The Invention of Nature

Then, nine months later, nature seemed to side with the Spanish. On the afternoon of 26 March 1812, as the inhabitants of Bolívar’s hometown Caracas crowded into the churches for Easter services, a massive earthquake destroyed the city, killing thousands. Cathedral and churches crumbled, and the air was thick with dust as worshippers were crushed to death. As the tremors shook the ground, Bolívar surveyed the devastation in despair. Many saw the earthquake as a sign of God’s fury against their uprising. Priests shouted at the ‘sinners’ and told them that ‘divine justice’ had punished their revolution. Standing in the rubble in his shirtsleeves, Bolívar remained defiant. ‘If Nature itself decides to oppose us,’ he said, ‘we will fight and force her to obey.’

Eight days later another earthquake struck, bringing the death toll to a shocking 20,000 people, about half the population of Caracas. When slaves on the plantations west of Lake Valencia rebelled, looting haciendas and killing their owners, anarchy descended across Venezuela. Bolívar, who had been put in charge of the strategically important port town of Puerto Cabello on the northern coast of Venezuela, one hundred miles west of Caracas, had five officers and three soldiers and stood no chance when the royalist troops arrived. Within weeks the republican fighters had surrendered to the Spanish forces, and a little more than a year after the creoles had first declared their independence, the so-called First Republic had come to an end. The Spanish flag was hoisted once again and Bolívar fled the country at the end of August 1812 for the Caribbean island of Curaçao.

As the revolutions unfolded the former American President, Thomas Jefferson, bombarded Humboldt with questions: If the revolutionaries succeeded what kind of government would they establish, he asked, and how equal would their society be? Would despotism prevail? ‘All these questions you can answer better than any other,’ Jefferson insisted in one letter. As one of the founding fathers of the North American revolution, Jefferson was deeply interested in the Spanish colonies and genuinely afraid that South America would not establish republican governments. At the same time, Jefferson was also concerned about the economic implications that an independent southern continent would have for his own country. As long as the colonies were under Spanish control, the United States exported huge amounts of grain and wheat to South America. But once they turned away from colonial cash crops their ‘produce and commerce would rivalize ours’, Jefferson told the Minister of Spain in Washington, DC.

Meanwhile Bolívar was plotting his next moves and in late October 1812, two months after he had fled Venezuela, he arrived in Cartagena, a port town on the northern coast of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in today’s Colombia. Bolívar was brimming with ideas for a strong South America where all colonies would fight together rather than separately as before. In command of only a small army but reputedly equipped with Humboldt’s excellent maps, Bolívar now began a bold guerrilla offensive hundreds of miles away from home. He had little military training but as he moved from Cartagena towards Venezuela, he managed to surprise royalist forces in inhospitable environments – on high mountains, in deep forests and along rivers infested with snakes and crocodiles. Slowly Bolívar gained control over the Río Magdalena, the river along which Humboldt had paddled from Cartagena to Bogotá more than a decade earlier.

Along their warpath Bolívar gave stirring speeches to the people of New Granada. ‘Wherever the Spanish empire rules,’ he said, ‘there rules death and desolation!’ And as he marched, he gained new recruits. Bolívar believed that the colonies of South America had to unite. If one was enslaved, so was the other, he wrote. Spanish rule was a ‘gangrene’ that would affect every part unless ‘hewn off like an infected limb’. It was the colonies’ own disunity, he said, that would be their downfall, not Spanish arms. The Spanish were ‘locusts’ that destroyed the ‘seeds and roots of the tree of freedom’, he said, a pest that could only be destroyed if they united against them. He charmed, bullied and threatened to convince the New Granadans to join him on his way to Venezuela to free Caracas.

If Bolívar didn’t get his way, he could be brash and insulting. ‘March! Either you shoot me or, by God, I will certainly shoot you,’ Bolívar shouted when one officer refused to cross into Venezuelan territory. ‘I must have 10,000 guns,’ he demanded on another occasion, ‘or I shall go mad.’ His determination was infectious.