Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to Spain's trade with its overseas colonies affected Great Britain, too,
because British ships carried so much of the merchandise from Cádiz
and other Spanish ports to South America. After a decade of commer-
cial frustration, the British invasion of Argentina in 1806 held promises
for an economic recovery for the merchants of Liverpool and London.
Nevertheless, the military expedition of Commodore Sir Home Riggs
Popham took the British government by surprise, since the invasion was
Popham's own idea and executed on his own recognizance. Without
prior authority, Popham sailed his force from South Africa across the
Atlantic to the estuary of the Río de la Plata. He easily captured Buenos
Aires in 1806, wrenching control from an unprepared and unsuspecting
Spanish viceroy. No sooner had British troops disembarked at Buenos
Aires than the viceroy, along with his highest-ranking Spanish com-
manders and the wealthiest Spanish merchants, fled unceremoniously
from the capital.
Popham thought an attack on the viceregal capital would encour-
age the colonists to rise up against the “unpopular” Spanish rulers and
wrote home to British businessmen that, “The conquest of this place
opens an extensive channel for the manufactures of Great Britain”
(Crump 1931, 183-184). Jubilant businessmen immediately fitted out
100 ships and dispatched them for Buenos Aires. But lower-ranking
Creole officers rallied the Buenos Aires colonial militia, 1,200 strong,
which expelled the British from Buenos Aires and captured the army
commander, General William Beresford. The British forces, meanwhile,
had succeeded in capturing Montevideo and Colonia, which they held
for nine months. Popham was recalled to stand court-martial.
Creole militia officers—commanding mestizo and mulatto soldiers
and led by a French-born officer, Santiago Liniers—had stood and
fought while the Spanish viceroy ran away. After they expelled the
British troops, the militia officers pressured the
audiencia
(royal coun-
cil) of Buenos Aires to depose the king's viceroy and elect Liniers to
replace him. Meanwhile, some of the Spanish merchants were trading
surreptitiously with British ships at Montevideo, rousing the resent-
ment of the Creole militias who were laying siege to the British troops
in the city.
In 1807, the British in Montevideo received reinforcements from
England and launched a second attack on Buenos Aires. Apparently, the
British political and military leaders still mistakenly believed that the
Creole colonists wanted to exchange their corrupt and weak Spanish
imperial masters for the more economically powerful British imperi-
alists. Once again, the colonial militias at Buenos Aires repulsed the
