-
Of all the provinces of Spain’s American empire, the richest and most influential was the viceroyalty of Peru. Pizarro had designated its capital, Lima, as ‘The City of Kings’; and it remained the focus of the entrenched power of peninsulares from the mother country. After the porteiios of Buenos Aires had set up their Provisional Junta in 1810 and embarked on the course which was to lead to complete independence, it was therefore natural that they should regard Peru as the main antagonist.
Worsted in a direct attack through Upper Peru, the Buenos Aires Junta turned its attention to the neighbouring and much poorer captain-generalship of Chile, where the creoles greatly out-numbered native-born Spaniards. As early as the summer of 1810 a porterio envoy, Alvarez de Jonte, was preaching revolution in Santiago; and in September the Spanish Captain-General was deposed and a Junta of seven leading citizens assumed power. Although in the first place the Junta ruled nominally on behalf of the exiled Ferdinand VII, it was hardly to be expected that the Authorities in Peru, of which Chile had always been a dependency, would allow this rebuff to go unchallenged.
An Irish soldier, General MacKenna, played a leading part during the first phase of hostilities. John MacKenna left his native Ireland at the age of eleven to study at the Royal Engineering Academy in Barcelona, and after seeing service with the Spanish army in Morocco and against the French in the war of 1794, embarked for Peru in 1796. The Viceroy in Lima at the time was his compatriot Ambrosio O’Higgins, who, from starting life as the son of a peasant farmer and page to the Dowager Countess of Bective, had become the most important officer of the Spanish Crown in South America — this as a result of his splendid record in building roads, promoting agriculture and in winning over the Indians by his conciliatory policies.
O’Higgins was warm in his welcome and made use of MacKenna’s talents as an engineer to construct roads and bridges and also to renew the fortifications of the great Spanish base of Valdivia in the south of Chile — ironically enough to be demolished a few years later by Admiral Cochrane and Major Miller, fighting for the patriots in the footsteps of MacKenna himself.
It seems that MacKenna changed sides as the result of his marriage to Josefa Vicuna Marrain, a girl of good Chilean family with Creole sympathies. At any rate, when the Spanish Captain-General was deposed, he was asked to prepare plans for the defence of the country, was appointed Governor of Valparaiso in January 1811 and became a member of the Junta with the rank of Commander-General of Artillery.
During a first and unsuccessful attempt of the royalists to regain power, in Spring 1811, the three forceful but unprincipled Carrera brothers seized the opportunity to topple the patriot government and to set up a new Junta in their own interests. MacKenna was removed from his command and subsequently banished to his farm in the country, from which he was recalled when, early in 1813. the Peruvian Viceroy, Abascal, despatched an army, which landed in southern Chile and seized the city of Concepcion. Command of the patriot army now passed to Bernardo O’Higgins, the English-educated son of the famous Viceroy, who, with José de San Martin, shared the credit for the final liberation of the country. During 1813-14 O’Higgins and MacKenna scored various successes against the Spaniards, notably at Membrillar, near Concepcion, where MacKenna, much outnumbered by the royalists, won a brilliant victory. However, O’Higgins, left in the lurch by the unreliable Carreras, was badly defeated by the Spaniards at Rancagua in 1814. and both they, O’Higgins and MacKenna made their escape across the Andes to the United Provinces of La Plata and their capital, Buenos Aires.
The feud between MacKenna and the Carreras flared up once again, and when Luis Carrera, the youngest of the brothers, arrived in Buenos Aires, it was to find that they were lodged in the same street. What next ensued is graphically described by Mulhall: ‘Carrera sent MacKenna a challenge for some alleged comments upon his brother. A duel came off at mid-night (Nov. 21st 1814) at Videla’s quinta, near Barracas, Admiral Brown being Carrera’s second, and Col. Vargas MacKenna’s. At the first interchange of shots, MacKenna’s bullet went through his adversary’s hat; at the second MacKenna fell dead, having received a ball in the throat. The corpse was conveyed to Sto. Domingo church next morning and buried there. Luis Carrera did not long survive the duel, meeting his death at the hands of a firing squad at Santiago in 1818 — the supposition being that General San Martin, who ordered the execution, was in no mind to risk a challenge to his authority or to brook their further intrigues.
