were shipped for Lima during 1814, three of his friends, a cousin Henry Vivian, a former partner Bull, and Thomas Trevarthen, going with them as engineers. The inauguration of the engines was marked by complete success, and in October 1816 Trevithick gave up all his prospects in England and embarked for Peru. He sailed from Penzance on 20 Oct. in the South Sea whaler Asp, Captain Kenny, to superintend the great silver mines on the Cerro de Pasco, near Lima. He arrived at Lima in February 1817, was received with extravagant honours, and remained abroad for over ten years (see Cornwall Geolog. Soc. Trans. i. 212). After he had surmounted many difficulties and made and lost several fortunes, the war of independence broke out. The patriots threw a quantity of his machinery down the shafts, the country became thoroughly unsettled, and, after some extraordinary vicissitudes, Trevithick had to leave Peru and virtually to sacrifice his property in mines and ores. In 1826–7 he was prospecting in Costa Rica, having a design of connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific by a railroad. After having been rescued from drowning at the mouth of the Magdalena river, by means of a lasso thrown by a friendly Venezuelan officer, he made his way, penniless and half starved, into Carthagena. There, in August 1827, he was, as ‘the inventor of the locomotive,’ introduced to Robert Stephenson [q. v.] ‘Is that Bobby?’ was Trevithick's exclamation; ‘I've nursed him many a time’ (presumably during a visit to Wylam in 1805). Stephenson generously advanced him 50l., with which, having travelled in company to New York, Trevithick took a passage to England, arriving at Falmouth with empty pockets on 9 Oct. 1827. A petition presented to the government on behalf of the inventor in February 1828 was disregarded. In the following year he went over to Holland to report upon some Dutch pumping-engines. He had to borrow 2l. as passage money, and it is recorded that he gave five shillings out of this sum to a poor neighbour who had the misfortune to lose a pig.
Among his later schemes were a project for an improvement in the propulsion of steamboats by means of a spiral wheel at the stern, an improved marine boiler, a new recoil gun-carriage, an apparatus for heating apartments (dated 21 Feb. 1831), and a proposal for a cast-iron column one thousand feet in height to commemorate the Reform movement. Unfortunately his opportunities of carrying his plans to maturity became more and more restricted. The year following his last patent (that for the employment of superheated steam, dated 22 Sept. 1832) he was living at Dartford, Kent, and employed upon some of his inventions in the workshop of John Hall, when he was seized by the illness of which he died on 22 April 1833. He was lodging at the time at the Bull Inn, but at his death it was found that he had not only outlived all his earnings, but was in debt to the innkeeper. He would therefore have been buried at the expense of the parish had not the workmen at Hall's factory clubbed together to give the ‘great inventor’ a decent funeral. These same men, on 26 April, followed Trevithick's remains to the grave in Dartford churchyard. No stone marks his resting-place. ‘Such was the end of one of the greatest mechanical benefactors of our country’ (Smiles; cf. Dunkin, Dartford, 1844, p. 405). In June 1888 a Trevithick memorial window was erected in the north aisle of the nave of Westminster Abbey (next the Brunel window), and at the same time were endowed a Trevithick engineering scholarship at Owens College, Manchester, and a triennial medal at the Institution of Civil Engineers.
Trevithick married at St. Erth, on 7 Nov. 1797, Jane, daughter of John Harvey of Hayle foundry, settling upon his marriage at Moreton House, near Redruth. His wife, who was born at Carnhell, Gwinear, on 25 June 1772, survived until 1868, when she died at Pencliff, Hayle, on 21 March. They had six children: Richard (1798–1872); John Harvey (1806–1877); Francis (1812–1877), his father's biographer and an engineer, who in 1847 designed for the London and North-Western railway a locomotive of a new and advanced type, with an 8-feet 6-inch driving wheel (this engine, the Cornwall, achieved remarkable success as a champion of the narrow-gauge principle); Frederick Henry, who constructed the steam floating bridge between Gosport and Portsmouth in 1864, and accomplished much engineering work in Russia, Germany, Portugal, Canada, and South America; Anne; and Elizabeth (see Boase, Collect. Cornub. 1890, pp. 1091, 1092).
As an inventor, it is probably no exaggeration to say that Trevithick was ‘one of the greatest that ever lived’ (Fletcher). In the establishment of the locomotive, in the development of the powers of the Cornish engine, and in increasing the capabilities of the marine engine, ‘there can be no doubt that Trevithick's exertions have given a far wider range to the dominion of the steam engine than even the great and masterly improvement of James Watt effected in his day’ (Hyde Clarke, On the High-pressure
