On June 10, 1776, the French government loaned Beaumarchais one million livres to create a shell corporation under the alias Roderigue Hortalez & Co.68 Its mission was to smuggle weapons and ammunition to the Americans. Spain secretly matched that amount, and by the end of June, Kosciuszko was on a ship sailing across the Atlantic with the Frenchman Charles Noel Romand, Sieur de Lisle, and Nicolas Dietrich, Baron von Ottendorf, a nobleman from Saxony. These were but the first foreign officers that Beaumarchais’ shell corporation sent to the new world. The same month the American diplomat and
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