Tycoon's War

They were sorely needed, for after the departure of Henry Titus, his Kansas ruffians had lost interest in Nicaragua. In the incessant rain, their depression spread to Lockridge’s other men, many of whom had come down sick. Over several days, a number of men, including sentries, slipped off the island at night, to float down the river on rough rafts to San Juan Bay and passage home. Lockridge’s command, reduced to 250 men by casualties and desertion, was brought up to close to 400 by the latest arrivals, and when the rain lifted, so, too, did spirits. Lockridge’s officers pressed for a new attack on El Castillo.

One of Walker’s staff officers had arrived with the New Orleans recruits. Major John Baldwin had come from Rivas via Panama, bringing a letter in which Walker confirmed Lockridge’s command on the San Juan and commanded that if Lockridge was unable to get by the enemy on the river, he and his men were to make their way to Rivas overland, through the jungle, to reinforce Walker. The arrival of the new men “gave us hope of forcing the passage of the river,” said Doubleday, and Lockridge agreed to another attempt to take El Castillo.³ This time, every man would take part. All were loaded onto the Scott and Rescue together with their rifles, ammunition, and two tons of gunpowder, and the boats set off west.⁴

Late on March 29, the Rescue eased into the riverbank a mile east of El Castillo, around a bend in the river and out of sight of the Costa Rican garrison. Twelve miles below El Castillo, the Scott had proven too heavy to manhandle over the Machuca Rapids. After getting the lighter boat over, Lockridge had continued west with the Rescue, loading her with men and equipment and leaving the Scott behind with a small guard.

Lockridge now landed his men, then took a party with him as he scaled a steep rise known as Nelson’s Hill—because, legend had it, Horatio Nelson had bombarded El Castillo from there. From the summit, the castle was visible on the next hill. But a deep ravine separated the two hills. Lockridge observed that to reach the castle overland, attackers would have to run down one hill, cross the ravine, and then run up the next hill—in range of the defenders’ guns every step of the way. As the sun set, Lockridge and his party slithered back down the slope to the men at the steamer. They all camped on the riverbank overnight.

When the new day dawned, Lockridge called an officers’ conference, then announced that the odds against them were too great. Titus and his men, in excusing their inglorious flight from El Castillo, had put the number of the Costa Rican reinforcements in the hundreds. Against such numbers, holding such a strong emplacement, Lockridge estimated that a hundred Americans would die in taking the castle, whether attacking by land or by water.

As the others voiced their opinions, Lockridge added that a note had come down on the Texas from Walker’s New Orleans agent, informing him that no more Morgan and Garrison steamers would sail for Nicaragua; no more reinforcements or supplies could be expected.⁵ This news staggered Lockridge’s men, and depression spread through the ranks. No one suggested a night attack or trying to bluff the Costas the way that the Costas had bluffed Titus. Instead, Lockridge’s officers unanimously voted to call off the operation.

Then, with Lockridge failing to reveal that he had orders from Walker to attempt to reach him overland if all else failed, Anderson, Doubleday, French, and Capers decided to go back down the river to Greytown to catch the next steamer bound for Panama, via which they would join Walker at Rivas, a ten-day journey. A hundred men, including most of the newly arrived Texans, joined them. The other three hundred, Lockridge included, voted to go home. In guilty silence, they all reboarded the Rescue.

Once the Rescue reached the Machuca Rapids, Anderson and those planning to go to Panama loaded up the Scott, which waited below the rapids, then steamed away, leaving Lockridge and the others who planned returning to the United States struggling to drag the Rescue down over the rocks.

Pausing only to take on wood from the riverbank en route, the Scott had hurried on ahead of the Rescue. When the steamer reached the mouth of the Sarapiqui River, Frank Anderson, wanting to be sure the Costas had not occupied Hipp’s Point behind their backs, landed a patrol on the riverbank to check out the abandoned fort while most of his men waited on board the Scott.

Charles Doubleday was in the steamer’s wheelhouse on the upper deck, leaning on the sill of the wheelhouse window as he watched the members of the patrol wend their way through the trees toward the point. Behind him, the steamer’s boiler hissed steam and stokers loaded wood into her firebox. “Suddenly I felt myself hurled into the air with terrific force,” Doubleday would recall.⁶

The steamer was rent by a massive explosion that ripped off her bow, blew the upper deck and wheelhouse to smithereens, and threw men high into the air. Moments later, Doubleday lay in wreckage amid scalding boiler water. Flames leaped up all around him. Men on the upper deck had been blown into the water; others onto land. Orderly Sergeant Sites was one of those who, like Doubleday, found himself in the wreckage on the lower deck, surrounded by blackened bodies. “The groans of the wounded were heart piercing,” Sites later told the New York Herald. Some of the injured, Sites said, ran around the boat “with the skin of their arms and hands hanging in strips, shrieking and groaning and begging to be put out of misery.”⁷ “The powder!” someone yelled.⁸

There were two tons of gunpowder on the lower deck, protected against the rain by canvas tarpaulins. Those tarpaulins were on fire. If the gunpowder went up, all the survivors from the first explosion would be blown up. “I could only gaze at it,” the badly scalded Doubleday recalled, “and wonder how soon the second and final act would come.”⁹ Frank Anderson and Bob Wheat, who were leading the shore patrol, ran to the boat. Scrambling up the Scott’s side, they dragged the burning canvas away and tossed it into the river, saving the day.

Sixty men were killed in the blast, and twenty-five injured—most of those severely. When the Rescue arrived on the scene a little later, the Scott survivors were taken on board. She carried them down to Greytown, from where they were repatriated to the United States, with all thoughts of joining Walker having evaporated.

Various theories as to why the Scott blew up abounded in the coming weeks and months. Walker put it down to “ill luck.”¹⁰ Some blamed poor repair work after the Scott was retrieved from El Castillo with her machinery damaged. Doubleday, who slowly recovered from his burns, felt that “the engineer had pumped cold water into the superheated cylinder, and the boiler had burst.”¹¹ Sites told the New York Herald, “Several eyewitnesses believed that it was caused by some miscreant, who threw a flask of powder into the furnace. It is not known who it was. We know it must have been powder, from the fact of the faces of the wounded being a great deal blackened with powder. We had at least two tons of powder on board the Scott, but not a bit of it was disturbed by the explosion.”¹²

It was indeed powder that caused the explosion, as George Cauty and Luis Pacheco immediately realized once the news of the event reached them. As Cauty told the Costa Rican ambassador to England, years later, when the Scott stopped to refuel, she must have taken on board pieces of the gunpowder-filled firewood that Pacheco had planted at the riverbank depots weeks before the disaster.

And so it was that Cauty, a wily mercenary in the employ of Cornelius Vanderbilt, finally sealed the fate of the San Juan River filibusters with an improvised explosive device and brought to a close the last attempt to reclaim the river and send hundreds of desperately needed men through to Walker at Rivas. Walker was now irretrievably cut off from the Atlantic and Gulf states.

The Allied generals and colonels clustered around a table in a forward headquarters tent at Cuatro Esquinas, or Four Corners, a crossroads a mile from Rivas. It was April 10, and General José Maria Mora, the latest Allied commander in chief, proposed one final all-out assault on Rivas.

Arriving at San Jorge on March 18 by lake steamer, General Mora had brought 560 much-needed reinforcements from the Third Costa Rican Division. Attempts on March 6 and 16 by General Canas to take Rivas by storm had been repulsed by Walker, at a cost of more than 1,000 Allied casualties. General Mora, impatient for final victory, had then personally taken charge of all Allied forces. Canas had, however, been able to claim some success—on March 6, General Sanders and 160 men sent by Walker to clear the Transit Road had been met by 150 Costa Ricans under Major Juan Estrada near the Jocote cattle ranch. Sanders’s force had retreated in disorder, allowing Estrada, soon promoted to colonel, to occupy San Juan del Sur. Despite the fact that Walker’s little warship Granada still sat in the cove, Estrada had succeeded in cutting Walker’s supply line from California. Now, both ends of the Transit were closed. Walker was completely cut off at Rivas.

Although the Battle of the Jocote, as Estrada’s encounter with Sanders came to be called, was trumpeted throughout Central America as a great Allied victory, General Mora knew that as long as Walker continued to occupy Rivas, the war was not won. Mora himself had subsequently launched an attack on Rivas just before daybreak on March 23. The assault, involving eighteen hundred Allied troops and launched at three locations, had been bloodily thrown back by Walker’s men, costing the Allies hundreds of casualties for no gain. Another Allied attack on Rivas on March 24 had the same result. Then, on the twenty-sixth, Mora occupied the Rivas suburbs of Puebla and Apaaco and closed off all roads into the city. An entire company of filibusters was soon captured while trying to sneak out to forage for food. The noose was squeezing even tighter around Walker and his dwindling army.

Yet, like Walker, the Allies had major supply problems. Worse than that, cholera was rife, the soldiers’ pay was months in arrears, and faced by Yankee filibusters who seemed unbeatable, morale was poor, with desertions constantly draining the ranks. A lengthy siege could not be sustained. Having received 250 fresh Nicaraguan conscripts from the north under General Tomás Martinez on April 3 and 500 Guatemalan reinforcements on April 7, General Mora detailed a new plan at the Four Corners meeting: An attack would take place the next day, April 11, the first anniversary of Walker’s reverse at Rivas, and consequently a symbolic date for Central Americans. Mora asked for 1,000 fresh men from all four Allied armies. And to lead them, he chose a Nicaraguan general—this was, after all, a war to liberate Nicaragua. The general was limping Maximo Jerez, who had recovered from his San Jorge wound. The assault would commence at dawn.

As Mora conducted his council of war, Walker was in conference with his senior officers at Rivas. Walker had noted that the enemy was unusually quiet. For weeks, the Allies had regularly shelled the city. Two twenty-four-pounder cannon sited on rises twelve hundred yards outside the city proved particularly annoying, and occasionally lethal, although their spent balls were collected by General Henningsen’s men and melted down into six-pound balls that were fired back at the enemy. Even the guns were silent, and Walker, aware of the significance of the April 11 anniversary to the Allies, sensed that an attack was imminent. He instructed his officers to concentrate their men around Rivas’s plaza and prepare to repel an early-morning assault.

As dawn approached, every able-bodied American waited at barricades, loopholes, and field pieces around the plaza. Ammunition was piled ready. There was no shortage of rifle rounds—tens of thousands had been received from supporters such as George Law in the United States. And hundreds of artillery shells had arrived in recent months from San Francisco. Church bells had been collected from surrounding villages and melted down to create cannonballs, and scrap metal had been gathered and turned into grape and canister shot in Henningsen’s artillery workshop.

To oppose four thousand Allied troops, casualties and desertion had left Walker with five hundred Americans, with only half of them fit to fight. On March 7, seventy Californian recruits had reached him via the Orizaba, wearing the cheap red flannel shirts then popular on the California gold fields; with neither uniforms nor black dye to give them, Walker had called them the Red Star Guard and sent them into battle in their red shirts. Within a month, less than half the Red Star Guard remained. On March 19, the Orizaba had delivered twenty more Californians. These would prove to be Walker’s last recruits. With the San Juan River lost and the Allies now controlling San Juan del Sur, Walker had to fight to the end with the men he had.

American deserters had told General Mora that a house on the southern side of Rivas’s plaza was occupied by two American ladies and undefended. Just before dawn on April 11, 250 Costa Ricans burst into the house from the rear. The screams of the terrified women alerted Lieutenant Sevier, whose twelve-pound howitzer stood in the middle of the plaza. Sevier hurriedly aimed the weapon at the house and depressed the short barrel. When the door opened and Costa Ricans poured out, Sevier fired. Twelve pounds of shrapnel blanketed the doorway. Costas fell like hay before the scythe. Stunned survivors stumbled back into the house.

Walker’s loyal Nicaraguan officer, Mateo Pineda, recently promoted to brigadier general, led the forty native Nicaraguans who remained in Walker’s army plus a company of Rangers to seal off the rear of the house, trapping the Costa Ricans inside. General Henningsen then fired six-pound balls into the front of the house, peppering the walls with holes. When Pineda called in Spanish for the Costas to surrender, more than two hundred crawled from the house and raised their hands. Of the ladies, we hear nothing.

Across town, General Zavala led five hundred newly arrived Guatemalan Indian farm boys through the northern suburbs toward the plaza. To give these recent draftees the courage to go against the filibusters, Zavala had filled them with guaro. Reaching barricades manned by the companies of Captains McEachin and McMichael, the liquored Guatemalan farmers were shot down “like so many cattle,” in Walker’s words. “The Guatemalan officers cared no more for their men than if they were sheep.”¹³ Few came any closer than sixty yards of the American positions before the assault was called off.

At the same time, 250 sober Nicaraguan recruits led by General Martinez advanced along the road from the west. As they broached the Santa Ursula Hill, they came under heavy fire from an American rifle company in the ruins of the Santa Ursula hacienda. Martinez’s men were driven back with heavy loss; the survivors refused to launch a fresh assault.

General Mora’s offensive ended not long after it began, with 700 of the 1000 Allied troops involved killed, wounded, or captured.¹⁴ Walker lost three killed and nine wounded. His troops took 220 prisoners and collected 250 discarded Minié rifles. Unable to feed many prisoners, Walker sent 150 wounded Allied soldiers back to their own lines. The remaining prisoners were made to bury their own dead. ¹⁵ April 11, 1857, was not a day to be remembered as the Allies had hoped. Such losses could not be sustained, and Mora suspended further large-scale military operations.

On April 14, one of Walker’s officers, John S. Hankins from Arkansas, slipped back into Rivas after a dangerous mission through enemy lines. He’d succeeded in meeting the Orizaba, which put into San Juan del Sur from Panama, and returned with mail.

In a letter from Samuel Lockridge, Walker learned that the attempt to recapture the San Juan had ended in failure. There was another letter, containing another shock for Walker. From Edmund Randolph, who was still in New York, this letter notified Walker that, due to Walker’s failure to retrieve the lake and river steamers and his inability to provide security for Transit passengers, the Garrison and Morgan Line had suspended all sailings to Nicaragua. In March, Parker Crittenden in San Francisco had written to warn Walker that Cornelius Garrison was acting strangely, hinting that the arrangement with Morgan and Garrison was under threat. Walker had dismissed that warning. With total confidence in his own ability to overcome the Allies, he had expected the pair to share that confidence, not to act like the businessmen they were. The news of Morgan and Garrison’s decision shook Walker to the core. “Their conduct was the result of weakness and timidity,” he said of them, describing their action as “treachery.” “[I] expected them to show more nerve and commercial sagacity.” In his opinion, in dumping him “they jeoparded their reputation of skilful merchants fully as much as it damaged their character for honesty and integrity.”¹⁶

General Charles Henningsen and Colonel John Waters dismounted amid a sea of tents at Cuatro Esquinas. Allied soldiers watched them with unconcealed hate as Lieutenant Thomas T. Houston of the U.S. Navy met them with a salute. Seven days earlier, on April 23, Houston had escorted all American women and children from Rivas to safety at San Juan del Sur, under an American flag and guarded by U.S. Marines from the St. Mary’s.

Houston led Henningsen and Waters into a nearby tent, where Commander Charles Davis was waiting. The pair had lost weight since Davis had last seen them, in Rivas. The filibusters had been surviving on a small ration of mule meat. “A little more of this,” Henningsen had said with a laconic smile when his ration had been put in front of him a few days before, “and we’ll have to start eating the prisoners.”¹⁷ Yet, the courtly Henningsen continued to carry himself with the dignity of a European royal.

“General,” said Davis to Henningsen, “I am in possession of information which, in my opinion, renders President Walker’s position at Rivas untenable.” He suggested that the only way to end pointless bloodletting was for Walker to evacuate Rivas. ¹⁸ In other words, Walker must agree to surrender and leave the country.

Davis had conducted strenuous behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Allied generals. Their commander in chief, General Mora, was prepared to let Walker’s men leave the country but had wanted to keep Walker in Nicaragua, to try him, and then execute him. Davis insisted that Walker must be allowed to leave and guaranteed to remove him to the United States. Only after Davis made Mora concede that the Allied army was in no fit state to continue the siege of Rivas beyond another twenty days, had Mora given in—Davis could remove Walker, if Walker could be convinced to surrender. ¹⁹

But Henningsen failed to agree with Davis that Walker’s situation was untenable, so Davis explained that Lockridge had ceased his efforts to reopen the San Juan River. This was news to Henningsen and Waters, and at first, they refused to believe it. Walker had known this for weeks, ever since receiving the letter from Lockridge. But he had kept the knowledge of Lockridge’s failure to himself, allowing his followers to continue to hope for the impossibility of salvation from the east. Meanwhile, Walker hoped that in the west, the Allies, exhausted by their failure to take Rivas and notoriously arguing among themselves and regularly changing commanders, would fold up their tents and go home, leaving Nicaragua to him.

Davis next announced that Morgan and Garrison intended to send no more steamers to Nicaragua. Again, Walker knew this but had not shared it with his officers. And finally, Davis revealed that he knew that Walker’s army only had enough rations for a few more days. Davis then proposed surrender terms that would see Walker and his men returned to the United States by the U.S. Navy and asked Henningsen to relay those terms to Walker at once. It had by that time dawned on Henningsen and Waters that their situation was far more desperate than Walker was prepared to admit; they had to talk sense into their commander in chief.

In the midevening darkness of May 1, William Walker slowly climbed the side of the St. Mary’s. Ahead of him, his sixteen most senior officers and aides had already boarded the U.S. warship. Wistfully he looked across the bay toward the Granada, his brave little ship of war. The Allies had tried to bribe Callender Fayssoux into giving her up; James Mullen, who’d come down from Nashville with Walker’s brother James and who later deserted, had offered Fayssoux five thousand dollars from Ramón Rivas to hand over the Granada, but Fayssoux had remained loyal to his general and held on to his ship.²⁰

Walker’s intent had been to escape aboard the Granada and use her for a return to Nicaragua once he had rebuilt his forces and his resources. But Commander Davis insisted that she also be handed over to the Allies, along with all Walker’s rifles, cannon, and ammunition. The St. Mary’s lay anchored with all the guns of her broadside aimed at the Granada, and Davis had made it clear he would sink the schooner if Walker did not instruct Fayssoux to hand her over. Walker would quibble but surrender the schooner he would.

As part of the May 1 surrender terms, Walker’s 407 remaining Americans—148 soldiers fit for duty, 86 armed citizens of his civil service, and 173 at the hospital (including the sick, wounded, and doctors and medical attendants)—would be ferried across Nicaragua with the American women and children aboard the lake and river steamers and put aboard the sloop-of-war USS Saratoga and the new steam frigate USS Wabash at Greytown, to be transported to New York and New Orleans. Walker and his officers would be taken by the St. Mary’s to Panama, from where they would be conveyed to New Orleans.²¹ At 5:00 P.M., Walker had addressed the last assembly of the Army of the Republic of Nicaragua in Rivas. “You have written a page of American history which it is impossible to forget or erase,” he had told the last hungry, exhausted remnants of his army.²² And then, after thanking his officers and other men for serving him, he had stepped aside to allow Henningsen to read the surrender terms aloud.

With a sigh now, Walker continued up the gangway from the captain’s gig. As he stepped onto the warship’s deck, a U.S. Navy officer looked up from the list of surrendering officers he had compiled and brusquely asked the name of the last man to board.

By November 23, not quite thirty weeks since Walker’s surrender, the USS Saratoga had been swinging at anchor off Greytown for months. Since taking one Walker party to New York, she had been stationed here in San Juan Bay with orders to prevent filibusters from returning to Nicaragua.

Through the summer of 1857, “General” William Walker had been received as a hero in the United States and mobbed and cheered wherever he appeared. He’d had a private meeting at the White House with the new U.S. president, James Buchanan—“Secretly he possessed a penchant for freebooters,” the Atlantic Monthly said of Buchanan.²³ Walker was spoken of warmly in the U.S. Senate by his idol, Sam Houston. Walker’s photographic portrait had been taken by Matthew Brady, the leading photographer of the day; the portrait showed a gaunt Walker still recovering from yellow fever and a starvation diet in Rivas. In speeches before large and enthusiastic gatherings in several cities, Walker had blamed Secretary of State Marcy, the British government, and Cornelius Vanderbilt for his removal from Nicaragua and made it clear he intended to reclaim his lost Nicaraguan presidency, and soon. Many, including Cornelius Vanderbilt, would have considered this an empty boast.

At 7:00 A.M. on November 23, the Saratoga’s captain, Commander Frederick K. Chatard, was called on deck—a steamer was entering the bay. Chatard, who’d only taken charge of the Saratoga months earlier, was expecting to be relieved by another ship by month’s end and was looking forward to home leave after boring months in the harsh Nicaraguan climate. He studied the approaching vessel with a spyglass. She was the ocean steamer Fashion, a smallish side-wheeler that had operated on the Atlantic Coast for years. Counting fifteen men on her deck, Chatard hailed her as she drew near, asking her business. All he could make out from the reply was the word “Transit.”²⁴ Chatard had orders to prevent the landing of filibusters, “those glorious regenerators who go with the torch of enlightenment to weak countries to commit all kinds of outrages,” as he’d described them in a July letter to a friend.²⁵ But Chatard knew that Cornelius Vanderbilt was anxious to reclaim Transit Company interests in Nicaragua, and assuming the Fashion had been sent by Vanderbilt, Chatard gave the passing ship a friendly wave.²⁶

The Fashion dropped anchor off Punta de Castilla. Her boats ferried men ashore. Casually observing from the Saratoga, Chatard frowned: There were a heck of a lot of these fellows, and they were carrying rifles. And then he saw the unmistakable figure of William Walker stepping ashore. Chatard was devastated; Walker had outsmarted him, for the commander’s orders prevented him from taking action against filibusters once they were on Nicaraguan soil. The very thing President Buchanan’s secretary of state, Lewis Cass, and Cornelius Vanderbilt feared, and that Chatard had been posted here to prevent, had just taken place—right under Chatard’s nose. Walker had returned to Nicaragua to reclaim his presidency.

On Punta de Castilla, Walker made camp and ran up his lone-star Nicaraguan flag. The Fashion had been chartered for him by U.S. supporters, including Vanderbilt rival “Live Oak” George Law. On November 14, she had sailed out of Mobile, Alabama, with 270 well-armed regenerators aboard. Officers included stalwarts such as Anderson, Hornsby, Natzmer, and Fayssoux, and men racked by guilt after letting Walker down on the San Juan River—Rudler, Wheat, and Doubleday among them.²⁷

Walker was unaware that the day after he sailed from Mobile, a newly elected Nicaraguan Constituent Assembly had itself elected a new president of Nicaragua—former Democratico general Tomás Martinez. Or that the Constituent Assembly had moved Nicaragua’s national capital to Managua, halfway between Democratico León and Legitimista Granada. Not that Walker would have cared. He still considered himself president of Nicaragua and was determined to regain control of his republic.

Over subsequent days, Walker drilled his men on Punta de Castilla between rain squalls but made no attempt to go inland. He had no need to. Two days before arriving in San Juan Bay, in pouring rain that helped shroud the operation, Walker had secretly landed Frank Anderson and forty-five men farther south, at the mouth of the Colorado River, which joined the San Juan River several miles inland. Anderson’s group had set off up the Colorado in three large rowboats. Their orders were to reach the San Juan, seize the first river steamer they encountered, then use that to reach El Castillo and surprise the Costa Rican garrison. It was a plan to equal Walker’s most wily past tactics.

Despite the almost incessant rain, Walker and his men on Punta de Castilla remained in excellent spirits. Twelve days after their landing, a bungo had come down the San Juan, paddled by two disarmed Costa Rican soldiers while one of Anderson’s men sat in the stern with a rifle trained on them. The regenerator brought news that Walker had been waiting for—El Castillo had been taken. As planned, Anderson’s party had seized a river steamer, then steamed up to the El Castillo wharf, flying the Costa Rican flag. They had dashed up the hill and taken the castle before the garrison knew what was happening—the former garrison commander, George Cauty, Vanderbilt’s man, had left the country in August.²⁸ What was more, Anderson had seized two more river steamers and a lake steamer at El Castillo. Walker now awaited the arrival of one of those river steamers to collect his main force. Once he headed upriver, he would dispatch the Fashion to New Orleans to collect reinforcements being assembled there by Charles Henningsen.

By December 8, the Saratoga had been joined by the USS Wabash and the elderly side-wheeler USS Fulton—after a despairing Commander Chatard had sent for Home Squadron commander Commodore Hiram Paulding, at Panama: “I beg you, Sir, in the most earnest manner, to come here and advise me,” Chatard had written .²⁹ Paulding, a teenage hero in the Battle of Lake Champlain during the War of 1812, had not come merely to advise Chatard. With two British warships now also anchored in the crowded bay, Paulding had come to take charge.

The ambitious Commodore Paulding wrote to his daughter that his action this day could either make him president of the United States or end his career.³⁰ It proved to be the latter. Even though the new Nicaraguan government would voice its approval of Paulding’s actions against the man they considered an “incorrigible adventurer,” President Buchanan would surprise many by subsequently removing Paulding from his command and forcing him into retirement for taking the offensive against Walker on December 8.³¹ “Commodore Paulding was clearly not a politician,” the Atlantic Monthly would remark when discussing the affair the following April. ³²

The commander of the British warships in port offered to combine with Paulding to expel Walker, but Paulding was neither prepared to share the limelight nor to let the British act against Americans. Without authority from the U.S. government to land armed forces on foreign soil, Paulding sent 350 marines and sailors ashore and surrounded Walker’s Punta de Castilla camp, something Walker had not anticipated, for it contravened U.S. policy. Captain Frederick Engle, commander of the Wabash, apologetically read out a letter from Paulding calling on Walker to surrender, or be fired on from land and sea.

Anderson and his men were ordered to give up El Castillo and come back down the river to become prisoners of the U.S. Navy, along with Walker and the rest of the invaders. Despite the stunning initial success of Walker’s return performance on Nicaraguan soil, the show was very soon over.