But this tiny Co Sligo townland has left a permanent footprint on two continents. When he was 30 he emigrated to the Spanish city of Cadiz: home of the Spanish navy and an important hub for trade with the New World. In an era when the anti-Catholic Penal Laws were in force at home, Cadiz was a magnet for ambitious young Irishmen. He took a job with the Butler Trading House, an Irish merchant firm.
Then, in , he sailed to South America to sell goods on behalf of a group of Cadiz businessmen. He landed in Buenos Aires, in what is now Argentina, then made the 1,km trek west to Santiago, in modern-day Chile. The climax of that journey was an arduous passage over the Andes. One of his first solo initiatives was to conceive and construct a series of weatherproof refuges along this route across the mountain range, which provided a year-round communication channel between Argentina and Chile for the first time.
In he was hired as a draughtsman by John Garland, an Irish-born captain in the Spanish royal engineering corps, and they were charged with repairing fortifications in southern Chile. The two Irishmen manufactured , bricks on site in pursuit of that effort.
Within four years he had been promoted to field marshal. In southern Chile he was a frequent guest at the home of a landowner named Simon Riquelme. He funded the education of Bernardo Riquelme but never met his son. He also clamped down on drinking, dancing, satirical verse and fraternisation between unmarried men and women.
In he was made viceroy of Lima, the highest royal official in Spanish America. But his son Bernardo was shunted off to Europe, without much in the way of financial support, lest word of his existence prove damaging politically. There Bernardo became acquainted with Francisco de Miranda, an ageing lothario and revolutionary, whose conquests included Catherine the Great of Russia.
