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Exile, as usual, gave him time to think. In his address To an Inhabitant of Jamaica Bolivar described his great vision of Pan-American unity. "A grandiose idea, to form a single nation of the New World!" he wrote. "With the same race, the same language, the same religion, and the same customs, a government should be able to unite the separate states. And yet it is impossible, for their situations, interests, and characters are too diverse. How splendid it would be if the Isthmus of Panama could be to us what the Isthmus of Corinth was to the Greeks! May heaven grant that we hold a great congress there one day to negotiate war and peace with the other three continents also. ..."
With the help of Haiti, he again invaded Venezuela, was driven out, again fled to Haiti, again invaded Venezuela. He had 700 men. One night while they were skulking in a swamp his officers heard him mumble: "We shall soon have liberated Venezuela. Then we shall pass on—people by people, state by state. Our arms shall liberate first New Granada, then Quito, then Peru. We shall climb up to Potosí and plant the flag of freedom on the sum mit of the silver mountain." "In God's name," said an officer, "the Liberator has gone mad." But eight years later he had done all that.
His return march across the Andes—this time to liberate New Granada— has been called "the most magnificent episode in the history of war." It was the rainy season. The men could not keep their powder dry. Their rifles rusted. All the cavalry horses died or were lost. The men were almost naked. After marching 75 days with no time to rest, the 3,000 exhausted men routed 5,000 Spaniards.
Wrote Bolivar to his troops: "When you set out on this incomparable campaign, there were not two hundred of you. Today, when there are thousands, all America will be the scene of your deeds. Yet that scene is still too small. North and south of this center of the world you will create a haven of liberty. ..." Says Author Ludwig: "Bolivar the poet began to dream in continents."
Manuela. As he rode into Quito, a woman tossed a laurel wreath on his head. Her name was Manuela Sáenz. "Born on the equator and married at seventeen, she . . . was ... a rider and fencer, a student, too, of Tacitus and Plutarch, and must have seemed to Bolivar the very embodiment of his dreams. . . . She was the first woman he knew to match him as a rider, to accompany him on his campaigns, astride her horse in wide trousers and a red dolman, to fear no danger and shoot like a rifleman." To live with Bolivar, Manuela left her husband, an English doctor, who seven years later was still begging her to come back.
"Why do you cause me so much pain?" she wrote the importunate man. "Now that the General has been my lover for seven years, and I know that I have his heart, I prefer to be the wife of nobody. . . . What you call honor leaves me cold. You think it does me little honor that he is not my husband. There is no room in my life for such prejudices. . . . Leave me alone, my dear Englishman. ... In heaven we shall marry again, never on earth. . . ."