Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic

"Sketch of the Political Career of Simón Bolívar" is among the opening pieces of the January 1823 issue of the New Monthly Magazine, which, as Nanora Sweet has argued, served to foster Anglo-Hispanic ties (Sweet 143). Within the first paragraphs, the anonymous author endeavors to establish the image of Bolívar as a cosmopolitan gentleman who had completed his education with the European grand tour. The assertions that follow this initial description, however, are puzzling to anyone familiar with Bolívar's life. He in fact was with López Méndez "in his mission to England"; José Blanco White, who corrected the proofs for the New Monthly article, knew this not only because of his friendship with Andrés Bello, who had accompanied el general to London, but also because he met Bolívar there. André Pons notes that "Blanco White personally met Bolívar in the summer of 1810 when Bolívar was appointed by the Junta in Caracas to a diplomatic mission with Andrés Bello and López Méndez" (Pons 508).

Why did Blanco White not correct this historical error in the "Sketch"? If it was an oversight, he caught it in "Noticia biográfica de Dón Simón de Bolívar," his version of the New Monthly piece that opened the first issue of Variedades, and which was published in January 1823 as well. Blanco suppressed the erroneous passage for his Latin American readers, to whom Bolívar's London visit would have been familiar. That the author of the Monthly article would want to make British readers think that Bolívar had not accompanied López Méndez and that Blanco would go along with this impression point to the careful manipulation of Bolívar's image in the early 1820s: a victorious general and statesman who had liberated a continent from "the oppression of the Spanish government" through his own efforts. A public acknowledgement of how much British assistance he received would have been, as Blanco astutely added in the conclusion of the "Noticia biográfica," contrary to Britain's political interests. "Aunque los enlaces políticos de la Gran Bretaña . . . requerían la neutralidad que su gobierno ha guardado, los Republicanos de la América Española no cumplirían con los deberes de la gratitud si no mirasen a la Inglaterra como origen, en parte, de la libertad que empiezan a gozar" ["Though the political ties of Great Britain . . . required it to be neutral, the Republicans of Spanish America would not fulfill their debt of gratitude if they did not regard England as an origin, in part, of the liberty they begin to enjoy" ] (Blanco 12).[1] Blanco also intuits that the idea that Simón Bolívar, who embodied the gestas of independence and the liberation of South America, was ever in the position of a supplicant to a European power like Britain, would have been repellent to the new republics.

Notwithstanding Blanco's dexterous editorial diplomacy, his remarkable statement—that England be considered an origin of Latin American independence—posits a challenge to scholars interested in transatlantic Romanticism.[2] William Keach's "thinking transatlantically about romanticism" (33), which pervades current critical discourse, is caught in an impasse: the transatlantic journeys are assumed to be between Britain and its English speaking contacts in the American hemisphere. This monolingual notion of the transatlantic cannot explain Blanco White's assertion. Nor, in fact, do other models of British Atlantic culture that include the Caribbean in their formulations.[3] With the exception of Mary Louise Pratt and Eugenia Roldán Vera, the Spanish American nexus that connected London, Kingston, and even Dublin with Spain, the Caribbean, South America, and Africa has been largely overlooked. Pratt, whose work on Humboldt has reintroduced Latin America as a locus for Romanticism, devotes a chapter to Andrés Bello and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, two major nineteenth century writers in Latin America, but it has not had the same critical impact as her work on Humboldt.[4] Eugenia Roldán Vera's work has shown the intricate connections between Rudolph Ackermann's bilingual press and the newly formed republics in the Americas; he published Blanco White's Variedades as well as 100 titles, including a translation of Scott's Ivanhoe and José Joaquín de Mora's Meditaciones Poéticas, a series of poems to accompany William Blake's engravings to Blair's The Grave.[5] This body of work, however, has not received the attention that it merits from transatlantic scholars.

To invoke the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic, and ignore the crucial presence of Hispano-Americans, whom Romantic authors themselves acknowledged, is an act of critical oversight that becomes less and less viable. Implicitly, this oversight condones what Kirsten Silva Gruesz calls the "imperial conflation of America with the United States . . . America [is] a name which [the U.S] has appropriated synechdocically unto itself" (10). However, the cultural history Gruesz maps for the United States, one in which intercultural exchanges cross linguistic borders, has earlier origins than those she claims for José María Heredia's "Niágara" (1824) and William Cullen Bryant's translation of Heredia in 1827. As Nigel Leask and more recently Robert Aguirre have shown, Humboldt's incursion into the Americas generated an avid interest in Mexican and Peruvian artifacts. Aguirre writes that "in the wake of Alexander von Humboldt's journeys, which made Latin America an object of intense scrutiny after 300 years of Spanish domination, the British quest for and representation of pre-Columbian antiquity became a crucial cultural arm of the larger political strategy historians call 'informal imperialism'" (xv). He focuses on William Bullock's Residence and Travels in Mexico (1824) and his collecting, which forms the basis of the British Museum's permanent collection of Mexican art (Aguirre 26-33).

As central as Humboldt's travels are when thinking about the European construction of Latin America, it must be remembered that two other pressing concerns made the Americas extremely real to the British public during the Romantic period—Napoleon and the slave trade. James Mill argued in "Emancipation of Spanish America" (1809) that South America was a "barrier . . . to resist the torrent whose pressure we must continue to dread" (230), a sentiment later echoed in other journals. "The Continent of America alone can save us from the gigantic power of Bonaparte" declares the November issue of The Statesman (Miranda 23:103).

Debbie Lee has most recently elaborated the connection between Britain and the slave trade, one that through commodities, maps, images, literature, discourse, and disease made itself felt in the metropolis and "shaped the Romantic imagination" (6). What has not been considered is how British discourse about the slave trade was linked in the British imagination with the independence of Latin America. A transatlantic reading of Simón Bolívar's "Carta de Jamaica" ("Jamaica Letter"), written during his exile  in Kingston in 1815, shows that he draws on the discursive connection between abolition and independence that Mill and others had made familiar to the British public in order to make his case for continued British support of the Latin American enterprise.[6]  Like El Español, the New Monthly Magazine, and Variedades, the "Jamaica Letter" aims to create a textual alliance between Britain and Latin America. Though it has long been considered a foundational document of Latin American thought, the letter's intended audience is clearly the British public, metonymically represented by its addressee, Henry Cullen. Bolívar's language expresses anxiety about slave uprisings even as it uses the language of abolition as a critique of empire to gain sympathy for the Latin American cause, an anxiety with which British audiences, and especially British Creoles in Kingston, could clearly identify. This reading also reasserts the importance of Kingston as a locale that connects the Anglophone and Hispanophone transatlantic.[7]

The letter's publication history also supports the need to reconsider it within a transatlantic context, rather than the more nationalistic readings that it has hitherto received. As Pedro Grases, a renowned Bolívar scholar, has shown, the first known manuscript of the letter is in English. It was published in The Jamaica Quarterly and Literary Gazette in 1818 and again in 1825 under the title "General Bolivar's Letter to a Friend, on the Subject of South American Independence. (Translated from the Spanish.)" (706). The manuscript in Spanish was not published until 1833, after Bolívar's death in 1830. Like the "Sketch" in the New Monthly and the "Noticia Biográfica," the "Carta de Jamaica" has a double life. This article will briefly address the ways in which Bolívar's self-fashioning in the "Jamaica Letter" and other writings during his exile in Kingston in 1815 shapes the image of Bolívar for the British public. My reading suggests that Romanticism in the Caribbean and the Americas has a multilingual dimension, and invites readers to rethink the "movements of time, plot, and history" (Bakhtin 84) in the transatlantic that more traditional readings exclude.

II. Kingston Circa 1815

For British sailors, travelers, and planters like Olaudah Equiano, Lady Maria Nugent, and Monk Lewis experiencing the city of Kingston became de rigeur when in Jamaica. Lewis, who arrived during the John-Canoe celebrations at Christmas in 1816, gives a lively account of the city, declaring that he "never saw so many people [both black and white] who appeared to be so unaffectedly happy" (40). Equiano's experience, on the other hand, points to Kingston's role as a major slave-trading port. Having been denied his wages by a captain Baker, he goes from magistrate to magistrate seeking redress, "and there were nine, but they refused to do anything for me, and said my oath could not be admitted against a white man . . . Such oppressions as these made me seek for a vessel to get out of the island as fast as I could" (218). Trevord Burnard notes that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Kingston "remained the principal port of entry of slaves until the abolition of the trade in 1808 . . . [from 1700] to 1808, 830,000 slaves were imported into Jamaica" (234). Merchants also supplied slaves to the Spanish American colonies—the illicit trade in goods and slaves provided needed bullion for traders, who in turn used it for loans to sugar planters (Burnard 237). Burnard continues "Having gone to the Caribbean to make their fortunes, some wealthy West Indians returned to Britain and made new careers as London merchants, continuing to deal with their brethren back in the tropics" (232)— dealings that Jane Austen dramatized in Mansfield Park through the figure of Sir Thomas Bertram. Kingston, as a city of empire, seemed distant and marginal, but as Edward Said has pointed out,"Far from being nothing much 'out there,' British colonial possessions in the Antilles [West Indies] and Leeward  islands were during Jane Austen's time a crucial setting for Anglo-French colonial competition" (90).

Said, however, does not mention that Spain also was part of this contest and does not posit Kingston as a site of resistance. The Ashanti Queen Nanny, who defeated the British in the Jamaican Maroon Wars during the 1720s and 1730s, played on the imperial rivalry between Spain and Britain. The British feared a plan by slaves to "hand over the island [of Jamaica] to Spain when they had taken it over, on the condition that the Spanish guarantee their freedom" (qtd. in Linebaugh and Rediker 195). Resistance was also expressed in the domestic sphere: Toussaint L'Ouverture's revolution encouraged enslaved Afro-Caribbeans in Kingston to "not do anything but listen" to the tabletalk of whites. Lady Nugent records in her journal: "The splendour of the black chiefs of St. Domingo, their superior strength, their firmness of character [. . .] are the common topics at dinner; and the blackies [sic] in attendance seem so much interested, that they hardly change a plate, or do anything but listen. How very imprudent, and what must it all lead to!" (198). The latent implications of a revolution in Jamaica—one that domestics could conceive around her own dinner table as they ignored the dishes that needed to be retrieved—do not escape Lady Nugent. As Lucille Mathurin Mair notes, "Domestic slaves in particular, many of whom were women. . . listened carefully to the discussions of their masters and mistresses: planters spoke quite frequently about slavery in their homes, at the dinner tables . . . confident that blacks were too unintelligent to understand the conversation of whites" (991).

If the slave trade connected the Anglo-Hispanic world in Kingston, the city also served as a strategic location for the wars of Spanish American Independence because of its geographical proximity to Venezuela, and its financial, political, and military connections to London. In 1806, when Francisco de Miranda had tried to invade Venezuela while the British attempted to take Buenos Aires, Kingston was a purveyor of supplies, and perhaps more importantly, the communications hub for news about Miranda's operations. London papers relied on their Kingston counterparts to report what was happening in South America and the Caribbean. A report from The Times is typical: "The Jamaican papers state, that Miranda's squadron touched at Jacmel of the 10th of April and sailed again on the 6th for Caraccas, joined by the Echo Schooner at Jamaica. The avowed object of the expedition (says the royal Gazett) is to revolutionize the south american Colonyes [sic]" (Miranda 23: 157).[8] When Bolívar arrived in Kingston after the disastrous loss of Cartagena to the Spanish at the end of 1814, the Latin America-Kingston-London news circuit was thus well established.

From Kingston Bolívar launched a public relations campaign to raise British support for more money and troops, directing his efforts towards individuals and the press. On May 1815, Bolívar wrote to Sir Richard Wellesley, who had been an Ambassador to the Central Junta in Spain in 1809 and Secretary of Foreign Affairs until 1812: "Me he salido a dar la alarma al mundo, a implorar auxilios, a anunciar a la Gran Bretaña y a la humanidad toda, que una parte de su especie va a fenecer, y que la más bella mitad de la tierra será desolada" [ "I have come to sound the alarm, to ask for assistance, to tell Great Britain and the world that part of its species will die, and that the most beautiful half of the earth will be desolate"] ("A Sir Ricardo"). He also wrote to the Duke of Manchester, who was then Governor of Jamaica. Besides those in governmental positions, Bolívar had contacts among the merchant class in Jamaica, which is not surprising given the fact that Kingston and South America carried on trade in defiance of prohibitions from the Spanish Crown. Maxwell Hyslop, who acted as an agent for plantation proprietors, is one of the persons to whom Bolívar wrote for money.[9] "Suplico a Ud. que se sirva suministrar el dinero que Ud pueda . . . en la inteligencia de que, en llegando a Cartagena, le pagaré a Ud. la suma total" [ "I humbly ask that you provide whatever money you can . . . with the knowledge that I will pay you the total sum upon my arrival in Cartagena"] ("Al Señor Don Maxwell").

Besides contacting government figures and merchants, Bolívar also wrote pieces for the Jamaica Gazette, which were reprinted in the Times; these were calculated to appease and appeal to a British audience. He had a difficult task ahead. On the one hand, the British were elated and exhausted after Wellington's triumph over Napoleon at Waterloo; the benefits of British intervention in South America would not seem as urgent to Britain after the Napoleonic menace had been removed. In a letter to the Royal Gazette's Editor published on September 23, 1815, Bolívar explains his view of "internal differences" between Royalists and those in the Independence army. The letter's temporal proximity to the better known Jamaica Letter shows Bolívar's struggle to rewrite the rationale for British participation and intervention in Latin America. He places Latin America in a historical continuum, beginning with Athens and concluding with "the United States of North America": "What free nation, ancient or modern, is there, which has not suffered by disunion? Can there be a history more turbulent than that of Athens?  . . . Civil wars, more violent than those of England? Dissensions, more dangerous than those in North America?" ("To the Editor"). Bolívar sees the internecine struggles in Latin America as a "thermometer of liberty," and not as a symptom of an instability that threatens to give victory to the Spanish, which is the concern of his detractors. He also notes that the United States had "a foreign Power" support its bid for independence, whereas "we were abandoned by the whole world" ("To The Editor"). His disappointment after months of lobbying is palpable: "We have no other weapons to resist our enemies but our arms, our breasts, our horses, and our pikes. The weak require to struggle long, in order to conquer. The strong give, as at Waterloo, one battle, and an Empire disappears!" (Bolivar "To the Editor"). Yet Bolívar ends with a brave front despite these reverses, acknowledging the desperate situation in which "The South-Americans" find themselves, "a despair which has almost always led to victory" ("To the Editor").

III. The "Jamaica Letter"

If the "Letter to the Editor of the Royal Gazette" presents a defiant Bolívar struggling to write Latin America into the narrative of world and British history, the "Jamaica Letter," written around the same time (September 6, 1815), shows a Bolívar who confidently draws upon authors such as Alexander Von Humboldt, William Robertson, Abbé Raynal, Montesquieu, and Blanco White to seek the "auspicios de una nación liberal que nos preste su protección" ["auspices of a liberal nation that would lend us its protection"] ("Carta" 84). While other scholars have focused on the letter's relationship to Enlightenment thought, I focus on Bolívar's doubling strategies within the letter given his consciousness of a transatlantic audience, and that the perception of his persona in London was crucial to the success of the Wars of Independence. [10] The letter's double life in Spanish and English creates a mirroring effect between Latin America and Britain in order to cement a textual alliance. Bolívar also uses the discourses of slavery and empire to deflect another "doubling" that he is at pains to conceal from his British audience: the actions of Afro-Venezuelans who, like the Independence army, fight against their criollo masters to get the freedom the latter are demanding from Spain. This was a special concern to the British, who were in the midst of abolitionist campaigns, and for Bolívar's financiers in Kingston and London, whose profits from slavery would be jeopardized if enslaved Afro-Jamaicans took up arms like their Venezuelan counterparts.[11]

The letter's composition in two languages is extraordinary—its historical equivalent would be a 1776 translation of the Declaration of Independence into Spanish for circulation in Florida, New Orleans, and Latin America. After Bolívar wrote the letter in Spanish, General John Robertson, an Anglo-Canadian officer in the British Army who had served as secretary of the governor of Curazao, drafted the English translation, and Bolívar then corrected it, marking his corrections on the English manuscript in French (Grases 706).[12] Yet the Declaration, as an official, public, statement carries with it the weight of the letter of the law. By contrast, a letter is dialogical in nature and depends on the addressee to complete its signification. As Lacan concludes with regards to Poe's purloined letter: "the sender . . . receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form" (52-3). The letter's signification points to several reversals. First there is the reversal of language in Bolívar's answer. Bolívar assumes the rhetorical stance of answering questions that he receives from Henry Cullen, and although Cullen's letter is presumably in English, Bolívar answers in Spanish. The second reversal is the Jamaica Letter's translation from Spanish to English; Bolívar reverses his own text by authorizing Robertson's translation into English.

The mirroring of English and Spanish in the letter stands for a complex rewriting of Anglo-Hispanic historiography, in which Spanish Americans emerge as accomplices of Britain, rather than as their traditional antagonists. In his Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father, Richard Rodríguez, the renowned Latino essayist, suggests that the emblematic episode of Anglo-Hispanic history is the sinking of the Spanish Armada. He summons this cultural icon as paradigmatic of Latino-Anglo American relations:

According to the Dallas Morning News, a gang of "Anglos" and a gang of Hispanics shed real blood in a nonfictional cafeteria, in imitation of a sixteenth century sea battle the students have never heard of. Who could have guessed that a European rivalry would play itself out several hundred years after Philip's Armada was sunk by Elizabeth's navie? And here? Yet Americans comically (because unknowingly) assume proxy roles within a centuries-old quarrel of tongues. (110)

While Rodríguez is right to point out that the narrative of imperial Spain and its rival England frames the Latino and Anglo students fighting in a cafeteria à la West Side Story, he overlooks how translation—mirroring rather than confrontation—was one of the strategies Latin Americans used to resist Spain's imperial narrative and author their own. Like other translations that invert colonial relations—for example, Richard Madden's translation of the autobiography of Cuban slave Juan Manzano—the "Jamaica Letter" problematizes the assumption that European rivalries replay themselves obsessively in the theatre of the Americas.

Rather than recapitulating the bitter history of England and Spain, Bolívar presents himself as Cullen's ally by quoting and answering Cullen's questions on the character of the "New World." Indeed, Cullen's letter serves to organize Bolívar's exposition. Bolívar assumes the role of the addressee returning the sender's message in "reverse form"; the message that Bolívar returns is a narrative of empire and oppression. Prompted by Cullen, who writes, "For the last three centuries, the Spanish have been committing barbarities in Columbus' hemisphere" (56), Bolívar invokes Las Casas, who "denunció ante su gobierno y contemporáneos los actos más horrorosos de un frenesí sanguinario" [ "denounced before his government and contemporaries the most horrendous acts of a bloodthirsty frenzy"] (56). The bloodthirstiness of the Spanish is "insaciable" (58), and the implied cannibalism and/or vampirism of the Spanish transposes the valuation of the European as "civilized" and the Native as "savage." As Tzvetan Tódorov has observed, Las Casas is the first European to make this transvaluation. Las Casas "show[s] the relativity of the notion of 'barbarism' . . . each of us is the other's barbarian" (190).

Las Casas's denunciation of abuse and torture against Native Americans becomes the basis of the case against Spain, and this seems to be the accepted reason as to why Bolívar chooses him to open his case to the British. [13] Antonio Benítez Rojo has noted that "las ideas de Las Casas cobraron particular importancia en las primeras décadas del siglo XIX, cuando la gran mayoría de las colonias españolas de América se rebelaba para conseguir la independencia" [ "Las Casas's ideas became particularly important during the first decades of the nineteenth century, when the great majority of American colonies rebelled to obtain their independence"] (112). When read in a transatlantic context, however, Bolívar's billing of himself as a second Las Casas raises important questions about the contradictions regarding slavery at the heart of the independence movement, and the way in which Bolívar wants to control how the British public read reports of his revolution, one that, for all its rhetoric against slavery, will not result in the actual liberation of slaves, and in fact conceals actual slave uprisings against Bolívar and the Independence army. While Bolívar writes from Kingston, slaves in Venezuela and Latin America have not been liberated, and Britain—still profiting from slavery—is providing financing for the Wars of Independence. Invoking the comparison to Las Casas allows Bolívar to communicate to his British audience that he vehemently opposes Spain without having to declare a position on slavery.

This double signification is possible because of Las Casas's contested status in Britain as an icon for abolitionists. Thomas Clarkson opens his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species narrating Las Casas's activities against slavery; Clarkson places his work in relation to that of "the pious Bishop of Chiapa" (Preface). In the midst of the brutal scene of the conquest, he is the man to "make a publick remonstrance before the celebrated emperor Charles the fifth, declaring, that heaven would one day call him to an account of those cruelties which he then had it in his power to prevent" (Preface). The abolitionists' identification with him partially explains Las Casas's deus ex machina role in Williams's Peru, where he appears as "the pitying angel" who opposes the priest Valverde's cruelty and brutality (3.97). In The West Indies, which James Montgomery wrote to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, he calls Wilberforce "The new Las Casas of a ruin'd race" (4.136); Las Casas "raised his voice against a sea of blood / Whose chilling waves recoiled while he foretold / His country's ruin by avenging gold" (1.120-2). At the same time, abolitionists fiercely defend him against the charge that William Robertson imputes in his History of America: "While [Las Casas] contended earnestly for the liberty of the people born in one quarter of the globe, he laboured to enslave the inhabitants of another region; and in the warmth of his zeal to save the Americans from the yoke, pronounced it to be lawful and expedient to impose one heavier still upon the Africans" (Robertson 1:319).

Robertson is not being entirely fair to Las Casas, though. In the early period of the conquest Las Casas did recommend that "if necessary, white and black slaves can be brought from Castille to keep herds and build sugar mills, and wash gold" and suggested that each Spanish migrant should be allowed to take 20 black slaves (qtd. in Traboulay 50). Todorov points out that "Las Casas did not have the same attitude towards Indians and Blacks: he consents that the latter, and not the former, be reduced to slavery. We must remember that the enslavement of blacks is an acknowledged phenomenon at the time, whereas that of the Indians is beginning before his eyes" (170). Las Casas's attitude changes from 1516 to 1546, for as Traboulay puts it, "The matter of providing Black slaves took a different turn than Las Casas had intended. The contract to provide 4,000 slaves was given to one of King Charles' friends, Governor Bresa, who then sold the license to Genoese merchants" (52). In other words, the Las Casas of 1514 sees the ramifications of Native American slavery but cannot foresee the enslaving of Africans becoming as systematized, inhumane, and genocidal as what he is witnessing in the New World. By 1546, the trade and exploitation of enslaved Africans leads him to write, "He [Las Casas] always considered the Blacks as unjustly and tyranically reduced to slavery, for the same reasons applied to them and to the Indians" (qtd. in Todorov 170).

Peter Blanchard has attributed "the origins of the language of the independence era" to the Enlightenment and notes that the "particular analogy [of] slavery" creeps into the language of "those fighting for freedom" (500). Yet slavery as a metaphor for the condition of Latin Americans in the Jamaica Letter is a result of Bolívar's unstated but analogous relationship to Las Casas, and his knowledge of the British abolitionist debate. While Bolívar has to gain support for his cause, he cannot afford to alienate those of his supporters who are profiting from slavery, which included the Baring family and banking house (Williams 171). Bolívar describes the colonial relationship between Spain and the Americas as a relationship between an abusive master and his slave. Speaking to Cullen of Spain's attempt to suppress the Independence army, he writes "Ya hemos sido libres y nuestros enemigos pretenden de nuevo esclavizarnos" [ "We have been free, and our enemies pretend to enslave us again"] ("Carta" 63). Under Spanish rule, Latin Americans have lived "en un grado más bajo de la servidumbre, y por lo mismo con más dificultad para elevarnos al goce de la libertad" [ "in a state lower than servitude, and because of this, with greater difficulty to lift ourselves to the enjoyment of liberty"] ("Carta" 70). Following Montesquieu, he speculates that it is harder for "naciones esclavas" [ "enslaved nations"] to become free than it is to "subyugar un[a] libre" [ "to subdue a free one"] ("Carta" 76). The metaphor is calculated to engender pathos: the degradation that accompanies slavery highlights the righteousness of the patriots' cause, since