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

‘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?’

Sharpe believed that officers who abandoned their men were officers on their way to defeat, but tact kept him from saying as much to the sardonic Ardiles, so instead he made some harmless comment about being no expert on Spanish shipping arrangements.

‘I think such officers are bastards!’ Ardiles had to shout to be heard over the numbing sound of the huge seas. ‘The only reason they sailed on this ship is because the voyage will be six or eight weeks shorter! Which means they can reach the whorehouses of Valdivia ahead of their sergeants.’ Ardiles spat into the scuppers. ‘They’re good whorehouses, too. Too good for these bastards.’

‘You know Chile well?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Well enough! I’ve visited twice a year for three years. They use my ship as a passenger barge! Instead of letting me look for Cochrane and beating the shit out of him, they insist that I sail back and forth between Spain and Valdivia! Back and forth! Back and forth! It’s a waste of a good ship! This is the largest and best frigate in the Spanish navy and they waste it on ferrying shit like Ruiz!’ Ardiles scowled down into the frigate’s waist where the green water surged and broke ragged about the lashed guns, then he turned his saturnine gaze back to Sharpe. ‘You’re looking for Captain-General Vivar, yes?’

‘I am, yes.’ Sharpe was not surprised that Ardiles knew his business, for he had made no secret of his quest, yet he was taken aback by the abrupt and jeering manner of the Colonel’s asking and Sharpe’s reply had consequently been guarded, almost hostile.

Ardiles leaned closer to Sharpe. ‘I knew Vivar! I even liked him! But he was not a tactful man. Most of the army officers in Chile thought he was too clever. They had their own ideas on how the war should be lost, but Vivar was proving them wrong, and they didn’t like him for that.’

‘Are you saying that his own side killed him?’

Ardiles shook his head. ‘I think he was killed by the rebels. He was probably wounded in the ambush, his horse galloped into deep timber, and he fell off. His body’s still out there; ripped apart by animals and chewed by birds. The oddest part of the whole thing, to my mind, is why he was out there with such a small escort. There were only fifteen men with him!’

‘He was always a brave man.’ Sharpe, who had not heard just how small the escort had been, hid his surprise. Why would a Captain-General travel with such a tiny detachment? Even in country he thought safe?

‘Maybe more foolish than brave?’ Ardiles suggested. ‘My own belief is that he had an arrangement to meet the rebels, and that they double-crossed him.’

Sharpe, who had convinced himself that Don Blas had been murdered by his own people, found this new idea grotesque. ‘Are you saying he was a traitor?’

‘He was a patriot, but he was playing with fire.’ Ardiles paused, as though debating whether to say more, then he must have decided that his revelation could do no harm. ‘I tell you a strange thing, Englishman. Two months after Vivar arrived in Chile he ordered me to take him to Talcahuana. That means nothing to you, so I shall explain. It is a peninsula, close to Concepción, and inside rebel territory. His Excellency’s staff told Don Blas it was not safe to go there, but he scoffed at such timidity. I thought it was my chance to fight against Cochrane, so I went gladly. But two days north of Valdivia we struck bad weather. It was awful! We could not go anywhere near land; instead we rode out the storm at sea for four days. After that Don Blas still insisted on going to Talcahuana. We anchored off Punta Tombes and Don Blas went ashore on his own. On his own! He refused an escort. He just took a fowling-piece! He said he wanted to prove that a nobleman of Spain could hunt freely wherever His Spanish Majesty ruled in this world. Six hours later he returned with two brace of duck, and ordered me back to Valdivia. So what? you are asking. I will tell you what! I myself thought it was merely bravado. After all, he had made me sail for a week through waters patrolled by the rebel navy, but later I heard rumours that Don Blas had gone ashore to meet those rebels. To talk with them. I don’t know if that is true, but on my voyage home with the news of Don Blas’s disappearance, we captured a rebel pinnace with a dozen men aboard and two of them told me that the devil Cochrane himself had been waiting to meet Don Blas, but that after two days they decided he was not coming, and so Cochrane went away.’

‘You believed them?’

Ardiles shrugged. ‘Do dying men tell lies or truth? My belief, Englishman, is that they were telling the truth, and I think Don Blas died when he tried to resurrect the meeting with the rebels. But you believe Don Blas to be alive, yes?’

Sharpe hesitated, but Ardiles had favoured him with a revelation, and Sharpe’s truth was nowhere near so dangerous, so he told it. ‘No.’

‘So why are you here?’

‘Because I’ve been paid to look for him. Maybe I shall find his dead body?’ Because even that, Sharpe had decided, would give Louisa some small comfort. It would, at the very least, offer her certainty and if Sharpe could arrange to have the body carried home to Spain then Louisa could bury Don Blas in his family’s vault in the great cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.

Ardiles scoffed at Sharpe’s mild hopes. He waved northwards through the spitting sleet and the spume and the wild waves’ turmoil. ‘That’s a whole continent up there! Not an English farmyard! You won’t find a single body in a continent, Englishman, not if someone else has decided to hide it.’

‘Why would they do that?’

‘Because if my tale of carrying Don Blas to meet the rebels is right, then Don Blas was not just a soldier, but a soldier playing politics, and that’s a more dangerous pastime than fighting. Besides, if the Spanish high command decides not to help you, how will you achieve anything?’

‘By bribes?’ Sharpe suggested.

Ardiles laughed. ‘I wish you luck, Englishman, but if you’re offering money they’ll just tell you what you want to hear until you’ve no money left, then they’ll clean their knife blades in your guts. Take my advice! Vivar’s dead! Go home!’

Sharpe crouched against a sudden attack of wind-slathered foam that shrieked down the deck and smashed white against the helmsman and his companion. ‘What I don’t understand,’ Sharpe shouted when the sea had sucked itself out of the scuppers, ‘is why the rebels haven’t boasted about Don Blas’s death! If you’re a rebel and you kill or capture your enemy’s commander, why keep it a secret? Why not trumpet your success?’

‘You expect sense out of Chile?’ Ardiles asked cynically.

Sharpe ducked again as the wind flailed more salt foam across the quarterdeck. ‘Don Blas’s widow doesn’t believe it was the rebels who attacked her husband. She thinks it was Captain-General Bautista.’

Ardiles looked grimmer than ever. ‘Then Don Blas’s widow had best keep her thoughts to herself. Bautista is not a man to antagonize. He has pride, a memory, and a taste for cruelty.’

‘And for corruption?’ Sharpe asked.

Ardiles paused, as though weighing the good sense of continuing this conversation, then he shrugged. ‘Miguel Bautista is the prince of thieves, but that doesn’t mean he won’t one day be the ruler of Spain. How else do men become great, except by extortion and fear? I will give you some advice, Englishman.’ Ardiles’s voice had become fierce with intensity. ‘Don’t make an enemy of Bautista. You hear me?’

‘Of course.’ The warning seemed extraordinary to Sharpe; a testimony to the real fear that Miguel Bautista, Vivar’s erstwhile enemy, inspired.

Ardiles suddenly grinned, as though he wanted to erase the grimness of his last words. ‘The trouble with Don Blas, Englishman, was that he was very close to being a saint. He was an honourable man, and you know what happens to honourable men – they prove to be an embarrassment. This world isn’t governed by honourable men, but by lawyers and politicians, and whenever such scum come across an honest man they have to kill him.’ The ship shuddered as a huge wave smashed ragged down the port gunwale. Ardiles laughed at the weather’s malevolence, then looked again at Sharpe. ‘Take my advice, Englishman! Go home! I’ll be sailing back to Spain in a week’s time, which gives you just long enough to visit the chingana behind the church in Valdivia, after which you should sail home to your wife.’

‘The chingana?’ Sharpe asked.

‘A chingana is where you go for a chingada,’ Ardiles said unhelpfully. ‘A chingana is either a tavern that sells whores, or a whorehouse that sells liquor, and the chingana behind the church in Valdivia has half-breed girls who give chingadas that leave men gasping for life. It’s the best whorehouse for miles. You know how you can tell which is the best whorehouse in a Spanish town?’

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s the one where all the priests go, and this one is where the bishop goes! So visit the mestiza whores, then go home and tell Vivar’s wife that her husband’s body was eaten by wild pigs!’

But Sharpe had not been paid to go home and tell stories. He had taken Doña Louisa’s money, and he was far from home, and he would not go back defeated. He would find Don Blas, no matter how deep the forest or high the hill. If Don Blas still had form, then Sharpe would find it.

He had sworn as much, and he would keep his promise. He would find Don Blas.

Albatrosses ghosted alongside the Espiritu Santo’s rigging. The frigate, Cape Horn left far behind her, was sailing before a friendly wind on a swirling current of icy water. Dolphins followed the frigate, while whales surfaced and rolled on either flank.

‘Christ, but there’s some meat on those bloody fish!’ Harper said in admiration as a great whale plunged past the Espiritu Santo. The ship was sailing north along the Chilean coast, out of sight of land, though the proximity of the shore was marked by the towering white clouds which heaped above the Andes. Inshore, the sailors said, were yet stranger creatures: penguins and sea lions, mermaids and turtles, but the frigate was staying well clear of the uncharted Chilean coastline so that Harper, to his regret, was denied a chance of glimpsing such strange monsters. Ardiles, still hoping to capture his own monster, Lord Cochrane, continued to exercise his guns even though his men were already as well-trained as any gunners Sharpe had ever seen.

Yet it seemed there was to be no victory over the devil Cochrane on this voyage, for the Espiritu Santo’s lookouts saw no other ships till the frigate at last closed on the land. Then the lookouts glimpsed a harmless fleet of small fishing vessels that dragged their nets through the cold offshore rollers. The men aboard the fishing boats claimed not to have seen any rebel warships. ‘Though God only knows if they’re telling the truth,’ Lieutenant Otero told Sharpe. Land was still out of sight, but everyone on board knew that the voyage was ending. Seamen were repairing their clothes, sewing up huge rents in breeches and darning their shirts in readiness to meet the girls of Valdivia. ‘One day more, just one day more,’ Lieutenant Otero told Sharpe after the noon sight, and sure enough, next dawn, Sharpe woke to see the dark streak of land filling the eastern horizon.

That afternoon, under a faltering wind, a friendly tide helped the Espiritu Santo into Valdivia’s harbour. Sharpe and Harper stood on deck and stared at the massive fortifications that guarded this last Spanish stronghold on the Chilean coast. The headland which protected the harbour was crowned by the English fort, which in turn could lock its cannon fire with the guns of Fort San Carlos. Both forts lay under the protection of the artillery in the Chorocomayo Fort which had been built on the headland’s highest point. Beyond San Carlos, and still on the headland which formed the harbour’s western side, lay Fort Amargos and Corral Castle. The Espiritu Santo’s First Lieutenant proudly pointed out each succeeding strongpoint as the frigate edged her way around the headland. ‘In Chile,’ Otero explained yet again, ‘armies move by sea because the roads are so bad, but no army could ever take Valdivia unless they first capture this harbour, and I just wish Cochrane would try to capture it! We’d destroy him!’