The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon Read online

  The Mapmaker’s Wife

  Copyright © 2004 by Robert Whitaker

  Maps drawn by Ingrid Aue

  Published by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016.

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Whitaker, Robert.

  The mapmaker’s wife : a true tale of love, murder, and survival in the Amazon / Robert Whitaker.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-7867-4184-7

  1.Godin des Odonais, Isabelle de Grandmaison, b. 1728?—Travel—Amazon River Region. 2.Amazon River Region—Description and travel. 3.Godin des Odonais, Jean, 1712-1792. 4.Mission g,eod,esique (France) 5.Scientific expeditions—Ecuador—History—18th century. 6.Ecuador—Biography. 7.France—Biography. I. Title.

  F2546.W46 2004

  981'.1032'092—dc22

  Book design by Lovedog Studio

  Set in Granjon

  First Edition

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10—06 05 04

  To my wife, Andrea, who shared with me our first adventure in Ecuador

  and

  To Ignacio Alvarez, who long ago taught me to love all things Spanish

  THIS IS CONSECRATED to the memory of Isabel Godin des Odonais, which can never be too honored, who alone and abandoned, traversed so courageously the vast expanse of the American continent buoyed up by her greatness of spirit and a martyr to her duty.

  —Charles Bonaparte, nineteenth-century naturalist, upon naming a South American field bird Champelix godina

  Contents

  Preface

  1A Sunday in 1769

  2Not Quite Round

  3A Daughter of Peru

  4The Mapmakers

  5Voyage to Quito

  6Measuring the Baseline

  7High-Altitude Science

  8Death in the Afternoon

  9Marriage in Quito

  10Down the Amazon

  11A Continent Apart

  12Lost on the Bobonaza

  13Into the Jungle

  14Deliverance

  15Saint Amand

  Characters

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Preface

  MORE THAN TWENTY-FIVE years ago, I fell in love with Ecuador. I had recently graduated from college, and I lived for a time in a remote village called Las Manchas on Ecuador’s coast. My girlfriend and I built a bamboo hut on stilts on the outskirts of the village, next to a river emptying into the Pacific, and hoped that we could stay there forever.

  We couldn’t, of course—the real world got in the way—but I always longed to go back. Researching this book provided me with that opportunity, and I quickly fell in love all over again with that mesmerizing country and its wonderful people.

  In many ways, the Charles-Marie de La Condamine expedition—which provides the backdrop for this story of Isabel Godin’s adventure in the Amazon—occupies a central place in South American history, akin to the exploration of North America by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Over the course of eight years (1736–1744), La Condamine and eleven others—nine Frenchmen and two Spaniards—collectively wandered far and wide across the continent, studying plants and minerals, climbing to altitudes in the Andes never before reached by Europeans, mapping the Amazon River, and, most important of all, precisely measuring the distance of one degree of latitude at the equator. This last effort was undertaken to answer questions about the earth’s precise shape and to resolve a heated debate—between Newtonians and Cartesians—over the physics that governed the universe. Along the way, several of the expedition members died, one was murdered, and another—Jean Godin—married a Peruvian woman, Isabel Gramesón. Theirs became a legendary story of love and survival.

  For reasons that are difficult to understand, this story has never gotten its due in history books. For the most part, the story of the La Condamine expedition has been relegated to chapter status in books on the exploration of South America, and as that brief story has been told and retold, the true history of the La Condamine expedition has become somewhat lost and muddied. Dialogue now and then has been imagined, events separated by years have been folded together for dramatic purposes, and a few incidents have been invented out of whole cloth. Lore has replaced history, so to speak, and when it comes to Isabel Godin, the basic chapter-length story that has been told over the past two centuries is simply mistaken in its most critical details.

  The source material that writers have always relied upon for Isabel’s story is a 1773 letter written by her husband Jean Godin, and while that letter is invaluable, he did not have access to information gathered by Peruvian authorities of witnesses to the event. That cache of documents fleshes out her story in a most vivid and surprising way.

  To write this book, I relied on a variety of original sources. Journals by four members of the expedition, La Condamine, Pierre Bouguer, and the two Spaniards, Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, provide vivid eyewitness accounts of their eight years in South America. In some instances, I obtained eighteenth-century English translations of their work. In others, I had French documents translated into English. I also found much useful information in various eighteenth-century articles published by the French Academy of Sciences in its yearly journal, Histoire et memoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences.

  The story of Jean and Isabel Godin is also well documented, even if much of the material lay forgotten in obscure journals. Jean Godin’s correspondence is one such source. In addition to his 1773 letter to La Condamine, he wrote frequently to friends and to King Louis XV’s ministers while living in French Guiana from 1750 to 1773. Much of this material was published in 1896 by a French historian, Henri Froidevaux, in the Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris. The testimonies gathered by Peruvian authorities in their 1770 investigation of the “Isabel Godin tragedy” were published in 1970 in an Ecuadorian journal, Archivo Nacional de Historia. The translations of those documents are mine.

  I am also indebted to historians in Spain, France, and Ecuador who have done archival research on the expedition. In particular, I relied on research by an Ecuadorian scholar, Carlos Ortiz Arellano, for biographical information about Isabel Godin’s early life and her family. It was through his writings, moreover, that I was alerted to the historical documents published in Ecuador’s Archivo Nacional de Historia.

  Finally, in order to flesh out this history, I retraced Isabel Godin’s journey in the upper Amazon, and did so in October, the month that she began her journey. In that manner, I hoped to obtain a better sense of the landscape and of the fears that this wilderness can provoke. I went by bicycle from her hometown of Riobamba to Puyo at the base of the Andes, and then by dugout canoe from Canelos to Andoas. That experience was memorable in
many ways, and it was one that left me ever more in awe of Isabel Godin.

  —Robert Whitaker

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Sunday in 1769

  TODAY THE ECUADORIAN VILLAGE of Cajabamba, which is about 110 miles south of Quito, is a place of little note. The Andean town stretches for a mile or so along the Pan American Highway, and most of the activity in the village centers on the bus stop, where vendors are lined up selling a mix of fruit, corn-on-the-cob, soup, and roasted meats. Tourists passing this way, if armed with a particularly good guidebook, might pause just long enough to scan a hillside on the north side of town, searching for a scar left by the great earthquake of 1797, which sent a flow of mud down upon the adobe homes below and killed thousands. At that time, this was a very different place. More than 16,000 people lived here, and Riobamba—as it was then called—was one of the most graceful cities in colonial Peru, home to musicians, artists, and wealthy landowners. But after the earthquake, the survivors picked up and rebuilt their town thirteen miles to the northeast, and old Riobamba gradually faded from memory. All that physically remains of the prosperous colonial city are a few ruins on the west side of Cajabamba.

  However, there is one other faint echo of the past that can be found in Cajabamba. From the center of town, next to where the buses idle and the vendors linger, one can look up a long street heading east up a hill and spot a small statue. It sits in front of a school, a gold-painted bust of a rather stern-looking woman. The monument is in disrepair—the stone base is marred by graffiti, the gold paint is chipped and flaked, and the inscription is not quite readable—and few people in Cajabamba can say who the lady looking out over their town is or why she might have deserved a statue. However, in the late eighteenth century, the story of Isabel Godin became so well known that it left all of Europe spellbound. The statue was erected at the site of her colonial home, and thus it would have been from here, on the morning of October 1, 1769, that she began her most remarkable journey.

  On that day, which was a Sunday, the dusty streets of Riobamba began to stir at an unusually early hour. Most mornings the town awoke slowly, the villagers waiting for the equatorial sun to chase away the nighttime chill. But this day was different. From the moment that dawn broke, people began coming out of their adobe homes, and soon many were lining up along the street that led north out of town. The wealthier women had even dressed up for the occasion, picking out their finest silk clothing to wear, and were gathered in small groups, whispering in disbelief at what was about to pass.

  Isabel Godin was heading off into the Amazon.

  Everyone understood her reason for going. She hoped to rejoin her husband, Jean, who was living on the northern coast of South America, in French Guiana. He had been a member of a French scientific expedition that had come to the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1736, Jean and the others hiking up and down the Andes for nearly eight years in search of an answer to a question so abstruse that few of the local people could grasp why they had come. Even so, the villagers of Riobamba had welcomed the French scientists into their midst, more so than any other community in the viceroyalty, and after the expedition had come to an end, Isabel and Jean had lived for a time—and happily so—in Riobamba. But then, through the twists and turns of fate and the cruel politics of the time, they had become separated, Jean stranded in French Guiana and unable to return to the Spanish colony. They had now been apart for twenty years. But travel from the Andes across the Amazon? No woman had ever dared to make such a trek.

  Indeed, this was a journey that only a few men had ever made. When the most famous son of the town, Pedro Maldonado, had contemplated such a journey twenty-five years earlier, his family—as a friend of his later wrote—“had sought to detain him by any means.” Maldonado’s colleagues warned him that traveling this “unknown and dangerous route” was “imprudent and reckless,” and that they personally viewed such a journey with “panicked terror.” Missionaries who traveled through the upper Amazon helped fuel such fear, for inevitably they returned with tales of how hard and perilous such travel could be.

  The trip that lay ahead of Isabel stretched more than 3,000 miles. Even if all went well, it would take her six months. The route that she would follow east out of Riobamba would skirt around towering Mount Tungurahua, a volcano known to spit fire and rocks into the sky. The path would then disappear into a deep canyon and tumble quickly out of the Andes into a gloomy rain forest filled with the nerve-wracking cries of howler monkeys. From there, she would have to travel by dugout canoe down the turbulent headwaters of the Amazon, passing through a jungle that was home to clouds of insects and populated by any number of poisonous snakes and wild beasts, including the much feared American “tiger,” which was believed to have quite an appetite for human flesh. Other hazards, wrote one eighteenth-century explorer who had gone this route, included “naked savages” who “eat their prisoners.”

  In the center of town, the scene was growing ever more chaotic. Isabel had hired thirty-one Indian porters to transport her goods on the first leg of the journey, overland to the Rio Bobonaza, and they were busy packing a long line of mules. Isabel’s traveling party had grown, too. Her two brothers had decided to come along to assure her safety, and one had decided—in a burst of questionable judgment—to bring along his eldest son, figuring that this would provide an opportunity to take him to Europe, where he could get a better education. Rumors of her impending trek had also spread far beyond Riobamba and had brought two strangers to her door, a French doctor and his traveling companion. They had been making their way along the Peruvian coast and now saw a trip across the Amazon as a more intriguing way to return to France. Both groups were bringing along servants as well: Isabel and her two brothers had two maids and a Negro slave, while the French doctor had one personal attendant, bringing the total number in Isabel’s party to forty-one.

  Isabel had been advised to travel as lightly as possible—advice that she found difficult to heed. There was the gear that they needed for the journey—blankets, ponchos, and food—and her many possessions. She was, after all, now moving to France. Fancy dresses, skirts, shawls, gold-buckled shoes, lace-trimmed underwear, and silver-studded belts were just a start. Next came the silver bowls, the fine china, the gold rosaries, the earrings set with emeralds, and various fancy linens. One reed basket after another was filled to the brim, the mules braying as cinches were tightened and the baskets heaved onto their backs.

  Yet amid this confusion and bustle, Isabel appeared the picture of elegance and charm. She had stepped from her house that morning looking as though she were planning an evening at a lively dance. She wore a light-colored dress that billowed out from her waist, dainty cotton shoes, several silver bracelets, and two gold necklaces. Her appearance reflected who she was: a Riobamban woman who had lived all of her adult life in this village, rarely traveling far from home and enjoying the luxuries that came with being part of the elite class in colonial Peru. She was forty-one years old, a little plump, and the first streaks of white could be seen in her coal-black hair. She, like the other women of Riobamba, had simply dressed up for the occasion.

  At last, the train of pack mules began to move. The procession of animals and men headed slowly down the town’s main street, kicking up so much dust that Isabel’s friends, waving to her as she went by, held scarves to their mouths. The mules brayed, Isabel’s two brothers and several of the others rode horses, and Isabel drew up the rear. She was carried aloft in a sedan chair, the Indian porters having been given orders to jostle her as little as possible.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Not Quite Round

  THE CHAIN OF EVENTS that led Isabel Godin to that moment in 1769, when she set off on her trek into the Amazon, had begun more than thirty-five years earlier, in a place far from her Peruvian home. At that time, a debate was raging in European scientific circles, one that was roiling the august halls of the French Academy of Sciences. The English were squaring off with the French, young scientists in th
e academy were battling their mentors, and tempers were such that when Voltaire jumped into the fray, with his customary stinging wit and on the side of the English, his book was summarily burned and he was forced to flee Paris. The question at hand was a profound one: What was the precise size and shape of the earth? And even more important, what did that shape reveal about the laws of gravitation and planetary motion that governed the universe?

  Although the argument may have turned rancorous, the fact that this question had become the most pressing scientific topic of the day, one savored by the educated public in Paris and London, represented a coming-of-age for the Enlightenment. The roots of this transforming movement dated back more than a century to the writings of the English philosopher Francis Bacon and the French mathematician René Descartes. In his Discourse on Method, Descartes argued that in order to know the world, it was necessary to doubt all accepted wisdom. That was a heretical idea in 1637, for it meant questioning Christian doctrines about the natural world. Once the mind was emptied of such beliefs, Descartes wrote, insight could arise from “an unclouded and attentive mind, which springs from the light of reason.” Seventeenth-century intellectuals adopted this faith in reason as their operating manifesto, even though it brought them into conflict with religious authorities. This approach produced a steady flow of achievements in astronomy, mathematics, and mapmaking, and as it did so, the literate public in France and England developed a keen interest in science, which, in the early eighteenth century, blossomed into the Enlightenment.

  Paris, a city with a population of 500,000 in 1734, was at the epicenter of this revolution in thought. Upper-class men and women regularly gathered in sitting rooms to discuss art, philosophy, and science. Periodicals carried announcements of public lectures on these topics, which drew standing-room-only crowds. Lending libraries were created and stocked with books on science. As a historian of eighteenth-century France wrote, “Science was the true passion of the century at all literate levels of society, in every urban center of France, and even among the progressively minded gentleman-farmers.”