The foreign commerce of the viceroyalty had diminished until only one small fleet came each year to Cartagena and Porto Bello, and though, during the latter part of the colonial period, certain viceroys did something to open up roads by which wheat, sugar, cacao, and hides could be exported at a profit, no measures could prove effective while the enormous fiscal exactions of the Spanish government continued. During the last few years of the eighteenth century, commerce was made nominally free, but this meant simply that the old prohibitions on private shipments by sea were abolished, and the ports opened for trade with Spain and the other colonies. These wise measures were, however, accompanied by such an increase in taxes that their effect was nugatory.
Meanwhile New Granada had also had her external troubles. In 1586 Sir Francis Drake reached Cartagena and forty years after the Spanish government fortified the place at great expense. Nevertheless Ducasse took it in 1695 though Admiral Vernon, with a great fleet and army, unsuccessfully besieged the place in 1741, after having captured Porto Bello. The unsettled Central American coast north from the Isthmus was nominally a part of the vice-royalty, but had been completely neglected by the Bogotá authorities, and in 1698 a colony of twelve thousand Scotchmen, with authority from Parliament and backed by a vast popular subscription, landed on the north shore of the Isthmus. They purposed the establishment of a general emporium for all nations on the spot which the great financier, William Paterson, who originated the scheme, regarded as "the key of the commerce of the world." There was to be free-trade; the Indians were to be protected; religious liberty was to be established; and the Spanish monopoly of South and Central America destroyed. The far-sighted Paterson hoped to found a colonial empire and to enrich his own country by the resulting trade. But the enterprise was wrecked by the fatal climate and the supineness of the British Government. Provisions fell short, and within a year the survivors re-embarked in a miserable plight. Two small supplementary expeditions arrived in 1699 to find assembled a Spanish fleet and army against which no serious resistance could be made. After a little half-hearted fighting the Scotchmen capitulated and the colony was definitely abandoned. The Bogotá government continued to neglect that coast. It was placed under the jurisdiction of the captain-general of Cuba, and the claim that Colombia set up after she became an independent nation has never held good against the Central American republics.
CHAPTER III
THE WAR AGAINST SPAIN
The stirring events of the year 1808 in Spain and the disorganisation of the monarchy produced great excitement in the New Granadan cities. When the news of the establishment of a junta at Quito came in September of the following year, Amar, the Bogotá viceroy, summoned an assembly of the authorities and leading citizens for consultation. The Creoles favoured an independent junta, but the prestige of the Spaniards and Amar's popularity prevailed, and it was resolved to recognise the home revolutionary government, and to send an expedition to crush the Quito junta. Meanwhile the Ecuador patriots had despatched troops to Pasto, but the sturdy conservative mountaineers resented the invasion and repulsed the Quiteños. Thenceforth to the end of the war Pasto remained a loyalist stronghold. Though Quito soon laid down its arms under promise of amnesty, the re-established Spanish government massacred the insurgent leaders, and reports of these cruelties threw the Creoles of the cities into effervescence, though the Indian and negro population of the rural districts remained indifferent. On May 22, 1810, the citizens of Cartagena demanded and obtained an independent revolutionary junta; shortly after an insurrection broke out among the llaneros on the Orinoco plains north-east of Bogotá; on the 4th of July Pamplona followed Cartagena's example and set up its own junta; and a little later Socorro did likewise. By this time things were ripe in Bogotá for an anti-Spanish revolution. Ambitious Creoles intrigued among the people; the natural feeling of jealousy and hatred between Spaniards and Americans became inflamed; a contemptuous remark about Creoles made by a Spaniard in the streets was the signal for the gathering of a great mob which rushed tumultuously to the public square and howled for an open cabildo and the immediate appointment of a junta. With six thousand armed men in front of his palace the viceroy had no choice. The junta was named and a circular sent to the other cities inviting them to name deputies for a congress to arrange a federal union. But local jealousies, hardly held in check by the rigid colonial system, now flamed forth; the people instinctively grouped along geographical lines; and divergencies of opinion and ambition among leaders increased the confusion. Cartagena and other provinces declined to send delegates to Bogotá, preferring to act independently until the re-establishment of regular government in Spain.
When the congress met it represented only a part of the territory, and but a small percentage of the population. Nariño and other popular young leaders in Bogotá intrigued for a centralised system in which Bogotá was to be master province. An insurrection against the junta installed him as dictator, and congress fled from the capital. The royalists had made no effort to oppose the revolution in the centres of population, contenting themselves with sending expeditions from Quito to occupy Pasto and Popayan, with keeping possession of the Isthmus, and establishing themselves on the lower Magdalena. Cartagena was thereby isolated from the rest of the revolted provinces, and Bogotá cut off from communication with the sea. In March, 1811, the patriots marched up the Cauca from Cali and defeated the Spaniards in Popayan. Quito rose in rebellion a second time, and the Ecuadoreans advanced north into Pasto, only to be beaten once more by the loyalist peasantry. The Granadans, who invaded by way of Popayan, met with no better success, and their forces under the command of a North American adventurer, Macaulay, were annihilated. The re-establishment of the royal authority at Quito followed, and Bogotá again lay open to attack from the south.