For many a long day in the past, in the multiple guises of seamen, merchants, explorers, overland travellers, settlers, geographers and scientists, the English were captivated by South America. By comparison with lands to the north of that continent and with Africa or Asia, where they were to carve out their own spheres of imperial dominance, their numbers were relatively small. But for over three hundred years during the age of sail, the most remote of Spain's New World possessions, originally the Viceroyalty of Peru, nourished their imagination and whet their appetite for overseas enterprises, and above all profit, in a distant land. In particular, enhanced by its very remoteness and endowed with what were perceived to be strange and wondrous attributes, the lure of Peru seemed capable of satisfying the wildest dreams that the imagination could forge. Consequently, when at the end of the sixteenth century Walter Ralegh chose the words to describe the fabulous assets of the kingdom of El Dorado that he desperately sought in Guiana, for purposes of comparison he selected a name that was instantly recognisable to his fellow Englishmen and by which its wealth could be measured. He wrote of Guiana, ‘it hath more abundance of Golde then [sic] any part of Peru, and as many or more great Cities then euer Peru had when it florished most’. In fact, what was set down as the reality of Peru by English writers constituted a composite based on personal observation and written texts, in themselves already suffused with ingredients which surpassed the limits of the imagination, but always interpreted by a gaze through the transmuting lens of myths and beliefs both of New and Old World origin. Moreover, it was a foreign reality frequently further contrived in hopeful expectation of its ability to overcome personal adversity and hardship in England and fulfil personal aspirations for betterment.

In contrast, today the popular concept of the Republic of Peru is very different, seen through the stunning impact of television images instantly transmitted globally by satellite, which shock by displaying actual scenes of life and death that reveal the economic, social and political realities of the so-called ‘Third World’.