Ruiz Biographical Record
SCANNED
Biographical Record
Mateo Ruiz
Born 11 Jun 1779 · Died 22 Dec 1819
Occupation: Cave Naturalist
Cause of Death: Fell down an unexplored limestone shaft while following an underground river. His lantern was found at the bottom, unbroken and burnt out. His rope was found at the top, coiled and unused. He had chosen not to tie on, and the Archive has formed a view as to why: he was in a hurry, and he had just seen something.
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Ruiz was called underground the way other men were called to sea. He mapped Patagonian cave systems for twenty-five years, alone or with one companion, by candle and by lantern and once — for six days, after an accident — by touch. He named the rivers he found under the world. He catalogued the pale, timid, eyeless little animals that live in permanent dark and considered them, in a phrase his editors cut, ‘the only honest citizens of the earth, having nothing to look at and not looking away." He was funny, half-mad by any reasonable standard, and the finest underground surveyor of his century.
The last sketchbook is why this file exists. In the winter of 1819 he entered a system he had not surveyed, and eleven pages in, the notation changes. There are marks in the stone. He draws them carefully, to scale, with his own hand span beside them for reference — four parallel grooves, cut deep into solid rock, in a gallery whose ceiling stands some six metres above the floor. He measured the height twice and then wrote his last line: ‘Nothing that could make these could reach these’.
ARCHIVE NOTE: The Ruiz gallery has not been relocated. The sketchbook gives a river, a bearing, and a distance, and the river has moved. This is regarded within the Archive as an open assignment.
PROVENANCE NOTE: The sketchbook was purchased from a Buenos Aires estate in 1822 by an English collector who did not want it, did not display it, and did not sell it on, and who wrote to three friends about it in terms his executors later found embarrassing. Those men are the reason there is a Society.