The
native troops ran away, and the Americans surrounded by six
hundred of the Legitimists' soldiers, after defending themselves for
three hours behind some adobe huts, charged the enemy and
escaped into the jungle. Their loss was heavy, and among the
killed were the two men upon whom Walker chiefly depended:
Kewen and Crocker. The Legitimists placed the bodies of the dead
and wounded who were still living on a pile of logs and burned
them. After a painful night march, Walker, the next day, reached
San Juan on the coast, and, finding a Costa Rican schooner in port,
seized it for his use. At this moment, although Walker's men were
defeated, bleeding, and in open flight, two "gringos " picked up on
the beach of San Juan, "the Texan Harry McLeod and the Irishman
Peter Burns," asked to be permitted to join him.
"It was encouraging," Walker writes, "for the soldiers to find that
some besides themselves did not regard their fortunes as altogether
desperate, and small as was this addition to their number it gave
increased moral as well as material strength to the command."
Sometimes in reading history it would appear as though for
success the first requisite must be an utter lack of humor, and
inability to look upon what one is attempting except with absolute
seriousness. With forty men Walker was planning to conquer and
rule Nicaragua, a country with a population of two hundred and
fifty thousand souls and as large as the combined area of
Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and
Connecticut.
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