I continue with the English robbery of our Essequibo.
The boundary runner and piling planter is a German, preacher's son, unsuccessful farmer and trader in Virginia and the Virgin Islands, later turned botanist and geographer. His name is Robert Hermann Schomburgk and he was the one in charge of delimiting the borders, not always very clear, of British Guiana. He had previously written a report on the Virgin Islands which impressed the Royal Geographical Society of London with its quality; and this, on Humboldt's recommendation, sent him in 1835 to the recent British colony of Guiana to study botany and geography.
Delivered to the service of England and anxious to obtain British citizenship, Schomburgk returned to London in 1839 with a geographical study on Guiana and a giant water lily that he discovered by chance in 1837 in a Guianan jungle swamp and that he dedicated to Queen Victoria, baptizing it as Royal victory. Satisfied, the Royal Geographical Society sent him back to Guayana in 1840 to define the limits of the English colony with Venezuela; and taking advantage of the inaccuracies and the scarce population of the Venezuelan Essequibo territory, he begins to disregard the rights of Venezuela over that territory. And in the limits that it assigns to the hypertrophied English Guiana, it includes not only all the Venezuelan Essequibo territory and a good slice of Venezuelan Guiana itself, but also takes the northern limit of the expanded English colony to Punta Barima and the mouths of the Orinoco, fixing piles and markers with the English crown and the figure of the queen in the waters of the river. This time what Schomburgk offers Victoria is not a giant water lily but a gigantic alien territory. He has moved the Guiana limits freely at the expense of the almost depopulated Venezuelan Essequibo territory and thus unleashing the border problem of Venezuela with the English colonial Empire. Predictably, Schomburgk is awarded honors upon his return to London in 1842; the Royal Geographical Society congratulates him on his work; he publishes his book Description of British Guiana; British citizenship is granted; Victoria grants her a peerage in 1845, and she soon enters the British diplomatic service.
The defender of Venezuela was Alejo Fortique.
Although there were early indications, in the times of Gran Colombia, that England was already occupying Venezuelan Essequibo territory, and the then ambassador in London, José Rafael Revenga, by order of Bolívar made a claim to England in 1822, the thing did not happen. And it was Alejo Fortique who was in charge of waging the first great battle carried out by the Venezuelan government as soon as the result of Schomburgk's activity became known in Venezuela. Fortique, a renowned Venezuelan lawyer, politician and diplomat, has been Venezuela's plenipotentiary minister to Great Britain since 1839, in charge of resolving various problems related to debt and treaties with England, and even the recognition of Venezuelan independence by the Spanish government. Overworked, because he has no permanent secretary to help him, Fortique takes on the problem and through sustained effort and admirable tenacity gets Lord Aberdeen, the British Foreign Secretary, to formally accept his claim and assure him (which was lie) that the Schomburgk piles at Punta Barima did not constitute a definitive boundary and could be discussed when a subsequent boundary treaty between the two countries was discussed. O'Leary said the same thing in Caracas, that he was no longer aide-de-camp to Bolívar but an ambassador from Great Britain. But at least Fortique gets Aberdeen to agree to remove the pilings and markers from the mouth of the Orinoco by ordering the Guiana governor to do so.
But exhausted by his immense and solitary work, Fortique falls ill and dies in 1845. There is no further discussion; and after an agreement signed in Caracas between the British diplomatic representative and the foreign minister of Venezuela, England considers the problem frozen in 1850. It is the first freeze of the dispute; and since then there have been no more protests from Venezuela nor has any of the two parties attempted to present projects for the delimitation of territories in Guayana.
And it is that in Venezuela a deep political and social crisis has been incubating. The conservative governments of Páez and Soublette in the 1866s were followed in the XNUMXs by the liberal governments of the Monagas in which the crisis precipitated and led to the outbreak of the bloody federal war. During those years, Venezuela did not deal with British Guiana or the Essequibo and it was only after the Federal War that it began to take up the subject again. In XNUMX, the Falcón government sent Guzmán Blanco to Europe to contract a loan and resume talks with Great Britain on the Guyanese issue. Guzmán negotiates the disputed loan, but finds no opportunity to take up the matter with the English. And he only takes it up again on several occasions during the following two decades, those of the seventies and eighties, in which he governs the country in an authoritarian manner, either acting as president or having himself appointed minister plenipotentiary in Europe in the intervals between his successive presidencies.
But since the question of the limits had remained open since 1850, the English have continued to occupy and populate the usurped territory in the Essequibo while Venezuela, dominated by its internal drama, did nothing and did not even try to occupy its own Essequibo territory. Since 1777, when the Captaincy General of Venezuela was constituted, Spain had indicated that the territory on that side of the Essequibo was Venezuelan, but that it did not intend to populate it. In other words, the territory was practically free, Venezuela never occupied it, because apparently there were no Venezuelans interested in populating it or a government that tried to interest them in it. Meanwhile, the English continued to explore it, and above all to occupy it, with settlers brought from their Asian and African colonies.
Thus, the territory of British Guiana continues to quietly increase daily at the expense of Venezuela. The western boundary drawn by Schomburgk, which came to be known as Schomburgk Line, had been expanded after he left Guiana. Thus, if it initially encompassed fifty thousand miles of Venezuelan territory, it was expanded by these advances to eighty thousand miles, which meant that the Schomburgk boundary cut openly into new areas of Venezuelan Guiana. Because those thirty thousand new miles began to cover the outskirts of Upata and part of the gold mines of El Callao, which since the second half of those same forties were in full exploitation of Guiana's gold wealth; and reaffirmed further north the illegal British ownership of the mouths of the Orinoco. Near Punta Barima, the installation of a checkpoint with a British flag is denounced while English ships begin to be seen openly in the main channel of the great river, and also in the neighboring Caroní. The British set up companies in Venezuelan Guayana and begin to deal friendly with the Guiana Indians trying to gain their support to base their domination over Venezuelan territory on it. As can be seen, it was a colonial project in form. And it is that all the ambitious British colonizing plan to seize Trinidad, Guayana, the Caroní and the Orinoco, comes from the time of the Spanish colony, and had Walter Raleigh as its promoter and main protagonist.
We will continue in a future article.
Knee on the ground! "The sun of Venezuela rises in the Ezequivo!"