The Project Gutenberg eBook, By-Ways of War, by James Jeffrey Roche

BY-WAYS OF WAR

By

JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE

HER MAJESTY THE KING, A ROMANCE OF THE HAREM, THE V-A-S-E, AND OTHER BRIC-A-BRAC

BY-WAYS OF WAR
The Story of the Filibusters

BY

JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
1901

Copyright, 1891, 1901,
by
JAMES JEFFREY ROCHE

Riggs Printing and Publishing Co.
Albany, U.S.A.

"So much the leaded dice of war

Do make or mar of character."

Joaquin Miller.

MAP OF THE REPUBLIC OF NICARAGUA 1850-1860
SKETCH MAP OF CENTRAL AMERICA at the time of the FILIBUSTERS

PREFACE

The rise and fall of the American Filibusters belong to the history of the Nineteenth Century. From time to time their deeds have been recounted by actors in the stirring scenes, by contemporary observers, and, incidentally, by travellers in Spanish America who lingered for a moment over the romantic legend of the modern Vikings.

Among the works consulted in the preparation of this volume are: "A History of Miranda's Attempt to Effect a Revolution in South America," by one of his officers; Yokum's "History of Texas"; Green's narrative of the Mier Expedition, and Kendall's of that to Santa Fe; Henri de la Madelaine's "Life of Raoussett-Boulbon"; Wells' account of Walker's expeditions to Sonora and Nicaragua; Walker's "History of the War in Nicaragua"; and the several works relating to the latter country of Squier, Scherzer, Stout, Captain Pim, Chevalier Belly, M. Nicaisse, and many other travellers.

From such sources, as well as from the periodicals and official documents of the day, and from the lips or pens of living comrades in the more recent of those tragedies, have been gathered the facts told in the following pages. It has been no easy task to sift the grains of truth from the mountain of myth, prejudice, and fiction under which the actual deeds of the Filibusters long lay buried.

Forty years ago it would have been well-nigh impossible, in the heated atmosphere of the slavery conflict, to view such a subject with philosophical impartiality. To-day we may study the Filibuster dispassionately, for he belongs to an extinct species. The speculator has supplanted him without perceptibly improving the morality of the world. Even the word "filibuster," transformed to a verb, is degraded to the base uses of politics. It is time to write the history and the epitaph of the brave, lawless, generous anomaly on civilization.

Boston, November, 1900. J. J. R.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

Etymology of the word Filibuster — Norse Adventurers — The Buccaneers  — Miranda — Services under the Directory — First Expedition from the United States — Dr. Jenner and the King of Spain — Miranda's second expedition and death.

The difference between a filibuster and a freebooter is one of ends rather than of means. Some authorities say that the words have a common etymology; but others, including Charlevoix, maintain that the filibuster derived his name from his original occupation, that of a cruiser in a "flibote," or "Vly-boat," first used on the river Vly, in Holland. Yet another writer says that the name was first given to the gallant followers of Dominique de Gourgues, who sailed from Finisterre, or Finibuster, in France, on the famous expedition against Fort Caroline in 1567.

The name, whatever its origin, was long current in the Spanish as "filibustero" before it became adopted into the English. So adopted, it has been used to describe a type of adventurer who occupied a curious place in American history during the decade from 1850 to 1860.

The citizen or subject of any country, who makes war upon a state with which his own is at peace, with intent to overrun and occupy it, not merely for the piratical ends of rapine and plunder, is a filibuster in the true sense of the term. Such act of war is, by the law of nations, a crime against both countries. Its morality, before the meaner court of popular judgment, will rest upon the measure of its success alone. So judged, as all invaders are judged at last, the bold adventurer draws but few prizes in the lottery of fame. Cortez and Houston are among the few successful filibusters of modern times.

In the shadowy chronicles of the Norsemen we find the first trace of that adventurous spirit which, during twelve centuries, gave the dominion of the ocean to the seafaring people of Northern Europe. The bold Vikings who, without chart or compass, sailed over unknown and dangerous seas, crossed the Atlantic and swept the Mediterranean, were the worthy fathers of the Drakes and Ansons of later years. History bespeaks them cruel, rapacious, daring; pirates when, as Wheaton says, the occupation of a pirate was considered not only lawful, but honourable. But they were not wholly destructive. Borrowing a lesson in natural history from their own lemming, they solved the troublesome problem, how to get rid of a surplus population, by sending the superfluous members forth to seek a new field. The lemming eats his way to the sea, in which he finds his grave; but his human imitator more wisely found there a pathway to fortune. They went forth mainly to conquer, incidentally to colonize and settle. Among themselves they were primitive republicans, though harsh tyrants to their vanquished foes. "Who is your king or leader?" asked the herald of King Charles the Simple, before the decisive battle on the banks of the Eure in A.D. 898. "We have no king, no chief, no master; but 'Rolf, the Walker,' leads us in war and on the day of battle," was the proud answer of Rolf's comrades and peers. That this was no idle boast, Rolf's own descendant, King John of England, learned to his sorrow when the sons of the sturdy Norse filibusters met him face to face at Runnymede. The Magna Charta is the written code of that fierce democracy, dreaded alike by its serfs and its kings. The Vikings stand alone as a race of warriors whose hardihood overcame even their native superstition, in leading them to defy the gods themselves. They were sceptics, because they knew not fear. Love was as yet an unknown power in their religion.

The Norsemen were suppressed only by absorption. Owing no fealty to their native land, they took possession of the conquered countries, in which they proved to be the strongest barrier against further aggressions from the dreaded North. But before this degree of safety was gained, all Europe had felt the scourge of the terrible Vikings, who had burned or put in vassalage London, Cologne, Treves, Paris, Tours, and Marseilles; carried their victorious arms to Portugal, Spain, Sicily, and Constantinople; and given dynasties of Norse blood to England, Russia, and France. Rolf married a natural daughter of King Charles, whence came the Norman dukes and the royal line of England. In brief, the Vikings held the western world at their mercy, overturning thrones, founding kingdoms, stabling their horses in the palaces of princes, and upholding on their hireling spears the crown of the fallen Cæsars.

With the rise of the powerful maritime nations of Europe filibusterism slumbered for several centuries. The immortal expedition of Cortez being, in so far as it lacked the sanction of his king, wholly that of a filibuster, needs but passing mention here. Its success has lifted it into the realms of history and made it a household story. Filibusterism was to awake on a new field and lead the van in the long warfare which, in two hemispheres and during three centuries, has followed the meeting of Northman and Southron. England, and also France, looked with jealous eyes upon the grasping policy of Spain in the New World. The fortune of discovery had given to the two former the apparently barren lots of Canada and the British colonies. Spain had drawn the rich prize of El Dorado. Not content with the spoils of Mexico and Peru, she grudged to the hardy hunters of the West Indies their petty trade with her colonies. She claimed the Mississippi. The epitaph of Columbus was read as a veritable bequest by Spanish greed. But avarice over-reached itself. The persecutions heaped upon the "boucaniers" of the West Indies aroused a spirit of opposition, which success fanned into aggressive fires, and which the governments of England and France did nothing to extinguish. The cumbrous galleon with its golden freight was no match for the swift Vly-boat, manned by reckless adventurers in whom the appetite for gold was whetted by the memory of countless wrongs.

From unexpected successes by sea the Buccaneers made bold to attack the rich towns on the Spanish Main, which they held for heavy ransoms, or sacked with all the attendant cruelty of their ancestral Berserkers. Panama, Granada, Gibraltar, every town or fort of note, fell before the resistless buccaneers, until the names of Morgan, Portugues, Dampier, and Lolonois became words of terror to the Spanish colonists. Yet it must be borne in mind that the buccaneers were not pirates. They warred against one enemy, the same which had for years oppressed them and their brethren, while the countries to which they owed allegiance were too weak or too indifferent to protect their distant sons. When the buccaneer degenerated into the mere pirate, none were more prompt than his late comrades to follow up and punish the Ishmaelite. Buccaneer Morgan, knighted and made governor of Jamaica, was the terror of the West India pirates, though the virtue of his motives may fairly be questioned.

To her buccaneers England owes the birth of her great navy, whose first fame was won in the rout of the Spanish Armada. They were buccaneers who first sailed around the world; they founded the East India Company, and were Britain's sword and shield for the defence of her nascent colonies. Neglect and indifference rewarded their deeds, until they had grown strong enough to protect themselves. Spain had her paid servants in the very cabinets of England and France, a policy which she has not forgotten how to employ in other lands and later days.

Because of a growing respect for the law of nations, filibusterism, during the grave changes of the eighteenth century and the lull before the storm of the American revolutions, slumbered once again.

The American revolution meant the people defending its rights; the French revolution meant the people avenging its wrongs. Each was successful; both taught an undying lesson to humanity. Free America, with wise selfishness, aimed to assure and bequeath her liberty; Republican France, with loftier if less practical aims, sought to carry the gospel of freedom to all nations. She failed only when she yielded her dearly won liberty to the seduction of martial glory. Napoleon, the child of the people, became a parricide, and usurped the place of the fallen trinity—Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Among the ardent friends of liberty who rallied around the flag of the Directory was Don Francisco Miranda, a native of Venezuela, of which province his grandfather had been governor. He was well educated, and owned a large private fortune. On account of his revolutionary sentiments he was forced to fly his native country and the military service of Spain, in which he had gained the rank of colonel. The bulk of his property was made forfeit. With what he could save from the wreck he fled to the United States in 1783. He afterwards visited several European countries. The French revolution found him in Russia, whence he at once set out to offer his sword to the Directory. He held a command under Dumourier in the Holland campaign of 1783, in which he won a brave name but no serviceable laurels. The campaign was a failure. Dumourier deserted the cause, and Miranda was arrested and tried for treason. Although undoubtedly innocent, his political intrigues had aroused against him powerful enemies who procured his banishment from France. He removed to England, a country whose ministry he interested in his lifelong scheme for the revolution of his native land. New York was chosen as the point of departure. With bills of exchange on London he bought there the ship Leander, with a formidable armament. On the 2nd of February, 1805, the first filibustering expedition from the United States, consisting of about two hundred men, "some of them gentlemen and persons of good standing in society, though mostly of crooked fortunes," set sail for Venezuela on a crusade of liberty. When eleven days at sea they were brought to by H.B.M. ship Cleopatre, and nineteen of the adventurers were impressed, in the ungracious fashion of the British navy of the period. The Leander was detained, notwithstanding her American clearance, until General Miranda produced some private papers, at sight of which the British captain not only allowed her to proceed unmolested, but also gave her a "protection paper," forbidding all other English cruisers to detain or search her. Apart from the Leander's questionable mission, this remarkable permit to travel on the high seas throws a striking light upon the construction of international law at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Miranda received material aid and comfort from Admiral Cochrane, commanding the British squadron on the West India station, but although his force was swelled by two small vessels, it was, from its first advent on the Spanish Main, a wretched failure. Differences among the invaders, aggravated by the wayward temper of the leader, together with a total apathy or active hostility on the part of the very Venezuelans whom the filibusters had come so far to deliver, brought all their fond hopes to nought. Such of the adventurers as were not captured by the Spaniards surrendered to an English frigate and were carried to the West Indies, whence they made the best of their way home.

Whilst lacking in the heroism and splendid audacity of kindred later crusades, Miranda's expedition was a painful prototype in its ill fortune for subsequent ventures. The inevitable defeat, with its ghastly epilogue of butchery or lingering captivity; the rescue of the wretched survivors by a pitying English or American vessel of war; the world's merciless verdict upon the failure: such has been the dismal tragedy as acted on different stages, from the days of Miranda to that "last appearance" in Santiago de Cuba.

Of the prisoners taken, ten were hanged; some fifty others were condemned to terms of imprisonment varying from eight to ten years. Among the latter was Major Jeremiah Powell, whose father visited Spain in a vain effort to procure his release. Returning, in despair, by way of London, he bethought him of a novel expedient. It was that of getting a letter of introduction to the Spanish monarch from the great Doctor Jenner. Armed with this he returned to Madrid and presented himself before the Court. The student of Spanish, and notably of Spanish-American history, will find few instances of generous or tender instinct in its bloody annals. Let it be written, as a bright line on the dark page of Spanish cruelty, that the appeal of humanity's benefactor was not made in vain. Major Powell was at once set free. The conquest of deadly pestilence was hardly a greater victory than that won over the heart of a merciless despot. Two half-pay officers of the British army, an ex-colonel of the United States service, a chevalier of the Austrian Empire, and several adventurous young men of good families in the United States formed the circle from which Miranda chose his officers. Among the latter was a youth named Smith, grandson of President Adams. It was rumoured that he was among the prisoners taken at Caracas. The Spanish minister at Washington, the Marquis de Casa Yrujo, fancying that he saw a good chance of serving his government, and, at the same time, getting credit for an humane act, wrote to a friend of young Smith's father at New York, offering to interest himself on behalf of the prisoner, who otherwise would probably be condemned to die with his companions. Respect for the exalted character of Mr. Adams, he said, prompted this step, but he must nevertheless stipulate that Colonel Smith should impart to him full and complete information about the plans of Miranda, and a list of the Spanish subjects who were concerned in them. The father, yet ignorant of the fact that his son was not among the unfortunate prisoners, at once replied thanking the noble Marquis for the interest he had shown, but adding with a dignity and fortitude worthy of a Roman: "Do me the favour, my friend, to inform the Marquis, that were I in my son's place I would not comply with his proposals to save my life; and I will not cast so great an indignity on that son, my family, and myself, as to shelter him under the shield of disgrace."

What sympathy, if any, was given to the undertaking by the administration of President Jefferson, it is hard to determine. Miranda always claimed to have been in the confidence of the American Government, as he undoubtedly was in that of Great Britain. It is certain that the people of the United States already looked with brotherly feelings upon the misgoverned peoples of Spanish America. Some of the leaders were tried before the United States courts upon their return, but, defended with burning eloquence by Thomas Addis Emmett, himself an exiled patriot, they were promptly acquitted.

Failing in his attempt to free Venezuela from without, Miranda returned to the country in December, 1810, and was favourably received by the semi-independent colonial government. Obtaining a seat in the republican congress he soon rose to the vice-presidency of that body, and organized a more formidable scheme of revolution. On the 5th of July, 1811, he signed the act of independence, and was appointed commander-in-chief of the forces. On his staff was Simon Bolivar, who was destined to play a more fortunate part than that of his chief in the destinies of South America. For a time Miranda was successful in the field, but reverses were soon followed by treachery, and when, in pursuance of the authority of Congress, he signed the treaty of Victoria, restoring Venezuela to Spanish rule, on July 25, 1812, he was denounced as a traitor by his fellow revolutionists, who, with little consistency, delivered him up to the enemy in whose interest they pretended he had acted. His after fate sufficiently establishes his innocence of treason to the revolutionary cause. The Spaniards sent him a prisoner to Cadiz, where he lingered for four years, dying in a dungeon, with a chain around his neck.

Of all his deeds fame has preserved but one enduring memento, his name, carved with those of the other great soldiers of the Directory, on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

CHAPTER II

Aaron Burr — The McGregor and his kingdom — Mina's expedition and fate — The Alamo massacre — Travis, Bowie, and Crockett — The tragedy of Goliad — Houston and Santa Ana — Victory of San Jacinto — The Santa Fe and Mier expeditions.

While Miranda's ambitious schemes were drawing the notice of the State department towards the seaboard, a more serious filibustering scheme was quietly hatching in another quarter, in the brain of one of the boldest and ablest adventurers known to American history. The imperial crown of the Montezumas was the prize for which an ex-vice-president of the United States risked fame, fortune, everything—and lost! The story of Aaron Burr is a matter of familiar history. His demoralized forces surrendered at Bayou Pierre, on the Mississippi, on January 17, 1807. Acquitted of the charge of treason, for which he was tried, but condemned by the unanimous opinion of his contemporaries, the sober judgment of history must pause before endorsing either verdict. The relations of Spain and the United States were in a hopelessly tangled state. Burr proposed to settle the disputed question of territorial rights by conquering the whole of Spanish North America, a scheme which his countrymen might not have severely rebuked or discouraged; but, unfortunately for his fame, Burr's ambition was personal and selfish. He would conquer, but not for his country's sake—a distinction, even then, sufficient to constitute a grave offence against the sovereign people.

What are now known as the Gulf States—Florida, Louisiana, and Texas—were then held under the colonial sway of Spain. The first and second became absorbed by purchase. Texas, as early as 1812, had begun to invite the notice of the restless filibustering element, but its more immediate importance lay in its convenience as a field of operations for the Mexican revolutionists. Hidalgo and his compatriots unfurled the standard of independence in September, 1810. Their first attempt to enlist outside aid was made six months later, when Bernardo Guttierez de Lara, a native Mexican, was sent as a commissioner to Washington to invoke recognition for the new Republic. His mission failing, Guttierez went to New Orleans and began recruiting adventurers, with such success that he was able in February, 1812, to lead a force of 450 men across the border into Texas.

His success was brilliant from the outset; and, in spite of some serious reverses, he succeeded in making himself master of Leon and Texas. Then came into play the unfailing ally of tyranny, corruption. Alvarez de Toledo, who had been appointed the successor of Guttierez as commissioner to Washington, made use of his position to negotiate with the Spanish minister for the betrayal of his compatriot. Returning to Texas, he incited mutiny among the troops of Guttierez, who deposed their commander and appointed Alvarez to succeed him. Personal ambition, rather than treason to his country, must have been the motive influencing the latter; for when the Royalist general, Arredondo, marched with an overwhelming force against the patriots at San Antonio de Bexar, Alvarez boldly gave him battle. Guttierez, with noble patriotism, fought in the ranks of his late command and did not survive the defeat. His heroic devotion was imitated on the same spot by Barrett Travis, twenty-two years afterwards. The defeat and death of Guttierez occurred on March 15, 1814.

Among the Americans who took service under Guttierez was Augustus W. Magee, of Massachusetts, who laid down his commission as a lieutenant in the United States army to join the filibusters. His fate was peculiar. After several successes he found himself, as he supposed, so beset by Governor Salcedo that he made terms for the surrender of himself and followers and their transportation to the United States. But the men boldly refused to abide by the timid measures of their leader, disavowed the contract, and actually assailed and routed the enemy, who was awaiting their surrender. Magee, overcome with shame at the success of those whom he had proved himself unworthy to lead, blew out his brains on the night of the victory.

Reuben Kemper, of Virginia, was another of the American adventurers of a widely different type. He is described as a man of gigantic proportions, with a voice and a heart to match his stalwart frame, and a profanity that attracted attention even on that Homeric field. As early as 1808 he made an attempt to capture Baton Rouge, and was kidnapped for his pains by the Spaniards, who would have cut short his career summarily but for the intervention of the United States commander at Pointe Coupée. On attaining his liberty, Kemper vowed to devote his life to the extirpation of Spanish rule in America. In 1812 he led an abortive attempt to capture Mobile, but was more successful on receiving from Guttierez the command of six hundred Americans with whom he gained several victories. Dissensions in the patriot ranks at last sent him home in disgust. He afterwards served with distinction under Jackson at New Orleans, and survived to witness the final extinction of Spanish rule on the American continent.

About this time occurred, like a burlesque injected into a tragedy, the extraordinary episode of "Citizen Gregor McGregor", or Sir George McGregor, which is said to have been his legitimate title in his native Scotland, who claimed dominion over Florida, then a Spanish possession. McGregor was the wearer of many titles, among them those of "Brigadier General of the Armies of the United Provinces of New Granada and Venezuela, and General-in-Chief of the armies of the Two Floridas, Commissioned by the Supreme Directors of Mexico and South America, and Cacique of Poyais, the last-named having been conferred by His Majesty George Frederick Augustus, King of the Mosquito Coast." Incidentally he claimed to be chief of the clan Alpin, or Gregor, of Scotland. Mr. Alfred M. Williams, author of the admirable "Life of General Houston," says of The McGregor:

He had taken a part in the South American revolution, and married a woman who was, or professed to be, a sister of Simon Bolivar. Failing to win fortune in South America, "Gen." McGregor sailed away in a small schooner which he had obtained possession of, and appeared in Baltimore in the winter of 1817. There, without attracting any particular attention from the authorities, he enlisted a small number of men for the conquest of Florida, and landed on Amelia Island in June, where he issued a proclamation suitable to his titles of distinction, and promised "to plant the Green Cross of Florida on the proud walls of St. Augustine." Whatever is to be said of the other Filibusters, they were not blatherskites and charlatans, and of this class Gregor McGregor most distinctly was. Failing to gather any recruits to his standard, McGregor was persuaded by one Woodbine, an English adventurer, who figured a good deal in the troubles which led to Jackson's summary execution of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, to sail for New Providence, where a British regiment had recently been disbanded, and where, as in former years, there was abundance of material in the shape of broken men and the waifs and strays of adventure, in the hope of enlisting a force, to be joined by one of 1500 Indians under Woodbine for the conquest of Florida. McGregor sailed for New Providence, but probably impressed with the idea that the conquest of Florida would require something more than a proclamation, determined "to arrange his private affairs," which it will be seen, that he subsequently did to his great advantage. McGregor's Filibuster expedition in Florida did not quite end with the withdrawal of the leader to attend to his private affairs. One Commodore Aury of the Mexican Liberal forces, appeared on the scene with some small vessels and a motley crew of one hundred and fifty men, made up, as usual, of land and water pirates, refugees and adventurers of every shade of color and nationality, and set up a provisional Government, fortified Fernandina and endeavored, without success, to get together a Legislature representing the people of Florida. He was attacked at Fernandina by the miserable, half mulatto, Spanish troops from St. Augustine, and beat them off without much difficulty. But Aury's troubles were more internal than external. Part of the Filibusters were sincerely desirous of driving out the Spaniards and setting up a free Government in Florida, as was Aury himself, but the majority were simply desirous of making Fernandina a smuggling and piratical headquarters, as Barataria Bay was, and an entrepot for landing slave cargoes from Africa. They quarrelled and fought among themselves, and, in the meantime, had made themselves such a pest and nuisance to American commerce, by piracy and wrecking, and by stealing as well as selling slaves, that President Monroe, probably also foreseeing that Florida would soon fall into the lap of the United States, sent a land and naval force to demand the surrender of Fernandina, which was abandoned by the Filibusters early in the winter of 1818 and turned over to the Spanish authorities. But in the meantime Sir Gregor McGregor had conceived the safer and more profitable idea of founding a kingdom by colonization, rather than by conquest. In 1822 he made his appearance in Edinburgh and announced that he had become the proprietor, by a grant from His Majesty, the King of the Mosquitos, of an immense and valuable territory on the banks of the Black river, which possessed all the advantages of the Garden of Eden in the way of climate, soil and natural productiveness, and which only wanted settlers to add thereto the luxuries, with none of the labors, of civilization. This delectable country was named Poyais, and he himself was the Cacique thereof, a title, which, so to speak, reeked with barbaric richness and grandeur. He opened subscription books to the amount of two hundred thousand pounds, the greater proportion of which was actually paid in. In the meantime he transacted business in a regal fashion, occupying a town house in the fashionable quarter, besides a villa in the country, to which he occasionally retired when fatigued by the affairs of State. He appointed a full set of Government officers, including a Lord Chancellor, but himself, it is to be presumed, retaining the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a military staff, clad in gorgeous green uniforms. He also established an order of knighthood, and, like other wise monarchs, had his historiographer and poet. The former produced a book dedicated to His Highness the Cacique of Poyais, entitled "Sketch of the Mosquito Shore, Including the Territory of Poyais; Description of the Country, with Some Information as to its Productions, the Best Mode of Culture, etc.; Chiefly Intended for the Use of Settlers. By Thomas Strangeways, K.G.C., Captain First Native Poyais Infantry, and Aid-de-Camp to His Highness Cacique of Poyais," in which the healthfulness and richness of the country were set forth with all the force of an untrammeled imagination; and the poet, a female relative of the Cacique, produced a popular song entitled "The Poyais Emigrant," in which love and lucre were attractively blended:

"Through smiling vales, 'neath lofty hills,

Through citron groves we'll stray together,

Our star of life will sweetly set,

When blessed in wealth and one another."

"With jewels rare, I'll busk your hair,

The fairest flowers for you I'll gather;

The rose's bloom, its rich perfume,

Is sweet as any Highland heather," etc.

When everything had been concluded, His Royal Highness, the Cacique of Poyais, gave a regal reception to his court and faithful subjects, when they were admitted to the presence of the Cacique and Caciquess, who were seated on a dais, and graciously permitted to kiss their hands. A collation was served, and as this was the only substantial return obtained for their investments, it is to be hoped that they had better appetite than the Kentucky Colonel, who, after an unsuccessful night at the gaming table, was invited to stay and partake of some refreshments, and responded with a vigorous negative, and the query: "Do you suppose I can eat 1100 dollars worth of ham and get even?" A party of unfortunate emigrants actually went out to the kingdom of Poyais, where they found that the King of the Mosquitos did not recognize any grant as having been made to the Cacique; but they were graciously allowed to remain until the pestilential fevers carried off most of them, and the remainder were rescued by a relief party. As for Sir Gregor McGregor, he disappeared permanently from public view, taking with him, it is presumed, the treasure chest of his Government.

Another stormy petrel blown from Europe to Mexican seas was Don Francisco Javier Mina, who managed to compress a world of adventure into his brief life. Born at Idocin in Spain in 1789, he won fame while a mere youth by leading his hardy mountaineers in many a guerrilla fight against the French. In his twenty-first year he had gained the rank of colonel, and was on the high road to preferment when the blind policy of King Ferdinand drove him into rebellion, along with his uncle, the brave General Espoz y Mina. A well-planned scheme of revolution having failed, he fled the country and made his way to England, where he was warmly welcomed. His talents and courage inspired the government of that country, which for reasons of its own wished to foment insurrection in Spanish America, to equip him for a renewal of warfare against Ferdinand on his transatlantic territory. He arrived in the United States well supplied with money and letters to the friends of the Mexican revolutionists, and on April 15, 1817, he landed a force of 270 men from New Orleans at Soto la Marina. Defeating a superior force of Royalists in several engagements, he made a junction with the revolutionary army, and speedily drove the enemy out of the Northern provinces.

It was a far harder task, however, to overcome the jealousy and incompetence of Torres, then in chief command; and Mina, betrayed by his allies, fell into the hands of Viceroy Apodaca, who had him immediately executed, with twenty-five of his followers, on November 11, 1817. Mina was but twenty-eight years old when he ended his career, but he had given proofs of rare worth as a soldier and a patriot.

Among the Americans who shared his fortunes was Colonel Perry, of New Orleans. Despairing of success, as soon as he discovered the worthlessness of the native leaders, he abruptly withdrew from the army and undertook, with only fifty followers, to cut his way back to the United States by land. In this attempt they partially succeeded, but were soon overtaken and surrounded by an overwhelming force. Perry rejected all demands to surrender until, the last of his band having fallen by his side, he put a pistol to his head and blew out his brains.

When Mexico at last won her freedom, her most northerly state, Texas, held an anomalous position. A large proportion of its people was made up of Americans who had borne their share in the battle for liberty. By birth and associations they were more closely allied with their Northern than with their Southern neighbours. It did not take them long to learn that Mexico, in changing her government had not changed her nature. The intolerance of the new rulers differed little from that of the old, while civil government was far less stable under the Republic than it had been while swayed by the Spaniard.

Upon the declaration of Texan independence in September, 1835, General Cos marched a large army into the rebellious state, determined to drive the rash intruders out of the country. In the first engagement, at Gonzales, the Texans routed their foes, and General Cos was forced to take refuge behind the walls of the Alamo, in San Antonio de Bexar. But the Texan blood was now fairly up, and General Burlison, with only 216 men, laid siege to the fortress. The garrison numbered 1,700, but in spite of the fearful odds, the Texans stormed the place and sent General Cos under parole to his astonished brother-in-law, the redoubtable Santa Ana. Colonel James Bowie, who had just defeated another large Mexican force, at the Mission Concepcion, joined Colonel Travis at the Alamo.

Bowie was a Georgian, born in Burke County, about 1790. Not much is known of his career until the year 1827, when he became famous throughout the Southwest by his participation in a "difficulty" between two citizens of Natchez, Mississippi. Several friends of both combatants assisted at the duel and a general fight was the natural and welcome result. During the melée, Bowie was wounded, but killed one of his antagonists with a knife which a blacksmith had made for him out of a large file or rasp. The fame of the new weapon spread under the name of the "Bowie Knife", which still holds a high place in the affections of those who love close fighting. Oliver Wendell Holmes drily compares it to the short sword of the ancient Romans and says that "nations which shorten their weapons lengthen their boundaries". Bowie fought at San Saba in 1831 and at Nacogdoches and Concepcion in 1835 and commanded as Colonel at Grass Fight, on Oct. 25, 1835. There is no doubt that Bowie was one of the bravest and coolest men that ever lived, even in Texas. To the Alamo presently also came "Davy" Crockett, of Tennessee, hunter, soldier, Congressman, unique in history.

David Crockett was the fifth son of John Crockett, an Irish soldier of the Revolutionary War. He was born on August 17, 1786, at the mouth of Limestone on the Nolachuky River, Tennessee. The time and place were suitable for the development of a hardy character. The father and mother of John Crockett were murdered by the Creek Indians, a brother was wounded and another captured and held by the savages for seventeen years. Young "Davy" had slender opportunities of obtaining an education. Such as they were he sedulously avoided them. He was sent to school at the age of twelve, but spent only four days there, playing "hookey" until discovered by his father who did not neglect Solomon's advice. The youth thereupon ran away from home and had the usual unromantic experience attending such an escapade. He found employment with waggoners, farmers and others, some of whom cheated him and others paid him but scantily. The young prodigal returned home when he was fifteen years old and justified his forgiving welcome by working a whole year to pay off some of his father's debts. Then of his own accord and at his own expense he went to school for six months, learning to read a little, to write less and to master some of the first three rules of arithmetic. With that his book education was completed. Not so, however, his more practical tuition. He became a thorough woodsman, a mighty hunter and the crack rifle shot of the neighborhood. Then, at the mature age of eighteen, he determined to get married; the which he did by running away with a pretty Irish girl whose parents had the bad taste to object to him as a son-in-law. Then, as he says in his autobiography, "having gotten my wife, I thought I was completely made up, and needed nothing more in the whole world. But I soon found this was all a mistake—for now having a wife, I wanted everything else; and, worse than all, I had nothing to give for it."

However, the stern parents became reconciled to the situation; his wife was a true helpmeet and their married life began happily. But the country was too thickly populated, in Crockett's opinion, and so he moved further into the wilderness.

The Creek War broke out shortly afterwards and he served gallantly in that and in the Florida war under General Jackson, as also in the brilliant campaign of that General against the British, culminating in the victory of New Orleans. Politics next occupied his attention and he was elected first a magistrate, next a member of the State legislature and then to the national Congress, in which last he served three terms. Being defeated in his next attempt at re-election, he determined to abandon the ungrateful field of politics, and calling his late constituents together told them in language more forcible than elegant that they might all go to a warmer country and he would go to Texas. In this resolve he believed that he was following his own famous advice: "Be sure you're right, then go ahead."

Colonel Barrett Travis had 144 men with him in the Alamo when Santa Ana and 4,000 Mexicans sat down before it, demanding an unconditional surrender, on February 23, 1836. Cos, heedless of his parole, was with the besiegers. Travis answered with a cannon shot, and the enemy hoisted the red flag, signifying "no quarter." In no spirit of bravado, but with a sincerity which the event only too fully confirmed, the Texan commander issued the following proclamation:—

"To the People of Texas and all Americans in the World.

"Commandancy of the Alamo, Bexar,

"February 24, 1836.

"Fellow Citizens and Compatriots,—I am besieged by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Ana. I have sustained a continual bombardment and cannonade for twenty-four hours and have not lost a man. The enemy have demanded a surrender at discretion; otherwise the garrison is to be put to the sword if the fort is taken. I have answered the summons with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then I call on you in the name of liberty, patriotism, and everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid with all despatch. The enemy are receiving reinforcements daily, and will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. Though this call may be neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible, and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honour and that of his country. Victory or death!

"(Signed)

"W. Barrett Travis,
"Lieut.-Col. Com't."

Houston, to whom Travis addressed an urgent call for reinforcements, could do nothing. On the 3rd of March, with death staring the little garrison in the face, Travis sent a despatch to the Revolutionary committee, calmly stating his position, reiterating his determination never to surrender, and dwelling with almost impersonal interest on the beneficial effect to follow such determined resistance as he and his men were making. "I will do the best I can under the circumstances," he says, "and I feel confident that the determined valour and desperate courage heretofore evinced by my men will not fail them in the last struggle; and although they may be sacrificed to the vengeance of a Gothic enemy, the victory will cost the enemy so dear that it will be worse for him than a defeat."

Day by day the toils were drawn closer around the doomed walls. Day by day the little garrison was thinned by wounds and sickness. Vainly they gazed northward across the plain for the invoked aid. The hungry eye beheld only a long train of Mexican recruits hastening like vultures to the feast of blood. Once they were gladdened by the sight of a little band of countrymen spurring towards the walls. But they were no forerunners of a relieving army. Thirty-two gallant Texans threw themselves into the fort, cutting their way through the besiegers, simply and solely that they might fight with their comrades; that they might be found, living or dead, by the side of David Crockett and Barrett Travis. Each morning a dwindling garrison answered to the roll-call, and the thin ranks were stretched a little wider apart along the crumbling ramparts which it had needed thrice their numbers to defend. They husbanded their scanty stores. They never wasted a shot. During that long and terrible fortnight it is said that nearly ten victims fell to each American rifle. With a thousand of his men shot down, and trembling in baffled wrath, Santa Ana on the fourteenth day, ordered another general assault. His officers drove their men to the breach at the sword's point.

When the smoke of battle had rolled away there was silence in the Alamo. The dead and dying strewed the ground. Santa Ana entered the fort. On the rampart, dead at his post, lay the commander, Travis, shot through the head. Beside him was the body of a Mexican officer, pierced to the heart by the sword still clutched in the dead hero's hand. They found Bowie in his own room. He was sick in bed when they broke into it, but his trusty rifle was with him, and four Mexicans died before he was reached. A fifth fell across his dead body, pierced through and through by the terrible knife. At the door of the magazine they shot Evans, ere he could touch a match and wreak a Samson vengeance on the foe.

Santa Ana stepped into the court-yard. There were six prisoners. His orders were that none should be taken. Nevertheless, David Crockett and five others had stoutly resisted, until his clubbed rifle broken in his sinewy hands, the dauntless backwoodsman listened to the promise of quarter. Santa Ana paused a moment before his unmoved captives. It was but for a moment. The next his hand sought the hilt of his sword. Crockett, divining his purpose, sprang at the traitor, but he was too late; a dozen blades had flashed at the sign and the hapless prisoners fell dead, the last of all the garrison.

These men of the Alamo were volunteers, simple citizens, bound by no tie save that of fealty to cause and comrades. Unsung of poet, all but unnamed in history, the brave men of the Alamo went to their certain death, with a sublime fortitude, beside which the obedient immolation of Balaklava's Six Hundred is but the triumph of disciplined machines. A monument raised to their memory bears the magnificent inscription:—

"Thermopylæ had its messenger of defeat; the Alamo had none."

It needs more than judicial impartiality to question the right of the Texan revolution while telling the story of the Alamo. Right and wrong are barred from consideration in recalling the tragedy of Goliad. Colonel Fannin and 330 of his men, who had surrendered to Santa Ana as prisoners of war, under a solemn promise that they should be returned to the United States, were marched out of the fort, on the morning of Palm Sunday, March 27, 1836, and, without a moment's warning, fired upon and murdered in cold blood. The outlaws to whom this fearful penalty was dealt out, without even the mockery of a Spanish trial, were all young men or lads, "the oldest not over thirty years of age." The world, freely as its soil is saturated with human blood, stood aghast at this horrible slaughter. Texas trembled at the Mexican's vengeance. Houston alone, husbanding his scanty means, animating his raw levies, working, planning, providing for all, laid his trap with such shrewd forethought, that in less than two months he had sprung it upon Santa Ana and all his army, and on the banks of the San Jacinto, dictated terms of peace to his captive, the butcher of the Alamo and Goliad. The victory was unstained by a single act of revenge. Thenceforth the world knew that Texas was free. The men who could use success with such forbearance were men worthy of self-government.

Texas striving for independence was to the nations of the world an object of keener interest than Texas sending her heroic filibusters to nameless graves. Lord Palmerston, anticipating with literal exactness the policy of a later administration dealing with Central America, threatened to send a ship of war to Texas "to demand payment of certain claims against the republic." The United States, with a similar foreshadowing of its future policy, at once took measures to insure the independence of Texas against all European meddlers. As usual, the people were in advance of their government, and Texas became a state of the American union, Mexico's attempt to hold it costing her the fairest part of her domain.

Before this happy end was reached, more than one bloody tragedy had been added to the gloomy history of Texas. In June, 1841, General McLeod led from Austin a party of 320 men, bound for Santa Fe, New Mexico, upon the ostensibly peaceful mission of opening up trade with that place. His real aim was to foment insurrection against the Mexican Government and annex the territory to Texas. After a long and painful journey through woods and desert, being attacked by Indians, and lost on the then mysterious waste of the "Llanos Estacados," the expedition reached the frontier in scattered parties which were promptly captured by Governor Armijo. It was not, however, until after they had given up their arms, under the false representations of a traitorous comrade and the promise of friendly treatment from Armijo, that they found out how grievous had been their error in trusting to the word of the Mexican. The whole party, with the exception of three or four who had been put to death in pure wantonness, were sent under a strong guard to the city of Mexico, making the long and painful journey on foot, exposed to the grossest outrages from their brutal guard. Many died on the way, and the survivors were thrown into prison, where they lingered for months, until the miserable remnant were at last set free at the motion of the British and American ministers.

Liberty was granted at the same time to the survivors of the Mier Expedition—an ill-starred band who, in December, 1842, had crossed the Rio Grande in pursuit of Mexican raiders. Colonel William Fisher headed the party, numbering about five hundred, their general, Somerville, having declined to lead them over the border. At the town of Mier they met and repulsed over two thousand Mexicans under General Ampudia, but their leader was wounded in the fight, and, against the protests of his chief officers, agreed to a conditional surrender. The terms, of course, were broken by the victor, and the unfortunate prisoners were hurried into the interior and buried in dungeons with the lowest convicts. Captain Ewin Cameron, one of the boldest in the band, foreseeing the fate before them, organized an attack on the guard before reaching their prison. They overpowered their armed escort, and made their way to the mountains, whence a few managed to reach Texas, but the greater part were recaptured, including their courageous leader. Santa Ana ordered them to be decimated. Cameron was lucky enough to draw a white bean in the fatal lottery, but it did not avail him. He was shot the next day. Few men would be found willing to increase the risks against them in such a terrible game of hazard; but there was one, a youth named George Bibb Crittenden, who, drawing a white bean, gave it to a comrade, with the self-sacrificing words, "You have a wife and children; I haven't, and I can afford to risk another chance." He did so, and fortunately again drew a safe lot. Crittenden survived to participate gallantly in the Mexican War, and attained the rank of brigadier-general on the Southern side in the Civil War. He was a son of the Kentucky statesman, John J. Crittenden.

The prisoners were scattered amongst various strongholds, where many sank under disease, starvation, and cruelty. The survivors when freed were turned adrift, penniless, to make the best of their way home to the United States. General Thomas J. Green was one of those who escaped by tunnelling the walls of the castle of Perote; the story of which exploit, with his subsequent adventures, he has told in a book little known but of vast interest.

It needs a Scott to tell to the world the story of our border romance, though no fiction ever surpassed the thrilling facts which were then of almost daily occurrence. Fame is a curious gift of the gods. Colonel Crockett, the daring soldier, is all but forgotten, while the whimsical, semi-fabulous "Davy" Crockett, hero of a hundred wild stories, seems likely to live for ever. Few remember how heroically he "went ahead," to the last extremity, after first making sure of what was "right" and fit in a patriot. Knightly scutcheon never bore a nobler device than that of the simple backwoodsman, nor lived there ever a preux chevalier who set a higher value upon his plighted word.

There were brave men, too, before Agamemnon. Mexier and Perry and Nolan, names well known on the border, lived and fought, and died, alas in vain, before the adopted son of an Indian, sturdy Sam Houston, crowned the long struggle with victory. Filibusters all, if you will, but every one a man, in an age when manliness is none too highly prized, and a country which is belied as the chosen home of dollar worshippers merely.

CHAPTER III

The Lopez Expedition — Landing at Cardenas — Pickett's Fight — An Exciting Chase — Last Expedition — Execution of Lopez and Crittenden.

Filibusterism under that name, however, was unknown to the people of the United States, until the famous descents of Lopez upon Cuba in 1850 and 1851. Narciso Lopez was a countryman of Miranda, and, like him, an officer in the Spanish service. Born at Caracas in 1799, he entered the royal army at an early age, attained the rank of colonel in his twenty-first year, and distinguished himself so well in the first Carlist war that he was promoted to the rank of major-general, and made Governor of Valencia. He went to Cuba in 1843 with Governor-General Valdes, who took him into high favour, and loaded him with honours. But O'Donnell, the successor of Valdes, did not continue the vice-regal favours, and Lopez consequently retired to private life, and ere long was discovered to be conspiring against the Government. He fled to the United States, where he found hundreds of adventurous spirits ready and eager for any undertaking that bade fair to be spiced with danger.

His first attempt at invasion, in August, 1849, was checked at the outset by President Taylor, whose marshals captured the whole expedition as it was on the point of departure from New York. Nothing daunted by this mishap, Lopez travelled throughout the Southern and South-Western States, secretly enlisting men and making provision for their transportation to Cuba. At New Orleans he chartered a steamer and two barks and assembled his forces. From the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi and the Gulf States they came, a hardy band of adventurers, three-fourths of whom had served in the Mexican War, the officers being men of known courage and ability. Colonel Theodore O'Hara commanded the first detachment, numbering 250, which sailed on the bark Georgiana, on the 25th of April, 1850, under orders to rendezvous at the island of Mujeres. Their colonel had won an honourable fame in the Mexican War and was not without greater distinction in the world of letters. He wrote the "Bivouac of the Dead," a lyric which will live at least as long as the memory of those whom it celebrated. Three weeks after their departure they were joined at the island of Contoy (for the Georgiana had not been able to make the rendezvous) by the steamer Creole, carrying Lopez and his fortunes and 450 followers. The whole command was then transferred to the Creole and sailed away for the shores of Cuba.

The little army was reviewed by their general, who made them a stirring harangue in Spanish (for he did not speak the tongue of his motley followers) promising them the co-operation of the Cubans the moment they should unfurl the Lone Star flag on the island, and the undying gratitude of a liberated people. More substantial rewards were also held out, in a bounty of four thousand dollars to every private soldier at the end of the first year's service, or sooner if the revolution should succeed within that time. In the meanwhile they were to receive the same pay, according to rank, as that of the army of the United States. It is not extravagant to say that hardly a man in the expedition gave a second thought to the money advantages contingent on success. The reckless dare-devils were content to enjoy a vagabond campaign seasoned with danger and hard fighting, while those of higher aims thirsted for the fame of Liberators. Among the men of education and lofty sentiments were Colonels O'Hara and John T. Pickett; the latter a bold and fertile organizer, who enjoyed the distinction of having a reward of 25,000 dollars offered for his head by the Captain-General of Cuba. The Adjutant-General, Gonzales, was a native Cuban, who had forsaken a promising career in the university to join the revolutionists. Many there were, too, of whom we shall hear again in Central America—Wheat, Titus, Kewen, Allen, and others.

Matanzas had been chosen as the first point of attack, but as they rightly judged that the Spaniards had been advised of their movements, it was decided to land at Cardenas, whither the Creole's bow was pointed, every eye turning to catch the first sight of the promised land. They entered the harbour about midnight, unchallenged by the over-confident enemy. So little were they expected by the good people of Cardenas, that not a boatman nor wharf watchman could be seen to take a line ashore, and the steamer lay a few yards from the pier until the first officer, Fayssoux, leaped overboard with a rope between his teeth and made her fast.

Pickett, upon landing, marched rapidly with fifty men of the Kentucky battalion through the city and seized the station of the railroad which connected Cardenas and Matanzas. The main body, consisting of four companies, formed upon the pier and marched towards the plaza, intending to surprise the garrison. Before reaching the plaza they were challenged and fired upon by a patrol. Instantly the alarm was sounded in the garrison, and volleys of musketry began to play about the ears of the invaders. Colonel O'Hara was wounded at the first discharge, but his men fought with cool bravery under the leadership of Lopez, who was constantly in the foremost rank, seeking to make himself known to the defenders. He was sure that upon recognizing him they would at once fraternize with the invaders. But the garrison made a stubborn resistance until their quarters were carried by assault, when they threw down their arms and shouted "Vivas!" for Lopez and Liberty. The governor, whose house was opposite the barracks, held out until it was in flames, when he surrendered, and the filibusters, after a three hours' battle, had won Cardenas.

Now was the time for the legions of revolutionists to fall in beside their liberators, and Lopez issued a strong appeal for volunteers. Not one native responded! Whether from apathy or cowardice, they showed no desire to risk their lives in the cause of liberty. The situation was becoming grave. Already the alarm had gone forth and the lancers of the enemy were beginning to appear in formidable numbers in the streets. Lopez saw that the capture of Cardenas was a barren victory. To carry out his intention of proceeding by rail to Matanzas in the face of the whole Spanish army, and without a single native adherent to welcome his appearance, would have been madness. Reluctantly he gave orders to embark, and recalled the detachment which had been guarding the railroad. The enemy seeing them retreat grew bolder, and made several determined efforts to prevent the embarkation, but the filibusters threw up a barricade of empty hogsheads and easily repelled the attack. After a final attempt to cut off the detachment from the railroad, in which Pickett drove them back with heavy loss, they offered no further opposition to the retreat. Cardenas had been won and lost within twelve hours. The Creole steamed out of the harbour at nine o'clock in the evening, but stuck fast on a sand-bank and lay there for five hours, until sufficiently lightened of her cargo to float again.

A council of war was held, and it was declared that no further attempts at a landing on the island were practicable, owing to the indecision of the native population. Lopez strove in vain to gainsay this determination, and even begged to be put ashore alone, or with the thirty Spanish soldiers who had just joined his cause. His mad request being refused he resigned command, and the steamer was headed for Key West, coming to anchor at nightfall within forty miles of that port.

In the meantime, the authorities of Cuba had despatched a war steamer in search of the filibusters, and offered a reward of 50,000 dollars for the capture of Lopez. The Pizarro sped into Key West while the Creole was lying at anchor, and set out again in quest of her at daybreak. The people of the town were apprised of her mission and thronged the piers and hills to behold the issue. Soon they descried on the horizon the smoke of a steamer, which, as it drew near, was recognized as the Creole. Not far in her wake they also saw the huge Pizarro throwing out volumes of smoke and rapidly closing with her prey. As the pursued steamer approached the coast it was seen that her fuel was giving out, while the Pizarro was crowding on every pound of steam that her boilers could carry. A few minutes more and the guns of the Spaniard would have opened upon the devoted vessel, but at the critical moment the funnel of the Creole began to belch forth clouds of smoke and her wheels to revolve as the wheels of a steamboat can when her Mississippi river captain begins to levy contributions on his cargo. The filibusters rolled barrels of bacon into the furnace-room, tore up the dry wood-work of the boat, and pulled the red shirts off their backs to feed the flames. Better a magnificent explosion and sudden death than capture and torture by the merciless Spaniard. The device succeeded. The Creole gallantly rounded the point, a few hundred yards ahead of her pursuer, and dropped anchor under the guns of Key West as the Pizarro, without even saluting the fort, came ploughing behind her and halted a few rods away, with port-holes open and broadsides grinning like the fangs of a bloodhound baulked of his prey. Her gunners stood by their pieces, match in hand, and ready at a word to blow the Creole to destruction. For a time it looked as though the word would be spoken; but, if such was the Spaniard's desire, he prudently forbore its gratification when he saw the United States officers take possession of the steamer, and a grim-looking array of filibusters swarm in the embrasures of the fort and sight the huge guns which were trained upon his deck.

Lopez and his followers made the best of their way from Key West; they to their homes and he to the custody of a United States marshal. The expedition had suffered a loss of fourteen killed and thirty wounded. Among the killed was their chaplain! The list of the enemy's loss was not officially published, but is supposed to have reached a hundred killed and as many wounded. Lopez was tried for his violation of the neutrality laws, but escaped conviction, and immediately set about preparing another expedition. His faith in the devotion of his American friends was better founded than the reliance which he placed on the promises of his native adherents.

In the following year, Aug. 12, 1851, he landed a force of 450 men at Bahia Honda, with the greater part of which he marched into the country, where he had been led to expect a general uprising the moment he should appear among the Creoles. Colonel W. S. Crittenden, a brave young soldier of the Mexican War, remained with the smaller body, awaiting reinforcements. But Lopez, as usual, had misjudged the spirit of his countrymen, who were not yet ripe for revolt. With his little band of 323 men he repulsed 1,300 of the enemy, killing their general, Enna; but being forced to retreat into the interior, his forces dwindled away and the leader was at last captured and carried in chains to Havana. Fifty of his followers were shot at once. Lopez was strangled by the garrote on Sept. 1st. It pleased his enemies to add this pang of an ignominious death. The old hero met it without flinching. Spain had honoured him for facing death upon many a bloody field, and she could not dishonour him while dying for the adopted country which was not worthy of his love.

Meanwhile Crittenden and his detachment had been captured at sea and conveyed to Havana, where they were allowed the merest mockery of a trial. But one verdict was possible, where sentence had been already passed. Only a few hours elapsed between the trial and execution. The crowds of Havanese who flocked to the show, as to a national bull-baiting, saw them die with stoical fortitude. They saw Crittenden, with but twenty-eight years of life behind him, stand and face death with unflinching mien. They bade him kneel in the customary attitude, with his back to the firing party. "An American kneels only to his God," he answered, and so met his death.

CHAPTER IV

The Count Raoussett-Boulbon — A father "de la vieille roche" — Raoussett's contract to garrison Sonora — Proclamations and pronunciamientos —  Battle of Hermosillo — Negotiations with Santa Ana — Expedition to Guaymas — Engagement and defeat — Last words of a noble adventurer —  Death of the Count.

To Mexico the gift of liberty was as the boon of eternal life to the wandering Jew. Freed from the exactions of a despotic master, absolved by the bounty of nature from the stern, ceaseless struggle for physical life, stirred no longer by the warlike spirit of the conquerors, the Latin races in America seemed for a time to have fallen into a condition of hopeless lethargy.

To redeem this fair land, with its boundless mineral and agricultural wealth, from the hands of its slothful owners, was a dream which fired the ambition and, it may be added, the cupidity of many daring minds. With the decline and final overthrow of Spanish power the richest mines of Northern Mexico were abandoned for lack of strength to repel the never-subdued and ever-hostile Indian tribes. Mexico was weak, torn by strife, and disorganized. In her feeble hands the mines of Sonora and Arizona were literally "treasure hoarded in the ground."

There was in California, in 1852, a man of high birth and humble calling, a day labourer, with the proudest French ancestral blood in his veins—a soldier of Algiers, a count by birth and rank. Raousset-Boulbon, or, to give him his full name and title, Count Gaston Raoulx de Raousset-Boulbon, was a prodigal. He had squandered his substance in the riotous living of Paris and come to the land of gold to mend his fortunes. Unhappily for his peaceful aspirations, California, in 1852, offered a poor field to the man whose only gifts were education, the use of arms, nobility of soul, and a patrician title. Such endowments were neither rare nor deemed precious in that primitive community. The poet has sung, and the novelist painted, the wild contrasts of that marvellous period, but no flight of fancy could exaggerate the picture. San Francisco, the sea-port, was a truly cosmopolitan city. There were two French newspapers published daily, so great were the attractions of El Dorado to the rarely migrating Gaul. Among the hundreds of his countrymen who, like himself, had failed to find a fortune in the golden state, Gaston judged that he might easily enroll a band of adventurers for any bold undertaking. He was not mistaken when the occasion offered itself. In the indescribable human medley of California the Count Raousset-Boulbon cannot be said to have been out of place. Nobody, nothing was that. He was discontented with a career hitherto fruitful only in misfortune.

He was the son of an émigré of the old stamp, a self-willed fantastic old man, who carried the sternest rules of obedience into the most trifling domestic affairs, and might have adopted the motto, "L'état, c'est moi." His scheme of government may be inferred from a brief anecdote recounted by the biographer of Gaston. The latter, returning from Paris, appeared at home with two things distasteful to his sire—a beard and a cigar. "Madam," said the father to his wife, the stepmother of Gaston, "it would give me pain to argue with my son, and I could not brook opposition. The cigar I can overlook; but pray tell him that it pleases me not to see one of his age wear a beard like a 'moujik,' and that I shall be obliged to request its sacrifice." Gaston grudgingly obeyed the royal edict, for which he was formally thanked. Some days after the sire spoke again, "Madam, I authorize you to say to my son that he may let his beard grow again. Upon second thoughts I do not find it unbecoming." Compliance followed as before; but the tardy efforts of nature did not satisfy the old count, who gravely decided that "a beard does not become Gaston. Madam, I beg you to tell him once more that he must shave." Gaston, instead of obeying, packed his portmanteau and fled to Paris, and was forthwith disowned by his irate parent.

His life in Paris was that of a Bohemian, until the death of his father, in 1845, enabled him to carry out a dear ambition, that of founding a colony in Algiers; but the revolution of 1848 recalled him to France and to a political career. He conducted a newspaper, La Liberté, and was twice elected to the Assembly. Beaten in a third candidacy he forsook politics in disgust, and turned his eyes towards California. Paris in 1850 counted as many as twenty Californian societies for organized emigration. Gaston, restless, weary, and yet fired with the longing for some great deed, was almost penniless when, in his thirty-second year, he took a third-class passage for California, along with a dozen compatriots of various ranks.

Reaching the wondrous city, which his biographer aptly calls "the modern Babel, with the confusion of tongues," Gaston, with a manliness little to be expected in one of his training, betook himself to the stern duty of earning a livelihood by hard labour. He tried fishing, which barely earned him bread. As a lighterman he did better, until the building of a wharf ruined his business. A speculative enterprise for importing cattle from Lower California proved "more picturesque than profitable." At this juncture when, in his own words, "a gendarme would have charged on me at full gallop," so wretched was his appearance, his friend, M. Dillon, the French Consul at San Francisco, procured him letters of introduction to Señor Arista, President of Mexico, and Gaston repaired to the capital of that country, full of enthusiasm. The banking-house of Jecker, Torre and Co. acting as agents of the Government, signed a contract with Gaston, whereby the latter pledged himself to land at Guaymas, in Lower California, a company of five hundred French immigrants, armed and equipped for military duty, ostensibly and immediately for the protection of the Restauradora Mining Company against the incursions of the Arizona Indians, but really intended to serve as the nucleus of an extensive French colony, to be used as a barrier against the supposed encroachments of their American neighbours. Already the expansion of the United States in the direction of Mexico and the Pacific coast had aroused the jealousy of Europe. There is no doubt that Gaston's scheme for the protection of Mexico, befriended as it was by the representative of France in California and the French minister in Mexico, M. Levasseur, was not without substantial aid from the home government. The banker Jecker played a leading part, years afterwards, in the ill-starred attempt of Napoleon III. to found an empire in Mexico.

As a present reward for his services in protecting the Arizona mines, Gaston was to have a share in all their profits. He was yet to learn, as the royal Maximilian did later, that a bargain needs more than two parties to ensure its fulfilment, in Mexico. Arista was President of Mexico, but Governor Blanco ruled in Arizona. Arizona is a state of boundless mineral wealth, and little else. "Ruins of houses, ruins of churches, ruins of towns, and, above all, ruins of crouching men and of weeping women," is Gaston's graphic summary of Sonora and Arizona as he found them in 1852. Two hundred and sixty gallant Frenchmen landed at Guaymas on the 1st of June, and were warmly hailed as deliverers by the fickle populace. Governor Blanco, however, showed himself strangely lukewarm towards his new allies, whom he peremptorily forbade to leave Guaymas. The reason of his opposition was simple. He was interested in a rival company to the Restauradora. Vexatious delays followed. The recruits lost heart and hope. Gaston, chafing at the delay, had gone forward to Hermosillo, whither he brought his followers, after vainly awaiting the governor's leave to set out for Arizona. Blanco thereupon decided to offer these alternatives: "The Frenchmen shall renounce their nationality, or I shall compel them to leave the country." Gaston protested vainly in a letter to the French minister, and kept on his march to Arispe. He wrote also to Governor Blanco, who temporized and offered new conditions, denationalization of the company, their reduction to a maximum force of fifty, or a guaranty that they should not violate an ancient Mexican law forbidding foreigners to own real estate, mines, or other such property. These propositions were laid before the company by Gaston, who, at the same time, offered the means of departure to any who wished to avail themselves of them. Not a man was found willing to accept the opportunity. Gaston then, in a firm but temperate note, declined to accede to Blanco's terms, claiming for himself and his followers the fulfilment of their contract with the government of Mexico. Blanco threatened to treat the strangers as pirates and outlaws. To some of them he made secret offers of rich rewards if they would betray their comrades.

In these straits, harassed also by the savage Apaches, Gaston took up the line of march back to Hermosillo. On the 30th of September they encamped at the pueblo of La Madelaine. Here, as elsewhere in Mexico, the national gallantry of the adventurers, "half-heroes, half-bandits," as they were, won them immense favour with the fair Sonoriennes, though it is doubtful if the latter's graver brethren took so kind a view of "fenêtres escaladeés, des maris infortunés, des duels, des processions, des bals, des representations theatrales," and the other exploits faithfully chronicled by the light-hearted chief.

A sterner welcome met them in another summons from Blanco: "Surrender your arms, or prepare to be treated as outlaws." Gaston, feeling that either choice promised little of mercy, proceeded to force the issue at once by hastening his march upon Hermosillo. By striking there a decisive blow he expected to rally around his standard the always numerous body of disaffected citizens, and so prepare the way for the independence of Sonora. Despatching an emissary to California for recruits, he set out, on the 6th of October, by the southerly road for Hermosillo. Fifty leagues from that city Blanco lay at Arispe, uncertain of his enemy's plans. Gaston's force numbered two hundred and fifty-three men, including forty-two horsemen and twenty-six marine veterans detailed to serve the four small cannon of the little army. Among them were many old soldiers of Africa and barricade veterans of Paris. Four or five months of sojourn in the Arizona deserts had not improved their looks. But with a good-natured patience truly French they made light of their troubles, jested at their sorry attire, and when their boots gave out made sandals of hides, or trudged along barefoot. In such guise and manner they marched to Hermosillo, but a few hours too late, for Blanco had distanced them by forced journeys, and thrown a body of twelve hundred men into the town. Gaston, without waiting to rest his weary followers, gave orders to attack. In less than an hour he was master of the place, and General Blanco was flying with the remnant of his command to Ures. Yet the latter could better spare his two hundred killed and wounded than the little band of adventurers could afford their loss of forty-two. To the filibuster there are no reserves.

But a greater calamity awaited the expedition. Gaston was stricken down with sickness in the hour of victory, and, feeling the insecurity of his position, gave reluctant orders to march to Guaymas. His malady, dysentery, grew worse as they advanced. Within three leagues of Guaymas they halted at the rancho Jesus Maria. Envoys from Blanco met them there and treated for a parley between the two commanders, of which nothing came but a short-lived truce. That evening Gaston was delirious, nor were suspicions of poison wanting. The French camp became panic-stricken, so that M. Calvo, Vice-Consul of France at Guaymas, and himself a partner in Blanco's rival mining company, easily persuaded the subordinates to sign a treaty resigning the contract and agreeing to leave the country. Gaston awoke from a three-weeks' stupor to find himself without an army. He was permitted to leave the country, and returned to San Francisco with his ambition only whetted by his late trials.

There was to be no mistaking the nature of his future operations. The next expedition should be made up solely of Frenchmen and soldiers, its avowed end the independence of Sonora. "These men shall be fully warned that they go to Sonora to fight; that their fortunes rest on the points of their bayonets; that if they be conquered they shall infallibly perish as pirates; that it is for them a matter of victory or death."

His friend, President Arista, had resigned his office, in the face of civil war, on the 6th of January, 1853. Mexico was in worse than its normal state of anarchy. A dictatorship was proclaimed, and Santa Ana recalled to govern the wretched country. One of his first acts was to send for De Boulbon, who, upon promise of a safe conduct, visited the capital.

The interview was dramatic between the old, crafty, and cold-blooded butcher of the Alamo, and the young, romantic, hot-headed conqueror of Hermosillo. The latter was in the prime of manhood, of medium size, well-proportioned and graceful, erect, broad-browed, with open, frank eyes, and fair hair and beard. Santa Ana, versed in the thousand wiles of Mexican diplomacy, and rightly appreciating the skilled courage of his guest, would have enlisted his talents in the dictator's personal service. Gaston steadily besought a confirmation of the original contract. Four months were spent with all the tardiness of Spanish negotiation in realizing that object. At last a treaty was prepared, binding the Count to garrison Arizona with five hundred French soldiers, who were to receive a total compensation of 90,000 francs, the Government advancing 250,000 francs for outfit and other expenses. The treaty was solemnly signed, attested, and annulled within a fortnight! Gaston was furious. The dictator blandly repeated his offer of a regiment and personal service at the capital, an offer which the Count spurned as an insult. "You offer me," he said, "a favour that is personal, when I ask for justice to myself and my brave men. Should I accept, what would be your opinion of me? what the opinion of those whom I should command? General, I have the honour to be a Frenchman. When I pledge my word I keep it." So the two adventurers parted in the halls of Montezuma.

Gaston, burning with indignation, easily fell into sympathy with some of the every-ready malcontents conspiring against the new government. The plot was found out, but Gaston received warning in time to put fifty miles of hard riding between him and the fatal anger of Santa Ana.

He returned to San Francisco, his old sense of wrong aggravated by this new grievance. With singular inconsistency we find him writing to a correspondent in France, in bitter complaint of the apathy shown towards his scheme by the "intelligent and rich" Americans, at the same time that he warns his compatriots against the designs of the United States on the territory of Mexico and the world at large. His gloomy forebodings must awaken a smile, in view of the actual results, yet they speak a sentiment which was powerful enough, ten years later, to work out the imperial tragedy of Maximilian.

"Europeans," he says, "are disturbed by the growth of the United States, and rightly so. Unless she be dismembered, unless a powerful rival be built up beside her, America will become, through her commerce, her trade, her population her geographical position upon two oceans the inevitable mistress of the world. In ten years Europe dare not fire a shot without her permission. As I write, fifty Americans prepare to sail for Lower California, and go perhaps to victory. Voila les Etats-Unis!"

On the 2nd of April, 1854, three hundred French military colonists sailed from San Francisco, upon a formal invitation from the Mexican consul, to perform the duty formerly allotted to De Boulbon; the latter had been declared an outlaw by the Government. Nevertheless he resolved to hazard a descent upon Arizona, counting on the fidelity of those colonists and the moral support of the French Government, still uneasy over the ambitious designs of the United States. On the 24th of May he sailed from San Francisco on the little schooner Belle. His departure was hurried, as the United States authorities, warned of his purpose, had taken steps for his arrest and detention. In his haste he was forced to leave behind a small battery which he had bought for the expedition. The captain of the Belle, an American, hesitated to put to sea, but Gaston (so says his biographer) promptly put him in irons and took command of the vessel himself. His avowed object was the carrying out of the original contract of 1852, namely, the protection of the mines of Arizona; but Arizona had meanwhile become American territory, under the Gadsden treaty of 1853. Hence the present attempt of Gaston was filibustering, pure and simple, if not something worse.

The voyage was long and tedious, lasting thirty-five days. On the 27th of June they came in sight of Guaymas. Landing at Cape San José, he sent two of his men to the city to prepare the three hundred Frenchmen there for his coming, and to concert a plan of action. The envoys were recognized and thrown into prison by General Yanes, who had succeeded Blanco in the governorship of Sonora. An amicable but fruitless parley followed between the commandant and Gaston. They arranged a sort of armed truce, which lasted until the 8th of July; but it needed only a small spark to explode magazines of such fiery material as formed the two rival garrisons of Guaymas. The French company, overweening, vain, and quick-tempered, met and jostled the dark-browed peons, jealous, revengeful, and proud. Both were armed, both quarrelsome as gamecocks. The French put faith in their national valour, the Mexicans in their national odds of eight to one. At the first outbreak, some petty street brawl, the native soldiers sounded the general alarm. The French rushed to their quarters, whence they sallied, fully armed, and met the irregular attack of the enemy with a resistance as unmethodical as intrepid. For three hours the battle raged on the rocky streets of Guaymas. Gaston, always a gentleman by instinct, refused the proffered leadership, as that honour belonged to Desmarais, the commissioned chief of the three hundred. He commanded a company, however, and fought with splendid courage, until, twice wounded, his men in retreat and everything lost, he broke his sword over his knee, and led the remnant of his force to the French Consulate, where they formally surrendered to their country's representative. An hour later they gave up their arms, upon the pledge of M. Calvo, backed by the promise of General Yanes, that their lives should be spared. Gaston was thrown into prison. Ten days later he was taken before a court-martial, tried, and condemned to death as a traitor and rebel. "Mark that they did not name me once as a filibuster," he wrote home.

The American consul, Major Roman, pleaded earnestly, but vainly, for mercy. M. Calvo would not interfere. Gaston in the hour of trial bore himself with manly fortitude, begging only, and not in vain, to be spared the indignity of dying with bound hands and bandaged eyes. The faith of his childhood returned to him, and his lifelong unrest shaped itself into perfect peace and resignation. The "old nobility," too, spoke out in his farewell letter to his brother, a curious blending of worldly pride, Christian humility, and philosophic fatalism. "It is my loyalty to my word that has dug my grave…. A mysterious chain, beginning at the cradle, leads to the tomb, and life is but a link thereof…. M. Calvo will bear witness that I died as became a gentleman…. To-morrow morning I shall have burned my last cap and fired my last cartridge…. Tell your children that Uncle Gaston died with a priest at his side, and that yet Uncle Gaston was a brave man…. If any wonder that I submit to this death, you may say that I look upon a suicide as a deserter…. I go to death a gentleman, and I die a Christian." The philosophy of this dying chevalier throws a little light upon his strange character. He died with touching and simple bravery, on August 12, 1854, at the age of thirty-six. Eleven years afterwards another and more imposing filibuster, lured to Mexico, partly by the intrigues of the same commercial house which had held the glittering bait before the eyes of poor Gaston, died with equal firmness at the hands of his executioners. Maximilian of Austria, Prim of Spain, and Napoleon of France, all played with fire, like the ill-fated Count Gaston Raoulx de Raousset-Boulbon, and all, like him, suffered.

But another and stranger being had witnessed the bootless expedition to Guaymas in 1852, and drawn his own false moral from the example before him—with what results will be told hereafter.

CHAPTER V

William Walker — Boyhood and education — Doctor, Lawyer, Journalist —  Goes to California — Personal appearance and characteristics — Departure of the Sonora Expedition — A government proclaimed — Stern discipline —  Retreat from Sonora — Bad news at San Vincente — The adventurers cross the boundary — Walker resumes the pen.

While De Boulbon, resting upon his fruitless victory of Hermosillo, awaited at San Francisco a chance to profit by the turn of the cards in Mexico, he was offered, and declined, a subordinate command in an expedition planned and conducted by the greatest of modern filibusters.

William Walker was the son of a Scotch banker who emigrated to Tennessee in 1820, marrying there a Kentucky lady named Norvell. William, their eldest son, was born in the city of Nashville, on May 8, 1824. His parents intended to give him a profession, preferably that of the ministry, and, though his taste led him otherwise, the gravity of the kirk always pervaded his manner, and theological speculations interested him through life. His boyhood was marked by a reserved and studious disposition, yet romantic and venturesome withal. His name appears in the graduating class of 1838 of the University of Nashville. The curriculum of that institution covered a wide course of study, including, besides the branches of common education, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, navigation, belles-lettres, geology, moral and mental philosophy, logic, political economy, international and constitutional law, oratory, natural theology, the classics, and many other studies. It was not the fault of his alma mater if he failed to prove as eminent in statesmanship as he was in arms. Duelling, the carrying of arms, and all wrangling were prohibited by the rules of the college. Cock-fighting was "especially forbidden." The cost of tuition and board was between two hundred and fifty and three hundred dollars a year. Altogether there is no reason to doubt that the University of Nashville, "authorized to grant all the degrees which are or may be granted by any college or university in Europe or America," was quite able to teach a young and ambitious student the elements of a sound education. The moral guidance of youth seems to have been well provided for, and a healthy desire to check extravagance in personal outlay is particularly noted in the regulations.

Having a liking for the medical profession, young Walker made a course of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a class-mate of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, the famous Arctic explorer. He afterwards visited and studied at Edinburgh, in France, Germany, and Italy, spending two years in travel, and gaining, together with his medical education, a fair knowledge of the languages and laws of those countries.

Of his professional experience we know little, save that he practised for a time in Philadelphia and Nashville, but, finding the profession unsuited to his health, he went to New Orleans and studied law. He was admitted at the bar in that city, but did not devote himself long to his new pursuit. He obtained a place on the Crescent newspaper, and gave himself up to the fascinating business of journalism with all the ardour of a novice. That a man should have tried three professions so different as those of medicine, law, and journalism, before reaching his twenty-fifth year is not remarkable in our country. It was equally in keeping with the character of the man of 1849, that he forsook this latest fancy to join the host of restless spirits bending their steps towards California. Arriving there in 1850, he became an editor on the San Francisco Herald and took sides with the faction of which David C. Broderick was the leader. His literary style was not ill-adapted to the journalism of the day and place, and ere long Walker the advocate found occasion to defend Walker the editor upon a charge for contempt of court. The lawyer failed to save the writer from the penalty of a brief imprisonment and a fine of five hundred dollars. The same pugnacious qualities involved him in a more serious quarrel with a Philadelphian, named William Hix Graham, and appeal was taken to the court of honour. The combatants met on a sandy lot outside of the city limits. Shots were exchanged, apparently without damage to either man, and the seconds were about to give the signal for another fire, when one of them perceived a pool of blood at Walker's feet. The doughty fighter had received a wound in the foot, and, in order to gain another shot, had tried to hide it by throwing sand over the spot with his other foot. The seconds, however, decided that honour was satisfied by the flow of blood, and the duel went no further. After this Walker retired from journalism, and practised law for a time in Marysville, with success enough to satisfy the ambition of anybody who aimed at law-expounding rather than law-making.

Walker was now (in 1852) only twenty-eight years of age. Nature had not dealt lavishly with this man, whose ambition grasped at no less a prize than the conquest of an empire. His figure was slight, though shapely; he stood about five and a half feet high, and never weighed over one hundred and thirty pounds. His closely-cut, sandy hair was thin and almost whitish; his face was freckled and beardless, giving him a boyish appearance. The lower half of his visage was plain, almost commonplace, but his large, rounded forehead and keen gray eyes were strikingly fine. When his usually cold nature gave way to emotions of anger or excitement the eyes dilated and kindled with a greenish light, like those of a bird of prey; the thin, short upper lip became compressed, and the slow, quiet voice rose sharp and short. He never showed other sign of emotion; but, says one who knew him well, "those were sufficient to awe the most truculent desperado into a submission as abject as that of the maniac before his keeper." Add to these a rare frugality of speech, a morality ascetically pure, and a temperance equally patent in word and action, and we know as much of the outward man as did the thousands of men who feared and loved him and died for his sake.

Joaquin Miller in his poem, "With Walker in Nicaragua," paints the Filibuster Chief, with

"A dash of sadness in his air

Born maybe, of his over-care,

And, maybe, born of a despair

In early love."

Henningsen, who knew him intimately, was unaware of any romance in the career of his chieftain; yet there was one, the only one of his life and it has been given to the world, within a few years, by a near relative of Walker. The object of his love was Helen Martin, a beautiful New Orleans girl, whom he met in Nashville after his return from Europe. She is described by Mr. Daniel Francis Barr, who had the story from Walker's cousin, as "a most attractive woman—the loveliness of face and form being enhanced by that endearing charm which helplessness to beauty lends. For nature, so lavish in her other endowments, deprived this beautiful creature of two most essential faculties—she was a mute. Strange as it may seem, these two young people, in appearance and character the apparent antithesis of each other, allowed friendship to ripen into an ardent and lasting affection. When Miss Martin returned to New Orleans, Walker soon followed, and as lawyer and journalist, gained distinction in the Crescent City. Just before the date fixed for their marriage the breath of pestilence poisoned the Gulf breezes, and the dreaded yellow fever became epidemic in the coast cities. Among the first to fall victim to the scourge was Miss Helen Martin, and her death changed the entire life-current, if not the heart of William Walker. From the ashes of a buried love ambition rose supreme."

The Ishmaelite nature urging him to travel again, his "destiny," as he called it, carried him to Sonora, at the moment when De Boulbon's first expedition was nearing its vain catastrophe. No longer a lawyer, a doctor, or an editor, he returned to California with dreams of martial glory, crude as yet, but, to a man of his unyielding courage, full of unlimited promise. People now spoke of "Colonel" Walker. The conferring or the assumption of military titles, solely by the grace of popular courtesy, was a curious foible of the Southern gentleman of the old school. Whether this unwritten commission preceded his assumption of a serious military career, or was coeval with it, is uncertain and of little consequence. There was no examination of titles or antecedents among the pioneers of California. The claimant of a military title could best defend it by deeds of daring, and by such William Walker was to prove himself. De Boulbon's short-lived success prompted Walker and a few friends to turn their eyes towards the same field. An agent, named Frederic Emory, was sent to Sonora in 1852 to treat for a contract such as had been granted the French company. Upon the failure of the latter, Walker and a partner, Henry P. Watkins, renewed the negotiations in person. It does not appear that they succeeded or received any encouragement from the jealous natives. Nevertheless, Walker and a few of his friends set themselves to the task of conquering the Western States of Mexico, in the face of difficulties which might have daunted even more daring spirits. The American Government was actively hostile to all filibustering movements. Sonora certainly did not offer a welcome to her unsought liberators. The singular unwillingness (already noticed by De Boulbon) of American capitalists to furnish the sinews of illegal warfare, no doubt continued to mark that unromantic class.

On the other hand, Walker had many warm personal friends, chiefly among the natives of the Southern states. He was actually a sincere, even fanatical, believer in slavery. To conquer new territory, and thus to extend the area of slavery, was a scheme certain to meet with sympathy throughout the South. The admission of new Northern territories already threatened to overcome the supremacy of the South in the national government. Sectional and party bias, personal interest, and political prejudice moved the citizens of the slave states to withstand this new and growing menace. Like feelings, intensified through years of political minority, stirred the North. So far as the South was concerned in the maintenance of slavery, her interests called for its extension; otherwise, the growing movement for its abolition, aided by the approaching change of political power, would soon compass its overthrow. So, at least, and not without foresight, reasoned the upholders of slavery in that dark and bitter era.

The impending conflict was well styled "irrepressible." Years of angry debate had made compromise impossible, but the wiser and better heads in either party shunned the wager of battle. Disunion was scarcely considered as a theory, among the mass of the people, ere it sprung into being, a fact. Doughty-tongued zealots alone talked of war, and they were those who kept on talking after men of cooler courage had begun to fight.

Walker, then, could confidently invoke the sympathy of the rich and influential slave-holders in a crusade for the extension of their favorite system. He could appeal to the daring and adventurous of every class by the dangerous fascination of his scheme, and to the Californian, especially, through his native hostility and contempt towards his Mexican neighbor. For the rest, he offered as inducements to immigrants in Sonora five hundred acres of land to each man, and four dollars daily pay for military services. Arms and ammunition were procured. Emigrants of strangely unpastoral bearing offered themselves at the rendezvous. A brig was chartered and the day of departure set. At this point the United States marshal seized the vessel. This was in July, 1853. Three months afterwards, the emigrants, learning caution from experience, took their steps so secretly that forty-five of them, including Walker and Emory, sailed in the bark Caroline, and arrived at Cape San Lucas, in Lower California, on October 28th.

Here they made a brief stay before continuing their voyage to La Paz. They captured that town, together with the governor, Espanosa, on November 3rd. Three days later a vessel arrived with the Mexican colonel, Robollero, appointed to supersede Espanosa; him also they took prisoner. Walker, being now in possession of the government and the archives, called an election, which resulted in his being chosen president. His report does not state whether or not he had any rival for the honour. Ten others of the adventurers were chosen to fill the several offices, civil, military and naval. Thirty-four remained mere citizens, as there were not "offices enough to go around." "Our government," wrote the President, "has been formed upon a firm and sure basis." However absurd the proceedings seem to us, in the light of the sequel, to him they appeared the solemn inception of free institutions and a glorious future. A high-sounding proclamation was issued, including a declaration of independence. Two months afterwards Walker annexed, on paper, the neighboring province of Sonora, and changed the name of the Republic to "Sonora," comprising the State of that name and Lower California. As yet he had not set foot upon the new half of his domain.

His friends in California were active in the meanwhile. Recruiting offices were opened in San Francisco, to which flocked the desperate, the adventurous, the reckless from every land. The Federal Government could not, at least, it did not, take active steps to check them. Between two and three hundred men were enlisted, and their passage engaged on the bark Anita. The name of the vessel and the date of her departure were kept secret from all but the leaders of the party.

On the appointed evening, December 7, 1853, they gathered at head-quarters. Horses and waggons were in readiness, and in a brief time the ammunition and supplies were on the deck of the Anita. Before midnight the embarkation was made, and the ship swung into the stream. A tow-boat carried her out of the harbour in safety. Before casting loose the lines several of the Anita's sailors secretly stole on board the tow-boat, their desertion not being perceived until the bark was beyond hail and ploughing the waves of the Pacific. The adventurers have been described by a friendly writer as "a hard set." They observed their departure by a merry carouse, the while the good bark tossed on the ocean swell and her captain cursed his recreant crew and his boisterous freight. Then the wind arose. A sea swept the decks, carrying overboard a dozen barrels of pork and making a clean breach through her starboard bulwarks. The adventurers awoke next morning, sobered and sick. A few of them who had been sailors volunteered to aid in working the vessel. The relief came none too soon, as it was found that the ship had been dragging her anchor and several fathom of cable all night, the deserters having failed to make it fast. The filibusters grimly consoled themselves with the reflection that they had not been born to be drowned.

Arrived at San Vincente, the reinforcements went into camp, amusing themselves, while they awaited orders to march, by foraging on the scattered ranches. Horses were procured by forced levies, and paid for in the promissory notes of the "Republic." Here for the first time Walker displayed the traits of stern command which afterwards made his name a word of terror in the ears of men who feared nothing else, human or divine. Half a score of the boldest desperadoes in camp formed a plot to blow up the magazine at night and desert with what plunder they might be able to seize in the confusion of the moment. To carry out their plan involved the risk of killing many of their comrades, as the ammunition was kept in the middle of the camp. Notice of the plot reached Walker, who had two of the ringleaders tried by court-martial and summarily shot. Two others were publicly whipped and drummed out of camp. Walker then ordered a muster of the troops, and after making a stirring appeal to them, called upon all who were willing to abide by his fortunes to hold up their hands. All of the original forty-five, and a few of the Anita's passengers, responded; the others shouldered their rifles and prepared to march. Walker confronted the recreants, and quietly ordered them to stack their arms, a command which, after some hesitation, they obeyed. They were then suffered to leave the camp. Less than a hundred men now formed the army of the republic. He gave orders to march to Sonora by the mountain paths, around the head of the Gulf of California. They buried the arms and ammunition of the deserters in cachés. Two men deserted on the march and joined the Indians, who harried the little band at every step.

The river Colorado was crossed on rafts. Disease and desertion thinned the ranks. The wounded died for lack of proper treatment, as there was not a case of surgical instruments in the army. They extracted arrow-heads from their wounds with probes improvised from ramrods. Every morning's roll-call showed a dwindling force. Beef was the only food left. Two men quarrelled over a handful of parched corn, and one shot the other dead. They were in rags. The President of Sonora, wearing a boot on one foot, a shoe on the other, fared no better than his followers. Those followers soon numbered less than fifty. A council of war was held, and it was decided to return to San Vincente. The Mexicans hung upon their flanks and rear, cutting off every straggler. Recrossing the mountains, they narrowly escaped annihilation in a gorge which widened out at the middle to a plateau of half a mile across, with a narrow opening at either end. Half way across the plains the Indians appeared on flank and front and opened a galling fire. Walker here showed coolness and generalship. Leaving twelve men hidden in a clump of bushes under command of Lieutenant P. S. Veeder, a cool young soldier, afterwards distinguished in Nicaragua, he retreated with the rest of the command towards the entrance of the valley. The passage had already been closed by the enemy's forces, who met the retiring party with an ill-aimed volley of arrows and bullets. At the same time those guarding the other pass joined their friends on the flanks in charging the Americans. As they passed the thicket where Veeder and his men lay in ambush, they received a deadly volley at short range. Every bullet struck down its man. Walker at the same time turned and delivered an equally well-aimed fire, which put the enemy to full flight. The two detachments then passed unmolested through the further defile before the astonished natives could be rallied to the charge. No bribes of aguardiente, with which the Mexicans were wont to ply their Indian allies could thenceforth induce the natives to face the deadly American rifles. They hung upon the line of march like coyotes, prowling about the late scene of each encampment, and robbing each new-made grave of its tenant's blanket, the only shroud of the poor filibuster who fell in the waste places of Sonora.

At San Vincente, where Walker had left in March a party of eighteen men to guard the barracks, he found not one remaining. A dozen had deserted, and the rest, unsuspicious of danger, had been swooped upon by a band of mounted Mexicans, who lassoed and tortured them to death. So many successive reverses sealed the fate of the expedition. To wait for reinforcements, even could they have come, from California was hopeless. Walker had but thirty-five men remaining. They were destitute of everything but ammunition and weapons; of these they had more than enough. At various places they had buried boxes of carbines and pistols. Eight guns were spiked at San Vincente. A hundred kegs of powder were cached on the banks of the Rio Colorado. Years afterwards the peon herdsmen or prowling Cucupa Indian stumbled, in the mountain by-paths, over the bleaching skeleton of some nameless one whose resting-place was marked by no cross or cairn, but the Colt's revolver rusting beside his bones bespoke his country and his occupation—the only relic of the would-be Conquistadores of the nineteenth century.

The stolid native who had sworn fealty to the mushroom republic, under pain of imprisonment for refusal, easily forgot his oath when the accursed "Gringo" had turned his back. The rancherio, whose sole mementos of vanished horses and cattle were the bonds of the Republic of Sonora, vainly proffered those securities at the cock-pit and the monté-table. The American of the North had come and gone like a pestilence, or like his ante-type of buccaneering days; nought remained save disappointed ambition with the one, and a bitter memory with the other.

The invasion was every way inexcusable. That his interference was unwelcome to the natives Walker soon found out; nor was he slow to learn that nothing less formidable than an army of occupation, backed by a strong power, could push his cherished dream of a new conquest of Mexico beyond the unsubstantial realms of fantasy.

With sinking heart, but bearing the calm front which never failed him, he led his starving, travel-worn band toward the California frontier. The natives made a feeble show of opposing their retreat. A host of ill-trained soldiery, formidable only in numbers, held the mountain heights; their Indian allies were drawn up on the plain to contest the passage. Colonel Melendrez, commanding the Mexican forces, sent four Indians with a flag of truce into the filibuster camp, bearing an offer of protection and free passage across the American border to all except the leader; Walker, with all the arms of the company, must be first given up. Such an offer would have been rejected, in the face of certain death, by men familiar as these were with the Punic faith of the Spaniard. Made as it was to men who had followed their chieftain through hunger and want, battle and defeat, up to this moment, when they could see their country's flag waving over the United States military camp across the border, it was treated with scornful laughter. Melendrez then begged the United States commander to interfere and compel the surrender, a request which, as it could not have been granted without a violation of Mexican territory, was properly refused. Three miles of road lay between the filibusters and the boundary line. Walker, resorting to strategy, left half a dozen men concealed behind some rocks to cover his retreat. The natives, with a wholesome dread of the American rifle, followed him at what seemed a safe distance and rode straight into the ambush. Half a dozen rifles emptied as many saddles, whereupon Melendrez and his Mexicans galloped off at full speed, leaving their Indian allies to follow as best they might. The filibusters lost one man, a victim to his own indiscretion in having borrowed a leaf from the enemy's tactics and fortified his courage with too much aguardiente.

So ended the last battle of the Republic of Sonora—if it be not a travesty to call by the name of battle a fruitless fight between a score of men on one side and a hundred ignorant savages on the other. Four and thirty tattered, hungry, gaunt pedestrians, whimsically representing in their persons the president, cabinet, army and navy of Sonora, marched across the line and surrendered as prisoners of war to Major Mckinstry, U.S.A., at San Diego, California. It was the 8th of May, 1854; and so Walker kept his thirtieth birthday.

A parole, pledging the prisoners to present themselves for trial to General Wool, at San Francisco, was signed by all, after which they were allowed to depart.

Of those starving, wounded, battle-scarred survivors of several months' accumulated miseries the names signed to the parole contain at least six of men who had love for their leader, or enough of unconquerable daring, to send them, twelve months later, in search of fresh dangers and glories under the same commander.

Walker came back from Sonora, defeated but not disheartened. He had proved himself a leader of men, even in so small an arena. Thenceforth, until his star of "destiny" was eclipsed in death, his name was worth a thousand men wherever hard fighting and desperate hopes might call him. It must be said in his favour that he sought popularity by none of the tricks of the demagogue. In camp or field he was ever the same cold, self-contained, fearless commander, inflexible in discipline, sparing of speech, prodigal of action. He won the devoted obedience of the wildest spirits by governing himself. His word of command was not "Go," but "Come"—the Napoleonic talisman. Only to the youngest of his followers would he ever unbend his solitary dignity. One of them, whose name, William Pfaff, appears on the San Diego parole, was a youth of fifteen. He was with difficulty restrained from following his leader to Nicaragua. He lived through four years of service in our Civil War, but no dangers or hardships could erase the memory of his experience in Sonora. "The rebellion was a picnic to it," said he, in the fine hyperbole of California.

The trial of the filibuster leader for breaking the neutrality laws of the United States ended in a prompt acquittal. Walker resumed the editorial chair, supporting Broderick in the San Francisco Commercial, the personal organ of that ill-fated politician. Let us leave the filibuster in his Elba, and visit the country which was destined to become the scene of his dazzling but brief career of glory, defeat, and death.

CHAPTER VI

Nicaragua — "Mahomet's Paradise" — Buccaneering visitors — Philip II. and an Isthmian Canal — Nelson defeated by a girl — The apocryphal heroine of San Carlos.

Nature in lavishing her favours on Nicaragua, left little for man to add. It is a tropical country with a temperate climate, one half of its territory having a mean elevation of 5,000 feet above the level of the sea. In that favoured land the primeval curse is stayed; where nature forestalls every necessity, no need for man to toil or want. Fruits grow in the reckless profusion of the tropics, and clothing is a superfluity wisely counted as such. Two-hundred and fifty thousand children, young and old, occupy a domain as large as New England. They are poor in accumulated wealth as the poorest peasantry of Europe; they are rich, knowing no want unsatisfied, as a nation of millionaires. But Nicaragua is a country in which to study with doubt the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The early discoverers called it "Mahomet's Paradise," an apt name for a land of sensuous happiness.

There man reaps without sowing, and the harvest never fails. He has but to stretch forth his hand and feast on dainties such as seldom grace the tables of kings; the citron, the lemon, the orange (with often 10,000 on a single tree), the banana, the mango, the papaya, the cocoa, the tamarind, the milk-tree, the butter tree, and a spontaneous perennial growth of coffee, cacao, sugar, tobacco, and everything that grows or can be grown in any tropical or temperate clime. Half the year he may sling his hammock beneath the shady trees. In the rainy season a few stakes and a thatch of palm leaves afford him ample shelter. Medicinal trees and herbs abound everywhere, for the relief of the few ills to which his flesh is heir. Birds of gayest plumage, flowers of loveliest hue, greet his eyes on every side. In the noble forests, where the pine and the palm grow beside the ceiba, the mimosa, and the stately cactus, the splendours of the rainbow are rivalled in the plumage of parrots, macaws, humming-birds, toucans, and the beautiful winged creature that bears the imperial name of Montezuma. It is the latest and the fairest land of earth, and the heavenly radiance of youth is on its face. So young, that the fires of nature's workshop have not yet died out. The volcano, towering thousands of feet towards heaven, still smoulders or flames, and the earth is shaken ever and anon by the engines of the Titans. Ometepe the glorious lifts his cloud-capped head five thousand feet out of the placid bosom of Lake Nicaragua; Madera, his neighbour, is but eight hundred feet less lofty. Momotombo and Mombacho and El Viejo, and the twin peaks which watch the mouth of Fonseca Bay, are flaming swords guarding the Eden to which the serpent has come, as of old, with a human tongue.

Little note takes the Nicaraguan of the lavish favours of nature, whose grandest mystery but awakens a languid Quien Sabe? and whose most winning plea extorts only a more languid Poco tiempo—the eternal by and by of indolence. One per cent. of the whole population makes a show of studying the elements of education. Why should they vex their souls in search of knowledge, when all that life needs can be had for the asking? Not, surely, to heap up wealth. Nature takes care even of that, for money grows upon trees of Nicaragua—that is to say, the fractional currency of the people is nuts, one cacao-nut being equal to a fortieth of a medio in value, and passing current as such in all the smaller affairs of trade. Nor is it worth the trouble of mastering letters where illiteracy is no bar to civil or military advancement, and where, especially if the "Serviles" be in power, an unlettered bandit ranks almost as high as a rascally advocate. In the days of President Chamorro the most notorious ruffians held high office, the revenues of the state were farmed out on the system which prevails to-day only in the more barbarous parts of Asia, so that it was a saying in the neighboring states, where, too, glass-houses are not scarce, that "the calf was not safe in the cow, from the thieves of Nicaragua."

It was not always so in Nicaragua. Years before the mail-clad Spaniard brought the curse of civilization across the western ocean, the simple Aztec built his altars to the sun on every hill-top from sea to sea. Centuries ere the Aztec, there flourished a semi-civilized race whose history is written in hieroglyphics of a language utterly dead and forgotten, and who have left no lineal descendants. Even such fragments of Aztec lore as survived the fanaticism of the Conquistadores in Mexico are wanting to the annals of the earlier Central American civilization. It was a culture of rich growth in its day and place, destined like that of the contemporary Roman Empire, to tempt the cupidity of a hardier race, and after an unavailing struggle, to fall before the might of numbers and superior physique. Howbeit, the Aztec Goths and Vandals overran the isthmus, and when the Spanish invasion came, it met only the late subjects of Montezuma's widespread, ill-governed kingdom.

The religion of Nicaragua before the conquest was a gloomy idolatry. The predecessors of the Aztec are conjectured to have been a gentle race, but no match in prowess for their conquerors. The Spaniards found a people of sun-worshippers degraded by human sacrifice and attendant cannibalism. Between them and distant Anahuac, to which they owed allegiance, lay the dense forests and trackless swamps of Yucatan. The journey by land at this day is long and toilsome. Cortez, nevertheless, projected and carried out an exploration as far as Honduras, until his appalled veterans refused to go further southward.

Don Pedrarias d'Avila, Governor of Panama, undertook its exploration from the south in 1514. Nine years later he was encouraged to send a force for its subjugation, under command of Francisco de Cordova, who secured the submission of its cacique, Nicarao or Nicaya. The conquerors gave that chieftain's name to his country. They founded Leon and Granada, which have remained its leading cities. Nicaragua gave a few recruits to Pizarro. Philip II., with narrow-minded foresight, sent a commission to survey the isthmus and judge of the feasibility of cutting a ship canal. The report was favourable, the route by way of Panama being chosen. It was too favourable, as it pointed out the advantages of such a passage to international commerce. Spain did not want such broad liberality, and Philip decreed the punishment of death to any one who might thereafter propose to wed the two oceans together. But, as high tariffs encourage smuggling, so prohibited commerce takes refuge in privateering. The Buccaneers arose to dispute with Spain the monopoly of her American trade. The isthmus suffered most from their ravages. Panama, then as now, the most important city on the coast, was the depôt for the royal treasure gathered at the adjacent mines of Cana. Drake paid it a predatory visit in 1586. It was afterwards taken and sacked at different times by Morgan, Sharpe, Ringrose, and Dampier. It was burned three times between 1670 and 1680. Finally it was abandoned for the new town, three miles inland.

Nicaragua, though liable to predatory forays, had not wealth enough to tempt the buccaneers from richer prey. Cape Gracias a Dios, on its north-eastern boundary, was a rendezvous of the freebooters; but the Atlantic coast was even less inviting to the plunder-seekers than the Pacific. The narratives of the buccaneers touch lightly on it. Its name of the Mosquito Coast appears to have been well deserved. De Lussan speaks with lively horror of the pestiferous little insect which "is sooner felt than seen."

The buccaneers passed away, but left a legacy. Great Britain in 1742 laid claim to the Bay Islands, which had been captured by English buccaneers just a century before. A war with Spain ensued, without material gain to either party. By the treaty of 1763, England renounced her claim on Central America, and evacuated all the disputed territory, except the Island of Ruatan, on the Atlantic coast of Honduras, a shirking of her obligations which awakened a renewal of hostilities. In 1780 Colonel Polson was sent to invade Nicaragua. Landing a force of two hundred sailors and marines at San Juan del Norte, he ascended the river in boats, carrying with little trouble the half-dozen fortified positions on its banks. At the head of the river, where it receives the waters of Lake Nicaragua, the expedition was confronted by the frowning batteries of Fort San Carlos, then, as now, guarding the mouth of the lake.

At this point in the narrative, history and tradition part company, the former averring, upon historical and biographical English authority, that Horatio Nelson, then a simple unknown captain commanding the naval forces, reduced the fort, inflicted a severe chastisement upon the enemy and returned victorious to his ships. Tradition tells a prettier story.

As the flotilla neared the shore in line of battle, the stillness was unbroken, save by the plash of their oars and the music of the surf. Not a soldier was visible on the ramparts, for the cowardly varlets of the garrison, taking advantage of the Commandante's sickness, had fled to the woods at the first sight of the enemy. The gallant hidalgo in command was left without a single attendant, save his lovely daughter. But she was a true soldier's child, with the spirit of a heroine. The boats drew rapidly near the shore, their oars flashing in the morning sun, the gunners awaiting with lighted matches the order to fire. Nelson stood up to bid his men give way, and at the instant a flash was seen in one of the embrasures of the fort; the next moment the roar of a cannon broke the stillness of lake and forest. Immediately gun after gun echoed the sound, but the first had done the work of an army, by striking down Horatio Nelson. The boats pulled rapidly out of range and down the river, beaten and discouraged. Nor did they escape heavier losses; for the Spaniards so harassed and plagued them on the retreat that, of the two hundred men who had started from San Juan, but ten returned in safety. Nelson's wound cost him the loss of an eye; and he who had never turned his back on a foe-man fled from the guns of San Carlos, served by a girl of sixteen. It was the Commandante's daughter, Donna Rafaela Mora, who had fired the battery and saved Nicaragua. The heroine of Fort San Carlos was decorated by the King of Spain, commissioned a colonel in the royal service, and pensioned for life.

Such is the tradition, accepted as authentic by the natives and supported by the testimony of several trustworthy travellers. None of Nelson's biographers make mention of the heroic maiden. According to those historians, Nelson ascended the river as far as Fort San Juan—probably Castillo Viejo—which he reduced after a somewhat protracted siege and a heavy loss to his forces. They place the scene of the accident by which he lost his eye at the siege of Calvi, in the Island of Corsica. Yet Captain Bedford Pim, of the Royal Navy, in his book of Nicaraguan travel, gives unquestioning credence to the legend of the country; which has also been accepted by other English writers who may be supposed to have a familiar acquaintance with the life of Nelson. So firmly is it believed in Nicaragua that, upon the strength of his inherited glory, General Martinez, a grandson of the heroine, was chosen President of the state in 1857, although there was at the time a regularly-elected President claiming and lawfully entitled to the office—a fact which should suffice to silence the most captious critic. In an iconoclastic age it were needless cruelty to rob the poor Nicaraguan of the only bit of heroic history he possesses. Possibly Nelson's biographers suppressed an incident which did not redound to the glory of their hero; perchance, his Catholic Majesty was imposed upon, or the tradition of the Maid of San Carlos may be but another transplanted solar myth. Quien sabe?

CHAPTER VII

British intrigues on the Isthmus — Morazan and the Confederacy — The Mosquito Dynasty — Bombardment of San Juan — Castellon calls in the foreigner — Doubleday and his free lances — Cole's contract approved by Walker.

So long as Central America remained a province of Spain, England's policy was one of peaceful words and hostile deeds. Binding herself, by treaty after treaty, to the renunciation of all claims upon the country, she steadily maintained and extended her hold upon various objective points—Ruatan, Belize, and the Bay Islands which command the Gulf of Mexico, being her favourite spoils. Some equivocal clause in a treaty, a frivolous pretence of avenging some imaginary dishonour, a buccaneer's legacy, a negro king's grant, if no better offered, was put forward as the excuse for armed occupation. Spain's ill-gotten possessions were beginning to bear the usual fruit. At length, in 1821, the colonies of the isthmus heard the cry of liberty from the North echoed by a responsive one from the South. Spanish America shook the chain fretted and worn in the friction of centuries, snapped the frail links asunder, and stood up among the nations, free. But the iron had done its work. The cramped limbs refused their offices; the eyes, wont to peer half closed in dungeon light, blinked and were dazed in the sudden noon of liberty. The body was that of a freeman, but the soul was the soul of a slave. When liberty comes to a nation prematurely, she must be born again in pain and travail ere the boon be valued by its receiver.

A disunited union of a few years' duration, a travesty of power under Iturbide's pasteboard crown, secession, reunion, discord, revolution—the annals of Central America are the Newgate Calendar of history. Yet, among the ignoble or infamous names of Central American rulers, there is one worthy of a brighter page, as its owner was of a better fate. Don Francisco Morazan, first president of the five united states, hardly deserved the title given him of the "Washington of Central America." He was an able, brave, and patriotic man, but cruel and vindictive towards his opponents. He was chosen to the presidency in 1831, and filled the office nine years; at the end of which time the natives had grown heartily tired of the civilized innovations, which were as unfitted to their inferior nature as the stiff garments of fashion to their supple limbs. Morazan had neither the grace nor the wisdom to accept philosophically the people's choice of a reactionary demagogue who catered to their tastes, and so he began to intrigue against the government of his successor, failing in which he was forced to fly to South America. Two years afterwards he landed with only three hundred followers in Costa Rica, and made himself master of the capital. But the President of that state soon rallied a force of five thousand and besieged the invader, who, after a gallant resistance of two days, was compelled to surrender. He was tried and found guilty of conspiring against the confederated states, and was put to death, together with his chief adherents, on the 15th of September, 1842. Guatemala ended the troublesome question of representative government in 1851 by electing Carrera, a half-breed, to the office of president for life.

The states of Central America, torn by internal strife, wasting their scant resources in fruitless wars and sad faction fights, were fast lapsing into a barbarism below that of Nicarao when he bowed to the Spanish yoke. Untainted by foreign blood, the independent native tribes proved themselves superior to the mongrel descendants of Cordova and D'Avila. The Indians of Darien and the Rio Frio region and the mountains of northern Costa Rica to this day preserve their freedom, whilst Nicaragua and Costa Rica have been wrangling, year after year, for the empty honour of being called their sovereign.

To this man-cursed land nature had given a noble heritage, coveted by many a powerful nation, though none dared clutch it single-handed. It is the lake, or inland sea, which covers five thousand square miles of the state, elevated one hundred and seven feet above the mean tide-level of the ocean, a natural reservoir, with an outlet ninety miles long—the San Juan river. By making this outlet navigable for large vessels, a comparatively easy work, and by cutting a canal sixteen and one-third miles in length, across the neck of land lying between the Lake and the Pacific Ocean, a highway could be opened to the commerce of the world, whose benefits it would be hard to over-estimate. It was a noble scheme, appealing to the enterprise of the civilized world and to the enlightened statesmanship of men like Bolivar and Morazan. Humboldt advocated it. Louis Napoleon beguiled his prison hours at Ham by writing a pamphlet showing its feasibility and need. As a commercial undertaking, its value was beyond question: the eye of national aggrandizement saw in it even more alluring features. The nation that should control that canal might be the dictator of America. Such nation was not, and could not be, that which, like the nerveless Ottoman, holds a point of vantage by the right of geographical position and by that alone. The power which held the key to the Mediterranean, and stood ready to seize the Isthmus of Suez, looked wistfully towards Nicaragua. Many and plausible were the dormant claims of England upon the territory of her weak enemy. For years she had exercised a nominal protectorate over the eastern coast known as the Mosquito kingdom.

The monarchs of Mosquito were ignorant negroes, ruling a scattered tribe, the savage descendants of a slave cargo wrecked upon the coast in the seventeenth century. They were appointed at various times by British man-of-war captains, being installed or dethroned at the will of their masters. Nicaragua, while never acknowledging this authority, lacked power to assert her own over the comparatively worthless tracts of her eastern coast, holding possession only of the river and town of San Juan. In 1839, the reigning king of Mosquito, His Majesty Robert Charles Frederick the First, cancelled a debt contracted for sundry liquors and other royal supplies, by making a grant of territory amounting to twenty-two and a half million acres or more. The grantees, Peter and Samuel Shepard, transferred the grant to the Central American Colonization Company, an American Association. This was the foundation of what became afterwards known as the Kinney Expedition.

The royal line of Mosquito may be classed among the unfortunate dynasties of the world. The first monarch, whose name is lost to history, was killed in a drunken brawl; his half-brother and successor was dethroned by a British captain, who placed a distant scion, George Frederick by name, on the vacant throne. The reign of the latter was short. His son, Robert Charles Frederick the First, was a merry monarch, "scandalous and poor," who sold his birthright to the Shepards for a mess of Jamaica rum and sundry pairs of cotton breeches. His son, George William Clarence, was reigning in 1850.

The superior swiftness of American ships had enabled the United States to forestall their English rivals in seizing California; whereupon the latter took the bold step, in 1848, of occupying at the same time Tigre Island, on the Pacific coast of the isthmus, and San Juan del Norte, on the Atlantic, which latter place they christened Greytown, in honour of a governor of Jamaica. England thus had the keys of the isthmus in her hands; the canal, worthless without a safe entrance and exit, might fall to the lot of him who chose the barren glory of building it. But, strange to say, the United States possessed at that time a useful diplomatic servant in their minister to Central America, the Honourable E. G. Squier, one, moreover, whose claim to honour rests upon a broader basis than the thankless triumphs of public service. He promptly seconded the protest of Honduras against the utterly indefensible robbery of her territory, Tigre Island. His government took up the question, and the island was reluctantly given up.

At the same time, the United States formally protested against the seizure of San Juan. Long and wordy negotiations ensued, ending in the so-called Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. It was a practical victory for Great Britain, as it entrapped the American Government into an obligation to refrain from "ever holding any exclusive control over the said ship canal, erecting or maintaining any fortifications commanding the same, or in the vicinity thereof, occupying, fortifying, colonizing or assuming or exercising any dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, or any part of Central America." Great Britain, with apparent fairness, bound herself to equal neutrality. The difference was that the United States promised to abstain from ever taking any steps to control the only avenue then available between the Eastern and the Western States of the Union, thus being placed upon the same footing with distant European nations which could have no such vital interests in the isthmus. Great Britain agreed to refrain from acts which were not only dangerous and inexcusable, but of very doubtful feasibility. Another difference: the United States kept the pledge; Great Britain broke it within fourteen months. The treaty was signed by both parties, and proclaimed on the 5th of July, 1850. In August of the following year, Captain Jolly, of the Royal Navy, solemnly annexed the island of Ruatan to the colony of Belize, which, notwithstanding the treaty, had remained a nominal dependency of England. In July, 1852, Augustus Frederick Gore, Colonial Secretary of Belize, proclaimed that "Her Gracious Majesty, our Queen, has been pleased to constitute and make the islands of Ruatan, Bonacca, Utilla, Barbarat, Helene, and Morat to be a colony to be known and designated as the Colony of the Bay Islands." It was the buccaneer's legacy redivivus.

Now, if ever, was a favourable time for the application of a theory set forth by a President of the United States nearly thirty years before: "That the American Continents, by the free and independent position which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power." So reads the extract from President Monroe's seventh annual message, dated the 2nd December, 1823, and known as the "Monroe Doctrine." This bold assumption of a protectorate over two continents was nothing more than the expression of its author's private opinion, unsupported by official action, either at home or abroad. But it fell like a bombshell into the diplomatic circles of the world. It was criticized, derided, repudiated by every nation of Europe; but it was secretly feared and not openly disobeyed by any, even in the much-vexed discussion of the Central American question. England carefully based her claim to the coveted territory upon the alleged facts of long possession and colonization. It is needless to say that the "Monroe Doctrine," even had it been incorporated in the American constitution, could not have been entertained for a moment in the high court of nations, save after the manner that such doubtful claims are always conceded to the right of might.

The British no longer claimed for themselves or their royal puppets of Mosquito, authority over the port of San Juan. Nevertheless, the traditional British man-of-war within a day's sail of anywhere continued to haunt the Caribbean Sea. The Transit Company's steamers sailed regularly between New York and San Juan. In May, 1854, a captain of one of them shot a negro in the streets of San Juan, and fled from arrest to the United States Consulate. The American minister, Borland, refused to surrender the fugitive to the officers of justice. A mob surrounded the consulate, and during the fray which ensued the minister was hit on the cheek by a bottle thrown by some rioter. Consul Fabens, then on board the steamer Northern Light, sent a boat ashore to take off the minister and his criminal guest, Captain Smith. Before the steamer sailed with the minister on board, a guard of fifty Americans was armed and left behind to protect the Transit Company's property at Puntas Arenas, a point of land opposite the town of San Juan. The boat which carried Minister Borland to the steamer was fired upon by the natives, but, as it appears, not with fatal results. Still the indignity offered to the representative of a great nation must be atoned for. The United States sloop-of-war Cyane was sent out as soon as the matter was reported at Washington. Her commander, Captain Hollins, on arriving off the town, found the inevitable British man-of-war lying between him and the shore. He promptly notified the Nicaraguan authorities of his intention to bombard the town, which was thereupon hastily evacuated. The captain of H.B.M. ship Express refused to move out of range, until the guns of the Cyane had been trained to rake his decks, when he reluctantly dropped astern, after protesting that the American superiority of armament alone saved the dispute from being settled by the last argument of kings and captains. The disparity is to be regretted, in view of the wearisome and vain diplomacy afterwards spent upon a question which force alone, or the show of it, could finally settle.

While the guns of the Cyane were squandering powder on the frail huts of San Juan in lieu of a worthier target, Nicaragua was too deeply engrossed in her usual internecine strife to resent the outrage from abroad. Don Fruto Chamorro, who succeeded Pineda as president in 1851, found himself towards the close of his term, ambitious of another lease of power. Chamorro was the leader of the Legitimist, or Servile party, as it was called; Don Francisco Castellon was the choice of the Liberal or Democratic party. At the biennial election in 1853, both parties claimed the victory, and, as is usual in such disputes, possession was the strongest point of law. Chamorro proclaimed himself duly elected, and was installed in office at Granada, the chief city of the Servile faction. Leon, the larger and more prosperous city, favoured the cause of Castellon, whereupon Chamorro promptly arrested his rival with several of his adherents, and banished them from the country. They took refuge in Honduras, whose president, Cabañas, received them hospitably. Chamorro, to make his position more secure, had himself, on April 30, 1854, proclaimed president for two terms or four years. A usurpation so bold was calculated to defeat its own object.

Castellon landed at Realejo within a week after its declaration, with only thirty-six followers. The Leonese rallied to his support, and drove Chamorro out of the department and into the Servile stronghold, the city of Granada. Soon after they obtained control of the lake and river and laid siege to Granada. The siege lasted nine months without material advantage on either side. Castellon was proclaimed Provisional Director by his party. Chamorro dying on the 12th of March, 1855, was succeeded by Senator Don Jose Maria Estrada, a weak substitute for his brave, popular, and ambitious predecessor. Each party had now a de facto president. General Jose Trinidad Munoz, a veteran of Santa Ana's, and like that luckless hero, fully impressed with the delusion that he was a physical and mental counterpart of the great Napoleon, commanded the army of Castellon. The Serviles were headed by Don Ponciano Corral, a clever, unscrupulous man, who relied upon the military assistance of adjacent states to strengthen the arms of his party.

Such was the state of affairs in Nicaragua in August, 1854, when an American, named Byron Cole, presented himself before Castellon with a novel offer. Cole, who had been formerly a Boston editor, was proprietor of the newspaper which we left under the editorial management of the late President of Sonora. His faith in the military genius of his editor was in nowise abated by the disastrous end of the Sonora expedition. Arriving in the camp of the Democrats when their earlier conquests were gradually slipping from their hands, and the long siege of Granada had been raised in despair, Cole's offer of aid was eagerly embraced by Castellon and his party.

They had already known and rated the value of the American rifleman as an auxiliary. At an early period of the civil war, an adventurous California pioneer, named C. W. Doubleday, found himself at the port of San Juan del Sur, the Pacific terminus of the Transit. He was homeward-bound after years of absence, but being thrown into the society of some Democratic leaders, he did not require much persuasion before deciding to abandon his cabin passage, already paid to New York, and become an apostle of Democratic principles among his fellow passengers. He worked with such good effect that thirty of them volunteered under his lead and marched to the aid of the army investing Granada. They were reckless fighters, who looked upon Central American warfare as holiday pastime. Nevertheless, although reinforced from time to time by occasional American recruits, who had drifted into the country on their way to or from California, ere the siege was raised they had been reduced by war and disease to the number of four. Doubleday then organized from the flower of the native army a corps of sharpshooters with whom he covered the retreat to Leon, losing nearly all his company, but impressing the native soldiery with a favourable opinion of the Americans as bold and reckless fighters.

Cole's plan to bring in a formidable American contingent to aid the Democratic cause, came at a time when foreign help was doubly welcome. Castellon's Honduran allies had been abruptly recalled to meet an invasion of their own country by Guatemala. The Serviles, now in possession of lake and river, were slowly but surely advancing on Leon. The strength which the Leonese might have received from the Democratic states adjoining was needed by these at home to protect themselves against their aristocratic enemies, and against the alert, wily intrigues of European agents.

Therefore, in October, 1854, Byron Cole made a contract with the government of Castellon to supply to the Democratic army three hundred American "colonists liable to military duty." The settlers should be entitled to a grant of 52,000 acres of land, and should have the privilege of becoming citizens upon a formal declaration of that intention. Cole took his contract and sailed for California to receive his chief's ratification.

CHAPTER VIII

Purchase of the Vesta — May 4th, 1855, sailing of the "Immortal Fifty-six" — The American Phalanx — First battle of Rivas — Punishing a desperado — Trouble in Castellon's Cabinet — Battle at Virgin Bay — Death of Castellon.

Walker submitted the contract, worded with legal precision, to the civil and military authorities at San Francisco, and was gratified to learn that it in nowise threatened to violate the neutrality laws of the country. General Wool, to whom Walker had surrendered on his return from Sonora, professed himself satisfied; the district attorney of the United States found no flaw; but everybody in San Francisco knew that Walker was about to colonize Nicaragua with filibusters, and smiled at the peaceful fiction. The legal difficulties overcome, there remained the graver question of funds. To add to his embarrassments, Walker fell sick. It was late in April before he had succeeded in getting the few thousand dollars needed to charter and fit out a vessel. Meanwhile General Jerez, commanding the Democratic army at Leon, had made one or two contracts with other Americans, unknown to his superiors. The Granadinos, too, not to be behind their Democratic rivals, had sent Don Guadalupe Saenz to California to drum up recruits for their side. But nothing came of either venture, and the Leonese, now hemmed in their own department by the victorious Legitimists, looked wistfully for the coming of Walker. He at last succeeded in collecting the barely necessary amount of money, and cast about him for a suitable vessel to carry the new Argonauts.

In the shipping intelligence of the day is chronicled amongst the clearances at the San Francisco Custom House, on April 21st, the brig Vesta, Captain Briggs, for Realejo, forty-seven passengers. She did not sail, however, though some fifty or sixty passengers had taken their quarters on board. For at the last moment a new obstacle arose. Walker had bought her outright, though she was a slow, unseaworthy craft, some thirty years old, as nothing better offered, and found out, when too late, that she was liable for several debts incurred by the former owners. The sheriff seized her and, for security, had her sails stripped off and stored on shore. New creditors with old claims also appeared, ready to serve other attachments as soon as the first should be dissolved. Everybody who held a claim, real or fictitious, against the luckless craft, hastened to present it, knowing that Walker must pay their demands or incur a delay of tedious litigation, and delay meant death to his hopes. A revenue cutter drew up alongside the brig, ready to prevent a possible attempt at departure. The expeditionists grew restive, but Walker quieted them with the promise of a speedy departure. Seeking out the creditor who had attached the vessel, Walker persuaded him to grant a release on easy terms, but it took his last cent to defray the sheriff's extravagant fees of three hundred dollars. The last charge was paid on the 3rd of May, and Walker was authorized to ask the revenue cutter's aid in having the brig's sails bent on, which was rapidly and noiselessly done at night. But though out of the hands of the Government officers, the Vesta was still liable to detention by civil process, and a sheriff's keeper remained on board. The captain fearing to risk illegal steps, a new commander, M. D. Eyre, was hastily engaged. He went on board about midnight, having hired a towboat to carry the brig out to sea, and about the hour of one on the morning of May 4, 1855, the legal functionary was put on board the tow-boat, the lines cast off, and fifty-six filibusters embarked on a voyage of 2,700 miles in a crazy brig bound for a hostile port. A story is told that just before putting to sea, Walker invited the sheriff's officer into the cabin and addressed him briefly as follows: "Here, sir, are wine and cigars; also handcuffs and irons. Please make choice of which you will have. This vessel is going to sea." The officer, according to this rather apocryphal story, was a man of the world, and the Vesta put to sea.

Walker breathed more freely as the Golden Gate closed behind him, and the tug-boat Resolute, fading to a smoky speck on the water, loosened the last tenacious tentacle of the octopus—law. Harassed like Cortez by petty trials, he was, like him, sailing with a few chosen followers to a new destiny. He confided in the superiority of civilization over barbarism, and the certainty that he would receive his country's support the moment that success should first crown his arms: success which condones even greater faults than illegal warfare. The cost of failure he did not count. The stout-hearted hunter who enters a lion's den does not ask what will happen if nerve or steel fail him confronting his angry foe. Despite the result, there is something thrilling in the story of the fifty-six men who stole out of a harbour by night to conquer an empire—and all but succeeded! For not by armaments nor resources should such enterprises be judged, but by the deeds of the adventurers. As Prescott says, "It is not numbers that give importance to a conflict, but the consequences that depend upon it; the magnitude of the stake, and the skill and courage of the players—the more limited the means, even, the greater may be the science shown in the use of them."

They sailed down the Pacific coast—a long and stormy voyage—and, after touching at Tigre Island for a pilot, cast anchor in the port of Realejo, Nicaragua, on the 16th day of June. Old Realejo, at which the Vesta's voyage ended, was the site of a once prosperous Spanish town with a good harbour and deep tide-water; but so often had the buccaneers ravaged it, that the inhabitants had abandoned it and built a new town of the same name five miles further up the river, accessible only to boats of light draught. The strangers re-embarked in several canoes, or bongoes, hollowed from the ceiba tree, and by four o'clock that day arrived at New Realejo. Castellon and his cabinet were at Leon, the Democratic capital, whither Walker and Major Crocker set out the next day escorted by Colonel Ramirez and Captain Doubleday of the native army. The Provisional Director warmly received his new ally, and promptly and formally accepted the immigrants into the military service of Nicaragua. They were organized as a separate corps, under the name of "La Falange Americana," or American Phalanx, and placed under the immediate command of their own officers. Commissions were issued on the 20th of June to Walker as colonel, Achilles Kewen as lieutenant-colonel, and Timothy Crocker as major. Orders were given them at once to proceed by water to Rivas, in the Meridional department, which was held by the enemy. Colonel Ramirez, with two hundred natives, was detailed to help the Falange, but only half that number answered the roll-call, when the Vesta weighed anchor at Realejo, on the 23rd of June.

Walker had seen enough of his new friends to convince him that his ambition had nothing to fear from such rivals. Castellon was an amiable and irresolute gentleman; Munoz was ambitious and vain, but incapable. The native soldiery were ill-trained and fickle-minded. Faction had stifled any faint sparks of patriotism in their breasts. A few hundred of them who bore the proud title of veteranos, had smelt powder and could face an enemy after a march of forty miles under a tropical sun. They wore a tasteful uniform and carried muskets and knapsacks.

But the hundred recruits of Ramirez were a Falstaffian corps of indolent, good-natured rascals, who devoted all the intervals between skirmishing to gambling and gossip. As their country's proverb hath it, "they would gamble away the sun before sunrise." In striking contrast with those children of nature were the men of California, with iron nerves and dauntless courage, in whose characters vice lost half its evil by losing, if not its grossness, all its meanness; men who "deemed no crime, or curse, or vice as dark as that of cowardice." Their manliness was incapable of treachery, falsehood, or the meaner passions, born of a society in which law, the only remedy for wrong, too easily becomes the strongest shield of the wrong-doer. Having summed up their virtues in the comprehensive ones of courage and loyalty, there is little else to be said in their favour. For themselves they would have asked no higher praise, and strict justice can accord them little beyond.

It was a bold move to attack the enemy in his stronghold. Rivas and the adjoining country are the most densely populated parts of Nicaragua. The city of Rivas contains eleven thousand inhabitants, while the department of that name and the adjacent Oriental department number respectively twenty thousand and ninety-five thousand. Four days after leaving Realejo, the party, to the number of one hundred and sixty-five landed at a point on the coast near the town of Brito, and immediately began a forced march to Rivas. Midnight and a severe rain storm overtook them in the midst of a strange country, but they trudged patiently along, ankle-deep in mud, shielding their precious ammunition from the falling torrents. On the second night of their march the weather proved a useful ally, enabling them to surprise and overpower a picket of the enemy at the village of Tola. Next morning they were rewarded by a first sight of Lake Nicaragua in all its matchless beauty. Walker, who had beheld the glories of Switzerland, Italy, and California, pauses in the recital of his dangerous adventures to note the charms of the earthly paradise upon which he had come to launch the horrors of war. Between him and the lake six hundred Legitimist's troops lay at Rivas, awaiting the attack.

No time was lost in forming the plan of assault. To the Falange was awarded the post of honour, the native command of Ramirez being reserved to support them. Kewen and Crocker led the Americans, who, at the word of command, advanced steadily, receiving the enemy's fire with the coolness of veterans, and reserving their own until it could tell most effectively. Then after pouring in a volley they charged with a yell, and drove the advance guard of the Serviles down the narrow streets to the plaza. A stubborn resistance was made at this point. Crocker was dangerously wounded in two places, his right arm was broken by a musket shot, but he carried his pistol in his left hand and continued to fire it into the faces of the enemy, until a third shot laid him dead. Walker, who had joined his countrymen in the charge, now called for the native reserves to decide the issue; but they were nowhere to be seen. The poltroons had fled at the first shot. The enemy perceived the defection and pressed the abandoned Falange so hard that they were driven for shelter to some adobe huts, behind whose walls they held their own for three hours. It was a losing game with so small a force, for every man slain was equal to thrice the number of enemies added. Achilles Kewen was the next officer to fall. The hardy pioneer, Doubleday, was shot in the head, though not fatally. Seeing six of his men dead, and twice as many wounded, Walker ordered a sortie. The enemy had lost a hundred and fifty in killed and wounded, and General Boscha, their commander, deemed it wiser to offer no opposition to the departure of the Americans. The Serviles, with cowardly ferocity, killed the wounded men who had been left on the plaza, and celebrated their victory by burning the bodies. The ghastly bonfire lit up the city as the weary filibusters halted on their retreat near the Transit road to San Juan del Sur. The following morning they resumed the march to that city, where they arrived about sunset, on June 30th, in a most deplorable plight. Some were hatless, some shoeless, and all exhausted with battle and travel, as they marched into the town. There is a whole epitome of filibustering in the fact that at such a time two recruits were found to join the ranks of the Falange. "The Texan, Harry McLeod, and the Irishman, Peter Burns," deserve mention for this characteristic piece of hardihood.

The Vesta was cruising off the coast, awaiting orders from Walker, who therefore impressed a Costa Rican schooner, the San Jose, for the purpose of carrying his command to Realejo, defending his action upon the ground that the same vessel had already been used to carry General Guardiola from Honduras to Nicaragua upon a hostile mission, thus forfeiting her neutral rights. The schooner was confiscated a year afterwards, by Walker, for sailing under a false register, and, being converted into a man-of-war and renamed the Granada, played quite an important part in the climax of this tragedy.

In this critical hour of his fortunes, Walker's firmness was put to a severe test. A couple of dissolute Americans, who had been living for some time at San Juan, either through drunken folly or private spite, or for the purpose of plunder, set fire to the barracks on shore, for a time placing the whole town in danger of destruction. Walker, foreseeing that the act would be at once attributed to his men, took measures to punish the offenders. One of them escaped from the party detailed to execute him. The other, a gambler named Dewey, took refuge in the hold of a small boat attached to the stern of the San Jose. The desperado was well armed, and any attempt to capture him would have proved fatal to one or more of his assailants. So all the night Walker and a guard of men kept watch over the boat, ready to shoot or seize the villain if he tried to escape. At daybreak the schooner put to sea, towing astern the boat in which Dewey lay sheltered behind a poor native woman, his wretched mistress. The gambler, as everybody on board knew, was a dead shot, while his guard lay under the disadvantage of fearing to injure the woman if they fired. At last he rose to cut the boat's painter, and at that moment a rifle ball ended his career. The poor woman was wounded also, but not mortally. Walker takes pains to recount minutely the details of this incident, in order to vindicate the character of his followers. So severe a punishment was not lost upon those of his men who might be inclined to take a baser view of filibusterism than their leader did.

On the same day they met the Vesta at sea, and embarking on board the old brig, arrived at Realejo on July 1st. Walker was justly incensed at the defection of his native allies at Rivas, and positively refused to continue in the Democratic service without better guarantees of support on emergency than the jealousy of the native commanders seemed likely to allow. The Falange remained several days at Leon, where the firmness of their leader alone averted a collision between them and the troops of Munoz, who had set the example of hostility and distrust towards the new-comers. At last, finding the Cabinet unable to agree upon a fixed policy (though a modified contract had been drawn up, by the terms of which the Falange were to be enlisted in the army of Nicaragua to the number of three hundred, and receive one hundred dollars a month per man, and five hundred acres of land each at the close of the war), Walker withdrew his men from Leon to Realejo. There he embarked them on the Vesta, with the pretended purpose of departing for Honduras, and entering the service of President Cabañas. Nothing however, was farther from his intention. The Meridional department, commanding the Transit route, was the point at whose acquisition he steadily aimed. To maintain his foothold in Nicaragua he well knew he must keep open his communication with the United States and the recruits who were sure to flock thence to his standard.

Castellon was perplexed, fearing equally to part with his valuable allies and to displease Munoz by retaining them. The fortune of war decided the question. The Legitimists under Corral and His Hondureño ally, Guardiola, were drawing close to Leon. Santos Guardiola (his name is still muttered with a curse throughout the length and breadth of the isthmus) was a native of Honduras, who joined the Guatemalan enemies of his country, and, by his unparalleled cruelties to young and old, men and women alike, acquired the dread name of "The Tiger of Honduras." He was sprung from the stock which produces nine-tenths of the murderers and thieves of Central America, the offspring of Indo-African amalgamation known as "Sambos."

A deadlier foe, the cholera, was also beginning to ravage the Democratic department. To meet Corral and his forces, Munoz went forth with six hundred men, and a sharp engagement occurred at Sauce, in which the enemy was repulsed, but Munoz was slain. The loss of that commander influenced Castellon more than the temporary victory, and he continued to beg Walker to return. But Walker had already secured the co-operation of an influential partisan, Don Jose Maria Valle, who readily enlisted a hundred and sixty men for the enterprise against the Meridional department, and, with the easy loyalty of his nation, proposed that Walker should pronounce against Castellon and set up an independent government. Walker was honourable enough to reject the ungrateful suggestion, although he did not hesitate to disobey the Provisional Director's commands when they crossed his own policy. Accordingly, on the 23rd of August the Vesta sailed once more for the Meridional department, and arrived at San Juan del Sur on the 29th. The Legitimists fled at his approach. While the Americans were there the steamer from San Francisco arrived and departed, carrying back with her, as a recruiting agent, the afterwards notorious Parker H. French.

After a stay of four days Walker set out for Rivas, where Guardiola and six hundred Serviles lay waiting to regain the laurels lost at Sauce. The Americans, after a few hours' march, halted for breakfast at Virgin Bay, on the lake, and were at once attacked by Guardiola's whole command who had made a forced march towards San Juan, and then, doubling, followed the Americans to Virgin Bay. Attacked on front and flank, Walker made a good disposition of his little force. Previous experience had taught him that no superiority of discipline, skill, and courage sufficed to counterbalance the numerical odds of eight to one on an open field. He was now to try the effect of pitting the same against a proportion of only five to one, with the ground in his favour. The Falange, as usual, bore the brunt of battle; but the natives, being better officered than before, fought well. Guardiola was driven back at every point, notwithstanding that his men showed desperate courage. But no courage could withstand the deadly marksmanship of the Americans, who, with rifle or revolver, always engaged at close quarters and never wasted a shot. The combat, which hardly deserves the name of a battle, lasted only two hours; sufficiently long to inflict on the enemy a loss of sixty killed and a hundred wounded. At its conclusion Guardiola withdrew his demoralized forces and fled to Rivas. Walker, Doubleday, and a few others were wounded, but none of the Americans, and but three of their native allies, were killed.

Walker now returned to San Juan, where he picked up a few recruits from among the ranks of homeward-bound Americans on the steamer from California. Here also he learned of the death of Castellon, who had fallen a victim to the cholera. His successor, Don Nasario Escoto, warmly congratulated Walker on his success at Virgin Bay, and promised further aid. Learning from intercepted letters of the authorities at Granada that the city was in an almost defenceless condition, he determined to attack the Legitimist stronghold without awaiting the advance of Corral, who had replaced Guardiola in the command of the enemy. To show his contempt of the latter, he sent the intercepted correspondence to the Legitimist headquarters, and was not a little surprised at receiving a polite acknowledgement of the courtesy, and a hieroglyphic document from Corral, which proved to consist of Masonic signs. A freemason in the Falange, De Brissot, interpreted them to mean an overture for confidential negotiations. No reply was made to the proposition.

Recruits continued to flock to the Democratic standard. Colonel Charles Gilman, a one-legged veteran of Sonora, came down with thirty-five men from California. The native allies now numbered about two hundred and fifty. Two small cannon were procured and mounted. By the 11th of October Walker had everything in readiness for his most audacious stroke, the capture of Granada, a city as dear to the Legitimist cause, and especially to its proud inhabitants, as was its namesake to the Moors of old Spain.

Corral was massing his forces at Rivas, hoping, yet fearing, to meet his enemy on the Transit road. No suspicion of an attack on the capital seems to have entered his mind. Dissension was rife in the Legitimist camp, Guardiola and Corral quarrelling for the supreme command. The native Democrats on the other side, whatever of jealousy they may have felt towards their foreign allies, carefully veiled their feelings and made a show of the utmost cordiality. Walker enforced absolute discipline without distinction of nationality, a spice of grim humour sometimes seasoning his decisions. Two native officers, having quarrelled all night over some old or new feud, were ordered to settle the affair by going out and fighting a duel next morning, but their courage had oozed away by daybreak, and the trouble was heard of no more.

At last, on the morning of October 11th, the Democratic army, about four hundred strong, took the line of march over the white Transit road to Virgin Bay. The Falange were in good spirits as they marched gaily along the dusty highway. They were nearly all in the prime of life—tall, robust, and spirited. Their only distinctive uniform, if it might be called such, was the red ribbon which they wore tied around their black "slouch" hats. They wore blue or red woollen shirts, coarse trousers tucked into heavy boots, with a revolver and a bowie knife in each belt, and a precious rifle on every man's shoulder. Many new faces were in the ranks, and some old ones were missing which could ill be spared from a service of trust and danger. Ten of the original fifty-six had fallen in battle—Kewen, a brave veteran of Mexico and Cuba, Crocker, McIndoe, Cotham, Bailey, Hews, Wilson, William and Frank Cole, and Estabrook. Some were absent on leave, amongst them the pioneer, Doubleday, who had returned home piqued by an untimely rebuke from his commander. The estrangement did not last long. Doubleday soon wearied of a peaceful life, and was welcomed back by Walker on his return to active service.

CHAPTER IX

A Servile victory in the North — Walker in the enemy's stronghold —  Negotiations for peace — Execution of Mayorga — Rivas chosen Provisional Director — Corral's treason and punishment — Newspaper history.

Corral lay with the main body of the Legitimist army at Rivas, keeping, through his scouts and spies, a close watch on the movements of his enemy. One of those spies, having been caught within the Democratic lines, was tried by court-martial and summarily shot. Corral fancied that he had his foes in a trap, and he accordingly devoted all his efforts to prevent their retreat to San Juan, as well as to cut off reinforcements from California. Matters, indeed, looked desperate with the Democrats. On the North the Leonese had just been routed in battle by General Martinez at Pueblo Nuevo, and the victor had only halted for a time at Granada to receive a triumphal ovation before coming down to Rivas to join in the extermination of the filibusters.

It had been a gala day in the city of Granada. From early dawn to midnight her ten thousand citizens filled the streets and plazas with revelry and congratulations. Salvos of artillery thundered a welcome to the victors, joy bells rang all day, and bombas and rockets wasted precious powder in their honour. Aguardiente flowed freely as water, until the valiant soldiers prayed that Walker might be spared destruction long enough to meet the heroes of Pueblo Nuevo. Far into the night lasted the grand fiesta, till the last drunken reveller had hied him home or lain down in the street to dream of renewed happiness on the morrow. The tardiest lover had tinkled his farewell on the guitar. In the grand plaza the guard nodded around the watch fire, while from distant pickets came at intervals the long-drawn nasal "Alerte!" of the sentinels. It was a melodious cry, equally unlike the sharp challenge of the Frenchman or the stern English monosyllables.

Granada slept, the while a little steamer, with lights cloaked and furnaces hidden, steamed slowly along the shore. Not a sound broke the stillness of the lake, save the lap of surf or the plash of the startled saurian. The jaguar prowling among the orange trees on the shore challenged the unfamiliar noise, and the night birds passed along the cry of warning which was lost upon the ears of the sleepy sentinels. They drowsed over their waning fires until the gray of morning broke on the mountains, and from convent and church tower the joy-bells renewed the merry peals. Here and there a straggling sentry discharged his piece in response. Another and another shot were heard; then, suddenly, a short, sharp volley such as never came from the mouth of smooth-bore musket. The joy-bells changed to a loud alarm as a terrified sentinel rushed in from the South suburb, crying, "The enemy are on us! the Filibusteros!" Close upon his heels came the broken and demoralized picket, with the advance guard of Americans under Walker and Valle galloping on their track.

The surprised garrison, after the first panic, rallied and made a short stand on the plaza, until an impetuous charge of the invaders swept them away. In less time than has been taken to tell it one hundred and ten filibusters had carried by assault the city of Granada, without losing a man—literally, for a drummer-boy was the only victim on their side.

The surprise was complete, and the consequence of supreme importance to Walker, who, from the chief city of the Servile party, might dictate terms to Central America. Corral had been completely outgeneralled, nobody but Walker himself and his trusted aids, Valle and Hornsby, having been acquainted with the object of the expedition when it set out from Virgin Bay.

Walker, as soon as he had organized a provisional government and convinced his native allies by vigorous measures that the conquered city was not to be subjected to the usual treatment of plunder and violence, sent a delegation to negotiate with Corral. The envoys were met with a polite negative, while the United States minister, Mr. Wheeler, who had accompanied them in the character of a peacemaker, was thrown into prison and threatened with other punishments, whence ensued much diplomatic correspondence and official shedding of ink.

Meanwhile the hope of a peaceable understanding was seriously jeopardized by the folly of Walker's recruiting agent, Parker H. French. He had come to San Juan with a body of new men from California, and after crossing the Transit had seized one of the lake steamers, with the intention of capturing Fort San Carlos, at the head of the San Juan River, the same stronghold which in its days of power had been the key to the Transit route and to lake navigation. French was easily repulsed, and made his way to Granada to report his misadventures. Tidings of his deeds reaching Rivas in the meantime, some Legitimist soldiers, by way of reprisal, attacked and killed six or seven Californian passengers who were awaiting at Virgin Bay a chance of passage to the Atlantic coast. Shortly afterwards the commandant of Fort San Carlos fired into a westward-bound steamer, killing some passengers who were as innocent of complicity with French or the filibusters as had been the other victims at Virgin Bay. The protest of the American minister being treated with contempt, Walker, with questionable justice, retaliated by ordering a court-martial on the Legitimist Secretary of State, Don Mateo Mayorga, who had been captured at the taking of Granada. Such a method of holding a cabinet minister responsible for the acts of his government was enforcing the principles of constitutional rule with a vengeance. The court was composed of the secretary's countrymen, who brought in a verdict of guilty, and Mayorga was promptly executed. Although personally refraining from interfering in the case, and only reluctantly sanctioning the sentence of death, it is evident that Walker had begun to learn the Central American method of conducting warfare. But the execution, if morally unjustified, proved to be a wise act politically. Corral at once agreed to treat for peace, and a meeting between him and Walker was arranged to take place at Granada on the 23rd of October.

Again the bells of Granada rang out in joy, and the light-hearted populace welcomed the festival whether of peace or of war. The Falange, now some tenscore strong, joined with the native soldiery in a military welcome to their late enemies.

At the approach of Corral, Walker, attended by his staff, rode out of the suburbs to meet him. The commanders saluted each other with grave cordiality, and re-entered the city side by side, proceeding to the grand cathedral, where Padre Vijil, the curate of Granada, offered up a High Mass, and Te Deums of thanksgiving were sung. Nor did the good father fail in his sermon to show the advantages to his beloved country attending the presence of the strange American of the North.

Handsome Corral was the darling of the Granadinos. He had the superficial traits which draw popularity—dash, openhandedness, physical beauty, and a sunny disposition; but he was weak, vain, and untrustworthy, for all that. We have seen how he coquetted with Walker while in command of the Legitimist forces, treating for peace and imprisoning its envoys. Having come to Granada to complete the negotiations, he now betrayed the rights of his principal, the President, so called, Estrada, and entered into a sacred compact with the Leonese, whose acts were sanctioned by their nominal President.

By the terms of the agreement Don Patricio Rivas was appointed President pro tempore, with the following cabinet: Maximo Jerez, Minister of Relations; Firmin Ferrer, Minister of Public Credit; Parker H. French, Minister of Hacienda; Ponciano Corral, Minister of War. Walker was appointed generalissimo of the army, which consisted of twelve hundred men, distributed throughout the country in small garrisons. Five hundred men were stationed at Leon and the remainder at Virgin Bay, Granada, Rivas, and other fortified positions. The general in chief received a salary of five hundred dollars a month, and his subordinates were awarded correspondingly liberal pay, or promises to pay. There were seven surgeons and two chaplains attached to the forces; the former held no sinecure.

During the progress of the negotiations Corral, with the small subtlety of miniature politics, had sought to entrap Walker in various ways, such as requiring him to take the oath upon the Crucifix, and similar ceremonial punctilioes, to which Walker, as a Protestant, might have been expected to object, but, like a man of sense, did not. He rightly judged that the keeping of an oath was of more importance than the form of taking it; and therein he differed from Corral, who was detected, a few days after the formation of the government, in treasonable correspondence with the neighbouring states. A native courier deceived the traitor, and placed in Walker's hands the fatal letters containing indisputable proofs of the writer's guilt.

To Xatruch, a Legitimist refugee, he had written, nine days after the signing of the treaty, begging him to foment hostility against the new administration. In a similar strain he wrote to Guardiola, the Honduran Servile leader, conjuring him to arouse the Legitimist element everywhere against the American intruders: "Nicaragua is lost, lost are Honduras, San Salvador, and Guatemala if they let this thing prevail. Let them come quickly, if they would meet auxiliaries." General Martinez, commanding at Managua, was also implicated in the treason, but received warning in time to fly the country.

Walker at once requested the President and Cabinet to meet him, and laid before them the evidence of Corral's guilt. A court-martial was convened, the members of which were all Americans, such, it is said, being the wish of the accused, who knew that he could expect no mercy from his countrymen. From the same motive, he did not deny his guilt, but threw himself on the mercy of his judges, relying, as it proved, over-much on the magnanimity which the Americans had heretofore displayed. He was sentenced to die by the fusillade at noon of the next day, November the 7th. The time of execution was subsequently postponed two hours. The friends of the condemned made earnest appeals for mercy in his behalf, being seconded by the leading public citizens, and particularly by Padre Vijil, the gentle apostle of peace; but Walker, though much moved and fully aware of the odious construction which his enemies would put upon the act, firmly refused the petition. The treason was too flagrant, the example unfortunately too necessary, and mercy to such a traitor would have been injustice to every loyal man in the state.

Corral died at the appointed hour, and the lesson was not wholly lost upon his accomplices. Walker has been bitterly censured for this piece of stern justice, especially at home in the United States, where the act was misrepresented as that of a suspicious tyrant who thus rid himself of a dangerous rival. But there is not the slightest reason for regarding Corral's death as aught but the well-merited punishment of an utterly unscrupulous villain. His whole conduct in connection with the late war was consistent with his last and fatal treachery. Even the morality of Nicaragua, loose as it was in matters of public faith, while lamenting the fate of Handsome Ponciano, confessed that he was well-named "Corral," the beautiful but deadly serpent of the country.

That impartial justice governed the action of Walker is evident from an incident which occurred on the very day on which Corral was inditing his treason to Xatruch and Guardiola. Patrick Jordan, a soldier of the Falange, while intoxicated, shot and mortally wounded a native boy. Jordan was tried by court-martial and sentenced to death. Padre Vijil and many others, including the mother of the murdered boy, begged in vain for leniency to the culprit. On the 3rd of November, two days after the commission of his crime, Jordan was shot at sunrise. Walker's detractors commented characteristically upon this execution, picturing the impartial judge as another Mokanna, delighting in the suffering of friend as of foe. The historian, groping in the darkness of contemporaneous journalism for facts of current history, wherever those facts bear upon the so-called political issues of the time, finds himself floundering at every step in sloughs of falsehoods or quicksands of misrepresentation. The evil, unhappily, is confined to no party or epoch. Walker being a champion, and a bigoted one, of a certain party, paid the inevitable penalty, that of being equally over-praised and underrated, according to the political prejudices of his critics.

To Don Buenaventura Selva was given the vacant portfolio of war. The representative of the United States recognized the new administration. The neighbouring states of Liberal tendencies sent assurances of hearty friendship; those in which the Servile party was supreme maintained a diplomatic silence. Peace reigned throughout the length and breadth of Nicaragua, the peace of her own slumbering volcanoes.

CHAPTER X

Filibusterism abroad — Kinney's Expedition — The Filibusters and their allies — An aristocracy of leather — Pierce and Marcy — A rupture with the United States — Costa Rica declares war — Schlessinger's fiasco —  Cosmopolitan adventurers — Steamers withdrawn — History of the Transit Company — Vanderbilt plans vengeance — The printing-press on the field.

In the United States, particularly in California, Walker's amazing success gave an impulse to filibustering of a different, because more sanguine, nature from that produced by the first expeditions of Lopez to Cuba. France and England also awoke to behold with dismay this solution of the Central American problem. Not less alarmed was the Conservative element in Spanish America, the more reactionary part of which talked wildly of calling in a European protectorate and of breaking off commercial intercourse with the North Americans. Mexico, Cuba, Ecuador, and Central America were threatened by invading expeditions, while Nicaragua was made the objective point of an actual invasion from the Atlantic coast. It will be remembered that the Mosquito king's grant to the Shepards had been transferred to a colonization company in the United States; upon the strength of which Henry L. Kinney, of Philadelphia, proceeded to occupy his property. But there were many difficulties in the way. The grant had been revoked by his Majesty in a lucid interval. Great Britain, as guardian of the kingdom, repudiated the contract. Nicaragua steadily declined to recognize the rights of either party to her territory; and, to complete the adventurer's misfortune, the Federal authorities arrested him when about to lead his first detachment of colonists to his tropical possessions. Not to rehearse the tedious litigation which followed, it suffices to say that the Kinney Expedition, having succeeded in embarking, was shortly afterwards wrecked on Turk's Island, finally reaching San Juan del Norte in a most forlorn plight. There new misfortunes overtook them. Most of the military colonists sailed up the river to share the more promising fortunes of Walker, to whom Kinney himself, despairing of success unaided, at last made overtures for an alliance offensive and defensive. But the messenger found Walker firmly entrenched in power and, as a member of the government, bound to consider all foreign claims on the Mosquito coast as mere usurpations. Had it been otherwise, he might perhaps have returned a less peremptory answer than the brief threat: "Tell Mr. Kinney, or Colonel Kinney, or whatever he calls himself, that if I find him on Nicaraguan soil, I will most assuredly hang him." The new element in Nicaragua did not fail to uphold the sovereign independence of the country with zeal, even if it may have sometimes lacked discretion. Walker was a stickler for dignity, and never failed to exact the respect due to himself, his office, and his flag. An English merchant, of Realejo, who had resisted a Government levy, and, with the sublime assurance of his race, had hoisted the Union Jack over his house, was caustically invited by Walker to lower the emblem or produce his Government's license to display the flag of a representative. "If he refuses," said Walker, "tear it down, trample it under foot, and put the fellow in irons." The Englishman knew enough of law to see that he had no authority for the display of bunting, which he accordingly furled, paid the requisition, and cursed the Yankee lawyer who had taught him a lesson. Walker was versed in the law of nations, but he unfortunately overlooked the fact that those wise statutes are framed for the control of strong nations dealing with their peers. It is not enough to be right, or to know one's rights, unless the power to maintain them accompany the knowledge. A touch of the lawyer's weakness for technical rights always marked this curious outlaw.

In the dazzling success of the Falange, the disasters of Kinney were forgotten, and many a band of hardy adventurers was tempted to rival their deeds. For a time it seemed as though the spirit of the Vikings had been revived in the land discovered by Eric the Red. On the Pacific coast those incursions sometimes assumed, as we have seen, formidable proportions. Sonora, Arizona, Lower California, and even the Sandwich Islands, were the various goals of ambitious adventurers, some of whom never carried their schemes into effect; others, like Colonel Crabbe, made a really imposing campaign for a brief space, only to die fruitless deaths.

The filibusters were by no means impelled to risk life and liberty through an abstract love of freedom or disinterested affection for their oppressed allies. They were, on the contrary, rather prone to turn to their own advantage the fruits of hard-won victory. Their extenuation lies in the worthless character of their allies, who invariably deserted them in extremity, and left the foreigner to save himself. It was so in Cuba, in Sonora, in Nicaragua, though there were honourable exceptions everywhere. A contempt and mistrust of the native character, often but ill-concealed, did not serve to make the alliance any more sincere. In Nicaragua, for the present at least, gratitude was stronger than prejudice, and the party favouring the Americans was powerful and enthusiastic. The common people remained faithful throughout; it was the calzados, the middle and upper classes composing the Conservative party, who hated the foreigner because they felt his superiority, and his still more galling consciousness thereof. The calzados were those who wore shoes, as distinguished from the barefoot rabble. Aristocracy, based on such transcendent merit, is naturally jealous of its prerogatives.

Almost every steamer from California brought down a squad, greater or less, of recruits. Amongst the earliest was a brother of the Achilles Kewen killed at the first battle of Rivas. E. J. C. Kewen was one of the most valuable of Walker's staff, on which he served throughout the war. Quite characteristic of the time and place is the matter-of-fact way in which the San Francisco papers state that Colonel Kewen participated as second in a duel at that place on the day preceding his departure for Nicaragua. Business before pleasure.

During the four months which followed the formation of the new government, Walker gathered about him a force of Americans and other foreigners numbering twelve hundred. They came from all parts of the Union, but chiefly from the Southern and Pacific states. Recruiting offices were opened in San Francisco, whose agents penetrated the mining camps and interior towns, unnoticed or unhindered by the Government authorities. Whenever any opposition was offered, the volunteers frequently bought through tickets to New York, and stopped at Nicaragua to enjoy a little filibustering. In the east more stringent precautions were taken by the authorities, though without much effect, as the colonists were responding to the invitation of the Nicaraguan Government, and could not be legally hindered.

Among the adventurers were many idle and desperate characters attracted by visions of beauty and booty, with the broad license of a freebooter's camp. To such the reality proved a terrible revelation; they found, instead of a free lance's easy discipline, a system of military government emulating in its stringent laws that of the great Frederick. Walker's abstemiousness was supplemented by the virtue, much rarer in men of his class, of absolute personal chastity in thought, word, and deed. Drunkenness, debauchery, and profanity were vices which he abhorred. The man who was detected selling liquor to a soldier was punished by a fine of 250 dollars; the drunkard was sent to the guard-house for ten days. With whisky of a vile quality selling at two dollars and a half a bottle, and the terrors of punishment before the eyes of both buyer and seller, drunkenness was rare in Granada. On the outposts discipline was more lax, officers and men availing themselves of secrecy to evade their general's stern commands. The well-behaved, on the other hand, were treated with the greatest favour, receiving their regular pay of a hundred dollars a month, according to some—a quarter of that sum, according to others—and a contingent title to five hundred acres of land.

The assurance of peace alone was needed to make Nicaragua, the veritable "Mahomet's Paradise" which its discoverers had named it. But there was no such assurance or prospect in view. Even had Walker been willing to rest content with his present wonderful success, he would not have been permitted so to curb his ambition. His enemies were too many and too powerful and implacable. Great Britain, which had been trespassing, secretly or openly, for half a century, on the rights of the weak Spanish-American republics, could not allow so rich a prize to pass into the hands of the hated "Yankee." Money, men, and arms were furnished to the neighbouring states, and every pretext was made use of to stir up a crusade against the Americans.

Enemies as bitter, though less powerful to injure openly, influenced the administration at Washington. The Secretary of State, William L. Marcy, was a politician who is best remembered by his enunciation of the notorious political maxim, "To the victors belong the spoils." Marcy had no personal ill-will towards Walker or his political friends; he was not the man to indulge a wanton grudge, but he carried into the great office which he filled the aims, sympathies, prejudices, and alliances of a thorough politician. To him the traditions of his country, the dignity of his high position, the honour of the republic were secondary ideas. What his party would say, how his acts would be criticized at Albany or on Wall Street, these were the thoughts which swayed his mind and governed his conduct. Like master, like man, Franklin Pierce was mentally as small as his secretary. So when a minister plenipotentiary from Nicaragua presented his credentials at Washington, and the other resident ministers protested against his being received, a terrible consternation fell upon the minds of President and Secretary. Mr. Marcolletta, the former minister, though recalled by the Government of Nicaragua, stoutly refused to resign. The other foreign ministers espoused his cause, and the secretary had the amazing stupidity to argue the case gravely with those officious gentlemen. Colonel Wheeler, the minister to Nicaragua, being appealed to, confirmed the de facto and de jure claims of the Rivas Government, adding, as a proof of the country's tranquillity, the striking fact, that "not a single prisoner, for any offence, is now confined in the Republic—a circumstance unknown before in the country."

Mr. Marcy had now no choice but to acknowledge the credentials of the new representative, when the discovery of a grave blunder of Walker's saved him the humiliation. No official objection could be urged against the minister, but unfortunately for him, there were pronounced personal objections strong enough to warrant the district attorney of New York in ordering his arrest on a criminal process. The individual, Parker H. French, was the same one-armed hero whose fiasco before Fort San Carlos had brought the Falange into disrepute and provoked the Virgin Bay massacre. Walker discovered when too late the unworthy antecedents of his envoy, whose conduct in Nicaragua should have been enough to disqualify him; but regarding his arrest as a violation of diplomatic privilege, he had him recalled, dismissed the American minister to Nicaragua, and suspended diplomatic intercourse with the United States. Some months later, and after the United States had declined to receive a second minister, Don Firmin Ferrer, Walker sent a third representative, in the person of the good Padre Vijil, who proved acceptable at Washington, as much on account of his high character as for the news which he brought with him, that Walker had routed his Costa Rica enemies, and frightened back the Serviles of the North. Franklin Pierce was not the man to turn his back upon a friend in prosperity, though his good will was not shared by Mr. Marcy. The Nicaraguan minister was received in form, but met with such studied discourtesy from the Secretary of State and his underlings that the cultured and amiable gentleman was glad to return, after a brief sojourn, to the better-mannered society of Nicaragua.

But the fickle conduct of President Pierce and his cabinet had exposed the weak joint in Walker's armour to his quick-eyed enemies in Central America and in Europe. The filibuster, so far from having the support of his native country, was apparently without a friend there. English consuls and men-of-war captains saw that they might crush out with impunity this adventurer and restore the supremacy of European influence on the isthmus. All the Servile partisans in the neighbouring states and the disaffected Legitimists of Nicaragua united to expel the foreign element. The Costa Rican consul-general in London wrote to his President, Don Juan Rafael Mora, in a letter which fell into Walker's hands, that the British Government would sell to Costa Rica two thousand army muskets, at a nominal price, for the purpose of "kicking Walker and his associates out of Nicaragua." British friendship was not purely disinterested nor did it proceed solely from hatred of Americans. Seventeen million dollars invested by English capitalists in Costa Rican bonds were the substantial basis of that interest. It is painful to reflect upon the fact that those bonds were afterwards defaulted to the last dollar.

A deputation sent from Nicaragua to negotiate a treaty of peace with Costa Rica was ignominiously expelled the latter country. Guatemala, San Salvador, and Honduras also declined to recognize the new administration.

On the 26th of February, 1856, Costa Rica declared war against Nicaragua, for the expressed purpose of driving the foreign invaders from the soil of Central America. Distant Peru sympathized with the crusaders by advancing a loan of $150,000 to aid the righteous campaign. President Mora at once collected a force of nine thousand men, and prepared to march on Guanacaste. A counter declaration of war was immediately issued by President Rivas. Walker, as general-in-chief, summoned his men to meet him on the plaza of Granada, and, having had the proclamation of hostilities read to them, made a stirring address, concluding with a peroration well suited to his hearers: "We have sent them the olive branch; they have sent us back the knife. Be it so. We shall give them war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt."

Unfortunately the officer chosen to lead the advance on Costa Rica proved to be a knife more dangerous to the hand which held than to the breast before it. Colonel Louis Schlessinger was given the command, partly by way of compensation for the ill-treatment which he had received from the Costa Ricans when he went thither as one of the peace commissioners. Another of the commissioners named Arguello had deserted to the enemy. The third, Captain W. A. Sutter, son of the famous discoverer of gold in California, alone showed himself possessed of ability and honesty. Walker was not happy in his choice of civil officers, but it must be remembered that the supply of such material was limited. Heaven-inspired statesmen do not flock to the support of a cause so dangerous and unpromising as his.

If Schlessinger was a poor diplomat, he was a worse soldier. Starting with a force of two hundred men, he crossed the border of Guanacaste on the 19th of March. Five companies, of forty men each, had been divided, according to their nationalities or origin, into a French company, under Captain Legaye, a German under Prange, a New Orleans under Thorpe, a New York under Creighton, and a Californian under Rudler. The American companies comprised men of every English-speaking nation, "blown from the four parts of the earth." This division, which a skilful commander might have turned to account by exciting a generous rivalry, was but a source of weakness in the hands of the incapable Schlessinger, himself a foreigner and little popular with his men.

Their first and only engagement occurred at the Hacienda of Santa Rosa, twelve miles within the boundary of Guanacaste. Schlessinger allowed himself to be surprised, the enemy under a skilful officer, the Prussian Baron von Bulow, attacking him with a force of five hundred regulars, and winning an easy victory. Schlessinger did not even make a show of resistance, but ran away at the first shot, followed by the German and French companies. Captain Rudler and Major O'Neill made a brave stand with the New York and California companies, until some fifty of their command were killed, when the survivors made the best of their way off the field and across the border. Only a poor drummer-boy remained beating his drum with childish glee until shot down at his post. The wounded and the prisoners were all put to death by order of President Mora, who had proclaimed no quarter to every filibuster taken in arms. So ended the battle of Santa Rosa, on the 20th of March.

Schlessinger was court-martialed on his return, found guilty of cowardice, and sentenced to death, but he escaped punishment by breaking his parole during the trial and fleeing to Costa Rica. More than twenty years afterwards he reappears in the courts of that country, claiming reward for the service rendered the state on the occasion just narrated.

The heterogeneous character of the filibusters, even at this early date, may be seen from a list of the prisoners butchered after the battle of Santa Rosa, of whom six were natives of the United States, three of Ireland, three of Germany, one of Italy, one of Corfu, one of Samos, one of France, two of Prussia, and one of Panama.

So unexpected was the rout that the victors, fearing a ruse, did not pursue their advantage. The demoralized fugitives returned in straggling parties, some without arms, some in rags, and all crest-fallen and disgraced. To cover their shame they exaggerated the numbers and prowess of the enemy, who, indeed, had behaved with great skill and courage, proving a formidable foe when well led.

For some days a panic prevailed in the Democratic headquarters. Matters were in a critical condition. The Legitimists in the State, always secretly disaffected, hastened to spread the news of the defeat among their friends in the North. Honduras and the neighbouring republics grew firmer in their refusal to recognize the Rivas Government, and Guardiola began to mass his savage troops on the border of Leon. The demoralization spread among the Americans themselves. Faint-hearted officers, erstwhile thirsting for glory, suddenly began to long for a return home, and to send in applications for furlough. Walker lay tossing on a bed of fever, the while his enemies conspired against him and fair-weather friends deserted him. But he had many a stout heart among his trusty veterans, men who welcomed danger as a gambler courts his risks, and who bade good-bye to their shrinking comrades with a fine scorn worthy of Pizarro's old lieutenant, Carvajal, who sang:

"The wind blows the hairs off my head, mother—

Two by two it blows them away."

Another misfortune at this moment overtook the adventurers. The steamers of the Transit Company were suddenly withdrawn, and all communication with California was suspended. Though it stopped desertion, this isolation also cut off the coming of recruits. This action of the company was the result of a misunderstanding of long date. By the terms of its charter it was bound to pay to the Government of Nicaragua ten thousand dollars annually, and ten per cent. of its net profits. The company claimed, and the Government denied, that the ten thousand dollars had been paid with some regularity; but by a process of book-keeping, well known to financiers, the accounts never showed a balance of net profit upon which to levy the additional tithe. Against this deception the weak and ephemeral administrations of Nicaragua had at times feebly protested. The agents of the company bullied, deceived, or bribed them into silence, and went on reaping a golden harvest, until the installation of the Rivas administration. Cornelius Vanderbilt was then managing the company's affairs in New York, while its Western business was conducted by Morgan and Garrison at San Francisco. Vanderbilt, a man of boundless ambition and no weak scruples, soon made himself master of the company's resources. Nicaragua had never challenged the Wall Street autocrat until Walker took the country's affairs in hand. One of his first steps was the appointment of a commission to examine the Transit Company's books. The commission reported that the Government had been defrauded flagrantly and systematically for years, and that a balance, amounting to over $250,000 was lawfully due to it. Vanderbilt peremptorily declined either to acknowledge or liquidate the debt, repeating the vague threats with which he had been used to awe the little officials of former days.

Thereupon the ex-lawyer of California simply directed the authorities to seize the company's property as security, revoking at the same time the old charter and granting a new one to Messrs. Randolph and Crittenden. This occurred on the 18th of February. The last act of the old company had been the transportation of two hundred and fifty recruits from San Francisco, the draft for whose passage money was paid by Vanderbilt, some days afterwards, while he was yet ignorant of the sequestration of his property. The Wall Street dictator was very angry, but bided his time and quietly despatched a draft for a much larger sum, payable to the order of Juan Rafael Mora, President of Costa Rica. He then made a formal protest and appeal to Secretary Marcy, invoking the help of the United States. Marcy, however, was too old a politician to identify himself openly with the unsavoury interests of the Transit Company, a corporation whose history is summed up by Minister Squier, as "an infamous career of deception and fraud." He quieted his friend Vanderbilt with promises which were only too well kept. The vengeance of the money king was not contented with abetting Walker's enemies. Nothing short of the filibuster's ruin would suffice to soothe the wounded pride of Vanderbilt. The man of millions was no mean power in affairs commercial and political at home. When he undertook to use his resources against an almost penniless adventurer abroad, the might of money proved to be all but omnipotent.

In December Kewen was sent to California to dispose of a million dollars' worth of the bonds of the State of Nicaragua. He was instructed to sell no bonds below a minimum of ninety per cent. of the face value, and it does not appear that he did dispose of any below that price—few, indeed, at or above it.

Another feature of a stable government appeared about this time. In the early Spanish invasions the outward adjuncts of religion always followed in the wake of the army. It was in keeping with the changed condition of affairs that the printing-press should accompany the filibuster. Two newspapers were already in full play in Nicaragua, El Nicaraguense, of Granada, and the Herald, of Masaya. The editors and printers of Nicaragua were not strictly men of peace, but were wont, when occasion served, to exchange the pen for the sword. On this account their war despatches ought to have been most authentic, being commonly written and published on the field. John Tabor, the editor and proprietor of El Nicaraguense, was twice wounded in the pursuit of his novel duties, but lived to accompany Walker on his second invasion, in 1857, when, alas! his ready press was not called upon to chronicle any glorious victories.

CHAPTER XI

The Costa Ricans invade Nicaragua — Second battle of Rivas — The enemy meet a new foe — Rivas orders an election — Walker a candidate — Treason of Rivas — Murder of Estrada — Coalition of the Northern States against Nicaragua — Walker chosen President — Inauguration and recognition by the United States minister — Tradition of the "Gray-eyed Man."

Walker was less concerned about his enemies in the United States than those nearer home, though he never committed the mistake of undervaluing a dangerous foe or the weakness of forgiving him. Three thousand Costa Ricans had crossed the border and overrun the southern part of Rivas. It was no time for fever of body or mind. Walker arose from his bed and summoned his forces to strike a vigorous blow for his rights. Rivas, the President, was at Leon, watching and waiting; he had placed the southern departments under martial law, and given absolute power to the commander-in-chief. Walker no longer opposed the enemy's march on Rivas, as his object in holding the Transit had been lost with the withdrawal of the steamers. All the American troops at Rivas and Virgin Bay were accordingly removed to Granada, with the ostensible purpose of retreating at once to Leon. When the enemy entered Virgin Bay they found there only the native inhabitants and a few foreign employés of the Transit Company. Without a word of warning, they opened fire on the latter, killing some nine or ten unarmed servants of Mr. Vanderbilt, and with a zeal for which that gentleman would have been far from grateful, burned all of the company's property in wharves and warehouses which they could find. After completing the work of destruction, they marched to Rivas, where President Mora took up his abode and cautiously awaited the movements of Walker. The latter kept his counsel so well that no one knew whether he intended retreating to Leon or abandoning the country entirely. The latter course seemed the more probable, as the lake steamer, San Carlos, had been for some days engaged in carrying men and munition across the lake and down the river to Forts San Carlos and Castillo Viejo. A side light was thrown on these movements, when Lieutenant Green, with only fifteen men, surprised a Costa Rica force of two hundred at the mouth of the Serapiqui, killing twenty-seven of them and putting the rest to flight.

At last on the morning of April 9th, Walker rode out of Granada at the head of five hundred men, four-fifths of them Americans, and pressed rapidly southward towards Rivas, where Mora lay encamped with Prussian von Bulow and three thousand regulars. There were several English, French, and Germans acting with the Costa Ricans, some as volunteers and many as mercenaries. At eight o'clock, on the morning of the 11th, Walker's forces entered Rivas in four detachments by as many different routes. The order of battle was that of a simultaneous assault, the several detachments to unite at the centre of the town. It was faithfully carried out, although the Costa Ricans, soon recovering from their surprise, behaved gallantly, using their firearms with precision and coolness, and picking off the American leaders with fatal accuracy. The combat lasted through four hours. At its termination Walker had gained possession of the plaza and cathedral, but at a cost of fifty killed and wounded. About two hundred of the enemy were killed and twice as many wounded. They were receiving reinforcements, but did not venture from behind their adobe walls to renew the contest. Setting fire to the houses near the plaza, they kept up a desultory sharp-shooting from the adjacent buildings. The Americans improvised a temporary hospital within the cathedral, whence at daybreak the wounded were deported, well guarded by their comrades. Mora did not oppose their departure, being well content to be rid of his troublesome visitors.

Walker's loss in officers was severe. Early in the fight Colonel Machado, commanding the native soldiers, fell mortally wounded. Five captains and six lieutenants also perished, and there were twelve other officers among the wounded. Of Walker's staff Captain Sutter alone survived. This mortality was due not more to the marksmanship of the enemy than to the reckless courage of the victims, who made it a point of honour to volunteer for every desperate adventure. Ten of them at one time had charged, armed only with revolvers, on a barricade, whence they dislodged over a hundred of the enemy's riflemen.

By this time the aspect of affairs had changed materially, and the situation of the invading army had become extremely perilous. The Legitimists, whom Mora had expected to unite with him in expelling the American usurpers, he found to be few and faint of heart, while the wanton insolence of his own men had tended to alienate whatever of sympathy they might have found among the poorer classes. In a word, the repulse of Walker at Rivas, if that can be called a repulse which was an unhindered withdrawal, was to Mora the signal of defeat. Unable to conquer an enemy of one-sixth his strength, and not daring to lessen his odds in the hazard of a pitched battle—much less in a siege of Granada—he lay at Rivas exhausted and impotent. It needed but one other enemy to complete his overthrow. That enemy, always a potent one beneath the tropic sun, appeared.

The bodies of two hundred Costa Ricans had been thrust heedlessly into the vaults and wells of Rivas, along with some fifty dead filibusters. Hundreds more lay in the wretched hospitals, with festering wounds and scant nursing. Cleanliness and good living did not distinguish the Costa Rican soldier. A strict discipline was maintained, but one day an Enemy passed the outpost, unchallenged of the watchful sentinel. The patrol crying "Alerté!" was stricken dead by a silent hand. The soldier at the monte table, the officer in his hammock, the camp follower in the slums, and the staff-officer in the palace—all ages, all ranks, all valour succumbed before the dread foe. The Cholera was in Rivas, that malady more terrible than a legion of filibusters. With the cholera, desertion. President Mora set the example, news of trouble at home hastening his flight southward. General Cañas remained in command until he heard of the arrival at Granada of some hundreds of recruits, whom the veteran Hornsby had gathered in the United States and brought to the country by way of the river San Juan.

Anticipating justly that Walker would soon resume an offensive attitude, Cañas hastily abandoned his wounded and fled to Guanacaste. The march thither was long and painful; the fugitives could be traced for leagues by the bones of their dead comrades. Whom the cholera struck down no brotherly hand stayed to lift up. About five hundred worn stragglers entered Costa Rica, the remnant of the gallant host that had marched forth to drive the filibusters into the sea. With them they carried the seeds of the pestilence, which being sown broadcast in the country, swept off ten thousand of its inhabitants.

Nor was Walker exempt from trouble during this period. Many of his most cherished friends were carried off by the plague, among others his young brother, James, whom he loved, in his undemonstrative way, very tenderly. The condition of political affairs was unsatisfactory. President Rivas, who had remained with his cabinet at Leon, seems to have dreaded an invasion from the North more than he did that of the Costa Ricans. He was a weak man, easily played upon by designing persons who had succeeded in imbuing him with a jealousy of Walker, which, so far at least, was entirely groundless. The northeastern districts of the State had been for some time harassed by roving bands of freebooters, pretended and real Legitimists, whose depredations became a serious annoyance. Against these guerillas Walker sent a body of cavalry, under Domingo Goicouria, who speedily restored order in the district.[1]

An election for President held in May had been conducted with such irregularity that it was decided by President Rivas to order one to be held anew in June. In this decision the opposing candidates, Salazar and Jerez, acquiesced. Both of them were, like Rivas, of the Leonese, or Liberal party; so the Granadinos, or Legitimists, dreading the influence of their rivals, cast about them for a strong candidate to represent their interests. No Legitimist of sufficient popularity being available, they chose Walker, preferring a neutral foreigner to a hostile countryman. It was therefore understood, in political parlance, that Walker was the "first choice" of the still powerful Legitimist party. The effect was at once to unite the opposing Leonese leaders. Rivas, supported by Salazar and Jerez, delayed issuing the call for a new election, and entertained with favour the suggestion that the American auxiliaries be reduced to the number of two hundred, at the very time when that number of new recruits were disembarking from the California steamer. The steamers had resumed their trips under the management of a company favourable to "immigration."

Walker proceeded to Leon to confer with Rivas, receiving on the way a popular ovation which encouraged him to maintain his rights with firmness. To the proposition of disbanding his forces he replied that the men were ready to leave the country as soon as they should receive their stipulated pay, a claim which he knew that the Government exchequer was in no condition to defray. Not to embarrass the resources of the republic, however, he arrested Don Salazar on a charge of having defrauded the Government of the duties upon some valuable Brazil wood, and of having sold the same wood to the Government, with a profit to himself seldom overlooked by contractors. The act was an offence against an old and seldom enforced law of the country. The arrest was doubtless meant to warn Salazar that he could not conspire with impunity against his vigilant ally, as he was not immediately brought to trial. Rivas, Jerez, and Salazar now decided to pronounce against their formidable rival, but with smooth duplicity they concealed their design, the President, on the 10th of June, issuing a decree for a general election to take place on the fourth Sunday of the month. Next day Walker departed for Granada, and Rivas and Salazar immediately fled from Leon, proclaiming that Walker was a traitor. They took refuge in Guatemala, where General Carrera was preparing a force with which to invade Nicaragua.

Walker, as general in chief of a state disturbed by a revolution within and threatened with invasion from without, was, of course, the head of the government in the absence of the civil ruler. At least, there was nobody to dispute that proposition. He accordingly appointed a provisional director, Don Firmin Ferrer, pending the election which was to occur in a few weeks.

In the election, when it was held, all the districts took part except the northeastern, which was disturbed by the presence of an invading army on its border and two pretenders to the presidency within its precincts. One of them was Rivas; the other the almost forgotten Legitimist puppet of Corral, Don Jose Estrada. Estrada did little of an official character save issue proclamations which nobody heeded; still, as a pretender is always a potential element in monarchy or republic, whom a cunning invader might use to his own advantage, the partisans of Rivas feared to leave to Carrera that poor excuse for betraying their interests. Estrada was murdered in cold blood by a band of ruffians from Leon. With him perished the last of the strictly Legitimist claimants. To insure further their personal interests, Rivas and his friends appointed General Ramon Belloso commander-in-chief of the army of invasion. The allied forces were from Guatemala, Honduras, and San Salvador, and it was from the last and smallest state that it was deemed wise to choose the commander, as the one least likely or able to usurp power after victory.

The lack of representation in the election of the northeastern district was of little consequence, as it was the least populous part of the state, and its vote would have had no influence to change the result. The voting was entirely free and unaccompanied by disturbance. In Nicaragua every male inhabitant over eighteen years old, criminals excepted, is entitled to the suffrage. Representatives, senators, and president, are all chosen by a college of electors who are themselves elected by popular vote. Such, at least, was the law at this period.

When the votes were counted it was found that 23,236 ballots had been cast, of which Walker had received more than twice as many as all his rivals, viz., 15,835, Rivas having 867, Salazar 2,087, and Ferrer 4,447. Walker was accordingly declared elected and, on the 12th of July, 1856, he was formally inaugurated President of Nicaragua. It is worth noting that he was chosen by the largest vote ever polled in the country, and that his actual tenure of office was longer than that of any of his predecessors in the presidency with the exception of two, Pineda and Chamorro. The former held office for four months—the latter for one month—longer than did Walker. In six years there had been no less than fifteen presidents inaugurated. Reform, even through filibusterism, was sadly needed in Nicaragua.

So far as legality was concerned, Walker's title was as sound as that of any prince or president in the world. It only remained for the world to acknowledge it. The first recognition came, unwittingly enough, from his enemy, Secretary Marcy. That statesman, after much consideration of the case, had sent instructions to the United States minister, Colonel Wheeler, whose suspension had been but temporary, to recognize the existing government of Nicaragua, under the supposition that the Rivas administration still held office. Thus much had been conceded to the reasonable demands of Padre Vijil. Mr. Wheeler, with a possible appreciation of the humour of the situation, yet with a strict obedience to the letter of his instructions, thereupon tendered to President Walker the good wishes and felicitations of the United States Government. But Mr. Marcy never forgave the instrument of his blunder, and one of his last official acts was to beg of President Pierce, as a personal favour, the dismissal of Minister Wheeler, a request which the dying administration was weak enough to grant.

We now behold Walker at the zenith of his fame, the lawful ruler of a country whose position and resources made it a prize worth the ambition of all Europe and America to possess. Besides a powerful native party, he had an army of his countrymen at his back numbering over a thousand men, a line of steamers under his control—for the California agents of the Transit Company were his friends as long as their interests and his were the same—and a strong party in the United States in sympathy with his cherished project for the extension of slavery. The tradition vouched for by Crowe in his "Gospel in Central America," as current among the Indians of Nicaragua—"that a grey-eyed man would come from the far North to overturn the Spanish domination and regenerate the native race"—seemed likely to be confirmed, in part, at least.

The ceremony of inaugurating the new President was performed with great pomp at the capital on the 12th of July. The acting provisional director, Don Firmin Ferrer, administered the oath of office, Walker kneeling to make the solemn affirmation. The President-elect was dressed in his customary civilian costume of decorous black, in manner and attire a striking contrast to the gaily decked natives who flocked to the ceremony. The inauguration was celebrated on a large staging erected in the plaza, which was festooned with the flags of Nicaragua, the United States, France, and the unborn republic of Cuba. The text of the oath which Ferrer administered, with a highly eulogistic address, was as follows:

"You solemnly promise and swear to govern the free Republic of Nicaragua, and sustain its independent and territorial integrity with all your power, and to execute justice according to the principles of republicanism and religion."

"I promise and swear."

"You promise and swear, whenever it may be in your power, to maintain the law of God, the true profession of the Evangelists, and the religion of the Crucifixion."

"I promise and swear."

"In the name of God and the sainted Evangelists, you swear to comply with these obligations and to make it your constant guard to fulfil all that is herein promised."

"I swear."

"And for this the succession is committed to you firmly, by these presents, by authority of the Secretary of the Government charged with the general despatches."

At the end of this ceremony Walker delivered an inaugural address of the usual character pertaining to such prosaic compositions. The President was not without hopes of establishing friendly relations with the Great Powers, and among his first acts was the sending of ministers to England and France. The envoys either never reached the fields of their missions or failed to receive official recognition, as the Blue-books of those governments make no mention of diplomatic intercourse between the filibuster cabinet and their own. The nations of Europe, in their blind jealousy of American influence, would not, or could not, understand that the aims of Walker were, if successful, likely to prove an unsurmountable obstacle to the very American expansion which they feared. To build up a strong confederacy of slave states, which should antagonize the powerful free states of the North, was the prime, if not the sole, object which won for Walker the sympathy and aid of the Southern States. By opposing and frustrating this scheme, Great Britain unwittingly lent herself to the service of the party of union in the United States, thereby weakening the cause which she afterwards favoured, of Southern secession.

The shrewd English observer, Laurence Oliphant, writing, in 1860, his personal recollections of "Patriots and Filibusters," shows the mistake into which his Government fell, as he frankly says, through "no mere considerations of morality," but through a mistaken notion of self-interest. Walker never intended that Central America should become a part of the Union. Like Aaron Burr, he wished to keep all the fruits of conquest for his personal glory and aggrandisement; but he was sincere in representing to his countrymen that the effects of establishing a powerful slave empire south of the United States would be of incalculable advantage to the pro-slavery party at home.

[1] Goicouria was a devoted Cuban patriot, who was executed many years afterwards by the Spaniards at Havana.

CHAPTER XII

Administration of President Walker — The Allies advance towards Granada — Naval victory — Review of the filibuster army — Filibusters and their allies — Assault on Masaya — Civil government — The Slavery decree — Antiquated logic.

Walker wisely gave the most important places in the cabinet to his native adherents. His faithful friends, Don Firmin Ferrer and Mateo Pineda, were appointed respectively Ministers of Foreign Affairs and of War. Don Manuel Carascossa received the Treasury portfolio, and that of Hacienda was given to the Cuban, Don Domingo Goicouria. Hundreds of recruits continued to pour in from California and the Atlantic states. In the Northern departments the Allies also received strong reinforcements, and by the 1st of July they had undisturbed possession of Leon, whence they soon spread over the country, annoying the foraging parties sent out of Granada to collect cattle in the district of Chontales. A detachment of cavalry which Walker sent against them was repulsed near the river Tipitapa, and one of the leaders, Byron Cole, was slain. Cole was the early friend of Walker, and the negotiator of the contract under which the filibusters had come to Nicaragua. Belloso, reinforced by a strong body under command of General Martinez, was now emboldened to advance to Masaya, which he fortified and made the base of operation against Granada, fifteen miles distant.

Xatruch, Jerez, and Zavala were acting with the enemies of their country. Rivas was of little importance among his dubious friends. Salazar, who had been so prominent in inciting the invasion, was captured on the coast of Nicaragua by Lieutenant Fayssoux, and carried a prisoner to Granada, where he was tried for treason, found guilty, and executed.

Fayssoux, the only commander in the navy of the ephemeral republic, was a splendid specimen of the sailor-filibuster. A native of Louisiana, he had seen service in Cuba with Lopez and Pickett. Walker, having confiscated the schooner San Jose for carrying a false register, had her fitted out with some guns and placed her under the command of Fayssoux. Her first exploit was an engagement with the Costa Rican brig, Once de Abril, carrying thrice the armament and six times the crew of the Granada, as the San Jose was now christened. The Costa Rican was blown out of the water after a two-hours' fight, and the Granada remained mistress of the Pacific waters until a heavier antagonist came upon the scene.

The position of the Allies at Masaya was well chosen. It is an eagle's nest, hung high a thousand feet, on the crest of a volcanic upheaval. Half-way down its sides lies the Lake of Masaya, imprisoned within its walls of adamant. To the south lies the lava desert, well named "the Hell of Masaya," barring the road from Granada.

Belloso from his eyrie was wont to swoop down on detached parties of foraging filibusters, or to strike with quick and deadly blow the solitary hamlets whose people might be suspected of a leaning towards the liberal cause. Walker did not need control of the northern districts, and would have been content to leave Masaya and its barren crags in undisturbed possession of Belloso's rough riders, but for the daily waspish annoyance to his foragers and the loss of prestige in the eyes of the conquered Leonese. Characteristically he chose the bold plan of attacking the enemy in his stronghold, regardless of the enormous odds against him. At the head of only eight hundred men he rode out of Granada, on the morning of October 11th, and took the high road for Masaya.

There was a gallant review of the little army, proud in the bravery of new uniforms and waving banners, and under the eyes of wives, sisters, and sweethearts, of whom not a few had followed the flag down to the seat of war. For the filibusters had "come to stay," they boasted. What further ambition they dreamed may not be known; but something was hinted in the device upon the flag of the First Rifle battalion, the corps of one-legged Colonel Sanders, a grim and hard-fighting old colonel withal. It bore, in place of the old-time five volcanoes and pious legend, the filibuster's five-pointed red star, and the motto, in sword-cut Saxon, "Five or None"—a hint to the allied states of new and stronger alliance yet to be.

The march was leisurely and uninterrupted. By ten o'clock at night they halted near the suburbs of Masaya, threw out pickets, and went into camp. It was a glorious tropical night. The early evening had been misty, but night fell without the laggard twilight of temperate zones, and the full moon shone in all her splendour upon a scene worthy the pencil of Salvator Rosa. Before the filibusters' bivouac lay the Lake of Masaya, reflecting the watch-fires of the town. In the distance rose the towering cone of Mount Masaya, clouded in dense volumes of smoke, and grandly indifferent to the puny preparations of the insects about to bring their mimic thunders into play on the morrow. The filibusters lay in groups around their fires, the very flower and perfection of that lost race called the "49-ers." They smoked their pipes tranquilly; they took an occasional sip of aguardiente—but it was a temperate potation, for the General was at hand, and woe betide the luckless wretch who unfitted himself for duty in that dread presence on the eve of battle. They talked of the past much, of the present little, and of the future not at all, save in connection with mining prospects. For it was a religious belief with those queer adventurers that in coming to Nicaragua they had been governed by a marvellous inspiration of good sense. It was to them a question of practical business, they believed; and if its pursuit involved a little incidental fighting, why, that was to be reckoned among the taxes to fortune. Hence they had not wasted their hours in Nicaragua, but had diligently, as their duties would allow, visited every rivulet and hill, and talked knowingly of "indications," and "colour," and other technical lore. Regarding themselves as industrious, if rather enterprising, men of business, they would have resented any intimation of romance or recklessness in their present occupation.

They spoke in a short, terse way which it was the despair of their allies to understand. Ollendorf had furnished the Spanish student with no equivalent for the wondrous vocabulary of California. The Nicaraguan, who uses not over one-fifth of the words in his glorious Castilian inheritance, was at the verbal mercy of the man who possessed a whole mine of phrases unknown to the lexicographers, and who pitied with a fine scorn the ignorant wretch, native or foreign, who knew not the patois of the mining camp. He even improved upon the language of the country, when he condescended to use it, changing such household words as "nigua" or "jigua," into the more expressive "jigger," nor omitting to prefix it with the Anglo-Saxon shibboleth known to all mankind—the watchword which, hundreds of years ago, gave to English soldiers in foreign towns the charming sobriquet of the "Goddams." The prefix was not inapt, for the "jigger" is the most pestiferous parasite of all his race, and a living thorn in the flesh of his victim. Spanish verbs, like "buscar," "pasear," &c., masqueraded with English terminals and marvellous compound tenses, a wonder of philology. Nor did the sonorous native names come forth unrefined from the furnace of California speech. "Don Jose de Machuca y Mendoza" was a style nomenclature altogether too lofty for democratic tongues, which found it easier and much more sociable to pronounce "Greaser Joe." Whatever was to come of the incongruous alliance, for the present there was a touch of nature, a community of courage, which made the parties kin in thought and action. The native, whether friend or foe, was no coward. In endurance he was the peer of his northern rival, though he lacked the physical strength and wild hardihood of the pioneer. The bivouac before Masaya was but one of a score of such.

The enemy, who had kept up a desultory firing through the night, appeared in force at daybreak a few hundred yards away. Walker began the engagement by a general advance on the town under cover of a well-directed fire from his battery of howitzers. In a short time the First Rifles had driven the enemy out of the main plaza, which was immediately occupied by the whole force of the assailants. The position was excellent as far as it went, but the enemy still held two other plazas and the intervening houses, and to dislodge them would have entailed a heavier loss of life than could be afforded. The artillery was accordingly brought up, and sappers were detailed to cut passages through the adobe house walls. Slowly but steadily the work proceeded, the besieging lines converging towards the enemy's stronghold. The day was thus consumed in engineering, with an occasional skirmish in the narrow streets.

While the combatants lay on their arms that night awaiting the morrow which was to see the city in the possession of the invaders, what was happening in Granada? Zavala and eight hundred swarthy Serviles, making a forced march from Diriomio, had entered the Jalteva at noon of the 12th. A scant garrison of a hundred and fifty men, mostly invalids, was all that remained to oppose them; and Zavala, feeling sure of an easy victory, divided his forces so as to surround the little band. The latter were distributed in the church, armoury, and hospital, whither also repaired all the civilians who could, having little confidence in the security of their neutral position. General Fry, commanding the garrison, hastily prepared for a desperate resistance. He had two or three field pieces, which were placed to best advantage and managed by Captain Swingle, an ingenious experimenter, with an enterprising eye to church bells and such raw material.