The Invention of Nature

Throughout the revolution Bolívar would use images drawn from the natural world – as if writing with Humboldt’s pen – to explain his beliefs. He talked of a ‘stormy sea’ and described those fighting a revolution as people who ‘ploughed a sea’. As Bolívar rallied his compatriots during the long years of rebellions and battles, he evoked South America’s landscapes. He would talk of magnificent vistas and insist that their continent was ‘the very heart of the universe’, in an attempt to remind his fellow revolutionists what they were fighting for. At times, when only chaos seemed to rule, Bolívar turned to the wilderness to seek meaning. In untamed nature he found parallels to the brutality of humankind – and though this fact didn’t change anything about the conditions of war, it could still be strangely comforting. As Bolívar fought to free the colonies from Spanish shackles, these images, nature metaphors and allegories became his language of freedom.

Forests, mountains and rivers ignited Bolívar’s imagination. He was a ‘true lover of nature’, as one of his generals later said. ‘My soul is dazzled by the presence of primitive nature,’ Bolívar declared. He had always adored the outdoors and as a young man had enjoyed the pleasures of country life and agricultural work. The landscape that surrounded the old family hacienda San Mateo near Caracas, where he had spent his days riding across fields and forests, had been the cradle for this strong bond with nature. Mountains, in particular, held a spell over Bolívar because they reminded him of home. When he had walked from France to Italy, in the spring of 1805, it had been the sight of the Alps that had channelled his thoughts back to his country and away from the gambling and drinking in Paris. By the time Bolívar met Humboldt in Rome that summer, he had started to think in earnest about a rebellion. When he returned to Venezuela in 1807, he said, there was a ‘fire that burned inside me to liberate my country’.

The Spanish colonies in Latin America were divided into four viceroyalties and were home to some 17 million people. There was New Spain which included Mexico, parts of California and Central America, while the Viceroyalty of New Granada stretched across the northern part of South America roughly covering today’s Panama, Ecuador and Colombia, as well as parts of north-western Brazil and Costa Rica. Further south was the Viceroyalty of Peru as well as the Viceroyalty of the Río de La Plata with Buenos Aires as its capital, encompassing parts of today’s Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. There were also so-called captaincy generals, such as those of Venezuela, Chile and Cuba. The captaincy generals were administrative districts that provided autonomy to those regions, making them like viceroyalties in all but name. It was a vast empire that had fuelled Spain’s economy for three centuries but the first cracks had occurred with the loss of the huge Louisiana Territory which had been part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The Spanish had lost it to the French who had then sold it on to the United States in 1803.

The Napoleonic Wars had severely affected the Spanish colonies. British and French naval blockades had reduced trade and resulted in huge losses of revenue. At the same time, wealthy criollos such as Bolívar had realized that Spain’s weakened position in Europe might be used to their own advantage. The British had destroyed many Spanish warships in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the most decisive naval victory during the war, and two years later Napoleon had invaded the Iberian Peninsula. He had then forced the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, to abdicate in favour of Napoleon’s own brother. Spain had no longer been an almighty imperial power but a tool in France’s hands. With the Spanish king deposed and the mother country occupied by a foreign force, some South Americans had allowed themselves to believe in another future.

In 1809, a year after Ferdinand VII’s abdication, the first call for independence had been made in Quito, when the creoles had taken power from the Spanish administrators. A year later, in May 1810, the colonists in Buenos Aires followed suit. A few months after that, in September in the small town of Dolores, 200 miles to the north-west of Mexico City, a priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla had united creoles, mestizos, Indians and freed slaves in their battle cry against the Spanish rule; within a month he had an army of 60,000. As revolt and unrest swept across the Spanish viceroyalties, the creole elite of Venezuela had declared independence on 5 July 1811.