III.
EL TEMBLOR.
We must leave young José among his comrades of the hato for a while, and glance at the contemporaneous doings of anointed heads, whose destinies were strangely interwoven with his own.
Far away across the Atlantic, in the shadow of the Pyrenees, events had been developing themselves to the consummation that should overturn a splendid throne, shake Europe to its foundations, and electrify Spanish America with a sympathetic current of revolution, flashing from the pines of Oregon to the deserts of Patagonia.
The mysterious treachery of Bayonne was consummated. Joseph, brother of Napoleon, reigned on the throne of which King Charles had been perfidiously despoiled. Ferdinand, heir to the crown of Spain and the Indies, had scarcely heard himself proclaimed as the seventh monarch of that name, when he had resigned his kingly functions to a Regency, and hastened into the snare which already held his father a captive on the soil of France. The astounding intelligence arrived in different parts of South America during the year 1808. The effect was everywhere alike. One moment of utter bewilderment, an instant's reeling under the shock of surprise, and then a magnificent outburst of loyalty from the simple-hearted Creole population! El Rey, the King,—that almost mythical sovereign, who was ignorantly adored as the personification of wisdom and beneficence, no matter how cruelly Viceroys might misgovern, or Captains-General oppress,—was it possible to conceive him a captive, the signer of his own humiliation, the renouncer of his immemorial rights? And Ferdinand, the young monarch of whom so little was known and so much expected,—he, too, a voluntary prisoner, while a Frenchman reigned in Madrid? This was news, indeed, to bewilder nations who had hitherto remained content in infantile tutelage, unconscious, undesirous, of the rights of men! Addresses, fervent with loyalty, were dispatched to Spain, embodying vows of eternal affection towards the King, and of detestation of Joseph, the usurper. French residents in Venezuela were publicly execrated by the excited Creoles; the French flag was insulted, and the French messengers were glad to escape with their lives from the hands of the infuriated Colonists. No Spanish monarch ever had a firmer hold upon the Indies than Ferdinand VII. when Spain was lost to him in July and August, 1808.
But soon there came that inevitable question, first in the catechism of all human society: Whom shall we obey? The King, whose hand had weighed not over lightly these many years, an abdicated prisoner at Bayonne; Ferdinand yielding his authority into the hand of a nameless Regency, and his capital to the brother of the Corsican Emperor; Spain overrun by two hundred thousand foreign troops; messengers at hand from Joseph, from the Regency, from the Junta of the Asturias, from the Junta of Seville, each alike asserting its right to authority over the Colonies, as legitimate possessors of jurisdiction in Spain itself! The accession of Joseph, in fact, gave a momentary independence to Spanish America, and the royal governors were thrown upon their own resources for the maintenance of their power. The Colonies were for the first time called upon to provide for their own defence,—solicited, not commanded, to obey; and they proved their loyalty by dispatching enormous sums in gold and silver to the Junta at Cadiz, as well as by their eagerness to ascertain in whom actually reposed the lawful government of Spain. Gradually, however, the consciousness of their own entity stole over the Venezuelans and New Granadians, and they bethought them of establishing an administrative Junta of their own, until better times should dawn on Spain. Blindly imprudent, the Viceroy violently opposed the project, and with such troops as remained in the Colonies the first Juntas were dispersed or massacred. Squabbles ensued, until the citizens of Caracas quietly deposed the chief Colonial authorities, and appointed a Junta Suprema to administer affairs in the name of Ferdinand VII. Intelligence of this step, however, was received with great alarm by the sapient Junta of Cadiz, and a proclamation was launched, on the 31st of August, 1810, declaring the Province of Caracas in a state of rigorous blockade. A war of manifestoes ensued, until the Provinces became enlightened as to their own importance and strength, and published, on the 5th of July, 1811, the Declaration of their Independence. Scarcely was this done when the Spanish Cortes offered liberal terms of accommodation, but they were rejected. The nation, that in 1808 thought it sweet to be subject, declared itself, three years later, for unqualified independence. The ardent revolutionist, General Miranda, was placed in command of some hastily-levied forces, and took the field against the Spanish commander, Don Domingo Monteverde, who had assumed a hostile attitude immediately after the Declaration.
It is only necessary here to say, that, after some hard-fought and honorable fields, Miranda and his fellow-officers were completely successful. All the principal cities were in the hands of the Patriots before 1812 began. Monteverde, in January of that year, was cooped up in the remote province of Guiana, and Coro on the sea-coast was also held by his troops; but elsewhere the new Republic seemed fully established. Already the point of Constitution-making—the crystallization-point of republics—had been reached. The ports of Venezuela were for the first time opened to foreign trade. Her inhabitants were no longer restricted from the enjoyment of the fruits of their own industry. A gigantic system of taxation had been brushed, like a spider's web, away. Two-thirds of the Captain-Generalcy, in a word, were free.
There was little fear among any of the inhabitants of Caracas, in March, 1812, that they would again fall under the dominion of Spain. The Carnival had been celebrated with greater joyousness than in any year before; the proverbial gayety of the town was doubled during the concluding festival of Shrove Tuesday; and Lent had scarcely thrown as deep a shade as usual over the devoutest inhabitants of the city. Lent drew to a close, and there was every prospect that Passion Week would be succeeded by a season of rejoicing over impending defeats of the Royalist Goths in Coro and Guiana; and Passion Week came. Holy Thursday fell on the 26th of March.
The solemn festival was ushered in with the most imposing rites of the Church. In the great cathedral, which dwarfed all other buildings in the Plaza, there was high mass that day. The famous bell clanged out to all Caracas remembrance of the agony of our Lord. A silent multitude was prostrated all day long before the gorgeous altar. Prelates and priests and acolytes stood, splendid in vestments of purple and white and gold, solemnly celebrating upon the steps of the sanctuary the holiest mysteries of the Roman Catholic communion. Above and around, gigantic tapers flared from candlesticks of beaten gold; and every little while, the glorious anthems floated forth in majestic cadence, eddying in waves of harmony about the colonnade that stretched in dusky perspective from the great door to the altar, soaring above the distant arches, and swelling upwards in floods of melody, until the vast concavity of the vaulted nave was filled with a sea of sound. But a sultry heaviness weighed with the incense upon the air. Elder citizens glanced uneasily at one another, and the thoughts of many wandered anxiously from the sacred building. Outside, the streets were empty. All Caracas was engaged in public worship; and the white dwellings that inclosed the Plaza, with its converging avenues, looked silently down upon deserted pavements, echoing only now and then to the careless tread of a party of negroes, or to the clattering heel of some undevout trooper. The sun had a glow as of molten copper; the atmosphere was dense; but not a cloud occupied the heavens. Towards evening the churches and the cathedral were again emptied, and the throng of worshippers, streaming out into the streets, prepared to witness the great religious procession that was to close the ceremonies of the holy day. Still the declining sun glowed with unnatural intensity of hue; and the evening breeze swept over the town in unusually fitful and stormy gusts. The air seemed to be laden with mysterious melancholy, to sigh with a hidden presage of some awful calamity to come.
Of a sudden it came. A shudder, a tremor, a quivering shock ran, for hundreds of miles simultaneously, through Venezuela. A groan, swelling thunderously and threateningly into a hollow roar, burst from the tortured earth, and swallowed up in its convulsive rumbling the shrieks of an entire nation suddenly inwrapt in the shadow and agony of death. For a moment,—as if a supernatural hand were painfully lifting it from its inmost core,—the earth rocked and heaved through all Venezuela; and then, almost before the awful exclamation, El temblor! had time to burst from the lips of that stricken nation, it bounded from the bonds that held it, and in a moment was quaking, heaving, sliding, surging, rolling, in awful semblance to the sea. Great gulfs opened and closed their jaws, swallowing up and again belching forth dwellings, churches, human beings, overtaken by instantaneous destruction.
A flash and a roar passed through the earth, and a jagged chasm followed in its track, creating others in its rapid clash and close. Whole cities shivered, tottered, reeled, and fell in spreading heaps of undistinguishable ruin. In one minute and fifteen seconds, twenty thousand human beings perished in Venezuela; and then the Earthquake of Caracas ceased.
It was after four o'clock in the afternoon when the first subterranean shock was felt; and long before five the agonized earth was still. Long before five, the stupefied survivors stood slowly recovering their faculties of speech and motion. Long before five, a piteous wail ascended to heaven from fathers and husbands and wives and mothers, desolately mourning the dead in the streets of Caracas, La Guayra, Mérida, San Felipe, and Valencia. In this manner the Holy Thursday of 1812 drew toward its close. But the physical disasters consequent upon the great earthquake were of insignificant import as compared with its moral effect. Colonist and Spaniard had shared alike in suffering and death during those dreadful moments; but the superstitious population readily accepted the interpretation which an eager priesthood placed upon the event, and bowed in the belief that they had suffered the infliction in punishment of their rebellion against the King. Nine-tenths of the clergy and monastic brotherhood inwardly hated and feared the Revolution, and their practised tongues drew terrible auguries for rebellious Venezuela from the recent throes and upheaval of the earth. Preachers solemnly proclaimed the fact, that this, without doubt, was a catastrophe akin to the memorable convulsion which once had swallowed up Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, for mutiny against the Lord; and the proximate wrath of God could be appeased only by a retrogression into his chosen paths. The people listened to the fathers, and obeyed trembling. Miranda, who had struggled against and overcome the material power of his enemies, was impotent when confronted by spiritual terrors; and after a few languid combats, his troops deserted, leaving Monteverde to triumph once more in the assertion of Spanish authority over every province of Venezuela. His headquarters were established at Caracas, and there, as well as elsewhere, his troops revelled in the perfidious torture and execution of their capitulated foes. During nearly two years, Monteverde reigned in Venezuela.