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?'