The Invention of Nature

After three months in Haiti, Bolívar sailed for Venezuela with a small fleet of Pétion’s ships, packed with gunpowder, weapons and men. When he arrived in summer 1816, Bolívar declared freedom for all the slaves. This was a first and important step, but he struggled to convince the creole elite. Three years later he said that slavery still shrouded the country in a ‘black veil’ and – once again invoking nature as a metaphor – warned that ‘storm clouds darkened the sky, threatening a rain of fire’. Bolívar liberated his own slaves and promised freedom in exchange for military service, but it was only a decade later when he wrote the Bolivian constitution, in 1826, that the full abolition of slavery became law. It was a bold move at a time when apparently enlightened American statesmen, such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, still had hundreds of slaves working their plantations. Humboldt, who had been a staunch abolitionist since seeing the slave market in Cumaná shortly after his arrival in South America, was impressed with Bolívar’s decision. A few years later Humboldt praised Bolívar in one of his books for setting an example to the world, particularly in contrast to the United States.

Over the next years Humboldt followed events in South America from Paris. There was much toing and froing – with Bolívar slowly uniting the regional warlords who were fighting the Spanish in their territories. The revolutionaries were in control of some regions, but these were often far apart and the men had certainly not acted as a united force. In the Llanos, for example, José Antonio Páez had, after Boves’s death at the end of 1814, gained the support of the plainsmen – the llaneros – for the republican cause. His 1,100 wild llaneros on horses and barefoot Indians armed only with bows and arrows defeated almost 4,000 experienced Spanish soldiers in the open steppes of the Llanos in early 1818. These tough and rough-mannered men were the most accomplished riders. As a creole and a city-dweller, Bolívar was not someone they would have chosen as their leader but he won their respect. Though extremely thin – at five feet six inches Bolívar weighed only 130 pounds – he displayed an endurance and strength in the saddle that gained him the nickname ‘Iron Ass’. Whether swimming with his hands tied behind his back for a dare or dismounting over his horse’s head (which he had practised after seeing the llaneros doing it), Bolívar impressed Páez’s men with his physical prowess.

Humboldt would probably not have recognized Bolívar any more. The dashing young man who had promenaded through Paris in the latest fashion now dressed simply in jute sandals and a plain coat. Though only in his mid-thirties, Bolívar’s face was already lined and his skin jaundiced, but his eyes radiated a piercing intensity and his voice had the power to rally his soldiers. During the previous years Bolívar had lost his plantations and been exiled from his country several times. He was relentless with his men but also with himself. He often slept, just wrapped in a cape, on the bare floor or spent all day driving his horse across rough terrain but retained enough energy to read French philosophers in the evening.

The Spanish still controlled the northern part of Venezuela including Caracas as well as much of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, but Bolívar had gained territories in the eastern provinces of Venezuela and along the Orinoco. The revolution was not progressing as swiftly as he had hoped, but he believed that it was time to encourage elections in the liberated regions and to have a constitution. A congress was called to assemble at Angostura (today’s Ciudad Bolívar in Venezuela) on the banks of the Orinoco, the town where Humboldt and Bonpland had been struck down with fever almost two decades previously after their gruelling weeks to find the Casiquiare River. With Caracas in the hands of the Spanish, Angostura was the temporary capital of the new republic. On 15 February 1819, twenty-six delegates took their seats in a simple brick building that was the government house to listen to Bolívar’s vision of the future. He presented them with the constitution that he had drafted on the river journey along the Orinoco and once again talked about the importance of unity between race and class as well as between the different colonies.

In his speech in Angostura Bolívar described South America’s ‘splendour and vitality’ to remind his fellow countrymen why they were fighting. No other place in the world had been ‘so bountifully provided by nature’, Bolívar said. He talked of his soul climbing to great heights so that he could perceive the future of his country from the perspective that it demanded – a future that united this vast continent that stretched from coast to coast. He himself, Bolívar said, was only a ‘plaything of the revolutionary hurricane’ but he was ready to follow the dream of a free South America.