Description: An expansive biography of William (or Guillermo, as he is known in South America) Miller, a soldier well-recognized and loved not just in modern Peru but across the swath of nations liberated from Spanish rule during the nineteenth century.
During Admiral Thomas Cochrane's demolition of imperial Spain's naval presence in the Pacific amid the revolutionary wars for Spanish South America, all the raids were carried out by his marines under a young officer called William Miller. One of three sons of a baker in a small village in Kent, with no family influence, money, or even secondary education, he came from nowhere, but he went on to have a meteoric rise in the armies that liberated the nations of Chile and Peru. By the time of Ayacucho in 1824, the large battle that ended Spanish rule in South America, there were seven generals in the royalist Spanish army and five on the patriot side. Eleven of these generals were Hispanic; Miller was the only foreigner. Set in the context of the great European powers' weakening grip over their global empires and the ensuing wars of independence in Spanish South America, John Hemming's gripping narrative spans Miller's time as a teenage soldier in Wellington's Peninsular War, his contribution to the liberation of the new nations Chile and Peru, and his years in diplomacy thereafter. Drawing on written accounts by many of Miller's contemporaries in addition to a wealth of modern research, Hemming casts the anti-imperialist, anti-slavery soldier as highly regarded by all the leaders of independence and popular with ordinary people and peasant farmers due to his own humble origins--a legacy evidenced by his burial in the Pantheon of founding fathers of Peru decades after the battles in which he made his name.Brief description: John Hemming is the former director of the Royal Geographical Society in London. He has traveled in and written extensively about the Amazon region. His previous books include Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon, The Conquest of the Incas, and Naturalists in Paradise: Wallace, Bates and Spruce in the Amazon.
Review Quotes: "Capturing the grit, grandeur, and glory of the Spanish colonial wars of independence, historian John Hemming gives us--for the first time--a complete and magnificent portrait of one of the revolutions' greatest heroes, General William (Guillermo) Miller. Not only did Miller rise from humble English beginnings to become a beloved defender of South American liberty, he served as the indispensable right hand to four of history's most colorful paladins: José de San Martín, Bernardo O'Higgins, Lord Thomas Cochrane, and Simón Bolívar. Told with propulsive brio as well as painstaking precision, "English Liberator" is essential reading for anyone interested in pivotal alliances that shaped world history."-- "Marie Arana, author of Simón Bolívar: American Liberator"