Bootleg Imperialist

THE FILIBUSTER--Laurence Greene-- Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

On Oct. 16, 1853, from San Francisco, a small, freckled, poker-faced, soft-spoken Tennessean named William Walker, 29 years old, sailed with 45 assorted killers, down-and-outers and adventurers to capture Lower California as the first step in privately annexing Mexico and Central

America to the U. S. In the next seven years before he faced a 'Honduran firing squad, William Walker hoisted his own flag over "the independent Republic of Lower Californi," got himself elected President of Nicaragua, was involved in a fight with ten countries, became No. i U. S. soldier of fortune, alternately a hero, a joke and a villain. Told this week in The Filibuster, his story fills 350 large pages with an adventure story as absorbing, fast-moving and as incredible as any so far dug out of that period of sleazy brigandage below the Rio Grande.

Effeminate, bookish, a graduate of the University of Nashville at 14, William Walker was successively surgeon, lawyer, journalist before he was 29. In that year, having absorbed as much as he could hold of the expansionist propaganda then parading as the "manifest destiny'' of the U. S., he decided to colonize the Mexican state of Sonora. Short of men and food, still shorter on experience, the expedition lasted through seven months of skirmishes, mutinies, desertions, marauding and general futility. Relieved to get out alive, Walker limped across the U. S. border with 34 survivors, surrendered to U. S. authorities. On trial in San Francisco for violation of the neutrality laws, Walker lied that he had intended no harm, won a prompt acquittal from a jury reflecting the public's readiness to wink at his kind.

Back on a newspaper, his boss, an enthusiast named Byron Cole, sold him on the idea of taking over Nicaragua. A fat prize, it turned out to be too fat--Walker had to meet competition from the feasting eyes of England, Spain, the U. S., the more glittering eye of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who controlled the lucrative transit route across Nicaragua. The deal by which Walker evaded U. S. neutrality laws provided that the Nicaraguan "Democrats" .invite him to send in "colonists." By the time the "Democrat" leaders realized what Walker was up to, it was too late to regret having asked him in. On the military side, Walker was unbeatable. Augmented by a steady flow of recruits from the U. S. (who received free transportation on Vanderbilt boats), he soon appointed himself commander in chief of the Nicaraguan army. Had his judgment been half as good as his luck he might have ruled a long time.

His first serious mistake was to acquire the services of a notorious swindler named Parker H. French, whom he sent to San Francisco to recruit more men, to dicker with Vanderbilt's agents for a loan. When Walker should have executed French, he executed instead an innocent hostage. Native support almost completely vanished when he followed this up by shooting a popular enemy leader. But a worse mistake, even worse than sending French to Washington as Nicaraguan minister, was to revoke the Vanderbilt concession in favor of that hard-fisted financier's double-crossing colleagues, to whom Vanderbilt wrote: "I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you." After Vanderbilt had made good his promise. Walker still pig-headedly refused to talk business, thereby cutting off his one important source of outside help. His last and biggest mistake was to elect himself President of Nicaragua. He now faced the armies of all his Central American neighbor countries, brought U. S. and British battleships hurrying to blockade his ports against new recruits. A match for his Central American enemies, even when his man power had dropped to a few hundred, he did not try to fight off the U. S. naval commander who demanded his surrender. The U. S. public gave him a big ovation, then dropped him when he turned viciously on the U. S. Navy as the source of his defeat.

Still undaunted, Walker tried to go back to Nicaragua, was arrested as he landed. His last try was an expedition to the Bay Islands, off Honduras. Meeting bad luck from the start, cornered finally by a landing party from a British battleship, Walker threw away his chance to get back to the U. S. when he proclaimed himself the leading citizen of Nicaragua. Protesting to the "civilized world" on the injustice done him by the British, "the gray-eyed man of destiny" spent the six days before he faced a firing squad in meditation and prayer.

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