24
CLOSING NICARAGUA’S BACK DOOR
THE ARN OUTPOST AT HIPP’S POINT, OR POINT TRINIDAD, AS THE Costa Ricans called it, was one of the loneliest in Nicaragua. Located on the western point where the Sarapiqui River joined the San Juan River, it was there to guard against a Costa Rican sally down the Sarapiqui. Its value had been demonstrated back in February, when, from there, Tom Green had destroyed General Alfaro’s expedition. Apart from alligators and tropical birds, the current garrison commander, Captain Thompson, and his company of forty Americans had only themselves for company. That situation was about to change, dramatically. Come the middle of the day on December 22, Sylvanus Spencer was standing at the base of a tree from which a Costa Rican with good eyesight surveyed the filibuster post on Hipp’s Point. The soldier could see Captain Thompson and his men sitting down to lunch. No sentries were posted, and the Americans’ rifles were all in neat stands around the post.
Over the past nineteen days, Spencer and the 200 Costa Rican pathfinders had marched overland to the head of the San Carlos River, chopped down trees and built their rafts, then drifted down the San Carlos to the San Juan, just as Spencer had planned. At the confluence of the two rivers, Englishman George Cauty and 80 men had landed to build a fort. Spencer had continued down the San Juan with Colonel Barillier, Major Blanco, and the remaining 120 troops. Just short of Hipp’s Point, they had landed. Now, aware that Thompson’s garrison was off guard, Spencer’s Costa Ricans moved into position and then launched an attack on the fort.
Although Thompson’s men were caught totally by surprise, they reacted quickly and put up do-or-die resistance. But they were outnumbered three to one. When Spencer led the Costa Ricans over the ramparts and into the fort with bayonets fixed, most of the Yankees were killed in the hand-to-hand fighting. Among the few wounded prisoners taken was Captain Thompson. Having gained control of Hipp’s Point, Spencer took Major Blanco, forty-five men, and their prisoners and continued the steady floating progress down the San Juan, leaving Colonel Barillier and the remaining Costa Ricans in occupation of the former ARN fort.
 
 
It took Vanderbilt’s man Spencer a day and a half to complete the navigation of the San Juan on his rafts. On the evening of December 23, Spencer and his troops reached San Juan Bay and paddled to Punta de Castilla—Castle Point. Here stood the ruins of an old Spanish castle, Castillo Viejo, and here Captain Joseph N. Scott, who was Morgan and Garrison’s manager in Nicaragua, had recently made a home for his family and himself and set up a depot for the Transit’s river steamers.
As Spencer and his men came ashore, they passed four idle river steamers awaiting the next ocean steamer arrival—the stern-wheeler Sir Henry Bulwer and side-wheelers Clayton, Wheeler, and Machuca—Spencer’s former vessel. Scott was roused from his bed by Spencer and his forty-five Costa Rican riflemen and advised that the four steamers were now confiscated.
At dawn, a furious Scott rowed across the bay to Greytown, passing a large British man-o-war lying at anchor. A steady rotation of armed British vessels had occupied the bay ever since Ambassador Crampton had promised Vanderbilt there would always be a British warship at Greytown. Now it was the turn of the 3,281-ton HMS Orion. An impressive-looking two-year-old screw-driven steamship of ninety-one guns, she was one of the largest vessels ever to have visited San Juan Bay.
After Captain Scott tracked down the U.S. government’s commercial agent in the port and protested the seizure of his river steamers, the agent went out to HMS Orion and demanded that her skipper, Captain John E. Erskine, intervene and protect Captain Scott and his family from Costa Rican aggression and forcibly restore control of the four little steamers to Morgan and Garrison’s manager. Captain Erskine, unhappy that Costa Rican troops were active on his doorstep, landed on Punta de Castilla with a party of marines and announced to Sylvanus Spencer that he’d come to protect American lives and property. In response, Spencer declared that his men had no intention of harming Captain Scott or his family. As for American property, Spencer told the British officer that ownership of the river steamers was in dispute. Spencer then produced a letter from Cornelius Vanderbilt authorizing him to act on behalf of the vessels’ original owners, the Accessory Transit Company, to recover its property.
After reading Vanderbilt’s letter, and ignoring Captain Scott’s protests, the Royal Navy officer then backed off, but not before securing the release of the American prisoners who had been taken at Hipp’s Point and who agreed to return to the United States on the next ocean steamer. Captain Erskine also insisted that the Costa Rican army cease to occupy Punta de Castillo, which Britain and the United States both considered Nicaraguan territory. In response, Spencer relocated three of the four captured river steamers to Costa Rican waters, then set off back up the San Juan River in the fourth vessel, the Machuca, his own former command.
Steaming up the river, Spencer passed the new Costa Rican garrison at Hipp’s Point with a toot and a wave. Plowing on up the San Juan, he continued to the mouth of the San Carlos River. Here, Colonel Cauty had placed his rafts out in the river, stationing a number of men on them to fire on any filibuster steamer attempting to come up or down the river. Spencer planned to steam up the San Carlos River to link up with General Mora’s main force, which by then had begun its rafting journey to the San Juan.
Without reducing speed, Spencer gaily turned into the San Carlos from the San Juan. The wash from the Machuca swamped Cauty’s rafts, knocking occupants into the water, and several Costa Rican soldiers drowned. After stopping to pull men from the water, Spencer decided to take Cauty and his command with him up the San Carlos for the linkup with General Mora.
Oblivious to the fact that the Costa Ricans had taken the river steamers at Greytown and were now on the San Juan River, hundreds of eastbound passengers from the latest Orizaba arrival from San Francisco were aboard the La Virgen, crossing Lake Nicaragua, as she headed for the town of San Carlos and the San Juan River.
Among these passengers were several of Walker’s officers, most heading for the United States. Even during the darkest days of the Nicaraguan conflict, Walker allowed many of his officers to return home on furlough. For some, this was after they had been wounded in action; others went on business for Walker’s government. One of the civil officers on the La Virgen was Samuel Lockridge, heading back to New Orleans on a fresh recruitment drive. Another was Undersecretary William Rogers, who only intended going as far as Greytown to collect paper for Walker’s printing press, which was now located in his new capital, Rivas. Generals Canas and Martinez, who’d occupied Rivas for the Allies, had pulled out after Walker completed the evacuation of Granada, and on December 16, Walker’s army had marched into Rivas.
The La Virgen entered the San Juan River and steamed east. At El Castillo, the La Virgen’s passengers disembarked to spend the night at the Hotel El Castillo. In the morning, the passengers would board the river steamer Joseph N. Scott—named in honor of Morgan and Garrison’s manager in Nicaragua—which waited at the jetty below the El Castillo rapids. The La Virgen then turned around and headed back up the San Juan toward Lake Nicaragua.
The Hotel El Castillo, also known as the American Hotel, was owned by a young American couple, twenty-six-year-old John Hollenbeck from Hudson, Ohio, and his German-born wife, Elizabeth Hatsfeldt Hollenbeck. John had been working on Vanderbilt’s river steamers when he bought the hotel from a former British seaman in 1852. He had found Elizabeth, who had grown up in New Orleans, managing the hotel. Hollenbeck had given her a 50 percent salary raise on the spot. In March the following year, he’d married her. The industrious couple opened a merchandise store in the town and expanded the hotel, with John hauling rock down from the ruined castle on the hill for the foundations of a new wing—until the Nicaraguan authorities stopped him. The Hollenbecks offered a hammock and a roof over the head for a dollar a night, plus cheap but wholesome American-style food, and were doing great business. But while they were prepared to face the uncertainties of war, they had sent their two-year-old son, John Jr., to stay with Elizabeth’s family in Illinois.
The next morning, Lockridge, Rogers, and the Transit passengers departed Hollenbecks’ hotel. Boarding the Scott, they set off down the river for a rendezvous with an ocean steamer at Greytown.
 
 
After Spencer and Cauty met up with General Mora on the San Carlos River, the Machuca returned to the San Juan carrying reinforcements. Pulling into the wharf below the El Castillo rapids, she disgorged Costa Rican troops, sending many of El Castillo’s two hundred inhabitants fleeing into the jungle. When Spencer, Cauty, and senior Costa Rican officers came ashore, hotel proprietors John and Elizabeth Hollenbeck were hauled before them. Colonel Barillier ordered the couple locked away until further notice. Hollenbeck and his wife would spend the next two weeks in their own woodshed, before being transferred to a dungeon cell for four months.1
With just thirty men, Colonel Cauty occupied El Castillo de la Immaculada Concepcion—the Castle of the Immaculate Conception—on the grassy hill above El Castillo. Built by the Spanish in 1673, it had been badly degraded by the passage of time and by a 1780 attack by Horatio Nelson, then a young Royal Navy lieutenant. Despite that, the massive stone emplacement still possessed great strategic value. Spencer, meanwhile, had the Machuca hauled over the rapids by the Costa Ricon troops, then took the remaining men with him when he and Colonel Barillier steamed away upriver with the Machuca.
North of El Castillo, Spencer came across the lake steamer La Virgen tied up at the riverbank at the mouth of the Zavalos River—one of the hundreds of small tributaries draining into the San Juan. With the La Virgen’s crew busy loading firewood from one of a number of stockpiles maintained along the San Juan by the Transit operators, Spencer was able to capture the larger craft without a fight. She came complete with a small cannon installed by Walker. Sending the Machuca back to Cauty at El Castillo, Spencer continued upstream with the La Virgen.
When the town of San Carlos and her lofty hilltop fort came in sight, Spencer kept his troops out of view, and with Walker’s lone-star flag still fluttering from the vessel’s staff, he eased the steamer into the town jetty. The fort’s seven cannon were capable of blowing the steamer out of the water, but Walker’s garrison commander, Captain Kruger, assumed that the La Virgen was on her scheduled return after taking the through passengers to El Castillo and paid her little heed. When Spencer sent a messenger up to Kruger to say there was a message on board for him from General Walker, the unsuspecting captain came down at once. As Kruger stepped on board the La Virgen, he found a gun to his head. Spencer warned Kruger he would be shot if he didn’t send a note to the fort’s garrison ordering immediate surrender. Kruger complied. The order was conveyed up the hill, and Kruger’s troops emerged from the fort with hands raised.
Within a matter of days, Sylvanus Spencer had captured Hipp’s Point, El Castillo, and Fort San Carlos, plus four river steamers and a lake steamer, all but closing the back door to Nicaragua. Just three lake steamers remained available to Walker, and Spencer had a plan for seizing them, too. Deprived of vessels, Walker would be like a man without legs. And Cornelius Vanderbilt would be one critical step closer to winning his war.
 
 
When President Mora learned of Spencer’s swift success, he issued a proclamation to his army: “The main artery of filibusterism has been cut forever. The sword of Costa Rica has severed it.”2 Time would tell whether that proclamation was premature.
In New York, although Cornelius Vanderbilt had yet to receive the news of Spencer’s successes, he had heard from Webster that Spencer and Cauty had set off from San José with the Costa Rican expeditionary force. Vanderbilt was so confident of Spencer’s ultimate success that he published a notice in the New York Herald on Christmas Day, for the attention of all Accessory Transit Company stockholders: “Present appearances indicate a realization of my hopes that the company will be speedily restored to their rights, franchises and property upon the isthmus of Nicaragua.”3
More than ever, Vanderbilt was counting on winning his war in Nicaragua. His Gulf line was locked in cutthroat competition with Charles Morgan’s ships, with neither magnate now making money in the Gulf. Meanwhile, the Commodore’s transatlantic steamship venture was not faring well. Using his pet ship, the North Star, bought back from the U.S. Mail Line, and the newly built SS Ariel, Vanderbilt was losing money on the run from New York to Le Havre. The Cunard Line and the Collins Line were in profit because of their government mail subsidies. Determined to make a success of the European run, Vanderbilt had placed an order for his largest ocean steamer yet, the 4,500-ton Vanderbilt. Yet, it could turn out to be a case of pouring good money after bad.
Unlike his fellow Transit Company shareholders, Vanderbilt was at least making money from the Transit business—via the bribes being paid to keep his ships idle. But this Nicaragua business had become more than just a matter of money to the Commodore. This had become all about winning. Vanderbilt was not prepared to let the “tin sojer” and his mercantile friends beat him. In Spencer, Webster, and Cauty, the Commodore had the instruments of war, and Walker’s destruction. And everything pointed to their ultimate success. But the drama involving Walker’s vital San Juan River corridor was still far from over.
 
 
Samuel Absalom of the Mounted Rangers had arrived in Nicaragua from California in December. By the beginning of January 1857, Trooper Absalom was quartered at Rivas. The war-ravaged city didn’t impress him. Its once grand plaza, where Private Hughes and other American wounded had been burned to death by Colonel Bosque in 1855, was now weed-infested. The cathedral where George Winters had made his last stand was still a desolate ruin. Guerra’s Inn, where Juan Santamaria the drummer boy gave his life to burn out the Americans, was a blackened shell. General Walker had his headquarters on the northern side of the plaza, in the line of low, red-tiled buildings where, the previous April, Robert Gay had died trying to drive out the Costa Ricans. Eight of General Henningsen’s prized field guns now lined the veranda on that side of the plaza.
Sitting in the shade of the guardhouse porch on the plaza’s western side with his Mounted Ranger comrades, Absalom watched companies of freshly arrived recruits drilling out on the sunbaked plaza. They wore new ARN uniforms brought down from San Francisco on the last steamer run—blue tunics, with a number and letter in white on the breast to signify the wearer’s battalion and company, plus canvas leggings and black felt hats. It was unlikely that uniforms would have any influence on the outcome of the war, but General Walker wanted his men to feel like soldiers, and act like them. Absalom estimated that Walker had a thousand fighting men in Rivas, a third of them yellowed and wasted by disease. The new Ranger regretted waiting so long to sign up with Parker Crittenden in San Francisco for twenty-five dollars a month plus 250 acres of Nicaraguan land once the war was won. Several of his friends had come down three months earlier, and all had won officers’ commissions, with the few privileges that entailed.4
Absalom had been sleeping rough in the streets of San Francisco after failing as a gold prospector. Nicaragua had become his best, if not his only, option. He had arrived with enthusiasm, and with admiration for Walker, but the sickness all around him here, the limited and unchanging diet of beef, tortillas, green fruit, and numbing guaro, and the gloom he felt from his fellow filibusters soon sapped his morale and that of many of his colleagues. The depressed mood that set in after the loss of Granada had been exacerbated since by the disappearance of the La Virgen. An armed rowboat had been sent across the lake to San Carlos to find out what had happened to the steamer, but it had failed to return. There was a nagging fear in everyone’s mind that the Costas had taken the San Juan River.
General Walker, very much aware of sagging spirits among his men, called for his military band to play some foot-tapping music. Once the drilling ended, the band struck up. Walker and his senior officers brought chairs out onto the veranda to listen. According to poet Joaquin Miller, Walker was partial to a sea shanty.5 Absalom observed that Walker had a wistful look on his face as the band played. Perhaps, in his mind, Walker was harking back to more peaceful days, listening to a brass band playing on a bandstand in Nashville, or attending an opera in New Orleans with his beloved Ellen. Around him, men who had very little to be cheery about began tapping their feet and whistling along to the music. But Walker himself was more worried than his inscrutable visage let on. The lack of information from the San Juan River was deeply troubling.
 
 
The largest steamer on the lake, the all-white San Carlos, made her way across Lake Nicaragua from La Virgen, bound for El Castillo on the San Juan River. The Sierra Nevada had landed Californian passengers at San Juan del Sur on January 2, and the San Carlos was taking them on the next leg of their Transit journey. Several of Walker’s most experienced officers had joined the steamer at La Virgen—Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Rudler, and Captain Julius De Brissot, as well as General Walker’s brother, Captain Norvell Walker. The three were intending to travel to the United States.
All on board the steamer were unaware that the Costa Rican military had seized control of the San Juan River. When the San Carlos passed the town of San Carlos, everything seemed normal there; the Costa Rican troops now manning the fort kept out of sight. A little time later, no one aboard the steamer spotted her green sister vessel, the La Virgen, sitting up a stream farther downriver. Once the San Carlos had passed, the La Virgen emerged into the San Juan, then overtook the larger vessel. There was a cannon on her forward deck, loaded, and aimed at the San Carlos. Scores of Costa Rican riflemen also lined her decks, with their weapons pointed at the leading steamer’s passengers. From the La Virgen, Sylvanus Spencer called on the San Carlos to heave to.
The master of the San Carlos, Captain Ericsson, a plucky Dane, was all for turning about and running for the lake. The San Carlos could outrun Spencer’s boat, but Ericsson was overruled—by a passenger by the name of Harris, a son-in-law and employee of Cornelius Garrison, an owner of the San Carlos. Harris, aware of the 1855 incident when the Costa Ricans fired on this very same steamer from Fort San Carlos, ordered Ericsson to heave to. After Spencer and scores of Costa Rican soldiers boarded her, the San Carlos continued to El Castillo. There, the Transit passengers and Walker’s officers were put aboard the waiting Joseph N. Scott, then taken to San Juan Bay and landed at Punta de Castilla, where Samuel Lockridge had been sitting in a quandary ever since discovering that the Costa Ricans had seized four river steamers.
As Spencer and his troops headed back up the San Juan River aboard the Scott, Lockridge and the Walker officers from the San Carlos conferred. Lockridge was aware that any day now, several hundred new filibuster recruits were due to arrive at Greytown from New Orleans and New York, along with weapons and ammunition. He proposed to Harris, Rudler, De Brissot, and Norvell Walker that they wait here for those men to arrive, then lead them to regain the San Juan River from the Costa Ricans. When all agreed, Harris appointed Lockridge to command that operation—because Lockridge was Walker’s recruiting commissioner to New Orleans and the others were officially on leave. Rudler, the senior ARN officer present, was unhappy with Lockridge’s appointment and declared he would continue to the United States. When Walker later heard of this, he criticized Rudler for not tearing up his leave papers and throwing himself into regaining the San Juan. De Brissot sided with Rudler. Meanwhile, Norvell Walker decided to return to Rivas, via Panama. The earnest but unpopular Lockridge was left to lead the San Juan campaign on his own.
 
 
The thirty men of Trooper Absalom’s Mounted Rangers company had transferred to La Virgen from Rivas, and during the night, they’d seen a light from a steamer on the lake. In the morning, Absalom and his comrades could see the white-hulled San Carlos docked at the lake island of Omeotepe. Shortly after, the La Virgen also arrived at the island.
When the La Virgen approached Virgin Bay from the island, a company of ARN infantry took up positions on the recently repaired jetty stretching 150 yards into the lake. While on the beach, Absalom’s Rangers also prepared for a fight. A quarter of a mile out, the cannon on the steamer’s deck commenced a feeble bombardment of La Virgen. Despite the gun’s inaccuracy, with balls merely splintering rowboats tethered to the wharf, several young Americans on the long jetty lost their nerve and went to run back toward land, only to be slung back by older, cooler comrades. The troops on the jetty then let off a rifle volley at the steamer, and Ranger Sam Absalom watched with amusement as startled Costa Ricans aboard the La Virgen scampered for cover. The boat promptly veered away, then returned to the island. But questions about the fate of the lake steamers and the San Juan River had been answered. The Central America and Morgan, too, fell into Costa Rican hands at this time; now all the operating lake and river steamers had been captured.
Walker knew from the last mail from the United States that hundreds of new recruits were due to soon leave New Orleans and New York to join him. He could only hope now that those reinforcements would somehow retake the river and the steamers for him.
 
 
At the Punta de Castilla Transit depot, an elderly, out-of-service river steamer, her hull damaged and long ago stripped of paint by the elements, her steam engine rusty, her paddlewheels creaky, was up on temporary stocks with workmen swarming over her. The old single-deck paddle-steamer was the Orus, which had stuck fast on the Machuca Rapids in 1851. Finally retrieved from the rapids, she had lain disused at the point, but, Captain Joseph Scott assured Sam Lockridge, she could be restored to life. With this one precious steamer, Walker’s new recruits could be ferried up the San Juan when they arrived from the United States, to wrestle the river back from the Costa Ricans. To reflect the task she was being prepared for, the old steamer was renamed—the Rescue. She was William Walker’s last hope.