Library News for Latin American Studies: August 2010

The ODNB has added these 30 Britons, men and women, active in Latin America after the end of Spanish and Portuguese colonial control. Many of those who sought adventure in the independence movements were of Irish origin. Peter (Pedro) Campbell (1782–1832), dubbed the Irish Gaucho, was a Tipperary tanner who served in the British expedition to the River Plate in 1807 commanded by John Whitelocke, whose attempt to capture Buenos Aires ended in humiliating failure. Campbell was taken prisoner and remained in South America, becoming a guerilla leader in the wars of independence from Spanish rule, and was acknowledged as the founder of the Uruguayan navy. The ‘liberator of Chile’, Bernardo O’Higgins (1778–1842), was the son of an Irishman who had served the Spanish crown; educated in England, where he spent his formative years, he returned to South America, became a commander in the patriot armies, and as supreme director of Chile staffed the Chilean navy with British officers. Previously tried for his involvement in the United Irishmen rising of 1798, and describing himself as a Roman Catholic victim of religious persecution, John Devereux (1778–1860) raised an Irish legion in support of Simón Bolívar. His supporters included Francisco Burdett O’Connor (1791–1871), from a Cork landowning family and brother of Feargus O’Connor, the Chartist leader. O’Connor spent seven years fighting in the independence campaign, and was declared a liberator of Bolivia, where he settled as a farmer. In 1829 a Dublin-born mercenary in the Colombian army, Rupert Hand, earned notoriety for his role in the killing of the rebel José María Córdova, later regarded as a national hero. After a colourful military career Hand became a teacher of English in Caracas. Another mercenary, Richard Longfield Vowell (1795–1870), the orphaned son of an MP in the Irish parliament, fought for nearly thirteen years in the independence campaigns, and survived to chronicle his experiences, published after his return to Britain in 1830. Contemporary with Vowell’s works was a carefully observed account of Simón Bolívar’s forces written by the Scottish soldier and sometime slave overseer Alexander Alexander (b. 1781/2), who had enlisted in the Venezuelan rebel army after service in the Royal Artillery.

After independence British influence in the region became so pervasive that it has been described as part of the ‘informal empire’. Among those who sought to make their fortunes there was Robert Ponsonby Staples (1784/5–1852), who represented British merchants in Buenos Aires in a semi-official capacity. At Bahia, Brazil, the British consul William Pennell (1765–1860) astutely managed the relationship between the British, Portuguese, and Brazilian governments during the process of Brazilian independence, protecting the trade privileges that British merchants enjoyed. Pennell’s success in building relationships in Brazil was shared by a successor in Bahia, James Wetherell (bap. 1823, d.1858), who left an unusually perceptive account of everyday life in the province. John Henry Mandeville (1773–1861) spent a decade as minister in Buenos Aires, where he mediated in the rivalry between the British merchants there and in Montevideo and managed relations—which some critics regarded as servile—with the Argentinian dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, whom he saw as essential for maintaining stability in the country. Less sensitive to local interests was Britain’s chief representative in Central America for two decades, Frederick Chatfield (1801–1872), who aspired to incorporate the region into the British empire, meddling in local politics and pursuing expansionist territorial claims, before over-reaching himself in his attempts to pre-empt growing American involvement in the region. Equally controversial was the Glasgow anti-slavery activist David Turnbull (1793?–1851), who as superintendent of liberated Africans at Havana tirelessly exposed the continuance of the slave trade in the remaining Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and Cuba, from where he was soon expelled.

Many of the Britons drawn to the new South American republics settled there. Perhaps the most remarkable was Mary Greenup (1789–1846) from Faversham in Kent, whose second husband, General James English, was in charge of raising a legion of mercenaries to fight under Bolívar. She accompanied her husband to South America in 1819 and was at the centre of the social scene in Bogotá, where she represented British banking interests. Later she ran a cacao plantation. Alexander Caldcleugh (1795–1858), whose account of his travels is an important source for the early years of independence, took the part of British bondholders in Chile, where he was visited by Darwin during the Beagle voyage. Thomas George Love (1792/3–1845) arrived in Buenos Aires in 1820, where he ran the meeting place for British merchants, and founded a newspaper for the British community, in which he criticized London’s failure to accord the Argentine republic proper respect as an independent nation. Two further Britons were prominent among the technical experts brought to Paraguay to spearhead that country’s national development in the mid-nineteenth century. The first was a London engineer, William Henry Keld Whytehead (1825–1865), who established and directed an arsenal at Asunción, whose scale and technology attracted widespread attention, and which played an important part in Paraguay’s war against the triple alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The second was a Scottish doctor, William Stewart (1830–1916), who trained army medical staff and was personal physician to the president and his remarkable consort (the Irish-born Eliza Lynch, whose biography appeared in an update of the Oxford DNB published in 2005). The independence of the former Spanish colonies also attracted such travellers as Frederick Catherwood (1799–1854), whose involvement in archaeological expeditions and railway building reflected the opportunities the region presented.

For emigrants from Wales, Patagonia offered a remote location where the Welsh language and traditions could be protected from external influences. A young printer in Caernarfon, Lewis Jones (1837–1904), was attracted to the idea of a Welsh colony, and organized the first pioneers to the Chubut Valley settlement, founded in 1865. Among those settlers was Abraham Matthews (1832–1899), a Congregational clergyman who ministered to their spiritual needs, likening the Welsh colonists to the Israelites in the desert.

South America was also the focus for protestant missionary and educational effort, as illustrated by four Scottish lives. James (Diego) Thomson (1788–1854) travelled through South America between 1818 and 1825 under the auspices of the British and Foreign School Society founding monitorial schools, encouraged by the governments of the new republics as a low-cost means of spreading education. In subsequent journeys to Mexico he distributed copies of the Bible and initiated its translation into indigenous languages. The missionary Robert Reid Kalley (1809–1888) was driven from the Portuguese island of Madeira as a result of his proselytizing among the Catholic population, but he and his wife Sarah Poulton Kalley (1825–1807) made more headway in Brazil, where they successfully established an evangelical church. From the South American Missionary Society’s base on Keppel Island in the Falklands, Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb (1865–1930) set out in 1889 to work among the indigenous peoples of the remote Paraguayan Chaco. His pioneering thirty-year mission, combining evangelizing with concern for the economic well-being of the peoples affected by westernization, was much publicized in Britain, where he was presented as ‘the Livingstone of South America’.Tyntesfield house near Bristol, built in Victorian Gothic style for William Gibbs (1790–1875), is evidence of wealth generated by British commercial interests in the former Spanish colonies. A lucrative guano monopoly in Peru and Chile underlay the prosperity of the Gibbs family, and funded William Gibbs’s high-church philanthropy. In 1884 the Cornish mining engineer George Chalmers (1857–1928) became superintendent of the Morro Velho gold mine in Brazil, the world’s deepest mine, and part of the largest foreign enterprise in Brazil, as well as being the centre of a large British community with its own church and clubs. By the early twentieth century, however, British commercial supremacy in the region was under challenge from the United States and Germany, as the business writer William Henry Koebel (1872–1923) warned. Koebel’s British Exploits in South America (1917) was wartime propaganda, criticized by scholars for omitting the more disreputable episodes (like Henry Morgan’s sacking of Portobello), and proved to be an epitaph to a diminished role. Nevertheless, in the post-war years the Scottish livestock breeder Sir Herbert Gibson (1863–1934), who ran his family’s ranches near Buenos Aires, continued to promote trade relations between Britain and Argentina, and was awarded a baronetcy for organizing the British Empire Trade Exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1931. Unusually, he took Argentinian citizenship, though he was readmitted a British subject during the First World War, when he secured supplies of South American wheat to feed the allies. The merging of expatriates into South American societies was exemplified by the civil engineer Richard Edward Latcham (1869–1943), who was employed on infrastructure projects during the colonization of the Araucania region of Chile. Meeting many Mapuche people, he learned their language, and developed a self-taught interest in Chilean anthropology and pre-history, on which he became a leading authority. His scholarly studies stood in contrast to the sensationalist approach of the adventurer Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges (1882–1959), whose quest for vanished Mayan cities in Central America in the 1920s was the subject of much embellishment and, subsequently, doubtful claims. And Latin America continued to attract idealists, among them Michael Woodward (1932–1973), who was born in Chile to a British father and Chilean mother. Educated in Britain, he returned to Chile and became a Roman Catholic priest, embracing liberation theology. His activities in that cause led to his arrest and death under interrogation when the Chilean military seized power in September 1973.

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