'Every engine that was erecting is stopped, and the whole county thinks of no other engine,' wrote its engineer; and that Trevithick had 'the courage of his convictions' may be judged from his saying: 'I have offered to deposit £1,000 to £500 as a bet against Woolf's best engine, and give him 20,000,000 (lbs. "duty"), but that party refuses to accept the challenge.' Indeed, Mr. Francis Trevithick claims that 'This engine performed the same work as the Watt engine, with less than half of the daily coal.'
It would, in fact, be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Richard Trevithick's contributions to this branch of applied mechanics; and had he been as prudent in his management of his business affairs, and as sharp in looking after his pecuniary interests as he was brimful of talent in his scientific inventions, it would never have been necessary for the late Mr. Michael Williams, M.P.,[154] to write of him that 'he was at the same time the greatest and the worst-used man in the county.'
Such was Trevithick's position when he had reached the age of forty-five. Sanguine, impetuous, and brilliant—no sooner finishing one invention than commencing another (nay, sometimes before he had thoroughly completed the first)—a benefactor of incalculable extent to the prosperity of his native county, but so unsuspecting and so indifferent to his own, that he turned at length to the New World for the appreciation and reward that he had failed to secure in the Old.
The circumstances which led to this determination are somewhat curious. A desire having been felt amongst several wealthy Spaniards in Peru to rework certain of the old gold and silver mines which required draining, Don Francisco de Uville, of Lima, a Swiss gentleman, was sent to England to search for the best steam pumping-engines for their purpose. The names of Messrs. Boulton and Watt were so famous, that, almost as a matter of course, he first consulted them; but they discouraged the project, mainly on the grounds that the rare atmosphere of the Cordilleras would interfere with the efficiency of the steam-engine. Thus rebuffed, and much dejected, he chanced to see in the window of a shop, near the spot where the 'Catch-me-who-can' had been exhibited, a small model of one of Richard Trevithick's engines, which he at once secured for £20, and hastened back with it to Peru. Arriving there, he at once put its powers to the test, and was delighted to find that Boulton and Watt's doleful prophecies were not fulfilled. Accordingly he forthwith returned to England with the model, which bore Trevithick's name engraved on it, in search of the engineer who had constructed the wonderful machine, and had the good luck to find on board the same ship as that in which he made the voyage a cousin of Trevithick's—a Mr. Teague—who at once put the Don on the right track. Satisfactory interviews ensued, large orders for engines were put in hand—pumping-engines, winding-engines, sugar-rolling engines, and crushing-engines, to the tune of some £16,000. The anticipated profits were £50,000 a year, and Trevithick was to be paid, not in money, unluckily for him, but in shares, which were to secure to him an income of £10,000 per annum.
At length the engines duly arrived at Lima, and were landed under a salute from the guns of the batteries. But things did not work well. The men sent out were unaccustomed to the use of wood-fires, and they failed to carry out all Trevithick's instructions, whereupon he himself resolved upon going to the rescue; and accordingly he sailed from Penzance in a South Sea whaler, the Asp, on 20th October, 1816, intending to land at Buenos Ayres and work his way across the South American continent—an undertaking which, in those days, it need scarcely be added, was of a most formidable character, and no doubt, therefore, was all the more attractive to the remarkable man whose career we have been considering.
On his arrival in Peru, he was received with almost royal honours, and, at once getting to work, soon set matters to rights; for by the early part of 1817 there were four engines at work, including that used for coining at the Mint. An immediate collapse of the whole undertaking would probably have been the result but for the timely arrival of 'Don Ricardo,' as he was styled by the natives. Amongst the difficulties to be overcome in this enterprise may be mentioned those of transit, and these may be estimated from the facts that the Cerro de Pasco Mines were 170 miles from Lima, that the roads were for the most part mule-tracks only, and that the site was 13,400 feet above the sea! No wonder that, on his eventually triumphing over all these difficulties, thoughts were seriously entertained of erecting a statue to him in solid silver, and that, according to Mr. Walker's memoir, he was made a Marquis and Grandee of Spain. But the whole scheme was unhappily doomed to failure. Deaths and dissensions took place amongst the shareholders; Uville died in August, 1818, and the whole brunt of the management fell upon Trevithick. He now, too, foolishly engaged in other undertakings whilst his hands were already sufficiently full, and lost large sums of money in a speculative process for extracting silver by smelting instead of by amalgamation. Then a war of independence broke out, and poor Trevithick had the mortification of learning that the Royalists had actually destroyed his machinery, and flung it—where he had so often before threatened to fling his enemies—'down into the shafts.'[155]
This was the death-blow of the affair, and he immediately set to work on a fresh venture, namely, the raising of the cannon from a Russian ship which had been sunk near Callao. By this he readily made no less than £2,500, but—will it be believed?—he forthwith lost it all by an imprudent speculation in a pearl-fishery at Panama! Some of the money would have been particularly acceptable to poor Mrs. Trevithick, whom her thriftless husband had left at Penzance unprovided for; in fact, he omitted (doubtless from sheer thoughtlessness) to pay, as he had promised to do, the house-rent a year in advance for her. Another curious instance of Trevithick's utter incapacity for understanding business matters appears in the following anecdote. Being very hardly pressed for payment of some account due from him, he snatched the bill from his creditor, and writing, 'Received—Richard Trevithick,' at the foot of it, handed it back to the poor man with an angry exclamation, in his strong Cornish dialect, of 'There! will that satisfy you?'
A strange episode in his career now occurs. Bolivar actually pressed him as a soldier; but Trevithick soon 'tir'd of war's alarms,' and the President readily allowed him to return to more congenial pursuits, sending him on some special mission to Bogota—yet not before Trevithick had signalized his connexion with the army by inventing a most ingenious carbine with an explosive bullet. Whilst in South America he also became, for the nonce, a surgeon, and actually amputated both legs of a poor fellow crushed by the fall of some of Trevithick's heavy machinery. The man was very proud of what he had undergone, and used to boast of his capital stumps.
Having previously paid a short visit to Chili, Trevithick (who had now lost all his property) finally left Peru in 1822, on the above-named special mission; but, distrustful of Bolivar's promises and hearing of something more to his advantage, as he considered, he made his way to certain rich mines that he had heard of in Costa Rica instead. Thither—to that region of snakes, miasma, and earth-quakes—we must now follow him.