Anita Arnon

He says to me, my love, to her, he says.

My love, let us go to Venezuela.

Let me show you my cacao plant.

Anyway, so they begin their life together on the Bolivar estate and the future looks bright.

Join us after the break where it all starts to go very, very wrong.

Well, she does.

She contracts a fever and within days, William, she's dead as well.

I mean, just imagine this for Paul Bolivar, who's had more than his fair share of loss and death.

And he's devastated by this death.

And by all accounts, he goes into a deep, deep depression.

And he makes this young man's vow never to remarry for the rest of his life.

He will never find a love like this.

I mean, he does find love, but he doesn't marry again, so that promise he certainly does keep.

And people think, or many historians certainly, of Bolivar, to pronounce it properly, and do forgive us for pronunciation if we mangle it, but a lot of historians think this is a key turning point in his life because having been marked by so much tragedy very early on, and then losing the love of his life,

kind of gives up on the idea that this kind of life of domesticity is something that he can ever have, that he's ever, ever going to have.

So he starts looking around for something else.

I've heard some professors of Latin American history

There's one at Liverpool University who has this amazing, interesting, we like a counterfactual on this program, what would have happened if he'd remained married and lived happily ever after?

If his wife hadn't died, if she hadn't got that fever?

He would have just carried on.