This article develops an empirical model of risk-premium for the Peruvian external debt of the nineteenth century. The model relates the risk-premium to a set of macroe-conomic variables of total indebtedness and liquidity. It explains die success of die Peruvian government in the British financial market, the behavior of die bondholders towards risk, and how they interpreted die changing macroeconomic data as the debt was growing, near the default date. The use of die Principal Components method helps to avoid multicolinearity problems as well as extracting most of the information from the different aggregate variables.