Daniel Florence O’Leary, Soldier, Diplomat, and Historian

Abstract

A Young Irishman from Cork was among those who answered a call sent out by Luis López Méndez, Venezuela’s agent in London, for foreign volunteers to join the patriot forces in their efforts to win independence from Spain. Though such enlistments were expressly forbidden by the British government, it would seem that little effort was made to stop them, for we know that several thousand Englishmen and Irishmen volunteered for service over a period of a few years. So it was that on December 3, 1817, Daniel Florence O’Leary left Portsmouth on board the corvette Prince, bound for the New World. What was it that led O’Leary to leave family and home at the rather tender age of seventeen? Was it the desire for adventure and excitement in an unknown land where a war was being waged or was it because the economic crisis in the British Isles after the Napoleonic wars gave an enterprising young man little hope of forging a successful career for himself? It is difficult to assess his motives at that time, but there seems to be no doubt that he felt strongly attracted by this struggle for freedom going on across the seas, all the more so because he came from a land where the Act of Union decreed by the British government in 1800 had ended the limited autonomy granted the people two decades earlier and had re-established many of the intolerable restrictions previously in force. It seems very likely, too, that the young adventurer had been influenced in his decision by the great champion of Irish rights, Daniel O'Connell, a family friend, who followed with keen interest the struggle for freedom and became a fervent admirer of Bolivar, even to the point of offering the latter the services of his son.