Petion's Haiti was a staging ground for Spanish American independence, and Lewis reconstructs one episode of that traffic from Venezuelan letter collections and Spanish and Cuban colonial archives. Simon Bolivar reached Port-au-Prince at the end of 1815 and was armed and shipped out by President Alexandre Petion together with Robert Sutherland, an English merchant who had made himself the financier of the revolutionary cause. When Bolivar came back beaten, the Spanish guerrilla Francisco Xavier Mina arrived from Baltimore and proposed that he join an invasion of Mexico. Bolivar hesitated for several days before refusing, and the two expeditions sailed separately. Mina won early victories in New Spain, failed to combine with local patriot commanders, and was captured and executed in 1817. Lewis draws on Spanish spy reports to show how closely Havana watched the Haitian port, and argues that the historical record has been unfair to a man whose failure fed another's success.