of books for the sword. Although a beardless youth of barely nineteen, he inaugurated the guerrilla war in his native province, at first at the head of a mere handful of followers. A born leader of men, and with great military talents, he achieved one success after another,[1] and within two years he had become celebrated throughout Spain as its foremost guerrilla chief, with the official rank of comandante general of Navarre. Captivity placed a sudden check on his career, and later the failure in 1814 of his uprising against Fernando drove him a refugee to England.[2] In company with other exiles, he soon evolved a plan for avenging outraged liberty, by lifting anew the standard of revolt in the colonies. Some Englishmen interested themselves in the scheme, partly from pecuniary motives, and provided a vessel, with arms and money, on which Mina embarked at Liverpool in May 1816, attended by over a dozen officers.[3]
- ↑ As Marshal Suchet testifies in his Mem., i. cap. iii.
- ↑ He was born Dec. 3, 1789, at Otan, near Monreal, the eldest son of a well-to-do land owner. After studying at Pampalona and Zaragoza, he became a volunteer, carried despatches across the French frontier, and then began the guerrilla war in Navarre, with the object of harassing convoys for French armies, and cutting off their communications. The biography in Robinson, Mem. Mex. Rev., i. 81-2, credits him with having inaugurated the guerrilla war in the peninsula. The regency rewarded his successes by making him a colonel, and finally comandante general also of Upper Arragon. In 1811 he was captured and sent to France, leaving his uncle, Espoz, who added to his own the now famous name of Mina, and was recognized as his successor, to add fresh glory to the family, which he did finally as one of the foremost generals of Spain. Mina, Breve Extracto de la Vida, 1-107, published at London in 1825, where this man was then an exile. Javier profited by his imprisonment at Vincennes to study military science, and on returning home, after an absence of three years, he was offered a prominent command in New Spain, but preferred to join his uncle in the vain revolt for the constitution. England recognized the services of the refugee by granting a pension. Portraits in Bustamante, Cuadro Hist., iv. 306; Alaman, Hist. Méj., iv. 547, 728; Frost's Pict. Hist. Mex., 160, etc.
- ↑ Six Spaniards, a few Italians, two Englishmen, and one American, to whom commissions were given, two of them above the rank of captain. The party included Doctor S. T. de Mier, a Mexican priest of distinguished descent, who had suffered persecution for his liberal ideas, and lived a poor exile in London. He joined as confessor. In his Declaracion, 800, he gives the names of some of the officers, and says that they embarked May 5th, on board the 'fragata Caledonia.' Hernandez y Dávalos, Col. Doc., vi. no. 952. He adds that the English government provided him and other Spanish patriots with assistance, as it had Mina, by pension. England certainly favored Spanish liberals to a certain extent. The biographers also point out that Gen. Scott of the U. S. met Mina in London. Alaman adopts a misprint in the Spanish translation of Robinson concerning the number of followers.
