On this date in 1814, the Venezuelan doctor and writer Vicente Salias was shot in San Felipe castle at Puerto Cabello by the Spanish who meant to run the place.
Salias (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) was a founding member of the Sociedad Patriotica de Caracas and editor of the nationalist publication El Patriota de Venezuela.
He worked for the First Republic of Venezuela, a short-lived (1810-1812) attempt to break away from a Spanish empire preoccupied by the Napoleonic Wars. In 1810, Salias is said to have* composed the lyrics for Gloria al Bravo Pueblo (Glory to the Brave People),
Captured attempting to escape the approaching royalist forces of Jose Tomas Boves, Salias was shot with the spectacularly defiant last cry of “God Almighty, if the Heavens admit Spaniards, then I renounce the Heavens!”
* There are some revisionist hypotheses postulating other authors.
On this day..
- 1943: The officers of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar, during the Villefranche-de-Rouergue mutiny
- 1915: Augusto Alfredo Roggen, World War I spy
- 1682: Ivan Khovansky
- 1524: Caspar Tauber, Protestant protomartyr of Vienna
- 1858: Preston Turley, drunkard preacher
- 1811: Anna Maria Zwanziger, "once beautiful, exceedingly beautiful"
- 1971: Victor Apaza Quispe, Arequipa folk saint
- 1895: The Vegetarian perpetrators of the Kucheng Massacre
- 1912: Bertram Spencer
- 1773: David Reynolds, colonial counterfeiter
- 1961: Adnan Menderes
- 1938: Nikolai Kondratiev, purged economist