This gentleman had a great many occupations besides the ordinary professional duties of saying mass, hearing confessions, and absolving sins. He supplied his people with whisky, of which he was the only distiller, and they the principal consumers. He considered it a proud discovery, (of which few of his neighbours were in the secret,) that ardent spirits could be made from barley, reared on the hills at comparatively little expense for the grain-grower; while the usual sugar-cane spirit, or “agua ardiente,” extracted by the help of the inferior copper, or the still worse earthen stills of the interior, had no superiority over it. On the other hand, the “pisco,” or finer flavoured _Italia_, both of which are procured from the fermented juice of the grape, could only be got, and at great expense of land-carriage, from the coast. He therefore hoped to supersede by his whisky the use of the cane-spirit or pale rum, called “agua ardiente,” or “agua ardiente de caña,” because it was sometimes very expensive, and frequently bad; not from any pernicious quality in the saccharine juice, as some natives have imagined, but on account of the defective mode of distillation by poor people, who buy up from the sugar-growers molasses, and a coarse brown sugar, made into little cakes, called “chancaca,” for the purpose of being converted into “agua ardiente,” for which there is always great demand in the colder and mineral districts.
Our speculative priest had a farm in the temperate neighbourhood of a place and curacy called Caina, which lay convenient to his own spiritual flock. Here he cultivated abundance of grain, and possessed extensive pasture grounds. He purchased the “primicia” (first-fruits) of his brethren in Conchucos, and other mountain ranges and elevated districts, wherein church-rates are paid in cattle, as the staple commodity of lands chiefly fitted for pasturage. These cattle he placed on grass, when young and cheap; and when they became in high condition, drove them carefully along the least frequented paths on the verdant heights, to the clover or alfalfa fields in the headland vales of the coast, where they were in demand by the grazier and butcher. He also contracted for so many thousand arobes of sugar yearly, with the planters in Huailas; and by the aid of his Cauri friends and customers, had his sugar conducted to Cerro Pasco at a lower rate of land-carriage than any one else in this line of trade; and, dealing on a large scale, he believed that he could easily undersell the smaller trader.