By and large, the works we have been discussing were circulating in the English language by 1700. Obviously, neither these diverse types of material, nor the English fascination with South America and especially with Peru, ceased abruptly at that moment. In fact, it has been our purpose not simply to shed light on the elements of Peruvian reality which provoked such attention, but even more importantly to convey an idea of the depth to which concepts of the region, in an enduring amalgam of the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘real’, became profoundly ingrained in the minds of authors, compilers and editors. From them they were transposed into the dreams, proposals and enterprises both of men of action and investors in overseas enterprise. By the end of the seventeenth century, perceptions of Peru had been widely consolidated into an image whose essential features would not suffer a radical transformation for at least a further 150 years. Without doubt, even before the early nineteenth century, the prospect of Peru's political independence from Spain had generated somewhat modified concerns, such as an awakening in Britain of imperialist interest in South America, in part out of fear of rival French involvement. The post-independence period would also bring in its wake new patterns of economic relationships. But essentially, the lure of Peru continued through the eighteenth century to remain potent and largely unchanged from that expressed in the works we have examined – remote, with elements of the strange and even fabulous, and above all a land offering extravagant prospects for exploitation in pursuit of personal or national gain and enrichment. Since the first descriptions gathered from translations of Spanish chroniclers, and from the earliest English eyewitness accounts in the age of Drake until the nineteenth century, what really occurs is a gradual but steady formulation of beliefs and fancies, followed by a constant regeneration of the basic attitudes in a variety of different guises.

Even before the seventeenth century drew to its close, some of the most inhospitable terrain on the northernmost fringes of the Viceroyalty of Peru was to witness the unfolding tragedy of one of the most foolhardy schemes in the name of Scottish pride and envy of the English, the Darien enterprise (1698–1700).