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Updated: May 7, 2025
Roch, those attempts, or rather resolutions to attempt, had died in the birth, or almost before it. Men blamed Torrijos, little knowing his impediments. From that Torrijos enterprise it did not seem that anything considerable would come. On the edge of winter, here at home, Sterling was married: "at Christchurch, Marylebone, 2d November, 1830," say the records.
"No, you won't." "I will!" "If you do you'll be hanged at the next Maidstone assizes, then; that's all," and Sterling's wherry shot rapidly ashore; and out of this perilous adventure. That same night he posted down to Deal; disclosed to the Torrijos party what catastrophe had come. No passage Spainward from the Thames; well if arrestment do not suddenly come from the Thames!
Such was the handsel of the new year 1832 for Sterling in his West-Indian solitudes. Sterling's friends never heard of these affairs; indeed we were all secretly warned not to mention the name of Torrijos in his hearing, which accordingly remained strictly a forbidden subject. His misery over this catastrophe was known, in his own family, to have been immense.
Sterling and his friends were yet new in this business; but Torrijos and the others were getting old in it? and doubtless weary and almost desperate of it. They had now been seven years in it, many of them; and were asking, When will the end be?
Mere talent carried beyond a certain point? If so, where does the one begin and the other end? Or is genius a precious, inconvertible, intellectual metal, of which some people have a grain and a half, and some only half a grain?... There is dreadful news from Spain, and I fear it is too true. Torrijos has made another attempt. Oh, how thankful we must be that John is returned to us!
I hardly know how to deplore the event for Torrijos himself: death has spared him the bitter disappointment of at last being convinced that the people he would have made free are willing slaves, and that the time when Spain is to lift herself up from the dust has not yet come.
The other adventurers, Torrijos among them in due readiness, moved silently one by one down to Deal; Sterling, superintending the naval hands, on board their ship in the Thames, was to see the last finish given to everything in that department; then, on the set evening, to drop down quietly to Deal, and there say Andad con Dios, and return. Behold!
Express is sent to Madrid; express instantly returns; "Military execution on the instant; give them shriving if they want it; that done, fusillade them all." So poor Torrijos and his followers, the whole Fifty-six of them, Robert Boyd included, meet swift death in Malaga.
Poor Torrijos, on arriving at Gibraltar with his wild band, and coming into contact with the rough fact, had found painfully how much his imagination had deceived him. The fact lay round him haggard and iron-bound; flatly refusing to be handled according to his scheme of it.
We may reckon this Torrijos tragedy the crisis of Sterling's history; the turning-point, which modified, in the most important and by no means wholly in the most favorable manner, all the subsequent stages of it.
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