Note I-34 — Chapter I · LAST DAYS OF SPANISH RULE. 1801-1818.

One of them, Manuel Antonio de la Cerda, refused to accept the pardon unless coupled with leave to prefer charges against Bustamante. But an influential friend of the general's prevented its being granted, and Cerda, to get out of the country, escaped on a vessel bound to Sweden; thence he went to Cuba, and lived there several years under an assumed name. Los Anales, Sept. 1, 1872, 30. The noted Nicaraguan statesman, Tomás Ayon, justly bewails the seeming ingratitude of some of his country's writers in saying that Nicaragua's independence had cost nothing. The history of that period, 1811-21, it is true, records no bloody fields, no brilliant feats of arms; but it presents an array of victims to the cause, of men who sacrificed their lives, liberty, and fortunes to secure their country's freedom; and these sacrifices, Ayon claims, should be remembered, and the sufferers' memory held in reverence. Apuntes, 18. Squier, in Travels, ii. 378, speaks of a suppressed revolution in Leon in 1815, giving that city the whole credit of the first impulse to liberal sentiment in Central America. There was no such movement in that year, and he probably had reference to that of 1811, though to Salvador certainly belongs the honor of the first attempt for independence. Pim's Gate of the Pac., 38, prints the same error.