88Before setting off, Bolívar drafted
a quick note to his sister, Juana. “We
march now for Barinas,” he wrote, in
case the letter should be intercepted by
royalist spies. The march began when
the troops set out from Mantecal on
26 May – but instead of going north to
Barinas, the army went west. Bolívar
alone knew their true destination and
the scale of the challenge that lay ahead.
Something of that challenge became
immediately clear as they waded waist-
deep in water – rifles and ammunition
held above their head – through plains
flooded by wet-season downpours that
had transformed the landscape. Streams,
rivers and lakes were discernible only
because of their depth. Those who
could, swam across these waterways;
the rest used makeshift rafts and boats
made from cattle hide. The marshland
“seemed to be a sea, like that which you
see from your balcony”, one general
wrote to his wife on the Caribbean coast.
The sludge of the swamp clamped the
feet of both people and animals: horses,
mules and cattle were engulfed. And
while being sucked into the mire, the
troops were attacked by leeches.
This was caiman country, but the
troops feared the caribe – piranhas that
lurked in the waters – as much as the
reptiles. Richard Vowell, an Oxford
dropout who fought with Bolívar’s ‘Brit-
ish Legion’, described these voracious
fish as resembling goldfish with “teeth
like those of a shark in miniature”. In
addition, until they reached the uplands
the party remained vulnerable to disease.
Like terra firma, rest was hard to
come by. The cavalrymen slept on their
horses while the rest slept in the water
with the leeches, the caimans and the
caribe. If they were lucky, they found
a bank and made a bed of wet mud.
Their food was raw beef. Clothing had
been scarce enough when the march
began; now, utterly drenched, it rotted,
still attached to their skin.
The sodden army enjoyed a brief res-
pite when they reached Guasdualito on3 June. Here, Bolívar revealed his plan
not only to cross the border into Casan-
are, but also to traverse the Andes.
The officers vented their anger.
“Campaigning in the mountains with my
llaneros [herder] is as impossible as seizing
the sky with our hands,” one objected.
But Bolívar was resolute, and the
next day the army crossed the Arauca
river, entering the province of Casanare
in New Granada. There, too, the plains
were flooded. On 11 June, Bolívar’s wea-
ry followers reached Tame, where Gen-
eral Francisco de Paula Santander had a
station. They rested for four days, and
Santander’s additional 1,200 troops and
plantain provisions boosted morale. But
the trek continued much as it had before
until they reached Pore, in the foothills
of the Andes, on 22 June, a month after
the council of war at Setenta.Across the Andes
After their tramp through the wetlands,
the snowy mountains were a welcome
sight for the army’s highland mestizos.
Many plainsmen, though, had never set
eyes on the cordillera [mountain range];
on seeing the next stage of the journey,
some 300 deserted. The troops who
remained had walked 400 miles in the
energy-sapping heat and humidity of the
plains, but nothing could have prepared
many of them for the altitude and
freezing temperatures of the high Andes.
To make the journey tougher, when
planning the traverse of the cordillera,
Bolívar had chosen by far the hardest of
three principal possible crossing points:
the Pisba pass.Mountain paths were
blocked by boulders,
fallen trees, horses
and cattle, now
being scavenged
by the condors
It was a calculated risk. Morillo’s
royalist counterpart in New Granada,
General Barreiro, had outposts to the
north and south of Pisba but none at
the pass itself. This seemed perfectly
sensible: Pisba was some 4,000 metres
above sea level and no one, not even the
few indigenous locals who crossed in the
dry months, attempted the journey in
the wet season.
Now the army’s problem was not
heat, humidity or mosquito-borne
disease but extreme cold. The weather
would have been deadly even with cloth-
ing, but most of the troupe had lost their
rags and boots to the swamps. As Vowell
wrote, “many, even the officers, had liter-
ally no trowsers [sic], and were glad to
cover themselves with pieces of blanket,
or whatever they could procure”.
Slanting rain and howling wind ag-
gravated each ascent. Cold and altitude
sickness overcame even some of the
fittest soldiers, who died in the night or
fell off precipices into the abyss below.
Woven vines were used to improvise
bridges over ravines; where mountain
paths existed, many were blocked by
boulders, fallen trees or the expedition’s
own horses and cattle – casualties of the
lethal conditions – that were now being
scavenged by the condors. By night, the
troops slept huddled together or beside
the carcass of some unfortunate animal.
“The roughness of the mountains we
have crossed is incredible for those who
have not felt it,” Bolívar wrote at Paya,
on 30 June.
But even that mountain crossing was
easier than what followed on the unshel-
tered páramo (high plateau), described
by O’Leary as “a bleak and uninviting
desert devoid of vegetation”. Here, the
under-clothed troupe were exposed to
the blizzards. Men died from freezing
temperatures, exhaustion and altitude
sickness; conditions claimed the lives of
perhaps 50 of the ‘British Legion’ alone.
On 6 July, the embattled army
reached the other side of the cordillera.
The ordeal was over. It was a triumphJOURNEYS In the footsteps of Simón Bolívar’s campaign to liberate ColombiaИЗП
ОДГОТОВИЛАГР
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