Santiago the Flier
It would be difficult to find anyone from Lima who, in his childhood at least, has not attended a puppet show. It was a Spanish woman, doña Leonor de Goromar, who in 1693 asked for and obtained the permission of the viceroy, the count of La Monclova, to put on a show that has been and will be the delight of children, and that has immortalized the names of ño1Pancho, ño Manuelito, and ño Valdivieso, the most famous puppeteer of our day.
Among the puppets, the ones that are most popular are ño Silverio, ñaGerundia González, Chocolatito, Mochuelo, Piticalzón, Perote, and Santiago the Flier. The first of these are fanciful characters, but the last was as much a man of flesh and blood as those of us who today eat bread. And he was not a nobody either, but a man of genius, and the proof lies in the fact that he wrote a very original book that is in the Biblioteca Nacional in manuscript, a copy of which I own.
This manuscript, with ink that with the years has taken on a color between white and red, must have passed through many a customs house and gone through severe storms before becoming part of the manuscript section of the library, for not only are its last pages missing, but, most regrettably, some mischief–maker has torn out a number of its pen–and–ink drawings, which, from what I gather from reading the text, must have numbered 15.
The work is entitled Nuevo Sistema de Navegación por los aires, por Santiago de Cárdenas, natural de Lima en el Peru.2
It is evident that, when it came to written style, the author was very plainspoken, a circumstance to which he naively confesses. The son of an impoverished father and mother, he learned to read haltingly and to write signs like scrawled letters that would try the patience of a paleographer.
In 1736 Santiago de Cárdenas was ten years old, and went to sea as a cabin boy on a merchant ship that plied the route between Callao and Valparaíso.
The flight of a bird, which he calls a tijereta, awakened in Santiago the idea that a man could also master space, aided by an apparatus that fulfilled the conditions he lays down in his book.
Many of the most admirable human inventions and discoveries are in fact owed to trivial causes, if not to chance. The oscillation of a lamp gave Galileo the idea for a pendulum; the fall of an apple suggested to Newton his theory of attraction; the vibration of his voice at the bottom of a derby hat inspired Edison to conceive of the phonograph; without the shudders of a dying frog Galvani would not have appreciated the power of electricity and invented the telegraph; and finally, without having observed a sheet of paper thrown casually into a fireplace rising because of the smoke and heat, Montgolfier would not have invented the hot–air balloon in 1783. Why, then would Santiago not have found in the flight of a tijeretathe primary cause of a marvel that would immortalize his name?
Santiago spent ten years at sea, and his constant preoccupation was to study the flight of birds. Finally, as a consequence of the disastrous earthquake of 1746 that caused the sinking of the ship on which he had hired on, he was obliged to settle in Lima, where he found employment in mechanical trades, at which, according to what he himself recounts, he was very proficient; later he made gloves, clerical caps, and pumps from one piece of vicuña, so that “the finest cloth does not match the delicacy of my work, for I enter and leave various trades with the same dexterity as though I had learned them by the rules; but unfortunately, I wasted the improvements I made without improving my lot.”
Whenever Santiago managed to rub together a few reals, he disappeared from Lima and went to live in the hills of Amancaes, San Jerónimo, or San Cristóbal, which are only a few miles from the city. There he spent his time contemplating the flight of birds, hunting them, and studying their anatomy. On this subject there are some very curious observations in his book.
After 12 years of climbing up and down hills and chasing condors and every sort of flying creature, not excepting even flies, Santiago thought that he had reached the end of his labors, and shouted: “Eureka!”
In November of 1761 he presented a petition to His Excellency the viceroy don Manuel de Amat y Juniet, in which he said that by means of an apparatus or flying machine that he had invented, but for whose construction he lacked monetary resources, flying was something easier than sucking a freshly laid egg, and less dangerous than crossing oneself. Furthermore, he asked the viceroy for an audience in order to explain his theory to him.
It is probable that His Excellency lent him an ear, and that after Santiago’s explanations he remained as much in the dark as before. What definitely appears from the book is that Amat brought the request to the attention of the Royal Tribunal, as this decree proves:
“Lima, November 6, 1761.—Refer this matter to Dr. don Cosme Bueno, the holder of the chair in Mathematics, so that after hearing the petitioner the corresponding aid may be granted him.”—Three signatures and a flourish.
While don Cosme Bueno, the most learned man in Peru at the time, was drawing up his report, the matter was the obligatory subject of conversation in Lima’s literary circles, and on the morning of November 22 an idle and ill–intentioned mischief–maker spread the rumor that at four in the afternoon Cárdenas was going to fly, as a trial, from San Cristóbal hill to the main square.
Let us listen to Santiago himself relate the consequences of the trick played on him: “In the usual manner of the people of this country, so curious about new things and eager to see wonders, there was not a single noble or plebeian who did not move closer to the hill or occupy the balconies, rooftops of the houses, and church towers. When they realized that nobody had offered to fly, given such an opportunity, God unleashed his wrath, and people surrounded me in the porch of the cathedral, saying to me: Either you fly or we’ll stone you to death. Advised as to what was happening, His Excellency the viceroy sent a military escort to defend me, and surrounded by it, I was taken to the palace, thus rescuing me from the insults of the crowd.”
From that day forward, our man was the talk of the town. Everyone forgot that his name was Santiago de Cárdenas and called him Santiago the Flier, a nickname the poor man resignedly put up with, for had he become angry he would have risked bodily harm.
Even the Holy Office of the Inquisition had to publish decrees to protect Santiago, forbidding by edict the singing of the “Pava,” an indecent popular song in which Cárdenas served as a pretext for offending the honor of one’s fellow.
I excuse myself from copying the four verses of the song that have come into my hands, because they contain words and ideas that are extremely obscene. As a sample:
Cuando voló una marquesa
un fraile también voló,
pues recibieron lecciones
de Santiago el Volador.
¡Miren qué pava para el marqués!
¡Miren qué pava para los tres!3
Don Cosme Bueno finally submitted his report with the title “Dissertation on the Art of Flying.” He divided it into two parts. In the first he supports the possibility of flying, but in the second he destroys this position with serious arguments. Dr. Bueno’s report reached print, and honors the erudition and talent of its author.
Despite the fact that the report was unfavorable, Santiago de Cárdenas did not admit defeat: “I let a year go by,” he says, “and presented my second petition. The news of the war with the English and the news that was arriving from Buenos Aires seemed to me to be an opportunity to see my plan come to fruition.”
Some tradesmen, perhaps to make fun of Santiago the Flier, offered him the necessary sum for him to build his machine, providing the government gave him permission to fly. Santiago undertook to serve as courier between Lima and Buenos Aires, and even to fly as far as Madrid, a journey that he calculated he would make in three days’ flight, in this order: “One day to fly from Lima to Portobelo, another day from Portobelo to Havana, and the third from Havana to Madrid.” He adds: “This still gives me a great deal of time, for if I succeed in flying as fast as a condor (80 leagues per hour), it will take me less than a day to reach
Europe.”
“This petition,” Cárdenas says, “did not cause the same astonishment and uproar as the first one, and I confess that, with the astuteness with which heaven endowed me, I had aready found partners for my plan.” Here it is relevant to say, along with the proverb: One madman creates a hundred more.
As for the viceroy Amat, he answered Cárdenas’s petition with the following decree: “This is not the time.”
A man less persevering than Santiago would have abandoned the project, but my countryman, who aspired to emulate the persistence of Columbus, then undertook to write a book with the intention of sending it to the king along with a petition, whose tenor he copies in the preface of his bulky manuscript.
It also appears the the duke of San Carlos had made himself the protector of the Icarus of Lima, and solemnly offered to put his book in the hands of the king, but by the time Cárdenas finished writing in 1766, the duke had left Peru.
A few months later, the soul of Santiago de Cárdenas took flight to the world where the mad and the sane are measured by the same rod.
The author of a curious work entitled Viaje al globo de la luna,4a book in the collection of the Biblioteca Nacional in Lima, which must have been written around the year 1790, says of Santiago de Cárdenas: “This good man, who in fact had great skill and discernment for mechanical work, was on the point of losing his senses over his theory of flying, and naturally his words were better than his deeds. He had had a portrait of himself made, standing at the door of his shop, in the public thoroughfare, dressed in feathers and with wings outspread infight, illustrating his portrait with distichs in Latin and Spanish alluding to his genius and the art of flying which he boasted of possessing. I remember this inscription: ‘Ingenio posem superas volitare per arces me nisi paupertas in vitas deprimeret.’5He observed very closely the flight of birds and discoursed on gravity and their movements, often correctly. One afternoon the common people of the city had their curiosity aroused by the vague rumor that had it that a certain fellow was going to take flight from the top of San Cristóbal hill. And it happened that the so–called Flier (who, being ignorant of the rumor, casually left his house) found it necessary to take refuge in the sanctity of a church in order to free himself from a fierce crowd of youngsters who were following him and making a great racket. A certain wit kept the people scattered over the hillsides and the banks of the Rimac in suspense, for while climbing the hill on a mule that he covered with his cape, and with both his arms covered with feathers outstretched, he gave popular curiosity a fair idea of a bullfighter’s pass, the way large birds flap their wings in order to take off. And so the crowd shouted: ‘He’s flying! He’s flying! He’s flying!’”
Mendiburu too, in his Diccionario Histórico,6devotes an article to don José Hurtado y Villafuerte, the owner of a hacienda in Arequipa, who around the year 1810 tamed a condor, which flew to the top of the highest hill of Uchumayo, carrying with it a boy, and then flew down with its rider. Hurtado y Villafuerte, in a letter he had published at the time in the Minerva Pervana, believes in the possibility of traveling by using a condor as a mount, and calculates that seven hours would be enough time to go from Arequipa to Cádiz.
Cárdenas’s work is unquestionably ingenious, and contains observations that are surprising, in that they are the spontaneous fruits of an uncultivated intelligence. He employs few scientific terms, but he nonetheless makes himself understood.
After expounding his theory at length, he undertakes to answer 30 objections and has the naiveté to take seriously and answer many objections to his theory made with the obvious intention of ridiculing him.
I shall not attempt to offer an opinion as to whether aerial navigation is a paradox that occurs only to people not in their right mind, or whether it is feasible for a man to master the space traversed by birds. But what I do believe in all sincerity is that Santiago de Cárdenas was not a charlatan out to deceive, but a man of conviction and very great inventiveness.
If Santiago de Cárdenas were a madman we must agree that his madness was contagious. Even today, more than a century after his death, there exists in Lima a man who for 20 years has pursued the idea of competing with eagles. Don Pedro Ruiz is one of those beings who have the faith of which Christ spoke, a faith that moves mountains.7
An observation: Don Pedro Ruiz could not have known the manuscript with which I have been dealing, but—by an odd coincidence!—his point of departure and the specifications of his flying machine are, in the last analysis, the same as those imagined by the ill–starred protégé of the duke of San Carlos.
In conclusion: Santago de Cárdenas aspired to immortalize himself, by perhaps realizing the most portentous of discoveries, and—human misfortune, his name lives only in the splendid puppet shows of Lima.
Even after death the boos and jeers of an audience pursue him.
Destiny has terrible ironies.
1A popular abbreviated form of señor.
2The text was published in Valparaíso by the publishing house Jover, in one volume of 230 pages in octavo, with four engravings, with this article serving as a prologue [Author’s note].
3When a marquise flew, / A friar also flew, / For they received lessons / From Santiago the Flier. / What vulgar mockery of the marquis! / What vulgar mockery of the three!
4Voyage to the planet of the moon.
5Possessed of genius, I can fly over the highest obstacles, unless a life of poverty weighs me down [Latin].
6See note 1, “Drink, Father, It Will Keep You Alive.”—Ed.
7Don Pedro Ruiz, a native of Eten, was a skillful mechanic. In May of 1880 he died in Callao, while trying out a torpedo that he had invented and that he proposed launching against the Chilean vessels that were blocking the port. In 1878 Ruiz published a short work, illustrated with 24 plates, on the art of flying [Author’s note].
Fourth Series
Three Historical Questions Concerning Pizarro
Did He or Did He Not Know How to Write? Was He or Was He Not Marquis of Los Atavillos?
What Was His Battle Standard and Where Is It?
I
Historical opinions as to whether Pizarro did or did not know how to write vary greatly, and some are contradictory. Intelligent and thorough chroniclers assert that he didn’t even recognize the letter O by its being round. That is how one anecdote has become common currency. It tells how one of the soldiers who were keeping watch over Atahualpa in the prison of Cajamarca wrote the word Godon the Inca’s fingernail. The prisoner showed it to everyone who visited him, and once he discovered that all of them except Pizarro were able to read the word with no difficulty, he had nothing but scorn for the leader of the conquest and considered him the inferior of the least of the Spaniards. Malicious or biased writers deduce from this that don Francisco had his pride injured, and that it was for this childish trifle that he took his vengeance upon Atahualpa by having him beheaded.1
It is difficult for us to believe that a man who rubbed elbows with distinguished members of the Spanish nobility (for he fought bulls as a picador before Queen Juana, earning fame for his bravery and skill as undying as that that later he would gain for his exploits in Peru); it is difficult, we repeat, to imagine that he was so lazy as not to know his abc’s, and all the more so in that, though a rough and ready soldier, Pizarro was quite capable of greatly respecting and bringing distinction to men of letters.
What is more, in the days of Emperor Charles V education was not neglected to the point that it was in previous times. It was no longer believed that knowing how to read and write befitted only second sons and friars, and people were beginning to laugh at the formula used by the Catholic Sovereigns in the document whereby they rewarded noblemen with the title of Gentleman of the Bedchamber, a title that was coveted as much as or more than the habit of the Orders of Santiago, Montesa, Alcántara, and Calatrava. One of the most curious phrases that, say what you will to the contrary, implies a great deal that is offensive to a man’s dignit
y, reads as follows: “And inasmuch as you [here the name was inserted] have proved to us that you know neither how to read nor how to write and are handy with the needle, we have seen fit to name you Gentleman of our royal Bedchamber, etc.”
Pedro Sancho and Francisco de Jerez, Pizarro’s secretaries before Antonio Picado occupied this post, have left a number of accounts concerning their chief, and far from confirming a suspicion of such supreme ignorance, it appears from these accounts that the governor read letters.
Nonetheless, Montesinos asserts, in his Anales del Peru, that in 1525 Pizarro set out to learn how to read, that his persistence came to nothing, and that he was content merely to learn how to sign his name. Almagro laughed at this and added that signing one’s name without knowing how to read was the same as receiving a wound without being able to give one.
As for Almagro the Elder,2 it is proven historical fact that he did not know how to read.
What is beyond doubt to us, as is true as well for the learned scholar Quintana, is that don Francisco Pizarro did not know how to write, despite the fact that the opinion of his contemporaries is not unanimous in the regard. But it would be enough to substantiate our view to look for a moment at the contract concluded in Panama on March 10, 1525, between the cleric Luque, Pizarro, and Almagro, which ends with these exact words: “And because the aforementioned Captain Francisco Pizarro and Diego de Almagro do not know how to sign their names, Juan de Panés and Alvaro de Quiro signed for them in the registry containing this document.”
A historian of the last century states:
“In the ecclesiastical archives of Lima I found various documents and instruments signed by the marquis (in an elegant hand), which I showed to several people, comparing certain signatures with others, amazed at the audacity of the calumny whereby his enemies sough to tarnish his reputation and belittle him, thereby taking out on that great captain their own passions and prejudices and those they inherited.”
Peruvian Traditions Page 16
