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

by Robert Whitaker

  * A meridian is any imaginary north-south line encircling the globe and passing through the poles.

  * He determined that a degree was sixty-eight Italian miles, which was roughly equivalent to sixty-three English miles.

  * In this process, a side from the first triangle—its length having been mathematically calculated—serves as a side of the second one. As a result, only the first baseline in the grid needs to be physically measured. All of the other distances can be determined mathematically based on the angles of the triangles.

  * In other words, the distance from the center of the earth to a pole would be greater than the distance from the earth’s center to the equator.

  * To calculate this effect, Newton imagined the centrifugal force exerted on a canal of fluid extending from the earth’s center to a pole and on a similar canal from the earth’s center to the equator. The canal extending to the equator would need to be longer and of greater weight in order to neutralize the increased centrifugal force on this column caused by the earth’s rotation.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Daughter of Peru

  MARÍA ISABEL DE JESUS GRAMESÓN was born on January 28, 1728, in Guayaquil, a port city 200 miles southwest of Quito. She was the second of four children, with two brothers and a younger sister, and she had the good fortune to be born to parents who enjoyed both wealth and political influence.

  Isabel’s mother, Josefa Pardo de Figueroa, came from a distinguished Spanish family, and she was a distant descendant of a Castilian king, Alfonso XI. Her colonial lineage was similarly impressive. Her ancestors had arrived in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the final years of the sixteenth century, which enabled her to proudly claim, with only a small degree of exaggeration, that she was one of the “daughters of the conquistadors.” As a nineteenth-century historian wrote, Josefa Pardo was “equipped with a considerable fortune” and rightfully seen as “one of the most gracious women of the Spanish colonies.” Two of her brothers were known throughout Peru. One, Pedro, was a bishop, and the other, José Augustín, was an accomplished writer who served a term as governor of the Cuzco province and was anointed the Marqués de Valleumbroso—an official title of nobility—by the Spanish Crown.

  Josefa’s marriage to Pedro Manuel Gramesón y Bruno in 1724 followed a common pattern for the time. Although the Pardos were part of the colonial elite, they were still Creoles—people of Spanish blood who had been born in the viceroyalty—and in eighteenth-century Peru, Creoles were rarely named to positions of high rank in the government.* For nearly two centuries, Spain had sent a steady stream of bureaucrats, drawn from the nobility or the military, to govern its South American colony, and prosperous Creoles, in order to maintain access to political power, had made a habit of marrying their daughters to the arriving officials or to Spaniards with good prospects for assuming a position of rank. Twenty-one-year-old Pedro Manuel Gramesón, a military man from Cadiz, Spain, had the latter credentials.

  As his last name revealed, Gramesón was of French ancestry. His father had been born in France but by routes unknown had come to serve as a captain in the Spanish military regiment that guarded King Philip V (who was also of French blood). Pedro followed his father into the military, and there he became acquainted with a nobleman, José de Armendáriz, the Marqués de Castelfuerte, who, in early 1724, was picked to be the viceroy of Peru, the top political post in the colony. Gramesón sailed with Armendáriz to the New World, and less than nine months later, he married Josefa Pardo. Much like his friendship with the viceroy, this was a union certain to serve him well. Wealthy Creole families like the Pardos provided their daughters with dowries that included land, jewels, slaves, and thousands of pesos in silver coins.

  The Gramesóns flourished in the years that followed. All of their four children survived the childhood scourges that struck down so many in colonial Peru, and Guayaquil provided both financial and military opportunities for Pedro. The port was a bustling town of 20,000, its economy fueled by import-export trade. Arriving boats dropped off such luxury European goods as wine, brandy, olive oil, and fine silk clothing, and departed with goods produced in coastal areas and in the Andean valleys—timber, cotton, woolen goods, bacon, hams, cheeses, and cocoa. Three forts defended the city, which had been sacked by marauding pirates in 1686 and 1709, and the “foreign company,” composed of men like Pedro Gramesón who were natives of Spain, was reported to have “the most splendid appearance among the whole militia.” Pedro quickly moved up in rank, and soon everyone who met him was certain to be informed that he was General Pedro Manuel Gramesón y Bruno.

  Although Guayaquil was a prosperous city, its swampy environs made it a somewhat unpleasant place to live. Insects and rats were a constant torment. The ground, one eighteenth-century writer noted, was of a “spongy chalk,” and “everywhere so level, that there is no declivity for carrying off the water, and therefore, on the first rain, it becomes one general slough.” Many of the town’s wealthier people viewed life in the Andes as preferable, and so, in 1733, when Armendáriz offered his old friend the chance to be the corregidor—or governor—of Otavalo, a township north of Quito, Gramesón jumped at the chance.

  A corregidor was an all-purpose government official whose functions ranged from justice of the peace to police chief. He sat on town councils, known as cabildos, throughout his district and generally kept his finger in everyone’s business. He also had an exclusive right to sell goods to los Indios, a monopoly in trade that could prove very lucrative. Pedro Gramesón fulfilled all the usual duties, and—according to a minor complaint that was filed against him—engaged in some trading that was supposed to be off limits to a corregidor. In 1734, he paid “300 loads of wheat” for a shipload of clothes from Castile, luxury goods that he then sold at a nice markup to his wealthy friends in Quito. As one of his peers remarked, Pedro Gramesón “didn’t let pass by any business that was favorable.”

  These early years were kind to Isabel as well. She and her siblings enjoyed every privilege. Her parents doted on her, and she was tended to by an Indian maid. Those who met young Isabel, one of her relatives would later write, remarked that “she was quite precocious and had a very lively and willful character.” But by the end of 1734, Isabel had reached the age when the life of a young girl in Peru underwent a profound change. The colonial elite whisked their six-year-old daughters off to convent schools, where they remained sequestered for the next six or seven years. There, they would be taught to be chaste and virtuous, and—at least in theory—to be a bit timid, too.

  The schooling that lay ahead for Isabel reflected cultural values at the heart of Peruvian society, which had a history of a most dramatic sort. The place of women in eighteenth-century Peru arose from a past rooted in the Christian Reconquest of Spain and Spain’s medieval world of knights.

  MOORS SWEPT INTO IBERIA in A.D. 711 and conquered most of it within seven years. However, they never gained a firm hold over the harsh plains northwest of Madrid. Soon Christian warriors, riding in from the Asturian mountains to the north and armed with swords, resettled the region. The society that formed here in the ninth and tenth centuries was a rough one. The thin soils would not easily support settled agricultural communities, where culture and education historically thrive. Instead, the terrain encouraged nomadic, pastoral pursuits, like the raising of sheep, which were tended to by rugged men on horseback. Warlords built castles perched on crags and organized legions of fighting men to protect their feudal estates.

  During the tenth century, this warring society coalesced into the Kingdom of Castile, which quickly began eyeing the prosperous Moorish states to the south. Militant priests filled the young men of Castile with fervor for a crusade against the infidels, while Castilian kings egged them on with promises of earthly rewards—those who fought and defeated the Moors would be rewarded with grants of land and titles of nobility. The warrior on horseback could hope to live off the wealth of the land, with the subjugated Moors and peasants supplying goods and tri
bute.

  The first major Moorish city to fall was Toledo, in 1085. A decade later, the most famous Christian hero of the Middle Ages, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as El Cid, conquered Valencia and the surrounding environs. With each new victory, ballads were sung celebrating the feats of these triumphant knights, and soon Castile had come to cherish the notion of the hidalgo, a man of great courage and honor who lived for war, and who achieved wealth and nobility through his feats on the battlefield. The man who toiled the fields, who lived by the sweat of his labor, was a man who deserved to be a vassal. In 1248, Castile sacked Seville, near the southern coast, which left Granada as the only Moorish enclave in Iberia.

  Although the Castilians may have reviled the Moors’ religion, they nevertheless adopted many Moorish customs. They studied the Moors’ architecture, their city-planning methods, and their commerce. The Castilians took to sitting on the floor and dressing in long flowing robes. Most notable of all, they adopted Moorish attitudes toward women. Arab poets employed fanciful metaphors to tell of a woman’s beauty and of the romantic love that such beauty could evoke in a man, and soon these conventions appeared in Castilian ballads. A woman’s eyes were “bright as the stars above,” her teeth “white as pearls”—these were the features of a heavenly creature who made men swoon. At the same time, she was a temptress who needed to be removed from society. The Castilians, a historian later wrote, “kept their women sequestered like the Arabs. A duenna or elderly chaperon guarded the women of a household much as if they formed a harem.”

  After the fall of Seville, Christians, Arabs, and Jews lived side by side in Spain in relative tranquillity for two centuries, a pluralistic society unlike any other in Europe. Ferdinand III, who ruled over Castile in the thirteenth century, called himself the King of Three Religions. The reawakening of a crusade against the Moors began in 1469 with the marriage of Isabella, heiress to the throne of Castile, to Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon, a Christian kingdom in the northeast corner of Iberia. Isabella was a zealous Catholic, and she was intent on purging her dominion of nonbelievers. In 1478, she and Ferdinand obtained a papal bull allowing them to establish an inquisition into heresy, which initially focused on identifying Jews who were “false converts” to Christianity. The first such “heretics” were burned at the stake in 1481, and a year later, Isabella and Ferdinand launched a full-scale effort to conquer Granada, which was still a Moorish stronghold. Unlike during the earlier era of conquest, in which private militias did most of the fighting, the monarchy now raised a public army to wage war. When Granada fell in 1492, Castilians hailed it as the “most distinguished and blessed day there has ever been in Spain.”

  The seven centuries of Reconquest, which had come to a triumphant end, had molded the Spanish character into a distinct type. Other European countries at this time were moving out of the Middle Ages and into a period of intellectual renaissance. The merchant and the scholar were the types that would lead France, England, Holland, and other societies into the Enlightenment. But in Spain, a militant Christianity had taken hold and produced a society that celebrated the soldier who fought the infidels and then lived off the spoils of his victory. And it was at that moment that all of Spain fell under the spell of “romances of chivalry,” tales that reminded them of their great triumph over the Moors and instilled in them a yearning to do it again.

  THE PRINTING PRESS appeared in Spain in 1473, and soon the verse narratives and ballads of an earlier time evolved into wildly inventive novels of errant knights who saved Christian kingdoms from pagan hordes. The first such tale, Tirant lo Blanch, was published in 1490, and over the next century, Spanish and Portuguese writers produced more than forty such narratives. The most popular of all the storied knights was Amadís de Gaula, who appeared on the literary scene in 1508 and whose exploits—and those of his descendants—were subsequently celebrated in a dozen novels.

  The Amadís romances, one twentieth-century scholar has observed, “mirrored with sufficient fidelity the Spanish gentleman’s dream of himself.” The plots were all much the same, Amadís and the other knights regularly marching off to magical lands of a sort that had once appeared on medieval Christian maps. The foreign countries were inhabited by dog-faced monsters, serpents that had human feet, and fighting Amazon women who lived in a land called California. There were giants, centaurs, lions, and dragons to be seen and mountains of gold and silver to be found. Amadís and the other knights of Christendom typically went into battle against great odds, a handful of men against armies of thousands. During the ensuing clashes, the knights, who were often wounded but rarely died, would attack with such ferocity that the ground would turn crimson, littered at every turn with the severed heads and limbs of the vanquished.

  Although the knights were fearless and brutal in battle, they were of the most delicate sort when it came to matters of love. Knights in a faraway land were constantly heartsick over beautiful maidens back home, who were locked away in castles. So great was their mutual passion that should a knight return and appear at his maiden’s window, her honor would be at great peril. How could she resist him? Yet the virtuous woman would find a way to remain in her chamber, offering her knight only a hand to kiss, for it was essential that she preserve her honor and remain a virgin until marriage. A similar chastity was not expected of the knight, however. He was quite adept at luring lower-class women into his bed, and in his travels abroad, he regularly took time out from his fighting to dally with the ladies. A knight, the writers made clear, was skilled at the art of seduction.

  While the romances were fanciful in the extreme, they were presented to the public as historical novels, and readers often thought of them as true. As one sixteenth-century priest wrote, the books had to be factual, “for our rulers would not commit so great a crime as to allow falsehoods to be spread abroad.” Authors exploited this naiveté by calling their romances “chronicles,” often claiming that that they had simply rediscovered old handwritten texts recording past crusades. Tirant lo Blanch employed this device, as did the Chronicle of Don Roderick, which was sold as a “history” of the Moorish invasion of Spain.

  This was the imaginative world that Spaniards inhabited in the early 1500s, and thus it was, their minds feverish with such fantasies, that they set off to conquer the New World.

  THE SPANISH CONQUISTADORS came from the same class of men that had waged the Reconquest. Many were poor, hailing from the harsh plains of Castile. In the first twenty-five years after Columbus’s 1492 voyage, they established control over Hispaniola and Cuba, explored most of the islands in the West Indies, and crossed over the Panama isthmus to the Pacific Ocean. And everywhere they went, they queried natives about where to find the mythical lands they had read about. Mexico was whispered to be such a place, and in 1518, those on an exploratory voyage from Cuba to Yucatán returned with thrilling news. “We went along the coast where we found a beautiful tower on a point said to be inhabited by women who live without men,” reported a priest, Juan Diaz. “It is believed that they are a race of Amazons.”

  This report stirred the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, to enter into a contract with Hernando Cortés for the conquest of Mexico. Velázquez warned Cortés to expect the fantastic, “because it is said that there are people with large, broad ears and others with faces like dogs.” He also directed Cortés to find out “where and in what direction are the Amazons.”

  Cortés sailed from Cuba with 600 men, sixteen horses, thirteen muskets, and one cannon—a small contingent to conquer an empire. After landing on the coast at a site he christened Villa Rica de Vera Cruz, Cortés took a page from the tales of knighthood and burned all his ships but one, which he offered to anyone who wanted to turn back. “If there be any so craven as to shrink from sharing the dangers of our glorious enterprise,” he told them, “let them go home, in God’s name. They can tell there how they deserted their commander and their comrades, and patient wait till we return loaded with spoils of the Aztecs.”


  Cortés and his men were Amadís knights on the march. Their adventure soon unfolded like the plots in the novels they read. As they neared the central plateau of Mexico, Aztecs greeted them with glittering gifts from their ruler, Montezuma. The goods were meant as bribes—the Aztecs hoped that the Spaniards would take them and leave—but the treasures simply hastened Cortés’s march. He demanded to see Montezuma, and on November 8, 1519, he and his men were escorted along a great causeway into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which was built, in the manner of a fairy tale, upon islands in Lake Texcoco. “We were amazed,” marveled Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier in Cortés’s army, in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain. “We said that it was like the enchanted things related in the Book of Amadis because of the huge towers, temples and buildings rising from the water and all of masonry. Some of the soldiers even asked whether the things we saw were not a dream.”

  Within three years, the men of Castile had defeated the Aztecs, and while they were disappointed in the amount of gold and silver to be had, they took the place of the Aztecs as ruling overlords of Mexico. The legal method that the Spanish Crown had established for rewarding conquistadors was known as the encomienda system. A native village or group of villages would be “commended” to the care of an individual Spaniard, who was obligated to protect the inhabitants and bring in a priest to convert them to Catholicism. In return, the governing Spaniard, who was known as an encomendero, was authorized to collect a “tribute” from the Indians in the form of food, goods, clothing, and labor. Cortés became the master of 23,000 Indian families, while others in his army were awarded encomiendas of 2,000 households.

  The conquest of Mexico inspired Spaniards to new heights of fancy. While the Amazon women first spotted on the Yucatán coast had never materialized, their location was now better known. A tribe of women warriors, Cortés explained in a letter to King Charles V, was living on an island further west, where “at given times men from the mainland visit them; if they conceive, they keep the female children to which they give birth, but the males they throw away.” There were also rumors circulating of an “otro Mexico” waiting to be discovered south of Panama, this one said to be even richer in gold and silver. The people there, the Spaniards believed, “eat and drink out of gold vessels.”