Most of the others in the crew were professionals as well. The surgeon Jean Senièrgues would attend to the team’s medical needs, ready to bleed and purge at the first sign of sickness. Jean Verguin was a naval engineer and draftsman expected to draw maps. The watchmaker Hugo would be responsible for the care and maintenance of the scientific instruments, while Morainville, an engineer, would help build the observatories for their celestial measurements. The final two members of the expedition were younger men who would be general assistants: Couplet and Jean Godin des Odonais. Couplet was the nephew of the academy’s treasurer, Nicolas Couplet, and it was rumored that his uncle had twisted an arm or two to get him on the expedition. As for Jean Godin, he was Louis’s twenty-one-year-old cousin, and the minute he had heard about the expedition, he had hurried to Paris to volunteer.
The son of Amand Godin and Anne Fouquet, Jean was born on July 5, 1713, in Saint Amand, a village in the central region of France about 165 miles south of Paris. He was the seventh of eleven children, but only four of his siblings—two brothers and two sisters—survived past infancy. Jean’s family was fairly prosperous. Amand was an attorney, and he also owned a property, Odonais, in the parish of Charenton, which provided Jean with the descriptive name—“des Odonais”—listed on the expedition’s travel documents. The countryside around Saint Amand was quite beautiful, the river Cher flowing through the fertile fields, and Jean would spend hours walking here, lost in his thoughts. He was “born a traveler,” a relative later wrote. “As a child, he dreamed of far-off places.”
He would be paired with Couplet on the expedition. Their job would be to carry the survey chains and do the advance mapping that triangulation required. He and Couplet would be expected to travel ahead of the main group to identify the best geographical sites for establishing a triangulation point. Jean, as a nineteenth-century French historian noted, also planned to “study at their source some of the lesser-known languages of the New World.” Upon his return to France, Jean hoped to publish a grammar on the New World idioms, establishing himself as an intellectual in his own right. He already felt the sting that comes from standing in the shadow of a famous relative, and—as his behavior on the expedition would later reveal—he wanted to be known as something more than just the cousin of a famous Parisian mathematician.
But on this day, those were half-formed ambitions. Jean had talked his way onto the voyage for the same reason that any young man would: He smelled adventure. He and the others would be the first group of foreigners to be allowed to travel to the interior of Peru, a colony that had stirred European curiosity for 200 years.
SPAIN HAD SOUGHT to keep the rest of Europe in the dark about its new lands almost from the moment of their discovery. By 1504, it had established a house of trade, the Casa de Contratación, to oversee all voyages to the New World. No one could ship goods or go there without the consent of the Casa. After Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas revealed the mineral riches of South America, Spain formally decreed that no foreigner could enter its colonies. To put teeth into this law, Spain later declared that helping a foreigner enter Peru was a crime punishable by death.
As New World silver and gold flowed into Spain in the sixteenth century, France and the other European powers looked on with envy. What particularly galled them was that it was their uncouth neighbor to the south that had built this world empire. “By the abundant treasure of that country (Peru),” Sir Walter Raleigh complained, “the Spanish King vexeth all the Princes of Europe, and is become in a few years from a poor King of Castile the greatest monarch of this part of the world.” French, English, and Dutch pirates regularly attacked Spanish ships in the colonial period, and occasionally they attacked Peruvian ports as well, which prompted Spain to further withdraw from the rest of Europe.
Ironically, it was a book by a Spanish priest, Bartolomé de Las Casas, that provided Europe with reason to season its envy with scorn. Until Las Casas published A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1542, the story of Spain’s conquest had been written by chroniclers who had celebrated the conquistadors’ feats as heroic, surpassing in glory even those of the Castilian knights of old. Bernal Díaz del Castillo glorified Cortés’s triumph over the Aztecs in this way, and these early histories became known throughout Europe. But Las Casas, who went to the New World in 1502, saw things through a different prism. In his account, he likened the conquistadors to “Moorish barbarians” who, like “ravening wolves among gentle lambs,” slaughtered Indians with abandon.
Hoping that his book would lead Spain to pass laws protecting the natives, Las Casas attacked all elements of the conquest. The encomienda system, he wrote, was “a moral pestilence which daily consumes these people.” He said that the Requierimiento, the formal document of conquest, was so absurd that he did not know whether to laugh or cry. And in his book, he described one graphic episode after another of Indians being killed, raped, and enslaved. Francisco Pizarro and his men—according to the testimony of an eyewitness who had told his story to Las Casas—were the worst brutes of all:
I testify that I saw with my own eyes Spaniards cutting off the hands, noses and ears of local people, both men and women, simply for the fun of it, and that this happened time and again in various places throughout the region. On several occasions I also saw them set dogs on the people, many being torn to pieces in this fashion, and they also burned down houses and even whole settlements, too numerous to count. It is also the case that they tore babes and sucklings from the mother’s breast and played games with them, seeing who could throw them the farthest.
While much of what Las Casas wrote was true, historians have noted that he also employed exaggerated rhetoric—such as the tale of baby tossing—to make his point. Las Casas hoped that his polemical book would stir reform in the colonies, but it served primarily to bring a flood of international hatred down upon his country. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies was immediately translated into every major European language. The ghoulish engravings of a Protestant Flemish artist, Theodore de Bry, which accompanied the translations, deepened the image of Spanish cruelty. He drew scenes of pregnant Indian women being thrown into pits and impaled, of Indian babies being roasted alive, and of dogs tearing apart the severed limbs of those so slaughtered.
After the publication of Las Casas’s book, Spain redoubled its efforts to build a wall that would separate it and its colonies from Europe. In 1551, the Spanish Inquisition published its first Index of Forbidden Books, which was designed to keep reformist writings—like those of Las Casas—out of print. Anyone who dared to challenge biblical teachings or the Spanish monarchy risked being branded a heretic and burned at the stake. Seven years later, Spain banned all foreign books in Spanish translations. Violators of these laws could be put to death. In 1559, Spaniards studying in other European countries were ordered to come home, and those who returned from the colonies hoping to tell of their experiences were forbidden to publish a word.
Theodore de Bry’s depiction of the Spanish hunting Indians with dogs.
By permission of the British Library.
As a result of this censorship, the rest of Europe learned little about Peru or the rest of South America. Rumors, gossip, and the scattered writings of a handful of foreign traders were the primary sources of information, and these reports often encouraged the imagination to run wild.
One of the earliest travelogues was written by an Italian slave trader, Francesco Carletti. He returned from Peru in 1594 with tales of an amazing wilderness, reporting, for instance, that frogs and toads of “frightening size” were found in such quantity in Cartagena that people there were uncertain whether “they rain[ed] down from the sky” or whether they were “born when the water falls and touches that arid land.” Vampire bats liked to feast on a person’s fingers and ears; chiggers bored into the feet and nibbled on the flesh until they grew fat; and in the forests, Carletti wrote, there were “mandril cats” so smart that, to cross a river, they linked �
��themselves together by their tails” and swung from trees on one side of the river to the other.
Levinus Hulsius’s depiction of Sir Walter Raleigh’s headless men in Guiana (1599).
By permission of the British Library.
At this same time, the English explorer Sir Walter Raleigh returned with a report on the Guianas, where he had gone to search for El Dorado. This region, he said, was home to a fierce tribe of headless men, known as the Ewaiponoma, who had “eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts, and a long train of hair growing between their shoulders.” Sir Walter also had met a man named Juan Martinez who claimed to have lived in El Dorado for seven months. This fabled empire, Raleigh wrote, was located around a salt lake 200 leagues (600 miles) in length and was graced by a city of stone, named Manoa, so grand in size that it “far exceeds any of the world, at least so much of it as is known to the Spanish nation.”
As a result of such writings, European cartographers depicted colonial South America in ways that recalled medieval maps of old. One map drawn in the sixteenth century featured a landscape filled with minotaurs, headless men with eyes in their chests, and bipedal creatures with ratlike heads. While many of these more fanciful items had disappeared from maps by the early 1700s when La Condamine and the others were preparing their voyage, El Dorado and the Amazon women were still present. The great lake described by Sir Walter Raleigh was called Lake Parima, and cartographers located it northeast of Río Negro as a body of water—on some maps—bigger than the Caspian Sea.
A seventeenth-century map depicting Lake Parima.
By John Ogilby (1671). Rucker Agee Map Collection of the Birmingham Alabama Public Library.
Accounts of Peruvian society, which were almost entirely based on life in the port cities of Lima, Guayaquil, and Cartagena, also left readers uncertain of where truth left off and exaggeration began. Peruvian merchants, Carletti wrote, piled treasures “of three and four hundred bars and ingots of silver” beneath their mattresses and spent “two hundred thousand escudos with greater security and ease than one of us buys a bit of salad.” Even the “common people live much at their ease,” reported a Frenchman, Acarete du Biscay, who slipped into the colony in 1658. “They always go dressed very fine, either in cloth of gold and silver, or in silk trimmed with gold and silver lace.”
The elite in Peru, the visitors said, busied themselves with the pageantry of society. There were fancy balls to attend and a steady calendar of religious festivals, bullfights, and military parades. At such public events, they noted, the men were ever ready to defend their sense of knightly honor, quick to display daggers or swords to anyone “that should oppose their pleasures or offend them.” In some cities in Peru, Biscay reported, sword pulling was so common that men “wear three or four buff-waistcoats one upon another, which are proof against the point of a sword, to secure themselves from private stabs.”
Nearly all of the visitors were quite taken by Peruvian women, entranced in particular by the mestizos and mulattos who were mistresses to the rich. In Lima, reported Pedro de León Portocarrero, a Portuguese trader who lived there in the early 1600s, such women liked to “display themselves strolling about in public” and had a ravenous “desire to satisfy their carnal appetites.” In 1714, the Frenchman Amadée Frezier similarly marveled at the lusty Peruvian women. They would sneak out from their homes at night under the cover of their veils for “immodest” purposes, he wrote, performing “the part which men do in France.” At societal events, he added, they favored risqué dresses that left their “breasts and shoulders half naked,” and they were pleased to field “proposals which a lover would not dare to make in France without incurring the indignation of a modest woman.” When it came to “matters of love,” Frezier concluded, Peruvians “yield to no nation.”
Readers of such literature could conclude only one thing: In the New World, everything was upside down. As one traveler quipped, South America appeared to be a place “where the rivers ran inland and the women urinated standing up.” The French explorers, however, were eager to sort out fact from fiction and planned to bring back “scientific” accounts of Peru. Existing travelogues, Bouguer declared, were from “persons who have never been induced to a strict examination of what they beheld.”
THE POLITICS that had led up to this moment, when Spain was finally going to lift the veil that it had thrown over its colony, dated back to 1700, when the long reign of the Hapsburg kings had come to an end. The last Hapsburg king of Spain, Charles II, was a sickly and haunted man—many in Europe considered him an inbred imbecile—and as he lay dying, childless, he had selected Philip of Anjou to be his successor. Philip was the great-grandson of Philip IV of Spain and the grandson of France’s Louis XIV, a Bourbon king. He had blood ties to both monarchies.
With a member of the Bourbon family on the Spanish throne, France seemed poised to gain coveted trading rights with Peru. It established a trading company, the Compagnie Royale de la Mer Pacifique, to carry out this commerce, and in 1701, Spain gave French ships permission to buy supplies in its colonial ports. However, the Council of the Indies, in Madrid, which governed colonial matters, privately seethed over this French influence, as did England and the Netherlands, which worried that the two Catholic countries were merging into a superpower. England and the Netherlands declared war, and when the War of the Spanish Succession finally came to an end in 1713 with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht, Spain and France were forced to agree to keep their countries separate. Philip V renounced any right he might have to the French throne upon the death of Louis XIV, and England was granted a commercial monopoly over the African slave trade to the New World.
After that, Philip V governed in a way that pleased Spanish isolationists. He refused to grant the French full trading privileges with Spain’s colonies, and shortly after Louis XIV died in 1715, the two countries even went to war. Philip’s embrace of the old guard in Spain also led him to pump new life into the Spanish Inquisition. During his reign, the Inquisition held 782 autos-da-fé, at which thousands of heretics were punished. This revival of medieval ways prompted Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, a reform-minded Benedictine monk, to bitterly complain that “while abroad there is progress in physics, anatomy, botany, geography and natural history, we break each other’s heads and drown our halls with howls.”
Indeed, in spite of Philip’s Bourbon bloodlines, the old dynamic still held sway in 1733, when the French Academy of Sciences decided to mount its expedition. The French wanted into Peru, and the Spanish wanted to keep them out. The mission, however, provided Louis XV with a sly way to break the stalemate.
There was no scientific reason that the French had to go precisely to the equator. A trip to their own colony, French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America, would get them close enough to zero degrees latitude to serve their purpose. Measuring an arc there would reveal whether a degree close to the equator was longer or shorter than one in France and thus reveal the earth’s shape. And certainly it would have been easier and quicker to complete this task in a French colony. La Condamine had even argued—with a “sharp voice,” Bouguer recalled—for going to Cayenne in French Guiana.* But La Condamine was naive about the political opportunity at hand, an opportunity that Count Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas, minister of the marine, eagerly laid out for the king. A scientific expedition, he told Louis XV in early 1734, would be above suspicion and yet it would enable France, as a French historian later wrote, “to study the country and bring back a detailed description.”
Properly briefed, Louis XV wrote his “dear uncle” on April 6, 1734, asking for permission for the French to travel to Peru. He assured Philip V that there was no reason for the Spanish to fret. His mapmakers would simply be making observations “which would be advantageous not only for the advancing of Science, but also very useful to commerce, by increasing the safety and ease of navigation.” How could his uncle stand in the way of such progress?
Phi
lip’s response showed that he had indeed been hoodwinked, at least in regard to the science. On August 14, 1734, he granted passports to the ten French scientists. He did so, he wrote, because the French were desirous of making astronomical observations that had to “be made at the Equator itself. … It is only on the coast of Peru that they may undertake [such observations] without undergoing great difficulties.” Knowing the precise shape of the earth, he added, would be “useful for navigation in general, and in particular, for the navigation of my subjects.” The French had successfully convinced Philip that the expedition would provide Spain with a practical benefit, even though such a claim was a stretch. While it was true that the expedition would enable cartographers to draw more precise maps, the improvement in accuracy would be modest—the French had already used updated triangulation techniques to develop a fairly reliable estimate of the earth’s circumference. The expedition was designed to answer a more abstract question, one of physics and gravitational forces, but Spain was unlikely to open the door to its colonies for such an abstruse end. However, the advancement of cartography and of the science of navigation were practical ends that every eighteenth-century European monarch desired, and in a letter dated August 20, 1734, Philip promised the French savants every possible support. They could borrow funds from Peru’s treasury, and he would advise his governors in Peru to “give them all of the assistance, favors and protection that they should require so that they may easily find housing, transportation, and mounts … and pay the just and ordinary prices without any obstacle whatsoever.” Philip, it seemed, was even going to protect the French from the price gouging that most travelers knew to expect.
The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon Page 6