing, and far beyond his military skill. After twenty months the first phase of that war was over. The revolution had for the moment been defeated; in the jails revenge was being taken on republican prisoners; and Miranda — like a man who had run to meet the fate from which he had more than once escaped — was a prisoner himself, betrayed to the Spaniards, his old enemies, by the man who had called him out from London, and had gone to tea one day at Grafton Street.

He was kept for five months in the jail at La Guaira, from where the Prins Frederik had left in 1771. Then he was moved to the fortress of San Felipe in Puerto Cabello, where in 1806 ten of the officers of the Bacchus and the Bee, dressed in white gowns and caps, had been hanged and quartered and burnt with their uniforms and arms and Miranda’s own South American flag. Five months later he was taken to Puerto Rico, to Morro Castle, where thirteen men from the Bacchus and the Bee had for some time been imprisoned, loaded with twenty-five-pound chains, and given beds of stone and pillows of brick.

IT IS there now, while he is waiting to be transported to Spain, that Miranda is allowed visits by a Venezuelan, Andrés Level de Goda. Level is thirty-six, and a lawyer by profession. Thirty-eight years later, when most of these passions have turned to dust, and the reputation of Miranda has been all but erased, Level in his memoirs will provide the only witness (apart from official jail-book entries) of Miranda in captivity.

Level is of a creole landowning family, with (at least until the revolution) cocoa and sugar estates on the Venezuelan side of the Gulf. He is a royalist. He wants Venezuela to hold on to the Spanish connection. He thinks the revolution Miranda was called out to serve was started by local aristocrats — second-rate people, in his estimation — to settle personal grudges and to secure their own position, and had no popular support. A Venezuela set adrift from Spain will live through an unending civil war, Level thinks: the country is too full of factions and castes and hatreds.

Politically, Level and Miranda have been on opposing sides. But in Puerto Rico they are meeting in a kind of understanding. Miranda has been betrayed by the revolution and is now beyond politics. Level has been turned by the troubles in Venezuela and Spain into a wanderer with little money. He cannot for the time being go back to Venezuela: the revolution has caught alight again and he has been declared a proscribed person. In Puerto Rico he is dependent on the generosity of the captain-general, Meléndez, who is a friend. So both men, Miranda and Level, are also meeting in a kind of shared destitution.

On many afternoons Level goes to Morro Castle to sit with Miranda in his cell, and they talk while Miranda drinks his daily cup of tea. The head of Miranda’s special guard leaves the cell door open when the two men are together.

Level’s admiration for Miranda grows: the fluent speech, the authority, the voice, the physical presence of the old man, the knowledge of men and books and great events.

Meléndez, the captain-general, shows Miranda every regard. He has Miranda’s meals sent from a tavern outside. He even arranges for Miranda to get money (against funds in London) from an official on the British island of St. Martin, which is only a few hours’ sailing away.

Miranda is interested in the news from Spain, and Meléndez passes on the Cadiz newspapers as soon as he gets them. In them Miranda reads of the war against the French in Spain. He reads of the battles and growing reputation of the Duke of Wellington and General Picton, the former governor of Trinidad. The old man must suffer, thinking of his own fall, but he shows no emotion to Level or Meléndez.

He drinks his tea in a special way. He squeezes half a lemon into a cup of tea, and while he drinks this mixture he nibbles at the hull of the lemon, taking care (almost as if he is racing against himself) to finish both drink and lemon hull at the same time.

He says one afternoon to Level, “Why are you staring? You remind me of the Chinese in Trinidad. They thought I had come to take them home. Did Hislop tell you about that?”

Level knows the reference. He worked for some time in Trinidad as an adviser in Spanish law to Governor Hislop.

He says, “I’m not staring, General. I’m looking, to remember. I was thinking that one day I would be telling people that General Miranda turned his tea into a lemonade.”

“It’s what my father used to do on hot afternoons in Caracas. I began to do it when I came back.”

“When I’m with you I think of all the places you’ve been to, and all the people you’ve seen, and I can begin to feel that I myself have entered history a little. It is a feeling so precious I can hardly hold on to it. General, I’ve been trying for some time to put this to you. It is something I know I shouldn’t put to you. But, equally, I will not forgive myself later for not doing so. I want to know about Catherine the Great. If you think the question is wrong, please forgive me. If you think it is too intrusive, please consider it as never having been spoken.”

“It was one of the stories I encouraged, almost something I spread myself in the beginning, in my thirties, after I had left the Spanish service. Like so many of the thoughtless things I did then, it came back later and did me much harm. It exposed me to a lot of jealousy. Not in the way you might think. Venezuelans loved the story. They didn’t see it as a tribute to me. They saw it as a tribute to themselves. Some of them behaved as though I had taken away something from them. They felt that I had misused something that belonged to them. I had come between them and the arms of the empress. And then they extended this to my whole career. Whatever I had done in the world I had done, according to this way of thinking, only because I was like them, my critics. Whether in Russia or England or France or the United States, there was nothing personal about my achievement. If they had been where I had been they would have done what I had done. I had gambled nothing of myself, taken no risks, exercised no personal will. And this was extended even further. They had done it for me. I had done nothing. I was nothing.

“I told Hislop in Trinidad — I don’t know whether he told you — how Picton had damaged me in 1798, nearly thirty years after I had left home. He had written to the ministers in London that though I was important, I was nothing, the son of a Caracas shopkeeper. Of course he had got that from Caracas — and even at all the removes I could detect the voice of the Venezuelan who felt I had sullied the empress’s arms and spoilt what was his due.

“Something like that happened again when I came back. I had been called back by Bolívar, as you know, and I was going to stay in his house in Caracas, because after forty years I had none of my own. I didn’t go there directly. I thought I should behave formally and show respect to the revolution. When I landed at La Guaira I wrote to Roscio, the junta’s secretary for foreign affairs, asking for permission to go to Caracas. His reply was insulting and extraordinary. He said that I should never forget that I owed more than most to the country, because I had been unusually privileged and had spent many years abroad in the courts of Europe. What he was saying was that during my forty years abroad I had actually been exploiting the country, living off the national patrimony, and now should pay back a little of what I owed. And I knew at once that, though we were talking about the revolution, it was the old Catherine-the-Great jealousy at work on Roscio. That story did me much harm. I should never have come to Caracas after receiving that letter of Roscio’s. I should have known that the situation had been misrepresented to me. I should have stayed at La Guaira and gone back to Curaçao on H.M.S. Avon. I should have made them wait, for a year, if necessary. That’s how I should have handled it.”

Level says, “Our hate, General, our hate. It isn’t like the hate of other places.”

“The Spanish empire damaged us in that way. It kept us backward, gave us very little to do. It gave us as men no way of proving ourselves. It never made us believe in human achievement. It made us believe only in luck and birth and influence and theft and getting patents from the king. It made us cringe before authority and mock it at the same time. It made us believe that all men at bottom were worthless. Many of the stupid things I did in the early days were because of that. It was ten years before I understood that things were different in other countries.”

Level says, “At one time I used to think the jealousy you talk about was harmless, like the jealousy of a grocer for a man who comes and sets up a shop next door. After the revolution this jealousy turned to hate. We’ve all surrendered to this hatred. People won’t” stop now until they see the white bones of the enemy. I never thought it would happen. I thought people would be too frightened. I remember the early revolutionaries, Gual, España, in the late 1790s. They sent people to our estates and to others and tried to get us interested. They said they were going to have a republic and the flag was going to have four colours, for the different races. White, blue for the Negro, yellow for the mixed, red for the Indian. The four colours would also stand for the four aims of the republic. Liberty, equality, security, property. Property for the white, liberty for the Negro, equality for the mulatto, security for everybody. They were going to give everything to everybody. How were they going to do it? When you asked them they couldn’t answer. They hadn’t worked it out. They had thought only about the flag and the colours. Sometimes they got angry. ‘You’re an americano. You should be a proud man. How can you talk in this low way? Don’t you care about your country?’ I would say, ‘It’s wrong of you to put it like that. You can’t tell me that my country is your flag. The question to ask when you talk about independence is: “Who is going to rule over us?” That’s the question everyone will ask, and that is where the war will begin.’ And, actually, that’s how it happened. Now that we are launched on that four-colour war I don’t see how it can stop. There will always be someone looking for a final victory, and someone wanting revenge.”

Miranda says, “I don’t think anyone can work out a constitution for a place like Venezuela. It’s the Spanish legacy to us. Those people you mention, Gual, España, and the others — they suffered too much to think more clearly. I can also tell you now that the constitution I worked out for Venezuela was absurd. And yet I spent so much time on it. It was half Roman and half British. I didn’t have consuls. I had officials I called Incas. A local touch, you see. I persuaded myself that I believed in my constitution, but I also know I had devised it to impress people abroad. Perhaps there is a genius somewhere who can work out a constitution for us. But he certainly isn’t Venezuelan, because no Venezuelan will be calm enough to manage things wisely, and he can’t be an outsider because he wouldn’t begin to understand the divisions and the passions.”

“In all your years of writing about Venezuela and South America, you simplified it, General. You talked about Incas and white people. You talked about people worthy of Plato’s republic. You always left out two of the colours. You left out the black and you left out the mulatto. Was that because you were far away?”

“No. I did it because it was easier for me intellectually. Most of my ideas about liberty came to me from conversation and reading when I was abroad. So the country I created in my mind became more and more like the countries I read about. There were no Negroes in Tom Paine or Rousseau. And when I tried to be like them I found it hard to fit in the Negroes. Of course, I knew they existed. But I thought of them as accidental to the truth I was getting at. I felt when I came to write that I had to leave them out. Because of the way I have lived, always in other people’s countries, I have always been able to hold two or more different ideas in my head about the same thing. Two ideas about my country, two or three or four ideas about myself. I have paid a heavy price for this. You mustn’t rebuke me now.

“I got to know William Wilberforce when I went back to England from Trinidad. I admired him greatly. I thought of him as a philanthropist, a protector of the oppressed. I knew he wanted to talk to me about Negro slavery, but the first time I dined with him at Kensington we quickly got on to the subject of the Inquisition, and that led to a wide discussion about South American liberty. I felt I had to get him to understand the humiliations someone like my father had had to live with. And someone like poor Manuel Gual whom we’ve been talking about — after thirty-three years of service, only a captain in the Veteran Battalion, poor Gual, because higher ranks were reserved for Spaniards from Spain. About the constant, humiliating obedience in all matters required from us. Obedience to the Church, obedience to the king and his officials, the humiliation in which we felt we walked. I had to get Wilberforce to understand those things — they are not easy things to explain — and I felt that to go into the Negro question with him would have been to waste his interest in us. It would also have added an element of confusion to what I was telling him about South America. I knew how important Negro emancipation was to Wilberforce, and I made it clear that I accepted his views without question. But I felt he was talking about other places. I felt I was dealing with another matter altogether. I wasn’t the only one to think like that. You will know how badly Hislop wanted to leave Trinidad and serve the South American cause.

“And then many months later, when I remembered, I wondered what that very fine man Wilberforce would have thought if he had known that after the siege of Pensacola I had in a matter-of-fact way bought three Negroes as a speculation, and that just a few years later I had had to leave the Spanish service because I had tried to smuggle two boatloads of Negroes from Jamaica to Cuba.”

“There was that story,” Level says.

“It was true. But it isn’t a fraction of the truth about me. It occurred at the very beginning, thirty years ago. I was starting out. That was the world I found. There was a whole life after that. That later life was what I was responsible for. I didn’t feel I had defrauded Wilberforce. Though again, when I took Bolívar and the others to meet him, and he was so gracious, saying how fortunate he was to be in London just then, I wonder what he would have thought if he had known that my fear of Spanish jails and the Inquisition — and a lot of the politics I talked to him about — had begun with that smuggling incident. I would have had to do ten years in Oran in North Africa, if I hadn’t deserted.

“For many years after I deserted I visited jails wherever I went. It’s one of the things travellers in Europe do. But I was also testing myself. The jail at Copenhagen was the worst. Some of the prisoners were chained. Some of them were only debtors. The excrement wasn’t removed from the latrine for months. I was so frightened by that I wrote to the authorities about it. And now I’m here. So I suppose that score’s been settled all round.”

Level says, “Hislop and I talked a lot about your time in Trinidad. I myself felt when I was there that I was in Venezuela. Didn’t you feel at all when you were there that you had been given a glimpse of what lay on the other side of the Gulf?”

“Again, I knew it and didn’t know it. There were two moments when I knew, very clearly. The first was on the day I arrived, after Puerto Cabello and the Bacchus and the Bee. My homecoming, you might say. I heard some Negroes talking in the grounds outside in an African language, and I went to the window. We were all surprised, all momentarily lost. It was in the middle of the day, but it was raining and dark. The Negroes looked at me as though they had seen a ghost — my white hair and long pigtail. I saw it clearly in their eyes. I felt very far away from the world. The second moment came about two or three months after I had come back from the Coro venture. A man called Downie and a lady called Miss McLurie and some others took me on a little tour of the island. One of the places we went to was an Indian reserve. There were a few places like that where the Spaniards had settled the remnants of the Indian people. Little missions, clearings in the forest, with the Indians in carat-palm huts and the priest in a little wooden house, and the church sometimes of adobe. All very rough and depressing. The Indians had become alcoholic. Miss McLurie and Downie and the other English people in the party became very angry on my behalf when we were in this mission. They thought the Spanish priest was a scoundrel, using the Indians as very cheap labour, getting them to cut down cedar trees and saw up the timber, and making an extra profit out of them by selling them rum. They wanted me to make a scene. They wanted me to abuse the priest. I thought it was strange, their concern, and then I realized that they were treating the Indians as my own people. I had a glimpse of the place as from a distance and I felt I had trapped myself there and would never leave. But then I put it out of my head.”

“You had a bad time in Trinidad. I know. I talked to people. It could have ended for you there. People in that little place were so full of their own hatreds they hardly had time for you. If you had stayed for another year or so you might have lost the few protectors you did have. The amazing thing is that, having had the luck to get away, you so quickly decided to risk it all again and come back. I don’t know what Bolívar told you about the state of the country. I don’t think he could have told you that the royalists held both the east and the west.”

“He seemed to be using my own words. He made me feel that what I had been prophesying had come true. The trouble I had, to get permission to leave England! It was almost as hard as leaving Venezuela the first time. It was much harder than leaving Trinidad. The ministers didn’t want it. They didn’t want their Spanish allies in Cadiz to think that they were encouraging the break-up of the Spanish empire. In the end we compromised. I would leave England on a warship and they somehow wouldn’t notice. But they insisted that for appearances’ sake Bolívar and I should travel on different ships. So Bolívar went ahead with my papers. I tell you this so you would understand I had complete faith in him and his family. I had had my papers beautifully bound the previous year by Dulau. Sixty-three volumes in three new boxes, with a brass plate with my initials on each box.”

“If you had known that at the end the whole country was going to be against you, would you have come out?”

“After thirty years I couldn’t have stayed away. I had to see it through to the end. Even to that moment you talk about. I had to see all my ideas turned inside out, as it were. That became a kind of release, in fact, right at the end. For years I used to tell people that if I could be set down on the Venezuelan coast with two hundred men, or fewer, the whole country would come over to my flag of liberty. It didn’t happen like that to me. It happened to the other man, the rough naval officer the royalist authorities sent against me. He was blessed with luck. He landed with a hundred and twenty sailors and everybody began to go over to him. In twelve weeks he overwhelmed us. He could do nothing wrong. The Indians went over to him. The mulattoes, the pardos, the dark people, were with him. The mulattoes fought like demons at Valencia. Even when the white people surrendered they fought on. I had five thousand men. The mulattoes fought on even when there were only five hundred of them. For them, as you say, the question of the revolution was: ‘Who is going to rule over us?’ And they simply didn’t want to be ruled by the people on my side. I had to make two assaults on Valencia. Eight hundred people were killed in that little siege, and fifteen hundred people were wounded. I remembered, too late, what Hislop had told me about the free people of colour on the other side of the Gulf — and I had never begun to think that that might have anything to do with me.

“I thought later, when things became hard, that I should enrol Negroes in my army. I offered them freedom if they served for ten years. I don’t know what Wilberforce would have thought of that — this was just a year after our meetings in London. But at this stage everything I did was going to be wrong. The offer to enrol Negroes didn’t get me suitable soldiers, and it turned everybody else against me. The royalists at Curiepe in revenge turned the Negroes from their plantations on me. They sent them marching to Caracas to loot and burn the place down.

“This was the end. I was quite encircled. After Bolívar lost Puerto Cabello we were absolutely without resources. People were leaving me every day. I could depend on no one. I couldn’t carry on the war. At the beginning people like Roscio wanted me to keep out of their revolution. Now they left me alone with it. Everybody focussed his resentment or fear or hate on me — republican, royalist, all the four colours. I saw then what you have said, that the war was unwinnable, that if somehow the revolution could be reconstituted and we could go back to the beginning, it would all unravel again, and in almost the same way. I realized in those last days that for all those years abroad I had been speaking only for myself, that the revolution I had been working for would have come about only if all Venezuelans were like me, coming from a family like mine, and having a career like mine. It was what the Spaniards had always said, that my revolution was a personal enterprise.

“The knowledge was a kind of release. I wouldn’t have arrived at it if I had stayed in London or if I had left the war half-way through. I would have been nagged by the feeling that there might have been something I could have done, that in spite of the four colours and the marquises of cocoa and tobacco and everything else I had always known about Venezuela, the ideas I had worked out might have proved right. Perhaps the philosophers were right. Perhaps below all the accidental things about people — birth, character, geography, history — there was something truer. That was what I had always felt about myself. Perhaps all men, if they were given a wise or rational liberty, became worthy of Plato’s republic.

“I had no half-feelings or misgivings now. I knew I had seen things through as far as they could go. The unimaginable moment came when I realized that I no longer had a side, and that apart from personal dependants there was no one with me. My thoughts then were all of Grafton Street. The territory I controlled or was safe in was shrinking day by day. Soon it was reduced to the city of Caracas and the mountain road to the coast, to La Guaira. A few square miles. Think of that! Two or three years after I deserted I used to present myself to foreign governments as the potential controller of a territory stretching from the source of the Mississippi, all the land to the west of the river, down to Cape Horn.

“A British warship was waiting at La Guaira for me, to take me to the British island of Curaçao. I sent my three boxes of papers ahead with a loyal follower. I took the precaution to address those boxes not to me, in case they were captured, but to a British firm on the island. I did the same with the twenty-two thousand silver pesos and twelve hundred ounces of gold I took from the Caracas Treasury. It was with a perverse pleasure that right at the end I assumed the character my enemies gave me. My feeling was that this was owed me, for all that I had done for the country, and for the forty years I had been cut off from my family fortune. But I didn’t manage to board H.M.S. Sapphire, as you know. It sailed with my possessions to Curaçao. My information is that the firm to which they were addressed claimed the money as their own, and were very happy to recover this fraction of what they had advanced through me to the revolutionary government in Caracas. So that account, too, has been settled all round.”

Miranda makes a signal to someone outside. Captain Lara, the head of the special guard, comes and stands outside the open door, and Level de Goda knows it is time to leave.

• • •

LATER THAT night, when the town was quite asleep, Level was awakened by Meléndez, the captain-general, in whose quarters he was staying. The captain-general was formally dressed, with his officer’s jacket, and he carried the polished baton of his rank.

He said, “It’s very hot, Andrés. Put on some clothes and come and walk with me by the sea.”

They walked a short way along the sea wall and stopped by a pier. Ships’ lights were reflected in the water of the harbour and masts were dark against the sky. A night breeze blew off the sea. The sails of one ship were bent for sailing. A small boat rocked near the pier steps. It wasn’t empty: there were two oarsmen and two soldiers in it. The soldiers got out now and stood to attention on the steps. Along the sea wall then appeared Captain Lara and Miranda arm in arm. Behind them walked a Negro carrying a small wooden trunk on his head. Level recognized the Negro: he came from the inn that for five months had been preparing Miranda’s meals.

Meléndez said, “The ship is waiting, General. It only remains to say goodbye. Lieutenant Ibáñez has given his word that no restraint will be placed on you during your voyage to Cadiz.”

Miranda said, “No chains?”

“You will be treated with honour.”

Miranda said, “I give thanks to God that I am going to Europe. Captain-General, I will never forget this kindness you have done me.”

He embraced Meléndez and then, before being handed down into the boat by the soldiers, he embraced Level. Level remembered the embrace as the embrace of a friend.

LEVEL WROTE his memoirs — and gave that little formal farewell speech to Miranda — thirty-eight years later, when he was seventy-four. This was in 1851, when, as Level said, the Venezuelan revolution or civil war was still going on after forty-one years, and seemed set to go on for another forty-one. The memoirs might have been one of the casualties of the war. They were never absolutely finished, and (perhaps also because of Level’s politics) were not published until 1933, and then only in a Venezuelan learned journal.

Level would have known that Miranda had died in jail in Cadiz just about thirty months after he left Puerto Rico. He wouldn’t have known that Miranda had died painfully, over four months, racked by one affliction after the other, violent fits, typhus, and towards the end by an illness that made him haemorrhage from the mouth. He was buried unceremoniously, lifted away from the hospital of the jail in the mattress and sheets of his deathbed, and in the clothes in which he had died, and set down with it all in his grave. The men who took him away then came back and gathered up his other clothes and possessions and burnt them. Knowledge of the spot where he was buried was soon lost.

Miranda’s second son, Francisco, was seven when Miranda was in Puerto Rico. Level might not have known that this Francisco, his father’s namesake, left London when he was grown up and went to fight in the South American civil wars. He was executed in Colombia in 1831 (the year after Bolívar’s death), when he was twenty-five, in one of the many purges of the war.

Level remembered, very delicately, Miranda’s concern about a lady in London, to whom he would have liked to send money, and to whom, through Meléndez, he sent a letter about household matters. Level would not have known that in 1847, four years before he began to write his memoirs, Sarah had died in the house in Grafton Street. She was seventy-three. She had lived in the same house for forty-eight years, and for the last thirty-seven of those years she had been without Miranda. The census of 1841 records two women servants in the house, and it is possible that Miranda’s library — valued at nine thousand pounds in 1807, with debts to booksellers of five thousand pounds — provided her in the end with a fair income.

It would have been a slow fading away for her. At the time of her death Miranda, once so important and busy in London, was hardly a name. His three boxes of papers had apparently been lost; and, as with the corpses at Pompeii, where Miranda should have been in historical accounts there was a void. Sarah vanished with him. The date of her death, and even the fact that she had kept on living at Grafton Street, was uncovered by a researcher from the Venezuelan embassy in London only in 1980.

Miranda’s papers were found more than a hundred years after his death. In the second decade of this century an American scholar, William Robertson, had the idea that (though the money and the gold had been seized) Miranda’s papers might have been sent on from Curaçao to London, to the appropriate British minister; and that they might subsequently have become part of the minister’s own archive. The appropriate minister in 1812 was Lord Bathurst, secretary of state for war and the colonies. In 1922 the sixty-three volumes of Miranda’s papers were identified by Robertson in the Bathurst library in Cirencester in Gloucestershire. Perhaps a speck or two of Venezuelan dust still adhered to them from the two three-hour journeys they had made more than a hundred years before on the cart road between Caracas and La Guaira. The papers were acquired by the Venezuelan government, and then made their last journey to Caracas.

The first volumes, heavily edited, with many things suppressed or omitted, were published in Caracas in 1924. The final volumes were published in Havana in 1950 for the bicentenary of Miranda’s birth. These Havana volumes, in which the papers appear just as Miranda preserved them, the ephemeral mixed up with more formal things, without editorial gloss or interference, seem still warm with the life of the man.