 In May of 1856, William Webster tried to set up a business in Granada as a migration agent, hoping that he would be able to carry favor with William Walker. Webster had a history as something of a con man, but it's unclear if anybody in Granada knew this. But William Walker did not take a liking to Webster, and without the benefit of government patronage, Webster's business venture failed. But in Granada, he met another man named Sylvanna Spencer, who had previously been employed by the transit company but found himself out of a job during the years in which the company was not controlled by Cornelius Vanderbilt. So Webster and Spencer teamed up in Granada, both of them in dire need of money, and both holding a grudge against William Walker, who they blamed for their circumstances. So by the end of May, while Walker was busy fending off allied attacks from the other Latin American countries, Spencer and Webster traveled to the United States to speak with Cornelius Vanderbilt. The pair met with Vanderbilt in his Manhattan office in October of 1856. Keep in mind that this is all taking place at the same time as the events I talked about in the last couple of episodes. Spencer did most of the talking. He had inherited some transit company stock from his father, and he spoke as a stockholder with a moneyed interest in the company. He hated William Walker, he told Vanderbilt, and he wanted to help get him out of Nicaragua. Spencer and Webster had a plan. Vanderbilt was depended on the transit route for the waves of new recruits that kept his small army replenished. If they could cut off his access to this route, he would be crippled, and his forces would be starved out of the country. Vanderbilt knew all this already, of course, and he told the men that he'd already tried to take the transit route through the Latin American allies he was funding. But Spencer had a new approach in mind. The allies had tried to take control of the transit road, which connected Lake Nicaragua to the Pacific Ocean between the towns of Lavier-Hinn and San Juan del Sur. The road could be taken if the attack on the connecting towns coincided with attacks from the southwestern part of the country, where the San Juan River connected the Atlantic Ocean to Lake Nicaragua and San Carlos. This was the connection between Walker and Eastern ports, which meant, among other connections, the port in New Orleans, where Walker received a large number of new recruits and supplies. The Costa Ricans had already tried to take control of San Carlos, which I detailed in one of the previous episodes, but it was a disaster. It was a clumsy attempt and their forces were driven off by a much smaller band of filibusters. But Spencer had spent five years running ships up and down this river, and he knew the geography well. He proposed to Vanderbilt that he lead the expedition for a surprise attack to seize all of the steamers on the river. Webster piped in to add that he had military experience, which was probably not true. He was a professional fraudster, but it's unlikely that even Spencer knew any of this when he teamed up with him. Vanderbilt was intrigued by their proposition, but being the business man that he was, he made a no-risk offer. They would carry out their proposed plan. If they failed, they would be out of luck. But if they succeeded, Vanderbilt said, he would write each of them a check for $50,000, nearly $1.5 million in modern terms. So only 10 days after Walker led his failed attack in the first battle of Messiah and nearly lost control of Granada, Vanderbilt, Spencer, and Webster shook hands on a plan to defeat him. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In the last five episodes, we have been covering the story of William Walker and his attempt to establish a new Republic of Nicaragua and pave the way for the Americanization of Latin America, bringing in planters and wid-them slaves, thus attracting the attention of many Southerners hoping to make more secure the institution of slavery and possibly extend the political power that was associated with it. In today's episode, we will conclude the William Walker story, and I apologize that this detour was longer than I originally anticipated, but I just found this to be a remarkably fascinating story and I wanted to do it justice. But in the next episode, we will return to the United States to wrap up the antebellum period leading to the Civil War. We last left off when William Walker reclaimed the all-important transit road after suffering a second defeat in the city of Messiah, which was just north of Granada, the city Walker had established as the capital of his Republic. He was receiving new recruits, but the five Latin American countries that had allied against him were making his life difficult, especially since they had modern weaponry — rifles — supplied secretly by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who Walker didn't even know was part of the story. So we are picking up, near the end of November 1856, the same month that Spencer and Webster arrived back in Nicaragua. I've mentioned the geography before, but I want to remind everybody of the geographical importance of some of the cities since I can't use visual aids in this podcast. The maps would be very helpful here, but unfortunately they're not an option. So I already reminded you that San Juan del Sur and La Virgen connected the transit road to Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific Ocean. North of La Virgen was the strategically important city of Rivas, where Walker had already waged two battles, each of which ended in defeat, and North of Rivas was Granada, Walker's capital. On November 20th, Walker took 650 men with him from Granada to attack Rivas. The city was an important connection between La Virgen and Granada, so he needed control of it to ensure that he didn't lose access to California. Rivas was defended by both Costa Rican and Nicaraguan troops under the command of Costa Rican General Jose Canas and Nicaraguan General Maxim Oyeras. Walker left Granada defended by 440 troops under the command of General Charles Henningson, who had recently proved himself to be Walker's most capable military leader. So keep in mind that Granada had enemy troops, the Latin American allies, in the city just north of it in Messiah, and troops south of it in Rivas. So Walker was fighting on multiple fronts just around his capital, not even considering the country as a whole, but he had so far been able to maintain control of his conquered territories through American volunteers armed with superior weaponry. Some of them now had sharps breach loading rifles, and he wasn't aware that so many Latin American soldiers also had rifles at this point, so he was probably overestimating the superiority of his firepower against the larger forces. But on November 24th, Granada was attacked at three different points, all while Walker and the bulk of his army were away. The idea formulated by General Raymond Bioso, the chief general of the Allied Force, was to attack Granada from the north and west so that Henningson would try to escape east, where a mile-long street connected the plaza to the eastern ports of Lake Nicaragua. There, Bioso would cut him off with his own band of Salvadoran soldiers. General Thomas Martinez led a company of Nicaraguans from the east. As they invaded the city, they came face to face with Major Schwartz's artillery. The Nicaraguan troops were no match for the large weaponry, and those who weren't hit, scattered. General Mariano Paredes led 500 Guatemalans from the north side of the city, where they ran into a band of filibusters at the San Francisco convent led by Major Cal O'Neill. Among his men was his younger brother, who was among the first killed in the attack. Witnessing the death of his brother caused Cal O'Neill to go berserk. He was hardly dressed for battle. He was in an undershirt and he had no shoes on, but after his brother fell, he hopped on a horse and led a charge of 32 men straight at the Guatemalans as they tried to regroup after their first assault. This was unexpected, so the Guatemalan soldiers were caught off guard and the small force of Americans cut them to pieces. So the Americans successfully fended off the Allied attacks from both the west and the north, but the eastern attack would be a different story. Bioso's troops overran the defending Americans under the command of Captain Hesse, killing him and 22 of his men. They took the Guadalupe Church and secured the street that connected the plaza to Lake Nicaragua. Henningson was trapped inside Granada and the Salvadorans were able to close in on the plaza, securing the Escapulis Church around the edge of the plaza, also cutting off Henningson from the 27 Granada police at the old fort on the city's coast. So General Henningson was trapped inside the city plaza with a force of more than 300 filibusters. They also had about 20 Guatemalan POWs, some civilian Jamaicans who'd been stranded in the city, and about 70 wounded Americans and another 70 women or children all surrounded by Allied troops and cut off from escape. Henningson was able to slowly fight back over two days. He attacked the Salvadoran troops and drove them out of the Escapulis Church and slowly made his way toward the lake, setting fire to buildings behind him as he moved. Basically the Salted Earth Strategy of Warfare. He was hoping to fight his way to the lake and escape, but unfortunately, since Walker wasn't in the city and James Jameson had abandoned Walker, we don't have the juicy details they provided in their personal accounts of other battles. But on the night of November 25th, Walker was in a steamer a mile off the coast of Lake Nicaragua. He had been able to successfully deliver orders to Henningson to destroy the city and escape. Up to this point, Granada was one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful city in all of Nicaragua and Walker had concluded that the Nicaraguans would remain determined to take it at any cost. So even though he was fond of the city as well, he decided that it would be better to destroy it than to try to keep it. If William Walker couldn't have Granada, nobody could. So as Walker squinted through the darkness to try to get an idea of what was going on in the city, he couldn't see anything more than that his Lone Star flag was still flying above the parochial church, which means that whatever was going on, the Allied troops still hadn't taken the city. What Walker couldn't see was that while Henningson was doing everything he could to fend off attacks from two sides, his men were losing heart. After two days of fighting a battle, they knew they couldn't win. They were drinking heavily and Henningson had to spend all his energy driving them forward. He had taken the 20 POWs and the stranded Jamaicans he had and used them as laborers. Slowly but surely Henningson had been able to get the women, children, and wounded as well as some of the supplies he'd been able to salvage from the plaza to the buildings that he took as he moved toward the lake. He did this by taking one building at a time, moving the people in supplies, and defending his rear with artillery, which was basically what kept him from defeat during these two days. So when Walker sent a man to order Henningson to destroy Granada, Henningson was able to receive the courier as he landed his small boat on the coast. Walker had also sent an officer to take the lake's side fort where a couple dozen Granada policemen were serving under the command of Captain Greer, though one of the policemen of Venezuelan had deserted and they knew that if he was captured he would inform the enemy of how bleak the situation was at the fort. It's almost certain that the Venezuelan spilled the beans shortly after deserting, because before Walker's officer could even finish informing Walker of Greer's situation, the fort was assaulted by two allied forces, attacking simultaneously from the front and rear. The fighting only lasted for a few minutes, but the allies killed Greer and 25 of his men, including the Venezuelan deserter, this meant that only one person in Greer's company survived, diving into the water, risking getting finished off by the fresh rodder sharks that inhabit Lake Nicaragua, but he made it to the steamer where he could give the news to Walker personally. Walker ordered the steamer to return to Laveer Hin, but he continued to travel back to Granada to sit off the coast helplessly, hoping to be able to rescue Henningson and his men. Three days later, after a full five days of fending off allied attacks, Henningson had retaken the Guadalupe Church, which put him halfway between the city plaza and the lake. To be clear, that's five days to make it a half mile away from the plaza. When he took the building, they levied volleys of artillery at the building before having 60 men charge into it to find out that it had already been emptied out. The day before the allies took control of the abandoned plaza, but as they celebrated, they were unaware that Henningson had left a supply of gunpowder under one of the towers of the parochial church, and when the victorious troops ran into the building to take down Walker's flag, Henningson set off the gunpowder, blowing up the tower and causing it to crumble on top of several allied troops killing them. Now with Henningson and his men and civilians secure in the Guadalupe Church, two enemy soldiers approached waving a flag of truce. One of the men was an American deserter from Henningson's forces who'd been brought in to urge his former commander to surrender as they were surrounded by 3,000 enemy soldiers. Henningson refused. Had the American deserter arrested and sent Zavala back with word that there would be no surrender. By the time this took place, Henningson's men were sober again since they'd had to abandon their liquor when they fled the plaza, so they were actually more orderly than they'd been a few days ago. Later the same day after Zavala delivered word of Henningson's refusal to surrender, the allies sent two waves of attack against the church, one at 3 p.m. and another at 8 p.m. Both waves were torn to pieces by Henningson's artillery. Shortly after the second wave was fought off, it started to rain and the Americans inside the church started to get sick. The group was stuck in the church for days, living off of horse meat and drinking rainwater. Disease was spreading, so even though the allies couldn't seem to get at Henningson's troops, cholera and typhus were doing the job for them, and people were dropping like flies inside the church. Some of them dying only hours after the symptoms first appeared. But while Henningson was barely holding out in Guadalupe church, Walker was receiving waves of new recruits from newly arrived steamers. Three steamers arrived between December 3rd and 5th, bringing more than 300 new volunteers to join William Walker at La Verhin. Keep in mind that he had no knowledge of Henningson's situation in Granada, but he continued to travel to the city to sit off the coast and watch for anything that might give him news, good or bad. On December 11th after Henningson had been holed up in the church for about two weeks, General Bayoso ordered a new large-scale attack on the church. Like Walker, he had also received several hundred new troops. The first wave of 200 fresh soldiers was sent in the morning under the command of General Florencio Zetruc. What the Allies didn't know is that the night before the attack, Henningson had been quietly moving his people closer to the lake, covering them in trenches. Only 31 men remained in the church to defend it, the commander of his force being Lieutenant Sumter Williamson. They each had sharps rifles, which had a range of about 200 yards. Even with Vanderbilt's aides, the Allied troops had far inferior weaponry. They had rifles at this point, but they were not the breach-loading rifles that Walker's men had been recently bringing with them. So as the 200 Honduran soldiers charged to the church, Williams's men opened fire as soon as the soldiers were in range, taking out several of them. Now it's worth talking about the psychology of these Honduran soldiers in the attack. Most of them, if not all, were conscripts. They didn't want to be there. The sharps rifle was a new technology of the much wealthier United States. So it's unlikely any of these Honduran kids even knew they existed. So when there's still 20 football fields away from the church, they start taking hits that in their minds shouldn't have even been possible. The technology the Americans were using probably seemed like sorcery from their perspective. Not only were they hit from a distance that they couldn't conceive of, the breach-loading rifle made reload so fast that for people who were used to ramming musketballs down a gun barrel, this would be almost like if we were handing AK-47s to Civil War soldiers because they had this incredible range and they were able to reload so quickly that it inflated the perception of the numbers of troops that the Hondurans were actually facing. So if the allies could close in on them, their superior numbers would make quick work of the 31 defending filibusters. But to get to them, they'd have to run the length of 20 football fields while facing gunfire that was able to come rapidly enough that 30 breach-loaders would seem like a force of many times its actual size. These 30 men with their sharps rifles took out about 100 Honduran conscripts before the commanding officer finally distorted the retreat. The same day as the attack, one of Walker's officers, General Sanders, arrived back from Granada after being sent to attempt a rescue of Hennison. Sanders told Walker that a rescue would be impossible, but Walker didn't believe him. He figured that Sanders was jealous of how quickly Hennison had been promoted above him and that he had no real desire to rescue him. So the next day, December 12th, Walker arrived off the coast of Granada himself with 160 hand-picked filibusters to stage a rescue. That night after sunset, Walker had all the lights on the ship put out and he quietly steered the steamer three miles up the coast, docking it at the very same spot he landed for his first invasion of the city in 1855. His men debarked while Walker stayed on the steamer to sail it back off the coast of Granada so that when the sun came up on the 13th, any enemy scouts would think that it had never moved. Back off the coast of the city, he could see a man swimming toward him. The man was Kanaka John, one of the few remaining men who'd been with Walker since the very beginning and he was also one of the soldiers defending Granada with Hennison. He'd been sent to tell Walker that Hennison and the rest were on their last legs and that if he was able to attempt a rescue, he should send a specified signal by lighting some of the lights on the steamer. Walker did this but the signal was poorly thought out as the lights were blocked out by the smoke from the fires that Hennison had been setting all over Granada. So Hennison was under the impression that Walker was not going to stage the rescue. But the 160 men that Walker had unloaded three miles north of the city were on their way to it anyway led by Major John Waters. The men came upon an enemy barricade, waged a battle that was mostly hand-to-hand combat and a handful of filibusters were killed but they were victorious. They continued onward and entered Granada at around dawn on the 14th. So now keep in mind that Hennison had been trapped in the city for about three weeks at this point. Waters and his men took another enemy barricade suffering another 43 casualties, 13 of whom were killed. But again, they won the skirmish and took a prisoner who was able to give them the location of Hennison who was camped out in a trench not far from the Guadalupe Church. Waters sent a man to inform Hennison that rescues were on their way and not to fire on them. The messenger successfully gave the word to Hennison, returned to Waters, and led the rescue party to the trench where Hennison and the remaining Americans were camped out. What none of them knew at this point was that General Bioso was under the impression that Walker had sent his entire force rather than just the 160 men and he had ordered a full retreat of the troops back to Messiah which was taking place at roughly the same time as the filibuster escaped. But everybody was under the impression that they still had thousands of enemy soldiers occupying the plaza. And three weeks after the invasion began, I'm sure they were all just happy to finally be able to make an escape. So at this point, Hennison had already lost 110 men to enemy soldiers and 120 more to disease, not to mention 40 deserters and two men who'd been captured. Among those remaining in his group were 200 who couldn't fight and some of them were women and children and other soldiers who were sick or injured. But as Walter's men joined Hennison's small group of survivors, Captain Sam Leslie, a Cherokee known as Cherokee Sam, who was part of Waters' rescue party, fell dead from a bullet to the head. Somewhere, enemies were sniping at them even as they were retreating themselves. So those who were able tried to stay covered as best they could as they carried the sick and wounded toward the coast. Hennison even made his men drag their six pieces of artillery with them, which the men were not happy about, but it was probably a wise decision as the artillery was the only reason any of them were even still alive. During the retreat, they could hear explosions and see smoke as the allies were igniting gunpowder destroy buildings as they retreated. Like Hennison, they wanted to make sure their enemies couldn't reclaim the buildings they were abandoning. By two o'clock in the afternoon, they were loaded up into the steamer with Walker. Before he got on board, Charles Hennison picked up an enemy lance that he found lying abandoned on the ground and stabbed it into the earth. He then fixed a piece of leather on the other end of it and used a piece of charcoal to write the words, Akifue Granada. Here was Granada. Walker's capital was no more. Granada had been destroyed. Walker was now headquartered in Rivas. While Walker and Hennison were occupied with Granada, Savannah Spencer was leading 200 Costa Ricans through the jungles toward the head of the San Carlos River. Once they reached it, they built rafts and took the San Carlos River to where it joined the San Juan River, which connected to the southern coast of Lake Nicaragua. On December 22nd, roughly a week after Walker rescued Hennison, Spencer was watching 40 American filibusters going about their business inside the small fort they were garrisoning, unaware that the enemy was close by. As they sat down to eat lunch, leaving their rifles nearby, Spencer ordered the attack, taking them completely by surprise. Spencer had left 80 men behind to build a fort where the San Juan joined the San Carlos, but even with only 120 men, he outnumbered the Americans 3-1. The battle was a quick and easy victory. Most of the Americans were killed, and the rest were taken prisoner. Spencer then led his men to the next closest fort, defeating another 45 filibusters. By December 23rd, Spencer reached Punta de Castilla just south of San Carlos, the city on the southern coast of Nicaragua that served as a transfer point for travelers passing through Nicaragua. As they moved in, they passed four river steamers sitting idly, including the one that Spencer himself ran for five years while he was a transit company employee. They also found Joseph Scott, the steamer captain who kept being pulled into Walker's war every time one side or the other wanted to use his ship. Spencer told him that he was confiscating the four river steamers. Walker's connection to the eastern ports of the United States was now completely cut off. Spencer was ecstatic when he took back his old vessel, the Machuca, and he sailed it to San Carlos where he expected to join forces with General Mora and his army. They'd taken rafts into San Carlos themselves and the rafts were set out on the San Juan River with allied soldiers, stationed on them to fire on filibusters. So as Spencer excitedly sailed his steamer up the river to San Carlos, he knocked a bunch of these soldiers off their rafts, drowning several of them. He pulled the rest on board the Machuca and then finished the trip to San Carlos. Over the coming days, lake steamers continued to bring passengers to San Carlos, unaware that the allies controlled the city and the transfer points on the river. Several lake steamers fell into Spencer's hands this way before Walker found out that he'd lost this connection. He knew that he was due to receive several hundred new recruits from New Orleans and he didn't have the force to retake San Carlos from the allies, so the only thing he could hope for was that some of the new recruits would take a steamer and make it to Walker. Walker's situation was as bleak as it had ever been, but on the San Juan River he had one small bit of luck remaining. A decommissioned river steamer named the Ores had been sitting unused at the Punta de Castilla transit depot. This is where Joseph Scott was being held, along with many other Americans, including several of Walker's officers who'd been captured by Spencer as they sailed into San Carlos on their way back to the United States. Joseph Scott informed Walker's captured men that the Ores could be repaired so that it could carry them in the new recruits back to Walker. With this antiquated paddle-wheel river steamer, Walker had one remaining connection to New Orleans that was not on Spencer's radar. The men renamed the ship the Rescue. As the men who knew how worked to repair the old steamer, new recruits arrived, a total of 240, most from New Orleans. Among these new troops were two returning officers that you may have forgotten about at this point. One was Frank Anderson, who was injured in the first battle of Rivas and sent back to California to help recruit as he recovered. The other was Charles Doubleday, who was Walker's right-hand man for a time before returning home just before Walker took Granada. Doubleday couldn't catch a break. He left Nicaragua right before Walker claimed his glory, and he would rejoin Walker just in time to participate in the defeat. He also left some valuable memoirs of his time in Nicaragua, which is part of the source of the information in this series. Another new recruit, as somebody you might remember from the episodes I did on the Cuba filibuster attempts, Chatham Roberto Wheat. He joined Walker on the promise of being made a brigadier general. So with the new recruits and factoring in the recruits that had deserted, 220 men piled onto the rescue and they started moving down the river to make an attempt to recapture it. At this point, there were several fortifications garrisoned by Allied troops along the river. The first fortification they encountered was at Cody's Point. When they started being fired at, they realized that the Latin American soldiers were armed with rifles that shot mini-balls provided by Vanderbilt. The filibusters quickly moved out of range and disembarked a ways north. There, they started cutting down trees to build a log stockade and prepared to attack Cody's Point. When they attacked, they greatly outnumbered the small garrison at Cody's Point and took it with only a few small injuries. They also gained possession of two brass cannons in their victory. The men moved back to the rescue and sailed a little ways further downriver and landed not far from another fortification at Hips Point, which was more well defended. This fortification was much older than Cody's Point and Spencer had left 200 Allied troops there, though they'd been reduced to only about 100 at this point due to disease, so the filibusters still had the advantage from numbers. With the newly acquired cannons, the filibusters fired their artillery at the fortification. This accomplished little other than keeping the Costa Rican troops from returning fire. The artillery attack came from the north, with wheat serving as artillery commander, but the bulk of the American forces were on the other side of the river, where they fired their rifles from the east. The Costa Ricans returned fire, and the shootout raged for more than an hour, with several Americans taking hits. After enemy fire died down, Doubleday led the Americans to charge the fort, and when they did, they found it completely undefended. Dead coast is littered the ground, but the survivors had already fled. The Americans tossed the enemy carcasses into the San Juan River, knowing that the water-blooded bodies would be carried with the current as a signal of the American victory to whoever found them. The Americans took the rescue further down the river, where they met another transport carrying an additional 180 new recruits, all equipped with rifles, ammo, and artillery. Their leader was Henry Titus, who was infamous as a border ruffian, who had been participating in bleeding Kansas, fighting John Brown and other northern guerrillas. The men with him had all been seasoned by the border war of Kansas and Missouri, and they refused to serve under the command of anybody other than Titus. So you might remember from one of the episodes I did on Kansas, Henry Titus was taken prisoner by New Englanders after they captured Titus Fort, which was named after him. That had taken place back in August of 1856, and it was now early February of 1857 to give you the timeline context. So again, we get a reminder of the connection between Nicaragua and the dispute over the extension of slavery in the United States. Titus was pretty arrogant after leaving Kansas, especially considering he'd surrendered his fort pretty quickly. Before leaving New Orleans, he bragged about how he and his men would secure Nicaragua in only a few days. Now, as the officers talked about attacking the fort at El Castillo, just outside of San Carlos, Titus said that he and his men would take it themselves. Double Day wrote in his memoirs that Titus was, quote, bone full of pride by the cheap reputation he had acquired in burning defenseless houses on the Missouri Kansas frontier, end quote. But the other officers relented and let Titus take his men on the rescue to attack El Castillo. As they sailed the old steamer up the river to El Castillo, the officer in charge of the garrison there, Colonel George Cotty, an Englishman, was able to watch an approach on February 16th, flying William Walker's lone star flag proudly. Up to this point, Cotty was completely unaware that the filibusters had repaired a steamer and taken some of the allied fortifications. When he saw the steamer flying Walker's flag, he ordered his drummer to signal the alarm of an impending attack. Cotty only had a handful of men at his disposal. He stationed 14 men in trenches that were dug at the base of the fort, and he led his remaining 16 Costa Rican soldiers from the ramparts above. He sent orders to the men in the trenches to destroy the two steamers that were docked in the river so that the Americans could recapture them. Titus had 140 of his men on the rescue, and they took to the shore firing as they charged the fort. As they charged, the men destroying the two steamers abandoned their work, though they'd successfully destroyed the ship machinery, and one of them was now in flames. One of the Americans cut loose the steamer that was not on fire, setting it adrift, letting the current carry it toward the other Americans downriver. The men defending the trenches fled up the hill to the fort, though one soldier and the commanding officer were killed first. Nearby, the city of El Castillo, not far from the fort, was in flames. In addition to ordering his men to destroy the steamers, he'd sent some Costa Rican soldiers into the town with torches to set fire to every building they could, causing the panicking citizens there to flee, not knowing why the town was even being destroyed. So Henry Titus surveyed the scene, watching the remaining steamer burn and slowly sink into the river, flames rising up from the nearby city, and the fort above him garrisoned by a small band of remaining soldiers, though Titus had no idea how many soldiers were actually in the fort. By the way, I'm calling it a fort, which is what it was used as at this point, but it was actually an old castle that the Spanish had built in the 17th century, called the Castle of Immaculate Conception, but sometimes it's referred to as a castle, and other times it's referred to as a fort. In any case, this is why the nearby town was called El Castillo. Titus sent a message up to the castle demanding that Cotty surrender. In response, Cotty came down to speak to the Americans themselves. Titus and Cotty drank some brandy together, and Titus offered to accept to the garrisons unconditional surrender, making a veiled threat if Cotty refused. According to the report Cotty gave later, Titus claimed to have had, quote, a large battery of cannon of great caliber mounted for the attack, and that his force consisted of 1000 men, end quote. Titus essentially was a wannabe military leader. His only experience had been leading border ruffians in Kansas, and he hadn't even actually been successful at that. Cotty, by contrast, had a very significant military experience in the British military, so it's fair to say that Cotty was able to size Titus up pretty accurately. Cotty countered Titus' bluff with one of his own. He said that he wanted to surrender, but he had to get permission from his superior at San Carlos. General Moro was a superior there. He asked Titus if he could have 24 hours to seek permission from Moro, and Titus, demonstrating that he was only an arrogant amateur, actually agreed to let Cotty send a man to San Carlos. Titus and his men made camp on the other side of the river to wait for Cotty's surrender, but of course Cotty had really sent his man with a note asking for reinforcements. Moro responded by sending 60 of the men he had at Fort San Carlos, and at 10 in the morning they ambushed Titus and his 140 filibusters, having snuck up on them from the rear. Caught by surprise, Titus' men threw down their weapons and took off, lucky enough to have a steamboat coming up river just in time to help them escape, but only after about 70 of them had been killed or wounded. On the same day that Titus originally joined up with Double Day and the others, Walker was waging his own attack. He'd gotten word that enemy soldiers had taken San Jorge, which was three miles from Rivas. Walker was worried they would take the all-important transit road, so he wanted to attack them before they could have the chance. So on February 4th, they attacked from the east at four in the morning. Catching the enemy while they were sleeping, the allied troops were jolted out of sleep, only to run into the middle of the attack in the town plaza. But even with the element of surprise on his side, Walker was too heavily outnumbered, and once the allied soldiers were able to start fighting back, Walker couldn't win. So he ordered the retreat, but it unfortunately wasn't soon enough as Cal O'Neill, the guy who went berserk in Granada after his brother had been killed, took one of the last bullets of the attack and died in Rivas two days later. O'Neill was one of Walker's originals, who'd been with him during both battles of Rivas, so this was a loss that hit closer to home than most for Walker. Shortly after this loss, he learned that 19 mounted rangers, and one of his officers had deserted, with morale at an all-time low. Walker was afraid that he would soon be losing more men to desertion than anything else, and this made it all that much more important for him to take back the San Juan River, so he could replenish his forces, though he was unaware that he already had men, such as Henry Titus, attempting to do just that on the other side of Lake Nicaragua. But after Titus had been driven off from El Castillo, Colonel Cody had another brilliant idea. He sent some volunteers on a mission to take a canoe down the river. Along the banks, they would periodically find piles of firewood that had been cut down to the size necessary to fuel the fireboxes of river steamers. His men didn't destroy the firewood, though. Instead, they had with them their own pieces of firewood taken from the supply at the fort. They then hollowed out the wood and packed the cavity they created with gunpowder, and then hammered wood plugs into the holes. They then placed these pieces of gunpowder-filled firewood in with the piles of firewood along the river. Back at the rescue, Titus and his men had abandoned Nicaragua after their embarrassing defeat, but the other Americans received yet another supply of 140 more volunteers. This brought the filibuster count on the San Juan River to about 400 fighting men. By this time, it was nearing the end of March, so the filibusters had been biding their time for more than a month after they rescued Titus. The one positive outcome of Titus' attack was that the steamer they'd cut free had drifted into the hands of the filibusters. But by this time, Samuel Lockridge, one of the officers, informed the men that he'd received word that no more recruits were expected from New Orleans. Some of the men voted to take the steamers down to Panama to try to take a longer route to Rivas to join Walker. Roughly a fourth of the troops voted to do this, including Doubleday. The other 300, staying with Lockridge, decided to take the rescue to go back to the United States. So Doubleday and the 100 men who volunteered to stay took off down the San Juan River. On the way, they stopped to replenish their firewood from the piles on the banks, included, in some of their supplies now, were some of the gunpowder-filled logs that had been planted among them. On April 2nd, at around 9 in the morning, Charles Doubleday was steering the ship on the upper deck when an explosion below sent him flying. He wasn't killed, but he found himself lying in the wreckage of the destroyed ship, his skin being scalded by the boiling water around him. He could see other men in the scalding rotter around him as well, and some men had been blown so far that they landed on the shore. Many of the bodies around him were black from gunpowder burns. One survivor gave his account of the New York Herald later, saying that he could see men running around what remained of the boat, quote, with the skin of their arms and hands hanging in strips, shrieking and groaning and begging to be put out of their misery, end quote. Then someone yelled out, the powder on the lower deck, which had not been destroyed, were two tons of gunpowder covered by tarpaulins to protect it from the rain. The tarpaulins were on fire, quickly burning its way through the fabric to the supply of gunpowder underneath. As Doubleday watched, waiting for the second explosion to finish him off, he saw Frank Anderson and Bob Wheat climb up the side of the part of the ship that wasn't destroyed and then drag the burning cover away from the gunpowder, tossing it into the river. They stopped the gunpowder from going off in an explosion that certainly would have finished off the rest of the survivors. When the total count was done, 60 men had been killed in the blast, and another 25 were severely injured from the flames and boiling water. The rescue came up behind them a little while after the explosion, picked up the few survivors, and everybody lucky enough to survive this incident made it back to the United States, never again to return to Nicaragua. The news of this explosion made it back to Walker and Rivas, and they could only speculate as to the cause of it. It's only because of our access to records from Colonel Cody that historians have been able to understand the cause of the explosion, but for the filibusters, it would forever remain a mystery. With this, Walker had once again lost complete access to the eastern United States. His men were deserting in large numbers, and he could expect no reinforcements. Some of the deserters were picked up by Allied troops and gave General Mora details about Rivas. On the southern side of the town was a house occupied by two American women. It was undefended. On April 11th, 250 Costa Ricans broke into this house. The women screamed, alerting one of Walker's officers who controlled the Hoitzer in the city plaza. The filibusters quickly surrounded the house, aiming their weapons as the coast is piled out. Walker had several men secure the rear exit of the house, blocking any retreat. The coast is surrendered, and the records give us no information as to what happened to the two women inside. Two other companies, one of 500 and the other 250 Allied troops, stormed into the plaza only to be mowed down by the filibusters. 700 were killed, and nearly all of the rest were taken prisoner. This would be Walker's final victory. It was three days after this attack on Rivas that Walker received word of the explosion on the San Juan River. With this information, he knew the war was lost. The filibusters were now effectively trapped in Rivas, surviving on subsistence rations of mule meat. Charles Henningson said, quote, a little more of this, and we'll have to start eating the prisoners, end quote. It's hard to tell how serious he was being when he said it, but he likely suspected that this would be what they would have to resort to if nothing soon changed. Luckily for everybody in Rivas, the US Navy sent a ship, the St. Mary, to Rivas on April 23rd, and the women and children were escorted by US Marines safely along the transit road to San Juan del Sur, where they were able to board a ship to California. A week later, a naval officer named Charles Davis met with Walker in Henningson, with the permission from General Zavala to peacefully secure Walker's surrender. Davis had negotiated with General Mora for permission to take the filibusters safely back to the United States, but Walker was to be left behind to be tried and executed. Davis pushed back, pointing out that the Allied Army was in poor shape itself and couldn't continue the siege on Rivas much longer, and Mora reluctantly agreed that if Walker surrendered, he could be taken back to the US alive. On May 1st, 1857, the defeated William Walker, having given his surrender, boarded the St. Mary to travel back to the United States. Now I'm not going to cover any of the rest of this story, but the spark note's conclusion is that after his defeat, Walker led two more invasions of Nicaragua, one in 1858 and the other in 1860. After the 1860 expedition, Walker was captured and executed by firing squad in Honduras. Between these last two expeditions, he wrote his memoirs, which you can still purchase on Amazon pretty cheaply. The memoirs titled The War in Nicaragua were largely written for propaganda purposes, and Walker presented himself in them as a great champion of slavery. He wanted to appeal to Southern interests by making himself seem extremely pro-slavery, though his personal history has made some historians question his sincerity on this. But the fact that he did this is important in the context of this series because it helps us to underscore the importance of the slavery controversy in understanding the 1850s. But William Walker had successfully made himself the most famous filibuster in United States history, far outshining Narciso López. Inspired by both exploits, many Southerners like John Quitman continued to push for US acquisition of Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, and other areas of Latin and Upper South America that they referred to as the Golden Circle. Quitman even lobbied for the repeal of the US neutrality law that made filibustering technically illegal. From these ambitions, the semi-secret group, known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, was formed largely in outgrowth of the earlier Order of the Lone Star. Their hope was to annex territories all over Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean, ultimately creating a new country that was safe for slavery and ran from the slave states of the United States through the Caribbean Islands and down to Venezuela. This idea, of course, would never come to see any real attempts to make their dream a reality as they really started to organize in 1858. The records claim that the group was first founded in 1854. So instead of leading filibusters, the group ended up serving as lobbyists for secession, and many of them waged guerrilla warfare against Union soldiers during the Civil War. I apologize that this detour on filibustering ran so long. I was never planning to even include this history, but I've ended up spending two months on it. So I hope you found it as interesting as I do. We will return back to the United States in the next episode, where we will learn about John Brown and his hope to take his war into Africa, as he liked to say, starting with his plan to attack Harper's Ferry, Virginia.