While chocolate was one of the few earthly pleasures that the Bishop enjoyed, he likely would have been far more interested in Lima’s vibrant intellectual life. The city was home to the University of San Marcos—the oldest in South America—as well as more innovative institutions such as the Convictorio Carolino, where students learned experimental science, and the Colegio de San Carlos, where Newtonian physics found a place on the curriculum the same year that Martínez Compañón arrived in Peru. Lima also had a growing community of naturalists. Cosme Bueno published his yearly almanac, Conocimiento de los tiempos, there. The city was the home of Hipólito Unanue, a naturalist who proposed that cultivating commerce based on Peru’s rich natural resources could benefit the viceroyalty. Another local scientist, José Eusebio Llano Zapata, sent a manuscript detailing the natural resources of Peru, titled Memorias histórico, físicas, crítico, apologéticas de la América Meridional, to the king in 1761. In 1787, Lima’s first Spanish-style economic society was founded. This same group would later become the Sociedad de Amantes del País (Lovers of the Country) and publish the Mercurio Peruano (1791–1794), which frequently commented on scientific matters. In 1792, Padre Francisco González Laguna oversaw the founding of Lima’s own botanical garden.41
Although all this surrounded Martínez Compañón, his chances for engagement would have been limited by his duties inside the walls of the cathedral. As chantre, or musical director, he was one of the most important members of the cabildo or cathedral chapter of dignitaries. These men met directly with the archbishop on a regular basis, exercised power on his behalf in his absence, and oversaw religious services. Martínez Compañón was responsible for supervising the musical accompaniments to liturgy, including chanting, singing, and instrumental music. Much of his work would have taken place in or near the cathedral’s impressive choir stall, one of the oldest and best preserved in all Peru. Built in the early seventeenth century, this large wooden structure features ornate chairs for each choir member. Situated at ground level alongside the cathedral’s main altar, the severe wooden seats are dominated by the carved relief figures of saints that stand behind them.42
Though records reveal nothing further about Martínez Compañón’s duties as chantre in Lima, we know that during his visita, the Bishop taught Gregorian chant to seminary students in Piura, Lambayeque, and Cajamarca. He also recorded musical notations and lyrics when visiting communities throughout Chachapoyas, Otusco, and Cajamarca. The songs he collected ranged from Christmas carols to music for a Chimú dance performed with violin accompaniment. As with the illustrations that made up the nine volumes of watercolors, he gathered these songs from vernacular sources; they were mostly “simple” folk songs dismissed as such. Today, ethnomusicologists praise the entire collection, especially the “Chimú tune,” which is the only known surviving musical notation in the Mochica language (extinct today and, even in 1644, spoken by only forty thousand people). The Bishop thought to preserve several musical instruments in his collection, including a “copper tambourine with seven jingle bells, a little hen, and four Indians dancing,” in which one of the human figures carried “in his hand an axe like those that … the Indians use to dance [with today].”43 Likewise, many of the watercolor images include musical instruments or people playing them, especially during Carnival.
In addition to his musical duties in the cathedral, Martínez Compañón was tasked with compiling a master list of chaplaincies and charitable endowments. The two massive volumes that resulted were an early indication of his organizational abilities: indexed like a modern-day address book with tabs separating the letters, the capellanías books listed by surname the individuals who had made the bequests, and for what purpose. He recorded that Miss Maria Theodora, for instance, had in 1740 established a chaplaincy based on the value of her country home outside Lima. With these funds, she supported a licentiate named Lorenzo de Azogue.44
In Lima, Martínez Compañón cultivated a close relationship with Archbishop Antonio de Parada, who soon thereafter rewarded him with additional responsibilities. By 1770, Parada had named him rector of Lima’s Saint Toribio Seminary, a position that he retained until his departure for Trujillo in 1779. Although the majority of the documents from his time there are lost, we do know that while at the seminary, Martínez Compañón worked tirelessly to organize and improve, soliciting permission and funding for several structural improvements to the building, including more student rooms and easier access to water in the cooking area. Years later, when he was founding his own seminary in Trujillo, he hoped for the boys there to wear purple sashes similar to those that the Lima students had worn.45
In 1772 and 1773, the cathedral hosted the Sixth Provincial Church Council of Peru, in which canons, bishops, and the archbishop debated how they would implement Charles III’s modernizing ecclesiastical reforms and how they would handle the aftermath of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Peru five years earlier. Martínez Compañón was named consultant, canon, and secretary of the council. He would have observed and perhaps even participated in heated discussions about the preparation of primary school teachers (they had to be well trained in Catholic precepts), the importance of repetition in teaching doctrine to Indians (adults were to study every Monday and Friday; children were to study every day), and the necessity of teaching Indians to speak fluent Spanish, so that “they will be more easily and better taught in the subjects of religion and of the state.”46 Many of these same ideas about Indian education were later incorporated into the reform agenda that the Bishop imagined for Trujillo.
In 1773, Martínez Compañón became a member of the Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País, or the Basque Friends of the Country Society, a social organization dedicated to improvement and reform that would likewise prove influential in his future imaginings of utopia in Trujillo. Founded in the Basque town of Vergara in 1765, this was the first of scores of economic societies established throughout Spain and America in the late eighteenth century. Although an ocean and a continent separated him from Vergara, Martínez Compañón’s membership in the Basque society was not an anomaly: the majority of the society’s nobles, government officials, academics, and clergy were men of Basque origin pursuing careers in other parts of the empire. Their original manifesto outlined their goal as “the socialization of progress [and] collective improvement … [of the] labor of groups and institutions.” Their many publications provided suggestions for improvement that Martínez Compañón later planned to implement in Trujillo: cultivating alfalfa and flax, promoting agriculture and industry, building town primary schools, and educating women. They suggested that students’ improvement be rewarded with prizes, and they thought contests useful for promoting technological advancement. In its 1780 ordinances, the Basque Society promoted the study of the arts, particularly drawing, which it decreed “useful to all types of people,” since it was “the basis of the liberal arts, the soul of many branches of commerce” and “a universal language that can benefit everyone.”47
Martínez Compañón carried these ideas with him when, on February 25, 1778, he was promoted to become the next bishop of Trujillo, in the north of Peru, near Ecuador. Reforming the Indians, promoting primary education, and pairing religious and social goals would become the foundations of his utopian agenda there. When complete, his successes would make plain to the rest of Peru, the Spanish Empire, and the world beyond that the Indians were fully capable members of society. Yet even with such a vast array of improvement strategies at his disposal, there were inevitable reservations. Being assigned to a post that was comparatively poor and isolated may have been somewhat of a disappointment. He subtly revealed these feelings in a letter from 1790 in which he wrote about how much he had loved Trujillo, “even though it was not Lima.”48 Regardless of any doubts he might have had, in 1778 he was scheduled to be confirmed as bishop the following June. When the necessary decrees finally arrived, he learned that, like all bishops in America, he was responsible for obeying the laws of the Indies and ensuring that all ecclesiastical income was to be shared with the Crown. From Lima that March, he confirmed: “I swear I will guard and comply with our king with all corresponding faith, observing all the laws of the patronato real [royal patronage of the Church], and that