Sharpe’s Devil: Napoleon and South America, 1820–1821

‘Why did he hate Don Blas?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Because Don Blas was honest, and Bautista is corrupt. Why else?’

‘Corrupt enough to murder Don Blas?’ Sharpe asked.

‘My husband is not dead!’ Louisa insisted in a voice full of pain, so much pain that Sharpe, who till now had been trying to pierce her armour of certainty, suddenly realized just what anguish lay behind that self-delusion. ‘He is hiding,’ Louisa insisted unrealistically, ‘or perhaps he is wounded. Perhaps he is with the savages. Who knows? I only know, in my heart, that he is not dead. You will understand!’ This passionate appeal was directed at Lucille, who smiled with sympathy, but said nothing. ‘Women know when their men die,’ Louisa went on. ‘They feel it. I know a woman who woke in her sleep, crying, and later we discovered that her husband’s ship had sunk that very same night! I tell you, Don Blas is alive!’ The cry was pathetic, yet full of vigour, tragic.

Sharpe turned to watch his son who, with little Dominique, was searching inside the open barn door for newly-laid eggs. He did not want to go to Chile. These days he even resented having to travel much beyond Caen. Sharpe was a happy man, his only worries the usual concerns of a farmer, money and weather, and he wished Louisa had not come to the valley with her talk of cavalry and ambush and savages and corruption. Sharpe’s more immediate concerns were the pike that decimated the millstream trout and the crumbling sill of the weir that threatened to collapse and inundate Lucille’s water meadows, and he did not want to think of far-off countries and corrupt governments and missing soldiers.

Doña Louisa, seeing Sharpe stare at his children, must have understood what he was thinking. ‘I have asked for help everywhere.’ She made the appeal to Lucille as much as to Sharpe. ‘The Spanish authorities wouldn’t help me, which is why I went to London.’ Louisa, who perhaps had more faith in her English roots than she would have liked to admit, explained that she had sought the help of the British government because British interests were important in Chile. Merchants from London and Liverpool, in anticipation of new trading opportunities, were suspected of funding the rebel government, while the Royal Navy kept a squadron off the Chilean coast and Louisa believed that if the British authorities, thus well-connected with both sides of the fighting parties, demanded news of Don Blas then neither the rebels nor the Royalists would dare refuse them. ‘Yet the British say they cannot help!’ Louisa complained indignantly. ‘They say Don Blas’s disappearance is a military matter of concern only to the Spanish authorities!’ So, in desperation, and while returning overland to Spain, Louisa had called on Sharpe. Her husband had once done Sharpe a great service, she tellingly reminded him, and now she wanted that favour returned.

Lucille spoke English excellently, but not quite well enough to have kept up with Louisa’s indignant loquacity. Sharpe translated, and added a few facts of his own; how he did indeed owe Blas Vivar a great debt. ‘He helped me once, years ago.’ Sharpe was deliberately vague, for Lucille never much liked to hear of Sharpe’s exploits in fighting against her own people. ‘And he is a good man,’ Sharpe added, knowing the compliment was inadequate, for Don Blas was more than just a good man. He was, or had been, a generous man of rigorous honesty; a man of religion, of charity, and of ability.

‘I do not like asking this of you,’ Louisa said in an unnaturally timid voice, ‘but I know that whoever seeks Don Blas must deal with soldiers, and your name is respected everywhere among soldiers.’

‘Not here, it isn’t,’ Lucille said robustly, though not without an affectionate smile at Sharpe, for she knew how proud he would be of the compliment just paid him.

‘And, of course, I shall pay you for your trouble in going to Chile,’ Louisa added.

‘I couldn’t possibly …’ Sharpe began, then realized just how decrepit the farm roof was, and how much a new weir would cost, and so, helplessly, he glanced at Lucille.

‘Of course Richard will go,’ Lucille said calmly.

‘Though not for the money,’ Sharpe said gallantly.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Lucille intervened in English so that Louisa would understand. Lucille had already estimated the worth of Doña Louisa’s black dress, and of her carriage, and of her postilions and outriders and horses and luggage, and Lucille knew only too well how desperately her château needed repairs and how badly her estate needed the investment of money. Lucille paused to bite through a thread. ‘But I don’t want you to go alone. You need company. You’ve been wanting to see Patrick, so you should write to Dublin tonight, Richard.’

‘Patrick won’t want to come,’ Sharpe said, not because he thought his friend would truly refuse such an invitation, but rather because he did not want to raise his own hopes that his oldest friend, Patrick Harper, would give up his comfortable existence as landlord of a Dublin tavern and instead travel to one of the remotest and evidently most troubled countries on earth.

‘It would be better if you did take a companion,’ Louisa said firmly. ‘Chile is horribly corrupt. Don Blas believed that men like Bautista were simply extracting every last scrap of profit before the war was lost, and that they did not care about victory, but only money. But money will open doors for you, so I plan to give you a sum of coin to use as bribes, and it might be sensible to have a strong man to help you protect such a fortune.’

‘And Patrick is certainly strong,’ Lucille said affectionately.

Thus the two women had made their decisions. Sharpe, with Harper, if his old friend agreed, would sail to Chile. Doña Louisa would provide Sharpe with two thousand gold English guineas, a coinage acceptable anywhere in the world, and a sum sufficient to buy Sharpe whatever information he needed, then she would wait for his news in her Palace of Mouromorto in Orense. Lucille, meanwhile, would hire an engineer from Caen to construct a new weir downstream of the old; the first repair to be done with the generous fee Louisa insisted on paying Sharpe.

Who, believing that he sailed to find a dead man, was now in mid-Atlantic, on a Spanish frigate, sailing to a corrupt colony, and bearing an Emperor’s gift.

The talk on board the Espiritu Santo was of victories to come and of the vengeance that would be taken against the rebels once Colonel Ruiz’s guns reached the battlefields. It was artillery, Ruiz declared, that won wars. ‘Napoleon understood that!’ Ruiz informed Sharpe.

‘But Napoleon lost his wars,’ Sharpe interjected.

Ruiz flicked that objection aside. The advance in the science of artillery, he claimed, had made cavalry and infantry vulnerable to the massive destructive power of guns. There was no future, he said, in pursuing rebels around the Chilean wilderness, instead they must be lured under the massed guns of a fortress and there pulverized. Ruiz modestly disclaimed authorship of this strategy, instead praising the new Captain-General, Bautista, for the idea. ‘We’ll take care of Cochrane in exactly the same way,’ Ruiz promised. ‘We’ll lure him and his ships under the guns of Valdivia, then turn the so-called rebel navy into firewood. Guns will mean the end of Cochrane!’

Cochrane. That was the name that haunted every Spaniard’s fears. Sharpe heard the name a score of times each day. Whenever two Spanish officers were talking, they spoke of Cochrane. They disliked Bernardo O’Higgins, the rebel Irish general and now Supreme Director of the independent Chilean Republic, but they hated Cochrane. Cochrane’s victories were too flamboyant, too unlikely. They believed he was a devil, for there could be no other explanation of his success.

In truth, Lord Thomas Cochrane was a Scotsman, a sailor, a jailbird, a politician and a rebel. He was also lucky. ‘He has the devil’s own luck,’ Lieutenant Otero, the Espiritu Santo’s First Lieutenant, solemnly told Sharpe, ‘and when Cochrane is lucky, the rebellion thrives.’ Otero explained that it was Cochrane’s naval victories that had made most of the rebellion’s successes possible. ‘Chile is not a country in which armies can easily march, so the Generals need ships to transport their troops. That’s what that devil Cochrane has given them, mobility!’ Otero stared gloomily at the wild seas ahead, then shook his head sadly. ‘But in truth he is nothing but a pirate.’

‘A lucky pirate, it seems,’ Sharpe observed drily.

‘I sometimes wonder if what we call luck is merely the will of God,’ Otero observed sadly, ‘and that therefore Cochrane has been sent to scourge Spain for a reason. But God will surely relent.’ Otero piously crossed himself and Sharpe reflected that if God did indeed want to punish Spain, then in Lord Cochrane he had found Himself a most lethal instrument. Cochrane, when master of a small Royal Naval sloop, and at the very beginning of the French wars when Spain had still been allied with France, had captured a Spanish frigate that outgunned and outmanned him six to one. From that moment he had become a scourge of the seas; defying every Spanish or French attempt to thwart him. In the end his defeat had come, not at the hands of Britain’s enemies, but at the hands of Britain’s courts that had imprisoned him for fraud. He had fled the country in disgrace, to become the Admiral of the Chilean Republic’s navy and such was Cochrane’s reputation that, as even the Espiritu Santo’s officers were forced to admit, no Spanish ship dared sail alone north of Valdivia, and those ships that sailed the waters south of Valdivia, like the Espiritu Santo herself, had better be well-armed.

‘And we are well-armed!’ the frigate’s officers liked to boast. Captain Ardiles exercised the Espiritu Santo’s gun crews incessantly so that the passengers became sick of the heavy guns’ concussion that shook the very frame of the big ship. Ardiles, perhaps enjoying the passengers’ discomfort, demanded ever faster service of the guns, and was willing to expend powder barrel after powder barrel and roundshot after roundshot in his search for the perfection that would let him destroy Cochrane in battle. The frigate’s officers, enthused by their reclusive Captain’s search for efficiency, boasted that they would beat Cochrane’s ships to pulp, capture Cochrane himself, then parade the devil through Madrid to expose him to the jeers of the citizens before he was garrotted in slow agony.

Sharpe listened, smiled, and made no attempt to mention that Lord Cochrane had fought scores of shipborne battles, while Ardiles, for all his gun practices, had never faced a real warship in a fight. Ardiles had merely skirmished with coastal brigs and pinnaces that were a fraction of the Espiritu Santo’s size. Captain Ardiles’s dreams of victory were therefore wild, but not nearly so fantastic as the other stories that began to flourish among the Espiritu Santo’s nervous passengers as the ship sailed ever closer to the tip of South America. Neither Colonel Ruiz nor any of his officers had been posted to Chile before, yet they knew it to be a place of giants, of one-legged men who could run faster than racehorses, of birds larger than elephants, of serpents that could swallow a whole herd of cattle, of fish that could tear the flesh from a man’s bones in seconds, and of forests which were home to tribes of savages who could kill with a glance. In the mountains, so it was reliably said, were tribes of cannibals who used women of an unearthly beauty to lure men to their feasting-pots. There were lakes of fire and rivers of blood. It was a land of winged demons and daylight vampires. There were deserts and glaciers, scorpions and unicorns, fanged whales and poisonous sea serpents. Ruiz’s regimental priest, a fat syphilitic drunkard, wept when he thought of the terrors awaiting him, and knelt before the crucifix nailed to the Espiritu Santo’s mainmast and swore he would reform and be good if only the mother of Christ would spare him from the devils of Chile. No wonder Cochrane was so successful, the priest told Harper, when he had such devilish magic on his side.

The weather became as wild as the stories. It was supposed to be summer in these southern latitudes, yet more than one dawn brought hissing sleet showers and a thick frost which clung like icy mildew in the sheltered nooks of the Espiritu Santo’s upper decks. Huge seas, taller than the lanterns on the poop, thundered from astern. The tops of such waves were maelstroms of churning white water which seethed madly as they crashed and foamed under the frigate’s stern.

Most of the Spanish artillery officers succumbed to seasickness. Few of the sick men had the energy to climb on deck and, in front of the scornful sailors, lower their breeches to perch on the beakhead, so instead the passengers voided their bellies and bowels into buckets that slopped and spilt until the passenger accommodations stank like a cesspit. The food did not help the ship’s well-being. At St Helena the Espiritu Santo had stocked up with yams which had liquefied into rancid bags, while most of the ship’s meat, inadequately salted in Spain, was wriggling with maggots. The drinking water was fouled. There were weevils in the bread. Even the wine was sour.

Sharpe and Harper, crammed together in a tiny cabin scarce big enough for a dog, were luckier than most passengers, for neither man was seasick, and both were so accustomed to soldiers’ food that a return to half-rotted seamen’s rations gave no offence. They ate what they could, which was not much, and Harper even lost weight so that, by the time the Espiritu Santo hammered into a sleety wind near Cape Horn, the Irishman could almost walk through the cabin door without touching the frame on either side. ‘I’m shrivelling away, so I am,’ he complained as the frigate quivered from the blow of a great sea. ‘I’ll be glad when we reach land, devils or no devils, and there’ll be some proper food to eat. Christ, but it’s cold up there!’

‘No mermaids in sight?’

‘Only a three-horned sea serpent.’ The grotesque stories of the fearful Spanish army officers had become a joke between the two men. ‘It’s bad up there,’ Harper warned more seriously. ‘Filthy bad.’

Sharpe went on deck a few moments later to find that conditions were indeed bad. The ocean was a white shambles, blown ragged by a freezing wind that came slicing off the icesheets which lay to the south. The Espiritu Santo, its sails furled down to mere dark scraps, laboured and thumped and staggered against the weather’s malevolence. Sharpe, tired of being cooped up in the stinking ’tweendecks, and wanting some fresh air, steadied himself against the quarterdeck’s starboard carronade. There were few other people on deck, merely a handful of sailors who crouched in the lee scuppers, two men who were draped in tarpaulin capes by the wheel, and a solitary cloaked figure who clung to a shroud on the weather side of the poop.

The cloaked man, seeing Sharpe, carefully negotiated a passage across the wet and heaving deck, and Sharpe, to his astonishment, saw that it was the reclusive Captain Ardiles who had not been seen by any of the passengers since the Espiritu Santo had left St Helena.

‘Cape Horn!’ Ardiles shouted, pointing off to starboard.

Sharpe stared. For a long time he could see nothing, then an explosion of shredded water betrayed where a black scrap of rock resisted the pounding waves.

‘That’s the last scrap of good earth that many a sailorman saw before he drowned!’ Ardiles spoke with a gloomy relish, then clutched at the tarred rigging as the Espiritu Santo fell sideways into the green heart of a wave’s trough. He waited till the frigate had recovered and was labouring up a great slope of savaged white sea. ‘So what did you think of Napoleon?’ Ardiles asked Sharpe.

Sharpe hesitated, wanting his answer to be precise. ‘He put me in mind of a man who has played a hugely successful joke on people he despises.’

Ardiles, who had flat, watchful eyes in a hungry, cadaverous face, thought about Sharpe’s answer, then shrugged. ‘Maybe. But I think he should have been executed for his joke.’

Sharpe said nothing. He could see the waves breaking on Cape Horn more clearly now, and could just make out the loom of a black cliff beyond the battered water. God, he thought, but this is a fearful place.

‘They made me sick!’ Ardiles said suddenly.

‘Sick?’ Sharpe had only half heard Ardiles’s scathing words and had assumed that the frigate’s Captain was talking about the seasickness which afflicted most of the army officers.

‘Ruiz and the others! Fawning over that man! Jesus! But Bonaparte was our enemy. He did enough damage to Spain! If it were not for Bonaparte you think there’d be any rebellion in South America? He encouraged it! And how many more Spaniards will die for that man’s evil? Yet these bastards bowed and scraped to him. Given half a chance they’d have licked his bum cleaner than a nun’s finger!’

Sharpe staggered as the ship rolled. A rattle of sleet and foam shot down the deck and slammed into the poop. ‘I can’t say I wasn’t impressed by meeting Bonaparte!’ he shouted in defence of the Spanish army officers. ‘He’s been my enemy long enough, but I felt privileged to be there. I even liked him!’

‘That’s because you’re English! Your women weren’t raped by those French bastards, and your children weren’t killed by them!’ Ardiles stared balefully into the trough of a scummy wave that roared under the Espiritu Santo’s counter. ‘So what did you talk about when you were alone with him?’

‘Waterloo.’

‘Just Waterloo?’ Ardiles seemed remarkably suspicious.

‘Just that,’ Sharpe said, with an air of irritation, for it was none of Ardiles’s business what he and a stricken Emperor had discussed.

Ardiles, sensing he had offended Sharpe, changed the subject by waving a hand towards the cabins where Ruiz’s artillery officers sheltered from the storm in their vomitrinsed misery. ‘What do you think of officers who don’t share their men’s discomforts?’