About the Book:

During Admiral Thomas Cochrane's demolition of imperial Spain's naval presence in the Pacific during the revolutionary wars for Spanish South America, all the raids were carried out by his marines under a young officer called William Miller. He came from nowhere - one of three sons of a baker in a small village in Kent, with no family influence, money, or even secondary education - but, following his service as a teenaged soldier in Wellington's Peninsular War, went on to have a meteoric rise in the armies that liberated the nations of Chile and Peru.

Inspired by some South Americans' wish to leave Spain's colonial empire, Miller went not to join Simon Bolivar in the north (as did many demobilised European soldiers), but to the south, to Jose de San Martin in Argentina and Chile. 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.

Miller was passionately anti-imperialist, anti-slavery, and unusually kind to ordinary people and peasant farmers due to his own humble origins. He was highly regarded by all the leaders of independence and popular with his men and fellow officers, and when he died decades after the battles in which he made his name he was buried in the Pantheon of founding fathers of Peru.

About the Author:

John Hemming is the former Director of the Royal Geographical Society in London. He has travelled 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 more recently Naturalists in Paradise: Wallace, Bates and Spruce in the Amazon.