Bolivar's British Volunteers

[john williams]

Has anyone read this new book from Osprey? If so, is it any good?

In the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, over six thousand British volunteers sailed across the Atlantic to aid Simón Bolívar liberate Gran Colombia from her oppressors in Madrid. The expeditions were plagued by disaster from the start. Shortly after leaving Portsmouth, one ship, The Indian was driven onto the rocks off the Isle of Ushant, killing all one hundred and ninety-three men, women and children onboard. Others deserted or died after arriving in the New World. Lieutenant Watson was captured and executed whilst making his way up the Orinoco. Lieutenant Plunkett succumbed to yellow fever, vomiting blood yet lucid until the end, and Sergeant Cookson was devoured by jaguars after wandering off alone into the jungle.

Conditions on campaign were appalling. Forced marches left a trail of dead across flooded savannah, through tropical rainforest and over snowbound Andean passes. Massacres were commonplace, rations crude, pay infrequent and supplies insufficient. Nevertheless, those that endured made key contributions to Bolívar's success. Colonel Rooke's bayonet charge at Vargas saved the army from destruction, the Black Rifles were instrumental in victories across the continent and at the Battle of Carabobo the British Legion's defiant stand proved decisive.

After the fighting had finished, several volunteers attained influential positions in military and political circles. Others returned to Britain and a few continued their adventures around the globe. Although the contemporary media followed their story closely, their memory soon faded once the war was won. In the intervening years, their role has been deliberately downplayed in the countries they helped to liberate and all-but-forgotten at home. Conquer or Die! aims to redress this imbalance. Conquer or Die! is their story.

[commissarmoody]

well you got me hooked, whats this conquer or die you are talking about? And when did this new osprey come out?

[john williams]

It came out in August. I've read one good review and am now waiting for my copy from Amazon. Here's a few links and another blog from the Osprey website from the author.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1849081832/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d0_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-3&pf_rd_r=1APV0KKSN7C890W5DMVA&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938811&pf_rd_i=507846

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/aug/31/recalling-bolivars-unlikely-allies/

The royalist officer in charge of the defences outside Pasto had chosen his position well. Two companies of veteran Spanish skirmishers screened the main line. The field then narrowed into a bottleneck ravine, leading to an open maize field. Beyond was a ditch with a breastwork of tree trunks defended by six hundred Pastusos armed with an assortment of muskets, axes, sling shots and clubs. Their flanks were impassable. To one side was a marsh. To the other stood a copse of trees climbing the slopes of the four thousand metre Galeras Volcano. The indigenous troops were confident of victory. Their opponents had been involved in a running fight all morning and had no option but to attack the position head on.

One thousand patriots fought at the battle of Genoy. One hundred were British volunteers. Amongst them was a remarkable young Englishman, Richard Longville Vowell. Born on the 24 July 1795 in Saint James, Bath, Vowell had enjoyed all the benefits of an upper class Georgian upbringing. The eldest son of a 49 year-old retired British Army major and former MP and the great-great-grandson of Gustavus Hamilton, the Viscount Boyne, Vowell had inherited £2,000 from an unnamed relative whilst an Oxford undergraduate and promptly set off to South America on the adventure of a lifetime. Joining Colonel Donald MacDonald’s 1st Venezuelan Lancers as a lieutenant, he left Portsmouth on The Two Friends on 31 July 1817.     

Unlike the vast majority of those who volunteered, Vowell was able to see beyond the prejudices of his age. A keen student of Humboldt’s writings on South America, he was interested in everything he surveyed on his travels, from the electric eels of the Orinoco, which he soon learnt not to handle, to the Indigenous tribes of Venezuela’s vast open plains.

After several close shaves in Los Llanos, including an extraordinary escape through enemy lines in early 1818, Vowell travelled to the newly liberated Santafé de Bogotá and later took part in a campaign against the Pastusos of southern New Granada. The following year, when his unit was sent to the Ecuadorian port of Guayaquil, Vowell’s adventures took a new turn when he joined Lord Thomas Cochrane’s Chilean Navy.

Following several years patrolling the Pacific coast, Vowell finally returned to England in the spring of 1830. He had been away from his homeland for over twelve years. His memoirs and two semi-autobiographical novels set in South America were published shortly afterwards. Public interest in the continent had long since faded, however, and the books sold poorly. Undaunted, at the age of forty two, Vowell decided to set off on one final adventure.

Eight months later, he arrived in Australia and found work as a constable and clerk at the Number 2 Prison Stockade near Cox’s River. Two years after his appointment, he was accused of accepting a bribe to alter the sentence of two inmates from twelve to nine months. Rather than passively awaiting his punishment, Vowell fled the stockade, taking four convicts and four privates of the 4th King’s Own Regiment with him. Travelling down the Murrumbidgee River, the fugitives survived on the proceeds of a series of robberies, before their eventual capture in August 1832. An ‘emaciated’, broken-toothed Vowell was hauled before the magistrates, convicted of theft and sentenced to death. This was commuted to life at Norfolk Island and later reduced to seven years imprisonment. Vowell was released in his late forties and remained in Australia for the rest of his days. It is tempting to imagine this great adventurer wiling away his twilight years by looking back at his extraordinary life. He had travelled on three continents, fought in numerous engagements by both land and sea, been decorated for valour and imprisoned for fraud, desertion and robbery. Richard Longville Vowell died in 1870 at the age of 76 in Bruk Bul, Victoria.

[Christian]

That sounds like a fantastic read!

[john williams]

Here's another review - this one from the Sacremento Book Review...

5.0 out of 5 stars Liberty or misery, October 6, 2010
By    Sacramento Book Review "Sacramento Book Review" (Sacramento, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Conquer or Die!: Wellington's Veterans and the Liberation of the New World (General Military) (Hardcover)
Thousands of British soldiers -- many of them Irish -- returned home from the Napoleonic Wars to economic recession and social unrest. When they were promised adventure and good pay for fighting alongside the charismatic revolutionary leader Simon Bolivar against the oppressive Spanish royalists in South America, hundreds enlisted. Though it was illegal to fight for a foreign government, England turned a blind eye, and six ships soon set sail under six British colonels. Most of those who managed to land in Columbia and sail up the Orinoco River to Bolivar's capital at Angostura eventually died in horrendous conditions that included lack of provisions, tropical diseases, filth, alligators, poor leadership, betrayal, desertion, brutal tactics, looting, senseless destruction of civilians, and massacres of prisoners of war.

A few adventurers, including the ill-fated Lieutenant Richard Vowell, kept accounts of exotic wildlife, local troubadours playing vihuelas, and native boat people who lived on boiled monkey and ant paste. Historian Ben Hughes's detailed explications, with notes, bibliography and index, add rigor to his portraits of colorful characters such as the Scots merchant James Hamilton who strode about the jungle in full highland dress. The new world, whose democratic future these British soldiers helped secure, became for them, alas, a field of their own unmarked graves.

Reviewed by Zara Raab

[john williams]

Here's another blog:

In the fourth of a series of blogs to promote the release of Conquer or Die!, his forthcoming book on the British volunteers who helped Simón Bolívar liberate Gran Colombia, Ben Hughes discusses the factors that distinguished the fighting in South America from Wellington’s Napoleonic campaigns.
6,000 Britons volunteered to fight for Simón Bolívar in the wars of South American independence. One sixth, appalled by rumours of the horrendous conditions on the mainland, got no further than the Caribbean before turning back. Of the rest, one and a half thousand died of disease shortly after their arrival in the republican strongholds of Margarita, Angostura and Maturín. Of those who actually fought the royalists, roughly 1,000 played a significant role in their defeat. The majority were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars.

The veterans’ experiences in Egypt, France, Flanders, Portugal and Spain did little to prepare them for the realities of campaigning in South America. Aside from the extreme climate and formidable geography, taking on the royalists was an entirely different prospect from fighting the French. Whilst Napoleon’s armies were renowned for their prowess with artillery, cannon rarely featured in Bolívar’s campaigns. A lack of roads, the sheer scale of the continent and its varied topography rendered them unsuitable for open battle. On the few occasions they were employed, such as when Colonel Ferrier used eight 8lbs to dispute the royalists’ crossing of the River Arauca, the barrels often had to be buried or hurled into rivers to prevent them falling into the hands of the enemy in the event of a retreat.

Irregular cavalry played a vital role in South America. Los Llanos, Gran Colombia’s vast inland plains, were the ideal terrain for skirmishing and harassing enemy columns. The Llaneros, mestizo lancers whose ancestors had raised cattle in the region for centuries, were natural horsemen and experts at guerrilla warfare. Their ability to live off the land, strike in strength and then disperse into the swamps and forests made them formidable opponents. They matched the manoeuvrability and tenacity of the Cossacks who chipped away at Napoleon’s Grand Armée throughout 1812, but had considerably more striking power in the charge. One of the first Britons to witness them in action was Colonel George Flinter, a Peninsular veteran who left the following account:

In the charge they lay their heads close along the right side of the horse’s neck, with the lance poised in the right hand ready to plunge into their antagonist: at a distance the rider is not discernable, and, on a nearer approach, it is very difficult to take aim at them, so close do they crouch to the horses’ backs; their charge is furious, nor will the most dreadful fire deter them from advancing; unappalled will they rush upon the guns, dealing destruction around then. During the charge, and in pursuit of an enemy, they make most horrid yells, and the unfortunate prisoner has to expect no mercy … [for] they always … return to the field of battle to dispatch those who have only been wounded.

In the coastal forests of New Granada the volunteers faced the Guajiro Indians, an enemy that proved equally unorthodox. Their ability to move invisibly through the forest and use of barbed arrows smeared with nerve toxins accounted for dozens of General Gregor MacGregor’s men and decimated the Irish Legion. Nevertheless, in pitched battle such opponents proved no match for the ordered British ranks whose musketry dispersed them time and again. Indeed, it was for this very reason that Bolívar had recruited the British in the first place. Before their arrival, his infantry were regularly defeated by the Spanish infantry who, along with their commander, General Pablo Morillo, had learned their trade under Wellington in the Peninsular War. At the battles of Vargas, Boyacá and particularly Carabobo, however, British discipline and concentrated firepower proved decisive.   

One of the biggest differences between the British officers’ experience in Europe and South America was the lack of an established code of honour. Although atrocities were committed in the Napoleonic Wars, especially during the Grand Armée’s Russian debacle of 1812, most British officers’ experience had been somewhat different. Wellington’s campaigns in the Peninsular, France and Flanders had generally seen a code of honour maintained by both sides: the sanctioned slaughter of prisoners in cold blood was rare. Captured officers were allowed to keep their swords and given considerable freedom provided they gave their parole, and battlefield truces to collect the wounded and remove the dead were commonplace. Even though the Creole elite and Morillo’s Spanish officers would have been aware of such conventions, they rarely applied in South America and the vast majority of the combatants would have considered them ridiculous. Prisoners were routinely slaughtered in cold blood by both sides and Bolívar made terror an active part of his arsenal. Many British volunteers struggled to adjust to such conditions. They were beyond their experience and broke the code of honour so many officers held so dear.

Two further factors distinguished the campaigns in South America from those fought against the French: their scale and intensity. Whilst Wellington’s set piece battles featured between 50,000 and 100,000 combatants on either side, those in South America were often contested by armies just 2,000 strong and even the largest, the battle of Carabobo, saw no more than 10,000 men take the field. What these campaigns lacked in weight of numbers they made up for in sheer intensity. 1818 for example, the first year in which the British took part in significant numbers, saw Bolívar’s army fight four pitched battles and march over 300 miles in just 42 days. By contrast, Wellington’s campaigns never saw more than three army scale engagements in a single calendar year. The casualties sustained by the British units in South America were also extremely high. At the battle of Vargas, a crucial engagement on the 25 July 1819, the British Legion, which entered the combat with 92 men at 3pm, was reduced to 61 effectives by the time nightfall brought the fighting to a close three hours later. Its commander, Colonel James Rooke, was hit twice, suffering a compound fracture to the right arm; 2 lieutenants and 20 of the rank and file were also wounded and Lieutenant Daniel Cazely and seven soldiers were killed. The defiant stand of the British Legion at the battle of Carabobo took place two years later. Despite only fielding five per cent of the patriot army, the Legion suffered 30 per cent of its casualties. A third of the 300 Britons who marched out that morning were lost in just over an hour. Two officers and 28 men were killed and 61 others were wounded, 12 of whom would later die in hospital. Both engagements saw the volunteers suffer a casualty rate of 30 per cent, double the British average in the Napoleonic Wars and comparable only to such rare incidents as the destruction of Colborne’s Brigade at Albuera.

[john williams]

I have now recieved and read my copy of Conquer or Die! It's an excellent read - full of details and primary source quotes - the hardships the volunteers had to put up with were extraordinary. Recommended for anyone interested in what happened to Wellington's veterans next!