Captain Gillespie and the 58 Anglophiles of Buenos Aires in 1806

After the British conquest of Buenos Aires General Beresford invited the citizens to take the oath of allegiance to King George. The names of those who did so, if we had them, would certainly shed some light on the antecedents of the May revolution. According to Captain Alexander Gillespie of the Royal Marines, whom Beresford had made commissary for prisoners, they numbered 58. Unfortunately the list has disappeared. In the Gleanings and Remarks Collected during Many Months Residence at Buenos Ayres and within the Upper Country, which Gillespie published at Leeds in 1818, with a second edition in the following year, we are told that he brought the document back to England and presented it to the government. Much effort has gone into the quest for it. The Argentine historian, Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Roberts, who combed the British archives very thoroughly for his work Las invasiones inglesas, published in 1938, found no trace of it and, though he accepted that it had existed, concluded that Gillespie's claim to have presented it to the Foreign Office in 1810 was an attempt to blow up his owvn services in order to support claims for recognition.' Twenty years later, in November 1958, Dr. Miguel Carcano of the Argentine Academy of History wrote to Professor R. A. Humphreys of University College, London, requesting that search be made in Oxford, but neither the Bodleian nor any of the Oxford colleges had the paper. However, Argentine documents showed conclusively that Gillespie had it in 1807, and Professor Humphreys was able to tell Dr. Carcano that a strange coincidence had brought him into possession of the receipt

Ancient history · Art · Art history · CONQUEST · Emperor · George (robot) · Order (exchange) · Residence · Sociology · Argentine historical studies · Classics · Demography · History

• Imperialismo Informal E Independencia

  Open Access•Deborah Besseghini•Illes i imperis•2021

  Add to list