Eduardo Lemaitre, industrialist and able historical scholar, and his colleagues Donaldo Bossa Herazo and Francisco Sebá Patron have for some years been engaged in writing a monumental Historia general de Cartagena. The book here under consideration, as he explains in his introduction, is only a summary, devoid of footnotes and with only a brief bibliography. It is aimed at a popular audience.
Lemaitre, not surprisingly, heavily emphasizes the colorful colonial period. He deals not only with famous attacks by foreign corsairs and fleets, and the building of the great walls and fortresses that have recently attracted increasing numbers of tourists, but covers well the city’s importance as Spain’s greatest gold entrepôt, slave mart, and Inquisition center. The roles of governors, military leaders, and eighteenth-century viceroys are well depicted. The long section on independence shows skillfully the extremely complex nature of the wars that were as often internecine as with Spain.
In his coverage of the nineteenth century, Lemaitre draws heavily from his La bolsa o la vida (Bogotá, 1974), a discussion of the Barrot (French), Russell and McIntosh (English), and Cerruti (Italian) crises, which involved foreign fleets that threatened to blockade and bombard Cartagena if grievances to the nationals named were not redressed.
The book threatens to close on a pessimistic note, for the nineteenth century saw the upstart Barranquilla rise to prosperity while Cartagena slipped to an almost moribund state. The concluding chapter, however, gives an overview of the twentieth century, and emphasizes the remarkable burst of population, trade, industry, tourism, and general prosperity of the last three decades.
The definitive scholarly history of Cartagena, which would necessitate years of work in the Seville and Bogotá archives, has yet to be written. In the meantime, this Breve historia, unpretentious though it is, is the best general history of the “Heroic City” yet to appear in any language.
