The 5 Saddest Attempts to Take Over a Country | Cracked.com

The 5 Saddest Attempts to Take Over a Country | Cracked.com

One of the saddest attempts of all actually succeeded. Adventurer William Walker once conquered Nicaragua with 60 men, and for a brief time was recognized as the president of that country.

Walker was an interesting man. He was unquestionably a genius. He graduated summa cum laude from college at 14; graduated from medical school at 19; finished law school shortly afterwards. But the powerful engine in his cranium came with a few loose screws. His big dream in life was to conquer various areas of Latin America, declaring them in turn to be slave states of the USA. He never had time to get Nicaragua on the path to statehood, but he did manage to re-institute slavery for a short time, and unilaterally declared English to be an official language before a coalition of Central American armies (aided by the U.S. Navy) drove him out!

That was not the first time Walker had engaged in such a quixotic invasion. Before his expedition to Nicaragua, he conquered Baja, California with an army of only 45 men, and declared himself 1st President of the Republic of Lower California. The country of Mexico was not entirely pleased with this, and eventually took Baja back. (Because Baja was sparsely populated and had no intrinsic value, Walker had counted on Mexican indifference to his scheme.)

Walker somehow managed to escape both death and imprisonment for those shenanigans, but was not so lucky on a subsequent crazy adventure in which he planned to liberate the island of Roatan from the control of Honduras and declare it a free country. He failed to take into account that the powerful British navy also had in interest in the area, and that the Brits considered Walker not an ally, but in the best case a nuisance, and in the worst case an enemy. The Brits captured Walker and turned him over to the Hondurans, who promptly executed his crazy ass.