‘Independence or Death’: British Adventurers in South America
Jan Read introduces some volunteers on land and at sea in the liberation of the Spanish Colonies.
On the tomb of Columbus in Seville there is an inscription referring to ‘ungrateful America’. Both Spain and Portugal were slow to understand the reasons that impelled their American possessions to break away or to forgive them for their defection.
But countries, like children, grow up and finally reject outside control; and the struggles for independence, in which freebooting British soldiers and sailors played so important a role, had been brewing long before the turn of the nineteenth century.
Although the process was delayed in Brazil by the arrival of the Portuguese royal family as an outcome of the French occupation of Lisbon in 1807, the grievances of both the Spanish and Portuguese colonists sprang from the same basic cause: the attempts of the mother countries to impose strict political and economic control long after they were in a position to do so. The English traveller, Maria Graham, who witnessed events in Chile and Brazil at first hand, writes that:
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