Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Last time, we finally liberated Venezuela from the Spanish. After the great republican victory at Carabobo, Venezuela was now independent, and the future of unified Gran Colombia began to take shape. But as I mentioned at the end of the episode, Simón Bolívar himself did not plan to be on hand to shape that future, at least not for the moment. He wanted to keep moving. Liberating the ancient city of Quito was now his immediate goal, and he spoke openly and often about wanting to add a third sister to join his triumphs at Boyacá and Carabobo. Once Quito had been brought into the Gran Colombian fold, Bolívar then planned to keep moving south into Peru to complete the liberation of South America. And for all the high-minded reasons Bolívar had for continuing to drive himself, there was under it all a strong undercurrent of professional jealousy. 

For years now, Bolívar had been getting reports of the progress of General José de San Martín down in the south. By the fall of 1821, San Martín had forged a professional army, marched them through the Andes, liberated Chile, and was now sitting in Lima, Peru, after successfully invading the last viceroyalty on the continent. Bolívar had followed these reports with a mixture of excitement and fear. Excitement, of course, that a man as talented as San Martín not only shared Bolívar’s vision of Pan-American liberation but was pulling it off. But also fear, because as Bolívar was getting these reports, especially early on in 1816 and 1817 and 1818, Bolívar himself was stuck in the mud, and he was deathly afraid of being eclipsed, that the world would remember the name San Martín and forget the name Bolívar.

And it was this mix of excitement and fear that helped fuel Bolívar’s half-mad brush up into the mountains in 1819 to liberate New Granada. His own personal ego simply could not handle the thought of being left behind. But the last few years had been good for Bolívar, and on the plains of Carabobo, he finally liberated his homeland, and the free nation of Gran Colombia, which now encompassed most of northern South America, was secure. And with this success in hand, Bolívar turned his own attention south. And he was soon gathering an army to march first on Quito, and then, when that city was hopefully liberated, to go on forward and link with San Martín, where together, as equals, they could decide the fate of South America.

So, as I mentioned a little ways back, though, I’m pretty much making the schedule up as I go right now, as I try to juggle finishing the book and producing episodes to keep up my obligations to you, my faithful listeners. So this week, we’re going to pick up where we left off back in Episode 5.13, when we talked all about Chile and Argentina and go forward to cover the final liberation of Chile and take San Martín up to the brink of his invasion of Peru. Then next week, we’ll be back for a shorter episode that will detail the rather crazy life of Alexander Cochrane, the brilliant, if combative Scottish captain who would wind up commanding San Martín’s navy. And then we’ll follow them all through the invasion of Peru from the south as Bolívar starts making his own way down from the north.

So it’s been a few episodes since we’ve talked about events in the south, and it probably wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world to go back and relisten to Episode 5.13 in preparation for today’s episode. But just to recap a little: after the May Revolution of 1810 in Buenos Aires, the old viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata had fallen into a multi faction conflict that boiled down mostly to Buenos Aires trying to control the whole of the old viceroyalty and everyone else resisting them – a conflict that was in particular defined by the rivalry between Buenos Aires and the nearby city of Montevideo. This conflict resolved itself, at least temporarily, in 1814, with the triumph of Buenos Aires and the egalitarian Uruguayan patriot José Artigas winding up in control of Montevideo.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Andes, Chile had had its own independence revolution at the end of 1810 that had unfortunately also given way to regional friction, with a faction of patriots up north in Santiago running into trouble with their brothers to the south in Concepción. Alternating between fighting each other and fighting off various Spanish reinvasions, the Patria Vieja, the old fatherland, had ultimately fallen after the Battle of Rancagua in October 1814, that’s when Bernardo O’Higgins ordered his army to run for it, but only the cavalry could actually run for it and everybody else was killed. Remember all that? Good.

O’Higgins and the other Chilean patriots had fled west across the Andes for the safety of Argentina. And there they were welcomed with open arms by the governor of the frontier province of Cuyo, General José de San Martín. 

So that’s right about where we left things off in 1815. And though the names and faces would change and change again, in the Río de la Plata, the basic rivalry between Montevideo and Buenos Aires continued to define events going forward. José Artigas, the egalitarian leader of the peasants and cowboys of the interior, now controlled Montevideo. And in defiance of the centralists in Buenos Aires, who were soon called the unitarians (no relation), Artigas established a rival Federal League, a government that promised decentralized confederate government rather than outright submission to the guys in Buenos Aires. They each vied for the loyalty of the interior provinces and likely would have begun a shooting war with each other, but eventually, a new player crashed into the scene, and that was the Portuguese. 

Now, we haven’t talked much about the Portuguese because, well, there’s been everything else to talk about. But remember, the Portuguese royal family had fled Europe back during Napoleon’s original invasions in 1807 and they still made their capital in Río de Janeiro. Well, now that Waterloo has come and gone, the Portuguese ruling elite had some decisions to make. And for now, they were like, well, Portugal is nice, but to a certain degree, Brazil really is a better, richer and more powerful place to base our empire. And so they moved to eliminate any kind of mother country colony distinction between their holdings in Europe and the Americas.

But the end of the Napoleonic Wars did encourage them to start thinking about growing Portuguese power again, rather than just retaining what they already had. And the new king decided that capturing Montevideo and annexing the Banda Oriental was a great place to start, as it would give Portugal control of all the territory north of the Río de la Plata. And so, in March of 1816, the Portuguese invaded the Banda Oriental, and it was an invasion that would submerge the region in five-plus years of war and would eventually end with the defeat of Artigas’s people and the occupation of the Banda Oriental by the Portuguese. This occupation would then last until 1828, until another round of war expelled what had by then become the Empire of Brazil, and the independent nation of Uruguay was established.

Meanwhile, on the southern side of the Río de la Plata, Buenos Aires was having enormous difficulties of its own, as its compulsive centralizing efforts were resisted far and wide. The Federal League, run by Artigas, and the now totally autonomous Paraguay, run by Dr. Francia, refused to let Buenos Aires call the shots. And then inside Buenos Aires, rival factions battled it out for power, and a run of regime changes and coups and counter-coups swapped leaders around and made true unity and centralization all but impossible. It was quite a mess, and in early 1816, factions inside of Buenos Aires called on José de San Martín to take the reins of power, but he didn’t want the job. Instead, he pushed for them to establish a new congress that would declare formal independence from Spain, something they hadn’t actually done yet, and then write a new centralist constitution for the job of the supreme dictator of the United Provinces, which is what they were now calling themselves, San Martín backed an ally of his named Juan Martín de Pueyrredón, who would support San Martín’s plans in Buenos Aires while leaving San Martín himself free to pursue them. 

Since it is those plans above all that we are interested in here today, we should move now to San Martín, who has set himself up as governor of the interior province of Cuyo, which ran right up against the steep Andes to the west. Now, for those who did not know San Martín, the governorship of a backwater province far removed from the action seemed a very strange job to cling to, especially when people are routinely asking you to come be the supreme dictator of the United Provinces. But people who did know him knew exactly why he was there. Far removed from the endless political strife of the coastline, San Martín was busy turning Cuyo into his own personal war machine.

Now, San Martín was, by all accounts, also an excellent and conscientious administrator, and the population of Cuyo came to genuinely admire him. But his whole purpose for being there was to prepare for an invasion of Chile, which lay just on the other side of the mountains. And so, from this population that came to love and admire him, San Martín turned all their attention towards his dream. And right now, that dream was building up something he now called his Army of the Andes.

The Army of the Andes started with a small contingent of cavalry assigned to him by his friends in Buenos Aires, about 700 men, but no more. To this, San Martín was able to add the Chilean refugees who had come over the mountains in 1814, chief among them Bernardo O’Higgins and José Miguel Carrera. The Chilean patriots were, of course, thrilled to discover that Governor San Martín wanted nothing more than to help them re-liberate their homeland. Though Carrera soon became disaffected as San Martín and O’Higgins fell into an easy partnership that rankled Carrera to no end.

San Martín then set about recruiting from the local population, with a special emphasis on the mixed-race pardo and mestizo populations. And then, when it became clear that something more drastic was necessary, he filled out his infantry with freed black slaves. As I mentioned in passing back in Episode 5.14, this was just around the same time Bolívar was putting it together up in the north that a revolution by and for the criollo was a dead end. San Martín was way ahead of him, and the Army of the Andes turned out to be one of the blackest nonwhite armies in all of South America. Even the officer corps was not the lily-white enclave it usually was.

By the end of 1816, San Martín had raised somewhere around 5,000 men. 

But it wasn’t just men that San Martín needed; it was everything. And like a little levée en masse, San Martín turned Cuyo into a war machine. San Martín’s attention to logistical detail and careful preparation put him in marked contrast with the more romantic windmill tilting that seemed to define Bolívar’s career. So San Martín didn’t have enough gunpowder? Fine. He sent his people out to gather the necessary ingredients and then taught them how to make him gunpowder. He also said, “We don’t have cannons, so here’s how you have to melt things down to get the necessary metal, and here’s how you cast the forges, and here’s how you do it. Get to work. Build me cannons. We also need cannonballs; we need wheels and axles and carts; we need shoes.” San Martín set up textile factories to weave cloth to make him uniforms, and blankets, and coats. He also started mass-producing portable food stuff that would sustain his army through the desolate stretches of the mountains. His people would make food, then dry it out and grind it into a powder like proto freeze-dried meals that required only the addition of some hot water to turn it into a meal.

So where Bolívar had been forced to run his war with captured supplies and what could be procured on the black market, San Martín grew, manufactured, and assembled everything himself. The entire economy of Cuyo was now built around building his army.

The other place that San Martín’s preparation shined through was in his intelligence operations, both in the acquisition of knowledge about the enemy, the terrain and conditions out there, but also the dissemination of counterintelligence to keep his enemy off guard. Using a wide network of spies and making productive alliances with the native Amerindian communities, San Martín soon acquired extensive knowledge about the terrain, and enemy fortifications, and the political situation on the other side of the mountains. He wanted to know everything about what he might be possibly marching into.

But he was also interested in spreading outright lies about what he was up to. And this was a game that he loved to play with the royalists in Chile, now aware that invasion was possibly in the making, San Martín started sending out fake orders. He would reassign units here and then send them over there. He would pretend to have made contact with Chilean guerrillas in the south. Then he would clearly set the stage to go through a pass over here, but no, now maybe over here. Even his own officers were often confused about what the plan actually was. The effect was to throw the Spanish army in Chile into dispersed confusion. It was like softening them up with a steady barrage of artillery fire. And the Spanish ultimately concluded, thanks to a few more moves that San Martín made at the end of 1816, that he would do the logical thing and take the shortest pass through the mountains in the south. So it should come as no surprise to us that San Martín was actually planning to take the longer pass to the north.

Now, one thing that is worth noting in all this is that even with all of his careful preparations and intelligence operations, this was still a crazy plan. Nobody had ever marched an army through this stretch of the Andes. It was some of the steepest and roughest country in the whole great range. There were a lot of skeptics out there, even among his close allies, about whether or not this thing could actually be pulled off. But San Martín was convinced that it could be done, and he was possibly aided by a small fact that I have not yet told you about Jose de San Martín. He was an opium addict.

Now, he came by his opium addiction honestly. He suffered from rheumatism and frequent bouts of stomach pain, and his doctors prescribed laudanum, which is basically liquid opium, as a painkiller, and it became a constant presence in his life. Now, people apparently still argue about whether San Martín was an addict per se, but he was never without his little vials of laudanum. An aides recalled him rolling out of bed and knocking back a slug first thing every morning and then just re-upping as needed throughout the day. Now, he was never a let’s-lay-around-in-bed-and-compose-bad-poetry opium head. San Martín was highly functional, but still, you do have to remember that through all of this, as San Martín is trying to do all of these things that he’s trying to do, and then even when he does them, he’s pretty much mildly zonked on opium the whole time.

With all his years of preparation now complete, though, on January 19, 1817, San Martín and the Army of the Andes began their march into the mountains. The final numbers were 5,200 men, 1,600 cavalry horses, and over 10,000 mules. San Martín personally led the main column, with Bernardo O’Higgins managing the rear guard, while smaller units took alternate routes to keep the enemy off balance and never quite knowing where San Martín was going to emerge. 

Now, remember, though, that because we’re in the southern hemisphere, a January launch date means that this is the height of summer, not the dead of winter. I mean, San Martín is not so whacked out on opium that he thinks it’s a good idea to march into the mountains in winter, but still, the going was not going to be easy. This was not going to be like a 72-hour sprint as Bolívar’s own crossing would be a few years later; the distance was greater, the pass is higher, and he had way more men and equipment to deal with. So the Army of the Andes proceeded slowly, day after day, climbing higher and higher. And even though it was summer, the cold started to set in and then problems with altitude sickness began. Mules and horses started dying of malnutrition and cold, and then men started following them. But they all kept going because there was nothing else to be done. 

It took fully three weeks to emerge on the other side of the Andes frozen, exhausted, and malnourished. But they had done it. The Army of the Andes sustained its share of casualties, and more animals than San Martín hoped had died along the way. But José de San Martín had just successfully marched an army through the Andes, which he had been told time and time again just couldn’t be done. And even more impressively, they emerged ready to fight. Not that his men wanted to fight, but when they emerged into Chile at the Chacabuco plains, they basically landed right on top of a 1,500-man Spanish garrison. A garrison that was far closer to the pass than San Martín had expected. And he had two choices; he could either let his men recuperate and risk a mass of Spanish reinforcements converging on top of them, or he could order an attack right now while he still had the numerical advantage. Confident that he had trained his men well, he ordered them to prepare for battle. 

The royalists bore a raid below them on the plains of Chacabuco centered around a fortified ranch house. Late in the evening on February 11, San Martín ordered 2,000 of his men forward in two columns. A 500-man contingent under one of his chief lieutenants, a guy named Miguel Soler, were to take a long circuitous route around to the right while Bernardo O’Higgins took 1,500 men around to the left. They were supposed to converge on the enemy at dawn and attack as soon as both were in position. But on the morning of February 12, 1817, O’Higgins suddenly led his men in a direct attack on the royalists before Soler’s men had reached their position. And apparently interpretations of O’Higgins differ, whether you are a Chilean or an Argentinian patriot. The Argentinians say that O’Higgins got all fired up being back home and he wanted to rush forward and grab all the glory for himself and nearly wrecked San Martín’s plans. Chileans, meanwhile, follow O’Higgins’s own explanation that he had emerged from the hills and was hit by a royalist advance no one had expected. And had he retreated, his men would have been picked off one by one trying to get back up the trail they had come down. So, it was either get slaughtered or charged forward. And so he had charged. And it all turns out to be an academic debate, though, because O’Higgins’ charge was not a disaster. Soler was finally able to swing around in position, cutting off any royalist retreat. The Spaniards formed a defensive square, but could only hold out for so long, and soon it collapsed under vicious, hand-to-hand fighting.

So despite O’Higgins jumping the gun, the Battle of Chacabuco turned out to be a rout: 500 royalists dead, another 600 taken prisoner, while the Army of the Andes lost only twelve dead and 120 wounded. But more importantly, the road to Santiago was now wide open. 

When the Spanish governor in Santiago was told that this liberating army had appeared out of the mountains and decisively won at Chacabuco, he recognized that his position was untenable and ordered an evacuation. The Army of the Andes then advanced and took the capital unopposed just a few days later. The jubilant inhabitants embraced their liberators, and a hastily cobbled-together provisional government immediately tried to make General José de San Martín supreme dictator of Chile, a job he had no interest in accepting. He said, “I’ve come here to liberate the Chileans, not rule them.” So he pointed them to Bernardo O’Higgins and said, “There is your man.” And so Bernardo O’Higgins became the supreme dictator of Chile. 

San Martín, meanwhile, focused on the next stage of his own grand plans — the invasion of Peru by sea. But there was just one problem: he didn’t have a navy, and, for the moment, the Chileans were in no position to provide one. So after recuperating from the campaign, San Martín left O’Higgins to see to things in Chile, while he himself made the long trip back to Buenos Aires to raise money and ships. 

Upon his return to the Río de la Plata, San Martín was welcomed as a hero and feted wherever he went. But he quickly found it hard to turn his newfound fame into tangible support. The whole region had devolved still further since the last time he had been there, with Portugal pushing into the Banda Oriental and José Artigas in the Federal League resisting both the Portuguese on the one hand and the United Provinces on the other. For Buenos Aires to peel off money and supplies to ship over for some faraway campaign against Peru, that was the last thing on any of their minds. Even San Martín’s ally, Pueyrredón, couldn’t deliver on promises he had made to San Martín to keep up the pressure on the Spanish after liberating Chile. There just wasn’t enough to go around, and what was around needed to be kept here at home. 

Disappointed and angry with the meager support, San Martín then got news that things on the other side of the Andes were not going very well. The supposed mop-up operations in the south of Chile that were meant to clear out the last royalist strongholds turned out to be anything but mop-up operations, and a combination of unexpected royalist strength and patriot mismanagement meant that there was now a real possibility that the gains they had all made the previous year were going to be reversed. So San Martín headed back across the mountains. 

But when he got to Santiago, he still tried to keep his own personal focus on building up a navy and preparing for his further push north, hoping that O’Higgins would be able to handle things in the south. But it was not to be. As had happened during the wars of the Patria Vieja, the viceroy in Peru was not going to let Chile just slip away. And so, in January 1818, 5,000 royalist troops landed outside Concepción, and San Martín had to set aside his planned invasion of Peru to go deal with an invasion from Peru. 

As he pivoted his army around and tried to muster local Chilean forces to go block the royalist march up the coast towards Santiago, San Martín urged O’Higgins and the Chilean government to make a resolution to declare independence formally, which they had not yet done. The hope being that this would give a little patriotic spark of life to the coming campaign. So on February 12, 1818, the first anniversary of the Battle of Chacabuco, Chile declared independence. Now, these days, Chile celebrates their original September 1810 meetings as the beginning of independence, but thanks to San Martín, this latest declaration would be the one that stuck for good.

By the beginning of March, San Martín’s Army of the Andes had combined with native Chilean troops to form an army about 6,000 strong, split into three divisions. But the campaign did not start well. The division led by O’Higgins, about 1,700 men total, was camped at a spot called Cancha Rayada when they were hit with a surprise night attack on March 19. In the midst of the attack, the patriot cattle stampeded, causing even further destructive chaos and O’Higgins himself was shot in the shoulder by a musket ball and badly wounded. The rout was complete, and the Chilean forces fled in panic. Now, when word of this debacle reached Santiago, terror took hold because this is exactly how the beginning of the end of the Patria Vieja had gone. 

But despite what now felt like the inevitable fall of Santiago, the defeat at Cancha Rayada was not as bad as it looked. A surprisingly large number of troops made it back to the city unhurt and uncaptured. They only lost a few hundred men in all. The royalists had then apparently decided to get sidetracked sacking a smaller city nearby rather than keeping up the pressure on the capital. Then, five days after the battle, Supreme Dictator O’Higgins himself finally arrived back in town, arm in a sling, but defiant and ready to muster every available resource to save the country from reconquest. Now, General San Martín was himself already in Santiago, directing the defenses of the city, but he wanted to go out and meet the enemy. And he had identified the plains of Maipú, just on the other side of the Maipo River, a few miles southwest of Santiago, as the best place where he might possibly be making his last stand. 

So, leaving the injured O’Higgins in charge of Santiago, San Martín led out somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 men. Like always, accounts differ about the final troop numbers. And on April 5, 1818, he made contact with the royalists on the plains of Maipú. The royalist army was about the same size as his own: they numbered somewhere around 5,000. And San Martín calmly allowed them to cross the river unopposed and then apparently watched with delight as they moved over to try to position themselves on the main road to Santiago, entering terrain that San Martín believed would be perfect for a trap. And it was that trap that would prove to be his finest hour as a general. 

His military intelligence being what it was, San Martín knew that the royalists would line up their best regiments on their right wing with their weaker regiments on the left. Rather than meeting strength with strength, San Martín lined up his own men the same way, with his weakest on the left and strongest on the right. This meant that each side would be pitting their best men against the enemy’s worst men. When battle was joined, things then proceeded as you might expect. The stronger wings pushed back their weaker opponents, and soon the whole battle line was turning in a big counterclockwise motion. 

So what’s so great about that? Well, San Martín had placed his cavalry in reserve, and as soon as the crack royalist troops got aggressively overextended, San Martín ordered his reserve cavalry to swing around at high speed and blast their now completely exposed rear flank. And this turned out to be a death strike. The best royalist troops were obliterated, while their weaker comrades over on the other side of the battle were routed without further difficulty. The fight for the center remained hotly contested for a few hours as the royalists formed defensive squares and did their best to hold out. But by then, it was hopeless. 

When the dust and the smoke and the fury cleared, the scope of the victory became apparent. The royalists had marched in with 5,000 men, and of those, fully 2,000 now lay dead, with another 2,200 captured. That is, almost the entire royalist expeditionary army was now gone.

Now, this had not come without great costs, as a thousand patriots also lay dead. But there was obviously not going to be an endless supply of reinforcements coming from Peru and the loss of this entire army at the Battle of Maipú marked the end of any realistic shot the Spanish had of reclaiming Chile. 

Famously, the injured Bernardo O’Higgins could not take just sitting around in Santiago for long, and he rode out to take stock of the battle, arriving just as it was winding down. Arm still in a sling, he thundered out onto the field where he found San Martín, and the two Generals embraced in a great big, glorious hug. 

The victory at Maipú was, as I said, San Martín’s finest hour as a General, and he was once again feted as the great hero of Spanish American independence, second to none, not even Bolívar, who was himself at that point still ensconced in Angostura. And when Bolívar got word of all of San Martín’s victories in the middle of 1818, his mind really started racing about the need to invade New Granada to keep up with his revolutionary colleague to the south. 

But this latest exploit really just got San Martín back to the place he thought he already was: with Chile secured and him preparing for the invasion of Peru, which meant going back to trying to cobble together a navy, which was slowly but surely coming together. 

In mid-1818, San Martín traveled back to Buenos Aires to request further money, support, men, and ships, but found the situation even further deteriorated than the last time he had been there. And the boys in Buenos Aires were able to provide very little in the realm of material aid. And in fact, now that Chile did seem to be fully liberated, there was talk that the Army of the Andes really needed to come home to help them secure victory over Artigas’ Federal League, which continued to make both political and military inroads. And that was to say nothing of the rumor going around — the very true rumor, I might add — that back in Europe, the Spanish were amassing 20,000 men whose destination would be the Río de la Plata. 

So what the government in Buenos Aires really wanted now was for San Martín to come home. But San Martín did not want to do it. He knew that the Army of the Andes would be used first and foremost in the service of one particular faction in a civil war that seemed ready to break out at any moment, and he did not want to waste his army on such a fratricidal venture. The Army of the Andes was an army for all Americans, for everyone to join together and fight the Spaniards — not to impose the will of one faction on another. I mean, San Martín sympathized with Buenos Aires, and he himself preferred a strong central government, but call off the invasion of Peru just to come back and kill Argentinians? No way. 

After multiple resignation threats, San Martín was finally able to squeeze some money out of the government because he was able to instill in them the fear that their greatest hero, their greatest General, might sever his ties to them completely. Although a year later, that’s exactly what he would do. 

So, for the rest of the year, preparations for the invasion of Peru continued, and a small patriot fleet was coming together in Chile. Then, in November of 1818, a crucial piece of the puzzle fell into place when a charismatic Scottish captain by the name of Thomas Cochrane arrived to take overall command of the fleet. And next week, we’ll cover the adventurous life of Cochrane before following him to Chile and then following everyone up to Peru.

But to finish up here though, in May of 1819, the government in Buenos Aires promulgated its completed constitution, which was as centralist a document as they could possibly write, and it sparked fury in the provinces. Many of them had been hanging on by a thread anyway, and now that Buenos Aires was making it perfectly clear that they planned to try to run everything their own way, revolt erupted everywhere, joining together with the old Federal League and sparking a full-blown civil war. Pueyrredón himself was booted as Supreme Dictator.

The new Supreme Dictator then demanded San Martín’s Army of the Andes abandon their plan to invade Peru and return to Argentina to defend the government, and San Martín refused. So the government in Buenos Aires was finally defeated by the combined army of federalists, who then joined to force them to submit to a decentralized government in February of 1820. Once all of this reached San Martín, he took a momentous step. He gathered his army in Santiago in July of 1820 and said,

“The government under which we were formed is no more. We do not answer to anyone anymore. Today, we answer only to ourselves.”

The men were all for this. They didn’t want to go back and fight in a civil war in Argentina, and they exuberantly ratified San Martín’s declaration and voted him Commander-in-Chief of an army that now fought for no one but themselves and answered to no civilian authority.

Back in Buenos Aires, San Martín’s reputation took a beating, as he was accused of stealing an army. But all they could do was vent and howl. San Martín would not be coming home. He was going to Peru. 

So next week, as I said, we’re going to double back a bit and introduce yet another very colorful character from the very, very colorful world of Latin American independence: the Sea Wolf, Thomas Cochrane. After a brilliant naval career during the Napoleonic Wars, during which he routinely ran afoul of his superiors, his subordinates, and public opinion— that is, when he wasn’t being justly celebrated as one of the great heroes of the war — Cochrane would eventually seek his fortunes in South America, and he allowed himself to be recruited to lead the liberating navy San Martín was constructing in Chile. And next week, they will all join forces to invade and liberate the last loyal Spanish viceroyalty left in South America.

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