Those who have children sucking at their breast, which is the case of the generality, carry them on their shoulders, in order to have their arms at liberty; and when the infants are hungry, they give them the breast either under the arm or over the shoulders, without taking them from their backs. This will perhaps appear incredible; but their breasts, being left to grow without any pressure on them, often hang down to their very waist, and are not therefore difficult to turn over their shoulders for the convenience of the infant.
As was true throughout Peru, the bringing together of three races—whites, Negroes, and indigenous groups—had produced a multihued population in Cartagena, and the colonial city went to great lengths to identify the amount of “impure blood,” whether black or Indian, that tainted those who were not 100 percent white. The result was a very complicated caste system. When a white mated with a Negro, Ulloa and Juan reported, the child was deemed a mulatto, and it took several generations of marrying back into white families for the mulatto blood to be washed out. The offspring of a mulatto and a white was deemed to be a terceron, and if a terceron married a white, their children were considered quarterones. A mix of quarteron and white produced a quinteron, and the child of a quinteron and a white was considered to have made it all the way back to being a “Spaniard, free from all taint of the Negro race.” When a Negro married an Indian, their offspring were known as sambos, and when a quarteron married a terceron or a mulatto, their children were called salto atras, or “retrogrades, because, instead of advancing towards being whites, they have gone backwards towards the Negro race.” This was a racial ladder of many steps, and everyone knew where he or she stood on it, “so jealous of the order of their tribe or cast that if, through inadvertence, you call them by a degree lower than what they actually are, they are highly offended, never suffering themselves to be deprived of so valuable a gift of fortune.”
Daily life in Cartagena.
From Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional (1749).
Ulloa and Juan observed the wildlife of Cartagena with equal diligence. There were tigers, foxes, armadillos, lizards, monkeys, and colorful snakes to be described. At dusk, vampire bats flew in such great numbers that they covered the sky and made their way into homes, where “if they happen to find the foot of any one bare, they insinuate their tooth into a vein, with all the art of the most expert surgeon, sucking the blood till they are satiated.” The two Spaniards identified “four principle kinds” of mosquitoes that tormented the inhabitants of Cartagena, described the life cycle of a parasitic worm called the cobrilla that was about the “size of a coarse sewing thread,” and dwelled at great length upon the nigua, a flea that would pester them for the rest of their days in Peru. This insect liked to bury itself in “the legs, the soles of the feet or toes” and make its nest there, depositing its eggs and eating the host’s flesh for sustenance, all of which caused a “fiery itching.” Removing the insect and its nest often caused extreme pain, because sometimes “they penetrate even to the bone, and the pain, even after the foot is cleared of them, lasts till the flesh has filled up the cavities they had made.” To ward off infection, the wounds were “filled either with tobacco ashes, chewed tobacco, or snuff.”
Cartagena was only the first stop on their journey, but already Ulloa and Juan were proving to be keen observers and able writers, busily compiling notes for the first chapter of a travelogue that would, upon its publication in 1748, become a best-seller throughout Europe.
IT WAS NOT UNTIL early November that the French academicians obtained permission to depart for Cartagena. The governor of Santo Domingo, unable to provide them with a ship, at last allowed them to sail in a French vessel, the Vautour, captained by a Mr. Hericourt. On November 16, the two groups finally met, and while the French were initially a bit resentful of this intrusion into their expedition, the friendliness of the two Spaniards quickly put everyone at ease, La Condamine remarking that “the knowledge and the personal merit of these two officers showed the high level of the guards of the Spanish Navy.” With everyone together now, they debated the best way to proceed. Several in the group favored heading overland to Quito, a journey that would involve poling up the Magdalena River for 400 miles and then proceeding on mules through the Andes for another 500 miles. “Ordinary travelers” took nearly four months to make this trek, and La Condamine was adamantly opposed to this route. Their equipment and delicate instruments would all have to be repacked, and with the large amount of baggage they carried, the journey could be expected to take much longer than usual. All this, he said, would cause “great fatigue, time and expense.” The forceful La Condamine won this argument—indeed, he rarely lost such battles—and on November 24, they all boarded the Vautour for Porto Bello, where they would disembark in order to cross the Isthmus of Panama. Their group numbered twenty-six: Ulloa and Juan had two servants and the French now had twelve, the governor of Saint Domingue having provided them with five or six slaves.
Porto Bello was well known throughout the Spanish Empire as a dreadful place to visit. It was a hub for the Peruvian export trade, the market open forty days each year. All of the goods exported from Quito and points south in Peru came through this port, having been shipped up along the Pacific coast to Panama City and then packed across the isthmus by mule. The mule train would reach Porto Bello at the same time as a convoy of trading ships from Spain, the Galeones, arrived bearing luxury items to be imported into Peru. Tents filled with merchandise crowded the plaza mayor and slaves were sold; with so many traders in town, rent for a single house for the six weeks could fetch “four, five, six thousand crowns,” Ulloa and Juan reported. But the swampy port was also a hotbed of disease. Low mountains surrounded the town, blocking winds that might have refreshed the air or blown away the mosquitoes, and rain pounded down incessantly. The illness of Siam and “fever,” soon to become identified as malaria, often claimed the lives of half the crew of a visiting ship, earning Porto Bello the nickname “the tomb of Spaniards.”
As the Vautour neared the port on November 29, it encountered a storm that stirred all their misgivings. Gale winds tossed the ship about so fiercely that it was unable to enter the harbor, and the men had to wait until the following day to go ashore. Jussieu arrived with a fever, and several others fell sick during the next several days. Local bureaucrats also took to heart King Philip’s order that their baggage be closely inventoried. “These verifications were so precise,” La Condamine complained, “that we were unable to prevent the customs officials from discovering a metal mirror which formed part of a catoptrical telescope, which we feared the humidity in the air of Porto Bello might damage.” A scorpion’s sting deepened La Condamine’s foul mood. He treated the bite with a poultice of his own making, which, he reported, relieved the pain so well that it could replace “all of the ridiculous and disgusting remedies used in the country.”
The men were stranded in Porto Bello for nearly a month. The route across the isthmus to Panama City had been made impassable by rain—La Condamine called it “the worst road in the world.” Their only alternative was to travel up the Chagres River, and that required waiting for the governor of Panama to send them river-boats. They spent the time doing what experiments and good deeds they could. After Jussieu recovered from his fever, he provided medical care to the local populace; Godin and Bouguer measured the length of the seconds pendulum; and Ulloa, Juan, and Verguin mapped the town. But most days were gray and damp, so gloomy that even the two Spaniards concluded that the town was “cursed by nature.” The incessant croaking of frogs kept them awake all night, and in the morning, if it had rained, the streets would be so blanketed with toads that the men could barely walk “without treading on them.”
The vessels that arrived for them on December 22 were flat-bottomed barges known as chatas. Each had a cabin at its stern for the comfort of passengers, and a crew of “eighteen to twenty robust Negroes” manning the oars. The forty-three-mile
trip up the Chagres turned out to be an unexpected joy. For the first two days, the flow of the river was such that they could proceed by rowing, but then the river’s speed quickened and its depth lessened, so they poled their way along. The surrounding wilderness, Ulloa wrote, was so glorious that “the most fertile imagination of a painter can never equal the magnificence of the rural landscapes here drawn by the pencil of Nature.” Alligators sunned themselves on the riverbank, turtles floated by on drifting tree limbs, and everywhere they looked they could see the colorful plumage of peacocks, turtle-doves, and herons. Monkeys diverse in size and color swung from every tree, and each night, the boat’s crew would gather food from the forest for their supper, plucking pineapples from trees and hunting pheasants and peacocks. Monkey was also served, and this meal, Ulloa confessed, initially made some of the group uneasy:
When dead, [the monkeys] are scalded in order to take off the hair, whence the skin is contracted by the heat, and when thoroughly cleaned, looks perfectly white, and very greatly resembles a child of about two or three years of age, when crying. This resemblance is shocking to humanity, yet the scarcity of food in many parts of America renders the flesh of these creatures valuable, and not only the Negroes, but the Creoles and Europeans themselves, make no scruple of eating it.
As they ascended the Chagres, La Condamine mapped its winding route, and Jussieu, at every possible occasion, urged them to stop so that he could gather plant specimens. It took them five days to reach Cruces, a small village at the head of the river, and from there it was a short fifteen miles by mule to Panama City, where they arrived late in the afternoon on December 29. Here they spent the next seven weeks making arrangements for a boat to take them south to Peru, and except for the fact that La Condamine, Bouguer, and Godin continued to quarrel over money and plans for measuring the arc, the respite was welcome. All of the French members of the expedition studied Spanish, and the three academics performed various investigations “of the thermometer, the barometer, and variations of the magnetic needle,” La Condamine reported. Jussieu explored the local vegetation, going out alone on walks each day with a bag on his back to gather botanical specimens. “I see that this trip,” he wrote in a letter to his brothers on February 15, 1736, “which shall after all have but one (stated) purpose, will in fact collect knowledge of geographic, historical, mathematical, astronomical, botanical, medicinal, surgical and anatomical subjects, etc. As we go along we collect instructive reports, which shall make up a comprehensive and fascinating body of work.”
Along the Chagres River.
From Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional (1749).
Meanwhile, Jean Godin, Couplet, Verguin, and the other assistants, when not helping the academics with their studies, enjoyed being tourists. They sampled oysters and other regional delicacies, like iguana seasoned with red pepper and lime juice, a recipe that unfortunately failed to hide the “nauseous smell” of the reptile’s white meat. Several times they stood along the shore and watched Negro slaves dive for pearls in the bay. Ten or twenty of them would go out in a boat at a time, and with a rope tied around their waists, they would jump overboard with small weights to accelerate their sinking. They dove to depths approaching fifty feet, Ulloa discovered, and in order to make the most of each descent, the divers would put an oyster under the left arm, one in each hand, “and sometimes another in their mouth,” before rising to breathe. They went down time and again until their daily quota was filled, and all the while they had to be on the alert for sharks, octopuses, and huge stingrays that haunted the bay. The boat’s officer also kept an eye out for these marauders and would tug on the ropes at the first sight of one, but this scheme, Ulloa lamented, was often “ineffectual” in protecting the divers. More than one slave had lost an arm or a leg or his life to a shark, and several—or so Ulloa was told—had been killed by giant rays, a “fish,” it was said, that “wraps its fins round a man, or any other animal, that happens to come within its reach, and immediately squeezes it to death.”
They sailed from Panama City on February 22, having chartered the San Cristóbal for the 800-mile voyage down the coast. They were eager to be in Peru, and yet their plans for precisely how they would proceed when they arrived were still quite unsettled. The ongoing feud between the three academicians was now focused on whether they should attempt to do their arc measurements along the coast, which Bouguer and La Condamine favored, or in the Andes, as Godin desired. The San Cristóbal crossed the equator on March 8, and a day later, it dropped anchor in the bay of Manta. The expedition members should have been overjoyed—the snow-capped Andes were now visible in the distance—but the tension between the three leaders was so palpable that Senièrgues, in a letter to Bernard and Antoine de Jussieu, worried that the expedition was blowing apart:
Tomorrow we are to see if the terrain will be adequate for the measurement of a base. Mr. Godin does not agree and intends to leave for Guayaquil and from there go directly to Quito. Mr. de La Condamine already announced in front of everyone that if no one wanted to stay he would remain alone. If he feels this strongly about it, Mr. Bouguer will no doubt remain with him. Mr. Godin has not been speaking to them for some time now. They fight like cats and dogs and attack each other’s observations. It is not possible that they will remain together for the rest of this trip.
To investigate the coast, they traveled to Monte Christi, a small village about eight miles inland. They were put up by the locals in bamboo huts raised on stilts, La Condamine awaking that first night to the unsettling sight of a snake dangling overhead. After the expedition surveyed the surrounding terrain, Bouguer, on March 12, wrote a formal memorandum to Godin. If they were to do their survey work here, he argued, it would save them the time and expense of transporting their gear from Guayaquil to Quito, which would require hiring more than 100 mules. It would also be “easier to provide for the subsistence of our company” along the coast, he wrote. Nor should it matter that King Philip was expecting them to do their work around Quito. Spain would be well served by their staying here: “I can even dare to add that it is within [the king’s] interest that our operations be carried out in the indicated place … because, in fact, we cannot conclude our work near the sea without drawing up a map which Navigators shall find invaluable.”
Although there might have been much to recommend Bouguer’s proposal, Godin did not want to discuss it. He was the leader of this expedition, Spain was expecting them to do their work around Quito, and that was that. Besides, Ulloa and Juan had explored the terrain, and they did not see the same opportunity that Bouguer did. The landscape around Manta, they wrote, was “extremely mountainous and almost covered with prodigious trees,” which made “any geometrical operations … impractical there.”
The leaders of the group were at loggerheads, and yet at the last moment, they resolved the matter in a way that at least held open the possibility of a later reconciliation. On March 13, everyone but La Condamine and Bouguer—and their personal servants—boarded the San Cristóbal, which was newly supplied with food and water. They would continue along the coast to Guayaquil and then travel inland north to Quito. La Condamine and Bouguer, having lost this particular battle, would conduct some experiments along the coast and then make their way to Quito. The bitterness of the moment, they all hoped, could be forgotten once they had some time apart, and not even Ulloa and Juan stopped to think about what else La Condamine and Bouguer might be accomplishing by staying behind. The two French academicians had barely stepped into Peru, and yet, once the San Cristóbal set sail, they had already freed themselves from their Spanish minders, a precedent for traveling about the colony with independence.
In anticipation of a lunar eclipse on March 26, La Condamine and Bouguer quickly built a makeshift observatory on the outskirts of Monte Christi. The event would provide them with a celestial timepiece, one much easier to use than Jupiter’s satellites, enabling them to fix the longitude “of all
this coast, the most westerly of South America.” Skies were clear that night and both were elated to have made such “an extremely important observation,” Bouguer wrote. They now knew that Monte Christi was fourteen leagues west of the meridian at Panama City, and that the nearby Cape of Saint Lorenzo was four leagues further west. When these data reached France, they enabled cartographers to draw the South American continent with much greater accuracy than ever before.
Over the next few weeks, La Condamine and Bouguer made their way north along the coast, traveling by horse along the beach. They stopped in several villages—Puerto Viejo, Charapoto, and Canow—and learned about the local folklore. Centuries ago, they were told, the people living in this region had worshipped “an emerald the size of an ostrich egg,” which was kept in a temple. When the Spanish arrived, the natives had hidden the precious stone, and they had remained mum about it ever since. Their silence, Bouguer observed, was wise, for if the Spanish had ever been able to find the source of the emeralds, the Indians would have immediately been put to work digging for more, a toil “of labour painful to excess, which they alone would bear the weight, and with but little portion of the profits.”
In early April, La Condamine and Bouguer set up camp along the Rio Jama, just a few miles south of the equator. Here Bouguer spent several weeks studying the refractory properties of the atmosphere, which he had been investigating ever since reaching Petit Goave. He planned to make similar studies once he reached Quito, enabling him to answer a critical question: Was refraction—which altered the apparent position of stars—more or less pronounced at higher altitudes? This difference would have to be factored into their arc-measuring calculations. The bitter feelings of Manta had definitely subsided, and on April 23, Bouguer decided that it was time to turn back. He had finished his refraction studies, and the rigors of traveling along the coast had worn him out. He found the heat oppressive, the insects a “plague,” and he had even grown tired of the birds in the forest, which, to his ear, produced a “discordant stunning noise.” He would hurry on to Guayaquil and try to catch Godin and the others.
The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon Page 8