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.