Vidiadhar Naipaul - A Way in the World

“It would be nice if the details were exaggerated. But I know they are not. The scaffold was outside the prison gate. The ten men, in white gowns and white caps and in leg-irons, were led out to it. After each man was dropped the hangman, a Negro, slid down the rope and sat on the shoulders of the hanged man. The bodies were then decapitated and cut into quarters. The quarters were heaped together with the uniforms and arms of the dead men, covered with the torn-up scraps of my Colombian flag, and set alight. I knew that they were going to do some special dishonour to the flag you made in Grafton Street, Sally. But I won’t tell you.

“The atmosphere of the Inquisition, my revolution treated as heresy — it is more undermining than I would have thought. If I, at one time, knew how to wound them, they still know how to trouble me. One of my first thoughts, when I read this letter, was that I had done the right thing to have the boys baptized. When I was thirty-five or so, and after just fifteen years abroad, when I was in the United States and then when I was in Russia, the whole world of my early years in Venezuela seemed very far away, seemed to be part of another life. I felt I had forgotten so much. Now it’s as though I’ve never left, as though 1771 was last year.”

• • •

“MY DEAR Sir, We are in such a State here. My uncle has just brought back six copies of your Picture from Mr. Holland the Printseiler. My uncle says the engraver should have done better but these people have to do too much and they cut corners and they don’t try to understand the work they are copying, before they finish one job theyre looking for the next one. The picture shows the Crown in the Clouds above your head and my uncle says it is poor work that crown, badly drawn but people don’t care. He says the picture is in Mr. Holland’s window and people stop and look at the crown and wonder so perhaps Mr. Holland knows his business. But the deseat of these London tradesmen my dear Sir they give no Credit to my uncle for the picture which he did at the small table in the Front Library. They say it is done from the life by their artist with the Navy in the Barbadoes my Uncle says it’s the kind of thing they always say. Below your picture they have engraved the names of the ships of your little fleet My dear Sir. What a fleet my dear Gen I never had the least idea. We daily wait to hear good news. What pretty names your ships have Lily Attentive Bulldog Trimmer Mastiff. I cannot tell you how Excited Leander is that one ship has his name, he pulls his toy ship on its wooden block all over the house and he says Mamy I will take my ship, and go to the Genl. When I tell him that the ocean is very big and his ship wouldnt sail very far he says Mamy I will buy a bigger ship and go and fight for the G. He reads his book well and he promises not to trouble little brother who is now sleeping and is as pretty as your picture My own dear General. These are their happiest days my dear Sir.”

“OH, SARAH. We are separated by more than the ocean. We are separated by time, by three to four months. You write about things here as they were four months ago, and what I write now you will read in two months. I don’t know what will have happened by then. It’s failed, Sarah. The whole thing failed. You were right. The people in London let me down at the last moment. They withdrew their support. And I’m back in Trinidad.

“I am not at Government House. Officially I have no position here. I have no headquarters. I am a private person, and while I am here I must give up all attempts to revolutionize the continent. On the morning I arrived I went to call on Hislop. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t know me, but he behaved as though he knew nothing about what I had been doing. When I asked for permission to stay, he said it was out of his hands. He said the merchants didn’t want me to land. They had made a petition to him. They said that for six months they had been cut off from trade with the Main because of me, and they were being ruined for nothing at all. The petition was going to be debated that very morning in the Council. Hislop thought I should attend the meeting. I suppose that was friendly advice. If I hadn’t gone, perhaps Bernard wouldn’t have spoken up for me as he did, and if Bernard hadn’t spoken up, the vote would have gone against me. Hislop would have been full of regrets, of course, but I would have had to leave. Heaven knows where I would have been now.

“And things seemed to be going so well in the beginning, Sally. Ah, those good beginnings! I’ve had so many of them. How they encourage, and at the same time how they unsettle! We sailed without interference to the town of Coro. We fired at the fort. There was some return fire and then the Spanish soldiers withdrew. We landed and entered the town with no trouble. Just three men wounded. Then we found there was nothing to celebrate. We had entered an empty town. Not a soul. The Venezuelan agents in Trinidad had done their work well. They knew our strength, and exactly where we were going to land, and they knew that the British were only going to support us from the sea.

“For years I had believed — and people like Gual and Caro and Vargas had encouraged me to believe — that when I landed the people would flock to my colours. No one came now. I thought they had been threatened by the authorities, and I thought I should deal with the situation in a Spanish or Venezuelan way. That side of my character took over. I felt that, having appeared with such a naval force, I should speak very loudly. I issued a proclamation. I said that Spanish rule had ceased, that all officials should come forward and declare their loyalty to me or suffer the consequences, and that all able-bodied men should enrol under my colours. It was a wrong thing to do. No one came forward, and my authority with my own men was further undermined. I sent out small parties to the villages round about to reassure the people. I found the Spaniards had forestalled me. They knew how to fight this war. For weeks the priests had been preaching against me. Everyone who helped me was to be excommunicated. The bishop of Mérida had declared me a heretic.

“For the next ten days the Spaniards who had withdrawn from Coro shadowed us, fifteen hundred of them to four hundred of us. No question of engaging them, no question of making a march over the hills to Caracas. The strain began to tell on our volunteers. Their discipline began to break. One day there was an incident between the two groups, the French and the Americans. Three more men wounded, a cook killed. This greatly alarmed me. I thought we should make our way back to the coast. We had no carts, of course, for the wounded and the sick, or horses or mules. We had to use litters, changing the carriers every half hour or so. It slowed us up. I felt I had walked into a Spanish trap. I felt that at any moment the Spaniards might fall on us. I drove the litter-bearers hard. At one stage I threatened to shoot some of them with my own hand. They haven’t forgiven me. I am not staying in Government House, and now they shout abuse at me in the streets.

“Late one night we re-embarked’. I didn’t know what to do. I had waited so many years for this moment. I wrote to the British governor of Jamaica for help. It was foolish. Of course he couldn’t send troops to me. I waited six weeks to hear that, our supplies running out, food very scarce, people getting sick and mutinous. And then a message came from Admiral Cochrane, telling me he couldn’t help any more. London had forbidden it. His help to me was to be limited to protection from a naval force of the enemy, to prevent enemy succours being landed, and to secure my re-embarkation. In short, it was finished. I had thought of Cochrane as an avaricious man, easy therefore to handle. Now the style of his letter, so precise and pointed, like instructions on the battlefield, spoke to me of the capacity that had made him an admiral, and of a power that I had never possessed.