Baja California After Walker: The Zerman Enterprise
D URING THE LATER months of the Revolution of Ayutla, Juan Alvarez and Ignacio Comonfort were led by their meager resources to listen to foreign offers of aid. One of the eager volunteers was Jean Napoleon Zerman, an old soldier of fortune then residing in San Francisco, Without authority to do so, but pressed by a short-term contract with Alvarez, San Francisco agents of the revolutionary government placed Zerman in charge of delivering a shipload of war supplies to Acapulco. As a condition for undertaking the task, Zerman forced the agents to grant him broad powers. He then stretched this authority to undertake a blockade of Mexican Pacific coastal ports loyal to Santa Anna. In trying to carry out this purely personal project he sailed into the harbor of La Paz, Baja California, where memories of William Walker 's abortive filibuster of two years earlier were still sharp. Military governor Jose Maria Blancarte considered Zerman an invader of the same type and forced him to surrender. The party was then mistreated, taken to the mainland, and marched to Guadalajara. Eventually, all were sent to Mexico City for trial on the charge of filibustering. The unsettled situation of the republic contributed to slow action in the courts. Only on November 25, 1857, more than two years after his arrest in La Paz, did the Mexican Supreme Court finally acquit Zerman of the charge. Even then the affair was unsettled, for the War of the Reform and the French intervention and Second Empire prevented judgment of damage claims filed by Zerman and his party. These were disposed of in 1876 and the ease was closed. For half a century after the settlement of damage claims there was no investigation of the expedition. When J. Fred Rippy, in 1926, looked into it he concurred with the Mexican courts, but he