JOEL GRIFFETT

Pre-order ‘Long Road to Nowhere: The Lost Years of Richard Trevithick (Part One)’ now, HERE.

Firstly I must apologise for the delays; I am extremely far behind with blog posts but I have much to share with you from the last few months in Peru (and Colombia briefly). The world’s worst historian (me) and his awful laptop require patience.

I arrived into Lima at the right time. A perfect storm had been brewing all over the country since Castillo’s big day. They called a truce for Christmas, but when the new year rolled in all the protesters were refreshed and ready to start again. It seemed like a country ready to implode; a country that may well hold the record for the most ex-Presidents in prison. The south of the country was the eye of the storm but Lima had a fair share of the protests too.

My own arrival was oddly reminiscent of Trevithick’s. He must have been well aware that Peru would descend into war dreckly, perhaps even while he was at Cerro de Pasco between 1817 and 1820. The worst would have been if Peru had begun to fight for its independence while Trevithick and Co. crossed the Atlantic. Not even war would stop him from arriving in Peru. In his mind, he was already there. The servant of the future was transfixed once more by tomorrow, not the present. So vacant was he that he forgot to pay the rent on the house he’d organised for his family, nor had he paid the premium on the life insurance policy he took out. He also had his portrait painted before he left. All three were ominous signs, and one could easily suspect his departure to be more akin to a farewell.

It almost was; few would hear from him again for over a decade.

Battles against the Spanish had already been fought across High Peru, which encompassed Peru, Bolivia and some of modern day Chile. In 1810, revolution was declared in Argentina. The Spanish were inevitably going to lose their hold on South America; one by one the provinces would form sovereign nations but Trevithick only had one thing on his mind. The day he left, he promised his wife a fortune. Incomprehensible and seemingly infinite riches lay across the Atlantic. The South Sea whaling ship Asp set sail from Penzance on 20^th October 1816 and it was a journey of almost 4 months – across the Atlantic and around the treacherous Cape Horn at the bottom of the world, before snaking all the way up the Pacific coast to the port of Callao. I tried to enter by boat from landlocked Bolivia – the man dressed as a Captain in the Salteneria in Sucre daintily excavating his breakfast pasty with a teaspoon at the helm – but I would’ve ended up in Puno, the eye of the storm, unable to move anywhere else.
Instead, I booked a flight from La Paz, the world’s worst capital city and the world’s worst international airport. On any given day, Exeter airport is busier and better well equipped, but I must say that it was the first time in Bolivia I didn’t have to pay to piss. What surprised me even more was the offering of  food and drink aboard the Boliviana de Aviacion flight from Santa Cruz to Lima. Nothing is free in Bolivia, except when you’re leaving, to entice you back in.

Precarious Peruvian Politics

In Trevithick’s day, regular updates were unheard of and even in the 21^st century, it is still rather difficult to ascertain what is going on in Peru. Most of what I know stems from watching grainy, ancient televisions sat in tiny plastic chairs in some unnamed restaurant in Bolivia.

A great deal of uncertainty pervades but (un)fortunately a lot of the world has moved on from civil war since Trevithick lived. The state is now an all-seeing, all-encompassing megalith that cannot be brought down by the unarmed masses. The people can protest all they like but they are beholden to democracy and it’s enforcers, who are more than happy to shoot people on command of their superiors. This makes the situation more stable than the one Trevithick arrived into, but whether I will face any oblivion is still unknown. All I knew is, none of the currency exchanges in La Paz had any Peruvian soles.

When Trevithick arrived in February 1817, it was a heroes welcome. He was tipped as the saviour of the Peruvian economy, the only man who could kickstart the ailing mining industry in and around the rich veins of Cerro de Pasco. My own arrival wasn’t quite as auspicious. There was no welcome party, no one wrote about it in the local paper, nor did anyone offer to build a silver statue of me. Not that I wanted any of that. My dad had told me to keep my head down when I arrived: under no circumstances should I refer to myself as a writer, merely a historian. It wasn’t a ridiculous suggestion; I’d seen videos on Twitter of people attacking Peruvian journalists in the street. Writer was akin to journalist so I had to adopt the official title of historian, a label I am undeserving of.

All the world’s worst historian was greeted by when he arrived was a swarm of thieves, all vying for my attention as I walked out of the arrivals terminal. I’d grown used to the half-assed attempts at every facet of life in Bolivia and this relentless hassle threw me off immediately.

4 months in and I finally broke the first rule of travelling – don’t get ripped off by a ‘taxi driver’ as soon as you emerge from the terminal. Don’t believe their persistent bullshit, nor the other ladrones that stroll past and whisper things like ‘official’ into your ear on their way to rip off other idiots like me. Just like in Santiago, it was a man who tried to sell me every drug under the sun and while I wasn’t interested in that, I was interested in the subwoofer in his boot, so I let myself get ripped off, paying triple the standard amount just so I could listen to drum and bass all the way into the centre of Lima, while confusing the driver with this delightfully English style of music.

Driving through Lima that night to the district of Lince where I was staying and in the following days when I wandered round all the noise and bustle heading towards the historic centre, I saw little or no trace of a city and a country mired in chaos.

On a daily basis, the rolling news cycle does an exemplary job at making the world seem all the more dangerous than it actually is. I was expecting to see a country imploding; instead I saw almost everyone just going about their business as normal. Either there was no chaos or everyone in Peru is so used to the fact they’re on their 6^th president in 6 years that it just seems normal now.  What does a country in crisis look like? Downtown Mosul at the peak of ISIS destruction, a Kabul market just after a suicide bomber has sent himself to hell? Maybe if we believe modern media narratives. But what I saw was perfectly normal – friends, family and couples all milling around the streets, sat in restaurants or lying on the grass.

If you only watch the news and don’t go outside your perception of reality is ultimately skewed. Curtain twitchers: put the remote down and get some fresh air.

The Trevithick Diaries

Even now as I arrived into Lima, undeniably, inexplicitly on the Trevithick Trail after 4 months away, I was nagged by the same suspicions I had all the way south in Valparaiso. While his mining exploits are somewhat documented here and at home, I could already sense that any trace of his adventures were lost forever. These weren’t official documents, these were the adventures and sojourns off the record of a man who rarely wrote anything down.

Other far less interesting accounts of less interesting Cornishmen survive. Diaries of others adventures in South America, such as JB Williams, recounts events that were probably new and exciting to the author, but are writings of excruciating, minute by minute detail of each day, from the time he woke, to what he ate. It seems unnecessary, even pointless to write such details down. A cut of meat and how it was cooked was far more important to the average 19^th century Cornishman than describing his surroundings or his interactions with the locals. The problem with most of these diaries that survive is that they aren’t particularly interesting, and the one man who should have kept a diary, the one man who is more interesting than the rest, didn’t write down a single word.
Writing was far too theoretical for Trevithick, who put practice over theory every single day of his life. He never bothered writing anything down, what use did words have when he could do a engineering sketch. It wouldn’t matter so much if he was as boring as the rest, but he took it to extremes by engaging in all kinds of lunacy, feats of intrigue and ever more hairbrained schemes. Great for him, but terrible for someone like me who has decided to try and piece it all together from myths, rumours and hearsay. Richard and Francis together are the most historically inaccurate duo in history: father creating his own legend in the years before his death and his starstruck son misremembering it all 40 years later.

Many of these banal accounts are ones of travels across South America. Not limited to Cornish miners. Trevithick is mentioned in many of these as the authors pass through Peru, all with an abundance of different spellings of his name: Trevithick, Trevethick, Trevetchick, Treverick. I have waded through untold tedium to pluck out any morsels or nuggets of info that appeal to my hyperactive mind but unfortunately I also know a lot about these men and their daily habits.

It makes me wonder what Trevithick did on a daily basis. So mysterious, so mystical was he that it’s almost impossible to imagine him eat or sleep – to do anything except tinker and invent and then argue with people who wouldn’t immediately give him the money he deserved and storm off in search of a new project. The Trevithick way was to be in the workshop as long as his body could physically manage each day, until someone had to pry him away and make him eat something. His wife always said he was ‘satisfied with most simple bed and board’ and ‘never gave trouble in home affairs’ which is obvious given how he was almost always in a workshop instead of at home.

Had he ever laid eyes on food with flavour in Georgian Britain? Was he aware of spice? Did he ever sleep? Were all his interactions loud and emotional? Or was he capable of having conversations that weren’t always arguments? Did he buy himself a poncho and stuff his cheek full of coca leaves upon arrival in the Andes?

A diary…if only it was so easy.