Peru in the Guano Age / Being a Short Account of a Recent Visit to the Guano Deposits, with Some Reflections on the Money They Have Produced and the Uses to Which It Has Been Applied

by A. J. Duffield

II.

Don Manuel Omms de Santa Pau Olim de Sentmanat y de Lanuza, Grandee of Spain and Marquis de Castil-dos-Rius, was ambassador in Paris when happened the death of Charles II, and which involved the monarchy in a bloody war of succession. The Marquis not only presented to Louis XIV the will in which the Bewitched one carried the crown to the Duke of Anjou, but openly declared himself a partisan of the Bourbon, and also procured that his relatives commenced hostilities against the Archduke of Austria. In one of the battles, the firstborn of the Marquis de Castil-dos-Rius died.

It is well known that the American Colonies accepted the will of Charles II acknowledging Philip V as their legitimate sovereign. He, after the termination of the civil war, hastened to reward the services of Castil-dos-Rius, and he named him Viceroy of Peru.

Señor de Sentmanat y de Lanuza arrived in Lima in 1706, and it could not be said that he governed well when he began to raise his loans and impose taxes on private fortunes, religious houses, and capitular bodies: but by this means he was able to replenish the exhausted treasury of his king with a million and a half of crowns.

Among the most notable events of the time in which he governed may be reckoned the victory which the pirate Wagner gained over the squadron of the Count de Casa-Alegre, thereby doing the English out of five millions of silver travellers from Peru. This animated the other corsairs of that nation, Dampier and Rogers, who took possession of Guayaquil, and squeezed out of that municipality a pretty fat contribution. In trying to restrain these marauders, the Viceroy spent a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in fitting out various ships, which sailed from Callao under the command of Admiral Don Pablo Alzamora. Everybody was anxious for the fray, even to the students of the colleges, all burning to chastise the heretics. Fortunately, the fight was never begun, and when our fleet went in search of the pirates as far as the Galapagos islands, they had abandoned already the waters of the Pacific.

The earthquake which ruined many towns in the province of Paruro was also among the great events of the same period.

Among the religious occurrences worthy of mention were the translation of the nuns of Santa Rosa to their own convent, and the fierce meeting in the Augustine chapter-room between the two Fathers, Zavala the Biscayan, and Paz the Sevillian. The Royal Audiencia was compelled to imprison the whole chapter, thereby suppressing the greatest of disorders, and after a session of eighteen hours and a good deal of scrutiny Zavala triumphed by a majority of two votes.

The venerable Marquis de Castil-dos-Rius was an enthusiastic cultivator of the muses; but as these ladies are almost always shy with old men, a very poor inspiration animates the few verses of his excellency with which we happen to have any knowledge.

Every Monday the Viceroy had a reunion of the poets of Lima in the palace; and in the library of the chief cosmographer, Don Eduardo Carrasco, there existed until within a few years a bulky manuscript, The Flower of the Academies of Lima, in which were guarded the acts of the sessions and the verses of the bards. We have made the most searching investigations for the hiding place of this very curious book, fatally without any result, which we suppose to be in possession of some avaricious bookworm, who can make no use of it himself, nor will allow others to explore so rich a treasure.

The little Parnassus of the palace, which after the manner of Apollo was presided over by the Viceroy, was formed of Don Pedro de Peralta, then quite a youth; the Jesuit José Buendia, a Limeño of great talent, and prodigious science; Don Luis Oviedo y Herrera, also a Limeño, and son of the poet Count de la Granja (author of a pretty poem on Santa Rosa); and other geniuses whose names are not worth the trouble of recording.

It was during the festivities held in honour of the birth of the Infanta Don Luis Fernando, that the little Parnassus was in the height of its glory, and the Viceroy, the Marquis de Castil-dos-Rius, gave a representation at the palace of the tragedy of Perseus, written in unhappy hendecasyllables, to judge by a fragment which we once read. The principal of the clergy and aristocracy assisted at the representation.

Speaking of the performance, our compatriot Peralta, in one of the notes to his Lima fundada, says, that it was given with harmonious music, splendid dresses, and beautiful decorations; and that in it the Viceroy not only manifested the elegance of his poetic genius, but also the greatness of his soul and the jealousy of his love.

It appears to us that there is a good deal of the courtier in that criticism.

Castil-dos-Rius had hardly been two years in his government before they accused him to Philip V of having used his high office for improper purposes, and defrauded the royal treasury in connivance with the contrabandistas. The Royal Audiencia and the Tribunal of Commerce supported the accusation, and the Monarch resolved upon at once dismissing the Governor of Peru from his office; but the order was revoked, because a daughter of the Marquis, one of the Queen's maids of honour, threw herself at the feet of Philip V, and brought to his recollection the great services of her father during the war of succession.

But although the King appeased the Marquis in a way by revoking the first order, the pride of Señor de Olim de Sentmanat was deeply wounded; so much so that it carried him to his tomb, April 22nd, 1710, after having governed Peru three years and a half.

The funeral was celebrated with slight pomp, but with abundance of good and bad verses, the Little Parnassus fulfilled a duty towards their brother in Apollo.