Tycoon's War

Captain Cockburn commanded Lockridge to parade his men, and under threat of bombardment, Lockridge begrudgingly assembled the recruits. Cockburn informed them that they faced annihilation by a vast force of Costa Ricans on the San Juan River, then read them a letter from his squadron commander, Captain Erskine of HMS Orion, offering protection to every British citizen in the filibuster ranks. Should the officer commanding the filibusters refuse to allow Britons to leave, Cockburn had orders to prevent any filibuster from going up the San Juan River. Cockburn then called on all British citizens present to step forward. Twenty men did so.² Among them was twenty-six-year-old Laurence Oliphant, son of Sir Anthony Oliphant, and onetime secretary to several British governors general of Canada. Oliphant had signed up to join Walker, in his own words, “for the fun of the thing.”³ Now, facing apparently impossible odds on the San Juan, filibustering didn’t sound like fun to Oliphant after all.

The rejuvenated Rescue steamed slowly toward the mouth of the Sarapiqui River, her deck crowded with Sam Lockridge’s 220 men. The old steamer had ferried them up the San Juan to land them, their equipment, and several tons of ammunition at the Petako orange orchard, two hours’ steaming time below the junction of the San Juan and Sarapiqui Rivers. From that base camp, Lockridge was launching his first assault of the campaign to recapture the river.

The Costa Ricans had fortified Hipp’s Point and established another emplacement at Cody’s Point, on the opposite bank. As the Rescue dawdled toward the Cody’s Point fortification, she was greeted by a fusillade of rifle rounds. “Whistling about us,” Charles Doubleday observed, “[they] notified us not only of the intention of the garrison, but, by the peculiar sound that Vanderbilt’s cargoes of Minie rifles had reached their destination.”⁴ The Rescue quickly retreated out of range, before sliding into the northern bank and landing the filibusters. The cautious Lockridge then had his men fell trees and build a log stockade. Urged on by Doubleday and Anderson, he subsequently agreed to an attack on Cody’s Point.

When the attack went forward, it met stubborn resistance from the enemy dug in behind earthworks. At the same time, two cannon at the Hipp’s Point fortification shelled Lockridge’s men, although with little accuracy. Lockridge’s force, far outnumbering the Costa Ricans, swept over the walls and captured Cody’s Point and two small brass cannon located there, wiping out the defenders while suffering only “trifling” casualties themselves.⁵

Flushed with victory, Lockridge’s officers convinced him to press on against Hipp’s Point that night. Anderson, Doubleday, and most of the troops left Lockridge and Wheat at Cody’s Point with the cannon, and just before midnight, the Rescue deposited them on the southern bank of the river, below the mouth of the Sarapiqui. Opposite Hipp’s Point, they took up positions in trees recently felled by the Costa Ricans.

At Hipp’s Point, Major Maximo Blanco prepared to defend his position. Sylvanus Spencer had left two hundred Costa Ricans here in December; already, Blanco had lost half his force to disease and desertion. The morale of Blanco’s remaining men was at rock bottom after seeing what happened to their comrades at Cody’s Point. Now, as the Costa Ricans waited for the inevitable Yankee assault, Blanco prayed that his outnumbered men would put up spirited resistance. Costa Rica was counting on them. So, too, was Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The first rays of the new day signaled the start of the battle for Hipp’s Point. From Cody’s Point to the north, Wheat’s cannon lobbed canister shot across the river, doing little damage but keeping Costa Rican heads down. From across the Sarapiqui to the east, two hundred American riflemen opened fire. For over an hour, Blanco’s men returned fire, causing frequent American casualties on the other side of the Sarapiqui. When, eventually, Costa Rican fire slackened, Doubleday led a group of Americans up the Sarapiqui and found a fording place.

Doubleday was surprised that when he and his men emerged from the jungle and charged the Hipp’s Point fort, they met no resistance. Mounting the walls, they dropped down inside. Apart from enemy dead, the fort was deserted. After eighteen of his men had been killed and many more wounded, Major Blanco had led the Costa Rican survivors out the back way and into the jungle.

When Lockridge arrived at the captured fort, he contemptuously ordered the enemy dead thrown into the San Juan, knowing the bodies would be carried on the current to San Juan Bay and float by HMS Cossack, providing the British with gory proof that William Walker’s men had annihilated Costa Ricans on the San Juan, despite their “overwhelming force.”

At Rivas, Walker acted as if relief was imminent. On January 3, Adjutant General Phil Thompson’s morning report listed 919 men, able-bodied and on the sick list at Rivas. This, Walker knew, compared with 4,000 men in the Allied armies camped at Masaya and Granada, including recent Honduran reinforcements. ⁶ Despite this, Walker appeared calm and self-contained, as always.

Walker was not happy with something the captain had done; precisely what, Absalom never learned. “Captain,” Walker said, in a controlled voice, “if this is the way you are going to do business, Nicaragua has no further use for you. We want nothing of this sort done here, sir.”⁷

On February 4, the Rescue returned to Hipp’s Point after a trip downriver to Greytown to meet the Texas. The steamer from New Orleans brought 180 more men, equipped with their own rifles, ammunition, and field guns. The latest arrivals were above the usual cut of boys and romantics attracted to Walker’s cause. In Doubleday’s opinion, they were “a fine-looking company of men.”⁸ Another member of Lockridge’s party said of them, “I never saw a finer set of filibusters.”⁹

The new arrivals were led by forty-two-year-old Henry T. Titus, infamous as one of the “Border Ruffians.” The previous year, they had fought a nasty little civil war in Kansas over the issue of slavery. Called Bleeding Kansas, it had pitted slavery advocates such as Titus against abolitionists such as John Brown. Titus, a huge, bearded man wearing a double-breasted frock coat and a black slouch hat with the left side pinned up, had not long stepped ashore before he generated dislike among Lockridge’s officers and conflict with Lockridge. Although only offered a captain’s commission, in Kansas he’d styled himself “Colonel” Titus and would not be addressed in any other fashion here. As for his men, they would not serve any commander other than Titus, so Lockridge allowed Titus to retain the command of his party, with Colonel Anderson commanding the original group.

In Doubleday’s opinion, Titus was “blown full of pride by the cheap reputation he had acquired in burning defenseless houses on the Missouri-Kansas frontier.”¹¹ In fact, before leaving New Orleans, Titus had boasted that once he and his men arrived in Nicaragua, they would set things right within a matter of days.¹²

With one thousand troops, Generals Canas and Jerez had occupied San Jorge, three miles from Rivas, from where they threatened the Transit Route. So Walker had sent Henningsen and Sanders to throw them out. But when Henningsen began the attack, Sanders held back. Henningsen was now a major general, promoted above Sanders, and he felt certain Sanders was jealous of him and wanted his attack to fail.¹³ Fail it did—with Sanders’s troops sitting outside the town, Henningsen had insufficient men and his advance stalled after bitter street fighting, losing eighty men killed and wounded for no gain. On February 1, forty new recruits had arrived at San Juan del Sur from San Francisco aboard the Orizaba. These new men were thrown straight into the firing line, when Walker personally led the next attack on San Jorge, taking several hundred men with him while leaving the majority of his army to hold Rivas.

Now, at 4:00 A.M. on February 4, the same day that Titus joined Lockridge on the San Juan, Walker and his troops infiltrated San Jorge from the east. The advance guard had reached a breast-high barricade at the entrance to the town plaza before the enemy was called to arms. Allied troops tumbled from their beds and straight into the fighting at the plaza. A senior Nicaraguan officer with a limp was shot in the face and had to be helped to the rear by his men—it was Walker’s old Democratico adversary, General Maximo Jerez.

But as had been the case in most of the urban battles Walker fought in Nicaragua, he did not have enough men to sustain the attack and had to order a withdrawal. Young Cal O’Neal, recently promoted to colonel, was brought down by one of the last shots of the battle and was carried away, severely injured.

Two days later, in the Hacienda Maleano, Walker’s crowded hospital at Rivas, as Walker stayed at the young man’s bedside and “watched over his last agonies,” Cal O’Neal died. He had survived both Battles of Rivas, the disasters at Santa Rosa and San Jacinto, and the two failed sieges of Masaya. But in the end, O’Neal’s luck ran out. He was not yet twenty-one years of age.

The muster list on February 6 recorded that an officer and nineteen Mounted Rangers deserted en masse the previous day, with their horses and equipment. Last seen riding hard and fast for Costa Rica, the deserters were Sam Absalom and most of his company. At the beginning of February, pamphlets had begun turning up in Rivas, containing a proclamation from Costa Rican President Juan Rafael Mora. Now, Mora promised, Americans who came over to the Allies would not be shot; they would be given protection and free passage back to the United States. Disillusion and desertion would now become Walker’s greatest enemies. If Lockridge’s bid to reopen the San Juan River did not soon succeed, there would be no Army of the Republic of Nicaragua left to relieve.

This same day, the U.S. Navy’s 958-ton sloop-of-war St. Mary’s dropped anchor at San Juan del Sur, a little distance from Walker’s armed schooner Granada and the Morgan and Garrison coal ship Narragansett. Commander Charles H. Davis had recently taken over command of the St. Mary’s at Panama. He’d come to Nicaragua with express orders from Washington. Officially, he was to “take such steps as circumstances required for the protection of American citizens” in Nicaragua.¹⁴ In reality, the navy secretary, at the request of the secretary of state and the urging of Cornelius Vanderbilt, had given Davis the job of ending this war by removing William Walker from Nicaragua. While Vanderbilt had been confident of Spencer’s ultimate success on the San Juan River, by involving the U.S. Navy, he was writing himself a little insurance. One way or the other, the Commodore was determined to get Walker.

From the castle battlements, thirty-year-old Colonel George Cauty studied the little steamer making toward El Castillo. It was the middle of the morning on Wednesday, February 16, and for Cauty, the unexpected appearance of the steamer was cause for alarm. As were the sight of William Walker’s lone-star Nicaraguan Republic flag being flown by the vessel and the scores of dark-clad armed figures she carried. Up to this time, Cauty had been unaware that Lockridge’s filibusters were on the river or that Cody’s Point and Hipp’s Point had fallen to them. Cauty had his drummer sound the call to arms.

Trenches dug by Cauty below the hill were occupied by a captain and thirteen men. Cauty’s remaining sixteen Costa Ricans manned the castle ramparts with him. Cauty now calmly instructed his deputy, Colonel Faustino Montes de Oca, to hurry a message down to the trenches ordering the men there to destroy the two river steamers at the town’s wharves and to fire the town, starting with the Hollenbecks’ hotel. As Costa Rican soldiers soon ran through the town with lighted torches in hand, sending the townspeople fleeing, several Costas clambered onto the Joseph N. Scott, which was moored at the wharf below the rapids, and began to smash her machinery. At the wharf on the high side of the rapids, other soldiers attacked the Machuca.

As the Rescue slid into the river bank below the town, 140 filibusters leaped to the shore and ran to the attack, firing as they came. The Rescue immediately reversed into the stream and headed back down the river out of range. The Costa Rican destruction party deserted the Scott, their work unfinished. But flames were shooting up from buildings in the town, and the Machuca was also burning. When filibusters reached the Scott, a quick-thinking American cut the steamer’s mooring lines and set her adrift. Driven by the current from the tumbling rapids, the Scott drifted east downriver and out of Costa Rican hands.

From the trench line, Henry Titus surveyed the scene. The Hollenbecks’ hotel had been razed; their nearby store was also a charred ruin. The Machuca, burned to the waterline, had sunk beside the wharf. Now, a little after midday, as an officer came down the hill from the castle under a flag of truce, Titus, grunting with satisfaction, clambered from the trench and began climbing the slope to meet him.

The Castle of the Immaculate Conception had never been taken by storm. The rectangular castle was 195 by 93 feet. Its stone walls were 4 feet thick and 14 feet high, and within those walls, there was a 50-foot central keep. At each corner were bastions equipped with loopholes. The Spanish had originally built the castle to prevent pirates from the Caribbean sacking Granada, as Henry Morgan had done. In 1780, with Britain at war with Spain, the castle had been attacked by twenty-five hundred British sailors and soldiers with orders to capture Granada, León, and Realejo. Horatio Nelson, then a twenty-one-year-old Royal Navy lieutenant, had brought four 4-pound naval cannon and a howitzer up the river and bombarded the castle for a week, sending more than four hundred cannonballs into its walls. The two hundred Spanish defenders had surrendered after running out of food and water, but so many of the attackers, including Nelson, had fallen ill with yellow fever and dysentery that the British withdrew.¹⁵

Henry Titus could only guess at the size of the castle’s Costa Rican garrison. In a letter from General Mora to Major Blanco found at Hipp’s Point, Mora had spoken of sending men from the San Juan across the lake to join an Allied attack on Rivas. By this time, Costa Rica’s General Canas was the Allies’ new commander in chief. After allowing Henningsen to escape Granada, then retreating meekly to Masaya, Guatemala’s General Belloso had received intense criticism throughout Central America and resigned. Canas, elected Belloso’s successor by the other Allied commanders, had urged his compatriot to send him men for a final push against Walker—Mora did in fact send him five hundred of his eleven hundred men.

Mora’s letter had suggested to Lockridge and Titus that the castle may have been lightly defended, although they could not be sure. Told by Lockridge that a long siege of the castle was out of the question if General Walker was to be relieved in time, Titus had sent a message up to the castle’s commander, demanding his surrender. Now, Titus reached the officer coming down to him—it was George Cauty, who wanted to hear what the American had to say in person. Producing a flask of brandy, “Colonel” Titus shared it with the English officer and, with false bonhomie, offered to accept the unconditional surrender of the castle garrison. The alternative, said Titus, hoping to bluff his opponent, would not be pleasant for Cauty or his men.

Cauty later related Titus’s comments to the Costa Rican ambassador to London, Pedro Perez: “He told me he had a large battery of cannon of great caliber mounted for the attack and that his force consisted of 1,000 men. This appeared so ‘gassy’ that I paid no attention to it.”¹⁶ Titus, a man prone to half-truths and exaggerations, had been half right—counting Anderson’s men, there were close to five hundred filibusters on the San Juan, and downriver, Lockridge had six field guns, although none were of any great caliber.

The English mercenary, given confidence by the knowledge that not even fellow countryman Lord Nelson had been able to blast his way into the castle, could have simply told Titus to do his worst and then bade him good day. But Cauty had fought more real battles than Titus had ever dreamed of, and quickly sized up the big man as an oaf and a fool. Playing along with Titus, Cauty agreed that his situation was indeed hopeless. He would dearly love to surrender, he said, but to do that, he would need the permission of his superior, General Mora, at Fort San Carlos. Cauty asked Titus to give him twenty-four hours to obtain that permission. And—Titus agreed.

One of Cauty’s men was subsequently permitted by Titus to leave the castle, get into a bungo above the rapids, and paddle off to the west. Titus and his men then withdrew to the other side of the river and made camp above the rapids. Here, they settled down to await an enemy capitulation next day.

The lake steamer Morgan eased into the riverbank west of El Castillo. Sixty Costa Rican soldiers jumped ashore, then made their way east through the trees, led by Captains Joaquin Ortiz, Jesus Alvardo, and Luis Pacheco; this was the same Luis Pacheco who, as a sergeant in Rivas on April 10 the previous year, made the first unsuccessful attempt to set fire to Guerra’s Inn. These troops had come in response to Colonel Cauty’s note. Rather than asking General Mora for permission to surrender, Cauty had sought reinforcements to help him throw back Titus’s filibusters. General Mora sent 60 percent of his 100-man Fort San Carlos garrison, hoping the element of surprise would compensate for lack of numbers, and these troops progressively worked their way down the riverbank, until, by 10:00 A.M., they were behind Titus’s 140 unsuspecting men. Once in position, the Costas rose up from the undergrowth, yelling their battle cries, and launched a bayonet charge.¹⁷

At the castle, George Cauty, who’d been expecting this attack since sunrise, broke into a relieved smile. “We heard firing in the hills,” he later said, “and loud shouts and ‘Vivas for Costa Rica,’ which we answered.” Within thirty minutes, the fighting was all over. “The filibusters fled, throwing away their arms, ammunition and provisions,” Cauty recounted, “so that the road for two miles down the river was strewn with them. Fortunately for Colonel Titus a steamboat arrived at the wharf just in time to take them off.” The Costa Ricans would estimate that seventy of Titus’s men were killed or wounded.¹⁸ The attempt to retake the San Juan for Walker had faltered, badly. Vanderbilt’s noose tightened a little more.

The Rescue had arrived in time to help Titus and his surviving Border Ruffians escape. She landed them twenty miles downriver, at San Carlos Island, which sat in the middle of the San Juan River. There, Lockridge and forty of Titus’s men had built a log emplacement, calling it Fort Slatter. Lockridge’s officers considered Titus an idiot for allowing Cauty to hoodwink him. Titus’s courage was questioned, as were his motives. The New York Tribune, when it reported the El Castillo fiasco, would say: “Some attribute Titus’s conduct to sheer cowardice, while others affirm that he sold the battle.” The Tribune added: “His officers swore that they would no longer serve under such a poltroon, and his men vowed that they would shoot him for his cowardice.”¹⁹

Titus, humiliated, declared his intent to travel via Panama to join Walker, and departed on the Rescue. His bungled attack did have one plus—the Rescue had taken the drifting Scott in tow and brought her down to San Carlos Island, and there Lockridge’s men set to work repairing her damaged machinery. When Titus arrived at Greytown on the Rescue, he argued with a British naval officer, who arrested him and detained the old steamer. But, shortly after, the U.S. sloop-of-war Saratoga arrived in the bay, and her presence inspired the release of both Titus and the Rescue.

Before long, the SS Tennessee arrived from New York, carrying not a single Walker recruit. Largely because of bad publicity stemming from the Slavery Decree and its suspension of the ban on slavery in Nicaragua, the flow of recruits from the Northern states had dried up, even though the press was still generally supportive. “Again and again we have called Walker a hero,” declared the new illustrated journal Harper’s Weekly in its January 31, 1857, issue. “We shall not take it back.”

Morgan and Garrison were also suffering. Now that it was known in the United States that the San Juan River had been closed by the Costa Ricans, no through passengers were signing up for the Nicaraguan Transit. The Morgan and Garrison Line was keeping its commitment to Walker by delivering his recruits, supplies, and mail to Greytown and San Juan del Sur, but had resorted to selling through passages via Panama. On this latest voyage, the Tennessee sailed on to Panama. And Henry Titus sailed with her.

As rain bucketed down, Lockridge and his men huddled in temporary shelters at Fort Slatter and Hipp’s Point, wet, hungry, and downhearted. Every rainy season, northeasterly winds off the Caribbean deposited two hundred inches of rain on eastern Nicaragua.²⁰ Old hands in Nicaragua knew that this downpour could continue for weeks.

At El Castillo, Colonel Cauty and his reinforced garrison enjoyed the protection of the old castle keep. There, Cauty, who felt certain the filibusters would be back, conceived a novel plan. His men procured pieces of firewood from the Hollenbecks’ woodshed, and in a dry castle workshop, the center of each small log was bored out. Gunpowder was packed into the cavity, and wooden plugs hammered into place at the ends. As soon as there was a break in the rain, the wood was loaded into a long, narrow bungo and covered with a tarpaulin. Steered by Captain Luis Pacheco, who had volunteered for this mission, the canoe was carried down the San Juan by the current.

Dotted along the river there were Transit wood depots. Here, firewood periodically felled in the jungle by subcontractors such as John Hollenbeck and cut to size for the steamers’ fireboxes stood piled in readiness for steamer use. At two of these depots, between El Castillo and San Carlos Island, Pacheco infiltrated his doctored wood into the stockpiles. Abandoning the bungo, which he would have struggled to paddle on his own back up the San Juan against the current, Pacheco set off overland with a compass loaned to him by Colonel Cauty, and he made his way back to El Castillo. “Captain Pacheco fulfilled my instructions exactly,” Cauty later told Ambassador Perez.²¹

In the middle of the day on February 18, fifty-year-old Commander Charles Davis, captain of the USS St. Mary’s, walked into Walker’s bleak Rivas headquarters. He was a tall, slim man with longish gray hair and handlebar mustache. Politely addressing Walker as “Mr. President,” Davis saluted.²² He had been permitted by both sides to enter Rivas to meet with Walker.

In the discussions that followed, Davis said that the captain of the coal ship Narragansett at San Juan del Sur would like his small boats back. Walker, who had confiscated the boats for an ultimately aborted mission against the captured steamers on Lake Nicaragua, responded that the coal ship had been chartered by Morgan and Garrison, so the ship’s boats were technically theirs, not the master’s. What’s more, said Walker, Mr. Morgan and Mr. Garrison would like their other boats back—the lake and river steamers seized by the Allies. If Davis asked for the former, said Walker, wearing his lawyer’s hat, then the commander must also ask the Allies for the latter. Davis said he would go to San Jorge and talk to the Allied generals on the subject. He would also ask, he said, if American crews on the lake and river steamers were being made to operate them against their will. Davis had clearly come to Walker, with the approval of the Allies, in the hope of convincing him to surrender. But Walker would not even contemplate the idea. After staying in Rivas overnight as Walker’s guest, Davis traveled to the Allied field headquarters at San Jorge next morning.

As soon as Walker heard that the U.S. Navy officer had left San Jorge, he personally led an attack on the town. It was important for him, Walker was to write, “while waiting the result of Lockridge’s effort to open the Transit, to let [my] troops see that they were not thrown entirely on the defensive.” ²³ Walker’s attack succeeded in driving the Allies from San Jorge, but General Canas managed to regroup his units and wheel them around behind Walker. Just in time, Walker realized he was about to be cut off from Rivas and fought his way back there. Rivas, the center of his shrinking dominion, was his only refuge. He prepared to hold it at all costs.