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War reporter in Spain (1873 - 1876) Schuver's wanderings far afield left him with a marked taste for adventure. After attending his father's second marriage in 1873, Joannes travelled to Spain in the June of that year. A civil war broke out in Spain, known in the history books as the Second Carlist War. Between the summer of 1873 and the spring of 1876 Schuver travelled from one war front to the other. [11] Readers of the Amsterdams Handelsblad were able to enjoy Schuver's war reports, and accounts of his sometimes bloodcurdling adventures, transmitted in some seventy letters.
In September 1873 the Republicans in the neighbourhood of Esparraguera (Catalonia) condemned Schuver to death, probably for suspected espionage. Having already been taken to a cemetary in order to be executed, he succeeded in extricating himself from this perilous situation in the nick of time. For some time he had had enough of the war. In 1874 he travelled through Morocco, from Tangiers via Rabat to Dar-el-Baida. After this he visited Gran Canaria and Tenerife, then travelled by ship to Cadiz and Lisbon, thereafter crossing Portugal on foot from Lisbon to Coruna. At Santiago de Compostella he attended the feast of St. James, held on 25 July 1874. Schuver next went in search of material for war reports, in the fighting round San Sebastian. In November the monarchists took him prisoner during a night attack, but this adventure also finished happily. Schuver spent the winter of 1874-1875 in the Netherlands. [12] He could not know that this would be the last time he would see his father. In March 1875 he once more crossed the border on a trip that was to take him to southern France, northern Italy, Basle, Cologne, and London. From England he crossed the Channel and reached Bordeaux, en route for Spain, where he attached himself to the Army of the Ebro. In the months that followed Schuver could be found on the battlefields of Catalonia and Aragon. One of the few precise items of information we have is that he attended the Feast of Mary at Saragossa on 12 October 1875. His presence at religious feasts in Santiago and Saragossa cannot be taken as proof that Schuver was still a practising Catholic. We can, however, say with some certainty that it was in this Spanish period that Schuver changed his first name from Joannes to Juan, a change undoubtedly significant in the psychological sense. Schuver's attitude to life may have been influenced by a number of fellow reporters, men such as Edmond O'Donovan, John O'Shea, and M.S. de Montmorency. At the beginning of 1876 Schuver departed with the Government army for the decisive campaign against the Carlists. He was present at the attack on Elqueta, where he had a narrow escape from murderous enemy fire, and he witnessed the surrender of San Sebastian and Pamplona. With the end of the civil war in March 1876, Schuver had little reason for remaining in Spain, especially since a new theatre of war had developed. | |
