Manuel Quimper

18/19th century Spanish Peruvian explorer, cartographer, colonial official, and naval officer

Manuel Quimper Benítez del Pino (c. 1757 – April 2, 1844) was a Spanish Peruvian explorer, cartographer, naval officer, and colonial official. He participated in charting the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Sandwich Islands in the late 18th century. He was later appointed a colonial governor in his native Peru at the beginning of the fight for independence there. He retired to Spain, but was able to return to Peru where he served as a naval officer in the new republic and pursued a literary career, publishing over 20 books about his experiences before his death there in Lima.

Quimper was born in Lima, Peru In 1805 he was appointed the governor of Huamanga (later renamed Ayacucho) in the southern part of his native Peru, but due to a confusing incident involving the newly appointed Viceroy of Peru, José Fernando de Abascal y Sousa, he instead became the governor of the Peruvian Intendancy of Puno on Lake Titicaca. Quimper provides an account of the subsequent events that lead to a massive uprising across the Intendancy. In the city of Puno, he later identified the elected mayor Benito Laso de la Vega as the "main revolutionary.". As Quimper desperately tries to quell the mass insurrection throughout his territory, the Cusco Rebellion explodes onto the scene on August 3, 1814. Within weeks, the patriot army arrives from Cusco to Puno. Quimper relates how in the middle of the night of August 24, 1814, he was informed that the city garrison had defected to the patriot cause. Quimper flees for his life to Arequipa, where he goes into hiding until the Spanish General Ramirez marches from Oruro and restores royalist control in Puno and then Arequipa (December 9, 1814). Id. While Ramirez confronts the main patriot army on the return to Cusco, he sends Quimper back to Puno to maintain order. On March 11, 1815 Quimper sends an ill fated royalist expedition to nearby Capachica. The entire royalist expedition is massacred. Ramirez sacks Quimper, and replaces him with Col. Francisco de Paula Gonzalez, who will lead a "pacification" campaign well into 1816 to forcibly suppress and end the rebellion across the Intendancy of Puno. By 1816, Quimper takes his place in Huamanga as the local governor.

While Quimper was in Spain, his son Colonel Manuel Quimper, was fighting for the Spanish cause in Peru. He had been serving in Upper Peru until named the commander in chief of Spanish forces of the southern coast of Peru on 9 February 1820. The young Manuel Quimper suffered a major defeat while defending the city of Nazca and was forced to flee to the coast in October 1820. Meanwhile in Madrid the senior Quimper received the military honor of La Cruz de San Hermenegildo in 1820. Quimper also began to receive recognition for his literary talent. In 1821 Imprenta Alvarez published his 180 page manuscript of Décima poetry entitled Laicas vivacidades de Quimper, antorcha peruana, acaecimientos del Perú en civiles guerras, promovidas por el Reino de Buenos Ayres, desde el año 1809 hasta el de 1818, describing his personal observations of the civil wars in Peru from 1809 to 1818. Still showing regret over the loss of the documents which had been destroyed at Puno, at the end of 1821 he solicited the endorsement of José de Bustamante, the director general of the National Armada, for the publication of a recounting of his experiences aboard the Atrevida in Manila Bay thirty years earlier. He apparently received no support from Bustamante. Nevertheless, in 1822 Quimper published in Madrid his book Islas Sandwich: Descripción sucinta de este archipiélago, which had been previously published in El Mercurio Peruano. In the "Introducción" to this book he attempted to explain himself and his return to Spain, citing his naval service to Spain since adolescence, and the fact that he had been treated as an American in Spain, and as a Spaniard in Peru.

Quimper longed to return to his native land of Peru and in February 1822 took steps to assure sympathetic treatment there upon his return. He returned shortly thereafter and is reported to have become a Peruvian "Patriot" in 1823. The government of the Republic of Peru named him a naval commander in 1827 and later a captain. He continued his literary pursuits and wrote the poem Poema raro, segments of which were published in La Gazeta de Lima. He died in Lima in April 1844.