The article reconstructs the biography of Gustavus Adolphus Bergudd (1771/1772–1806), a Swedish-born native of Gdansk, who lived a short but eventful life. He fought in the insurgent cavalry regiment under command of Tadeusz Kościuszko in 1794, left for America after the defeat of the uprising, met Kościuszko in Philadelphia in 1797, received US citizenship in 1804, tried to earn his living as a worker in Western Pennsylvania. However, his restless nature led him to join the volunteer detachment of the Venezuelan revolutionary Francisco de Miranda as early as in 1806: as “captain of the dragoons”, he participated in the first attempt to overthrow Spanish domination of the New World, but was captured and soon executed with nine other officers from Miranda’s detachment in the Venezuelan fortress of San Felipe near the city of Puerto Cabello. He was only one of those executed whose memory was honoured with a monument erected there in 2006. Reconstructing the milestones of Bergudd’s life corrects the generally accepted view of Polish participation in the wars of Spanish American independence, which goes back to the work of the prominent publicist and activist of a united Europe, Józef Retinger (1888–1960). The study of Bergudd’s fate faces an important methodological problem: no sources directly deriving from him have survived (even the interrogation record is a text created not by the interrogee, but by the interrogator), so his words have reached us in one way or another distorted. The author concludes that the image of Bergudd, which was created in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries mainly in Polish popular literature and crowned with his monument, was little related to the real person almost unknown previously. This image embodied an “ideal type” of the Polish fighter for the freedom of Venezuela.