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

by Robert Whitaker

  With the wind constantly blowing their rods askew, it took the French academicians twenty-six days of dawn-to-dusk labor to measure the baseline. Their results, however, were phenomenal. The two groups’ conclusions varied by only three inches across a distance of nearly eight miles, and so they split the difference: Their baseline was 6272.656 toises long. They returned to Quito on December 5, confident that they had done this all-important first measurement well.

  A panoramic view of the plain of Yaruqui.

  From Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi à l’équateur (1751).

  THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD, everyone in Quito was keeping up with the progress of the French expedition, even though they were not quite sure what the visitors were up to. Their presence even stirred a passing fancy for things French. Ever since Spain had come under the rule of a Bourbon king, the elite in Quito, influenced by a steady stream of Crown-appointed administrators who came to the town, had come to think of French customs as superior to their own, and now, with the French scientists nearby, the wealthy residents of Quito could more easily imagine being part of that elegant world. The women practiced their curtsies and memorized a few French phrases, and, according to one account of the times, no party was complete unless the host could provide a bottle of French wine.

  Pedro Gramesón and his family became personally acquainted with the French mapmakers. The general spoke passable French, having learned it from his father, and his house, one Ecuadorian historian has noted, “was always open for all the French men.” In fact, he could boast that his brother-in-law had played a small role in making the expedition happen. When the French had first proposed it to King Philip V, Spain’s Council of the Indies, which oversaw all colonial matters, had sought advice from several notables in Peru, one of whom was José Augustín Pardo de Figueroa, the Marqués de Valleumbroso. Pardo had a keen interest in science, and he had given his whole-hearted approval. He particularly liked the idea that two Spaniards would be assigned to this expedition, although not because they would keep tabs on the French. Instead, he saw their presence as a way that Spain could participate in this endeavor and learn “the practice of astronomy and trigonometry.” After the academicians had arrived, Pardo and La Condamine had quickly become friends, La Condamine writing in his diary of how impressed he was “by his [Pardo’s] knowledge and how well read he was.” There were other ties as well that brought the Gramesóns closer to the expedition. The Gramesóns and Jean Godin’s family shared mutual close friends, the Pelletiers from Lignieres, a village near Saint Amand. Members of the Pelletier clan living in Cadiz, Spain, shared business interests with the Gramesóns there, while in France the Pelletiers and the Godins had known each other for at least three generations. The connection may have been a distant one, but it made Jean Godin feel welcome at the Gramesóns, and he became a regular guest.

  Although Isabel was still in a convent school, she heard all about the French men from her father and through other gossip that filtered into the cloister. The school had not turned out to be such a dismal place. She and the other girls had learned to read and write, and they all enjoyed singing in the choir. Occasionally, the nuns even hosted small fiestas, having musicians and singers in to entertain. And every day, visitors were allowed into the convent parlor to call on the girls, enabling them to keep up with all that went on in Quito. Often they wondered whether it was true, as had been whispered, that the French men had shown the women of Quito a Parisian dance step or two. That was a deliciously scandalous thought, and it naturally caught Isabel’s fancy. She had particular reason to be fascinated by this world—her grandfather, after all, was French, and her family personally knew the scientists—and this interest was starting to blossom into an unusual ambition for a Peruvian girl. She had yet to turn nine years old, but—as would later become evident—she had already begun to dream of one day seeing France for herself.

  * A plumb line points to the center of the earth, and thus the French academicians could move their sawhorses up or down along a vertical axis.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  High-Altitude Science

  WITH THE BASELINE MEASURED, the French academicians thought that they could complete their mission within eighteen months. Bouguer was even more optimistic. He believed that they might finish by the end of 1737, and he wrote to his colleagues in Paris that he now had “hope of seeing France once more.” But in January of 1737, the French academicians began to realize that they were being overly optimistic, their efforts certain to be delayed by a lack of money, the upside-down world of colonial politics, and their own internal squabbling.

  Although it was now twenty months since they had left La Rochelle, they had yet to receive any letters from France. Nearly everyone had sold personal goods to keep the expedition going—even a telescope had been peddled—but in the absence of any new letter of credit, they were, as a group, once again nearly broke. The Peruvian viceroy, the Marqués de Villagarcía, had denied Louis Godin’s request for an advance beyond the 4,000 pesos already given to the expedition. To further complicate matters, Alsedo was no longer the president of the Quito Audiencia. He had been replaced on December 28, 1736, by Joseph de Araujo y Río, a small-minded man who immediately began harassing the French academicians and the two Spanish officers accompanying them. Without any money or political support in Quito, La Condamine decided to travel to Lima, 1,200 miles distant, in order to make a personal appeal to the viceroy. If that failed, he hoped to cash a personal letter of credit that he had brought with him from a French businessman in Paris.

  La Condamine left Quito on January 19, 1737, and on his way to Lima, he stopped in Loja to investigate the famous cinchona tree that grew nearby in the tropical rain forest, on the eastern slopes of the Andes. The bark of this tree was in great demand in Europe as a treatment for fever, particularly when the fever was accompanied by terrible sweats and chills (an illness soon to be named malaria.) It was sold there as “Jesuits’ bark” or as “the countess’s powder,” the latter name arising from a story that Francisca Henriquez de Ribera, the Condesa de Chinchón, wife of a Peruvian viceroy, had been miraculously cured of a high fever by a preparation from this tree in 1638. Indians in the Loja area referred to it as quina quina (the bark of barks), and on February 3, La Condamine spent a night with a cascarillero, an Indian skilled in stripping the bark from the trees.

  The opportunity to learn more about this tree could easily have justified an entire expedition. While a dose of the countess’s powder often worked wonders, the preparations varied widely in their efficacy. The problem was that there were many species of cinchona, and not all had the same therapeutic value. The Indians of Peru used the same name, quina quina, to describe a balsam tree, and its bark, which regularly showed up in European apothecaries, was worthless. Old World merchants and pharmacists were eager to know how to separate the good from the bad, and La Condamine, after his three-day stay in Loja, wrote a scientific treatise, “Sur l’arbre du quinquina,” on the tree, complete with a drawing of its leaves. He noted that the inner bark came in three colors, white, yellow, and red, and the red one, which was more bitter than the others, appeared to be the most potent against fevers. No one had ever published a detailed botanical description of cinchona, and when the treatise was published by the French Academy of Sciences in 1738, it caused a sensation.

  La Condamine’s sketch of Cinchona officinalis.

  The Wellcome Trust Medical Photographic Library.

  La Condamine arrived in Lima on February 28, only to find that it was an inopportune time to be seeking a loan. Funds were scarce in the capital. Nearly all of the gold and silver from the mines had recently been loaded on a frigate for shipment to Spain. Even if the viceroy had been willing to lend the expedition money, there was little in the royal coffers. Three weeks later, La Condamine received more bad news: The new president of the Quito Audiencia, Araujo, had filed criminal contraband charges against him and sought his arrest. Authoriti
es in Lima searched his belongings thoroughly, and while nothing illegal was found in his possession, his motives were now seen as suspect. All of Lima was buzzing over this scandal when Juan unexpectedly showed up in the capital, with an even more salacious tale involving the new president.

  The viceroy’s appointment of Araujo had been unusual, for Araujo was a Creole, a native son of Lima. The relationship between Creoles and chapetones, as those born in Spain were called in Peru, was contentious throughout the viceroyalty, and particularly so in Quito, which was known for being thoroughly dominated by the chapetones. The Creoles disliked the chapetones for their superior airs, and they had been quick to make fun of Ulloa and Juan, too, referring to them as the caballeros del punto fijo (knights of the exact)—men who preferred the pencil to the sword, a put-down that nobody could miss. But the disdain was mutual. The chapetones complained that the Creoles were spoiled and lazy, living off the labor of slaves and Indians and devoting all their energies to frivolous affairs. They have “no employment or calling to occupy their thoughts, nor any idea of intellectual entertainment,” Ulloa and Juan observed. Instead, they said, the Creoles spent most of their time drinking, gambling, and going to “balls and entertainments.” Alsedo, during his term as president, had exacerbated the bad feelings between the two groups by excluding Creoles from the local cabildo, and when Araujo had replaced him, the Creoles had danced with joy, eager to see the tables turned.

  Araujo did not disappoint them. Even though he himself had arrived with a mule train of goods to sell in Quito, which was forbidden, he immediately launched an investigation into La Condamine’s contraband activities, confident that it would embarrass Alsedo.* He also found a way to needle Ulloa and Juan, repeatedly addressing them with usted, the common form for “you,” instead of the more formal usía. Given the diplomatic protocol of the day, this was the rankest kind of insult. Ulloa and Juan were members of the Guardias Marinas, in Peru as representatives of the king, and, just as Araujo had hoped, they were outraged. A Creole was acting as their superior, and doing so in public for all of Quito to hear? When Araujo ignored several admonishments to stop, Ulloa reached his breaking point. He charged into the president’s house one morning, brushed aside servants who tried to stop him, and confronted Araujo in his bedroom. Usted? He told off the president with a few choice words of his own, then turned on his heel and left, returning home—as a biographer later wrote—a much “happier man.”

  Naturally, Araujo escalated the battle. He sent out armed officers to arrest Ulloa and Juan. The two Spaniards, however, refused to be taken into custody and instead drew their swords, badly wounding one of Araujo’s men before fleeing to the Jesuit church where La Condamine had holed up the previous summer. Enraged, Araujo ordered his men to surround the church. He swore he would starve them out, by God, and he promised bystanders that if the two cowards dared to show their faces, he would have them killed. All of Quito found this a spectacle not to be missed, but the show ended a few nights later when Juan slipped out under the cover of darkness and hurried to Lima to seek relief from the viceroy, whom he had befriended on his trip across the Atlantic.

  Once La Condamine and Juan were together, they were able to get the expedition back on track. The viceroy wrote them letters of support and assured them that they could safely return to Quito—Araujo would be counseled to that end. La Condamine, meanwhile, used his personal letter of credit to obtain a loan of 12,000 pesos from a British merchant, Thomas Blechynden, who, by a stroke of good fortune for the French, had come to Lima to collect on a debt owed his trading company. La Condamine also obtained a letter from the viceroyalty authorizing the expedition to draw 4,000 pesos from the royal treasury in Quito, and on June 20, he and Juan returned there, ready to get on with the work of triangulation.

  WHILE THESE FEUDS were playing out, the other members of the expedition had been surveying possible triangulation routes. Louis Godin, who wanted to measure a degree of longitude, had headed west from Quito, while Bouguer scouted out the region to the north, and Verguin and Jean Godin reconnoitered the terrain to the south. Once La Condamine returned, they all agreed that they would head south to measure three degrees of latitude first and worry about measuring one of longitude later.

  The triangulation would enable them to measure a distance of 200 miles or so along a north-south line. They would run their triangles—a long-distance tape measure, so to speak—down the Andean valley that had been the old Inca highway. The valley was twenty-five to thirty-five miles broad and lined on both sides by mountains that rose to over 12,000 feet, including a number of individual volcanoes that soared above 16,000 feet. By setting up their triangulation points on the top of peaks or on the sides of the higher volcanoes, they figured that they would have clear lines of sight from one point to the next, making it easy to measure the interior angles of each triangle. Partly because of the tensions between the academicians, they decided to break into two groups and divide the work. La Condamine, Bouguer, and Ulloa would form one party, Louis Godin and Juan the other. The assistants would help both groups.

  On August 14, La Condamine’s group set out for the first triangulation point, the summit of snow-covered Mount Pichincha. From there, they expected to be able to clearly see the two ends of their baseline in Yaruqui.* However, Pichincha is roughly 15,500 feet high, nearly equal to the tallest peak in the Alps, Mont Blanc, which at that time had never been climbed. During their ascent, first by horseback and then on foot, several members of the group suffered fits of vomiting, and all were “considerably incommoded by the rarefaction of the air,” Bouguer reported. Ulloa fared the worst, fainting and falling face first into the snow. “I remained a long time without sense or motion, and, as I was told, with all the appearance of death in my face.” After Ulloa spent a night in a cave, several Indians helped him reach the summit, where the others were huddled up inside a small hut.

  The top of the peak was too small to accommodate the large tents they had had made in Saint Domingue. Instead, their “lodging,” as La Condamine referred to the hut in his journal, was about six feet high, made from reeds lashed to posts that served as a frame. Five or six people crowded into it at a time, Verguin and Jean Godin joining La Condamine, Bouguer, and Ulloa in this humble abode. Their Negro slaves were close by in a “little tent,” the two groups camped out on a summit that dropped off steeply on all sides.*

  Along with a quadrant for measuring angles, they had brought a thermometer, a barometer, and a pendulum clock to the summit, and during the first few days, they exulted at the opportunity to do science at such an altitude. They charted temperatures that plunged below freezing each morning, hung the pendulum clock from the posts to measure the earth’s gravitational pull at this great height, and marveled at how low the mercury in their barometer dipped. “No one before us, that I know of, had seen the mercury go below sixteen inches,” La Condamine wrote in his journal. “That is twelve inches lower than at sea level, indicating that the air we were breathing was diluted by almost half of what it is in France, when the barometer goes up to 29 inches.” He calculated that the peak was a “large league” in height (roughly three miles) and that it would take 29,160 steps to climb it from sea level.

  At times, they put aside their scientific duties to play around like little kids, “rolling large fragments of rock down the precipice” to amuse themselves, Ulloa wrote. They were living on top of the world, so high that often they could look down on storms roiling the valley below:

  When the fog cleared up, the clouds, by their gravity, moved nearer to the surface of the earth, and on all sides surrounded the mountain to a vast distance, representing the sea, with our rock like an island in the center of it. When this happened, we heard the horrid noises of the tempests, which then discharged themselves on Quito and the neighboring country. We saw the lightnings issue from the clouds, and heard the thunder roll far beneath us, and whilst the lower parts were involved in tempests of thunder and rain, we enjoyed a delightfu
l serenity, the wind was abated, the sky clear, and the enlivening rays of the sun moderated the severity of the cold.

  But for the most part they suffered, and horribly so. They were pounded regularly by snow and hail, the wind so violent that they feared being blown from the summit should they dare step outside the hut. They spent whole days inside, each trying to warm his hands over a “chafing dish of coals.” They ate a “little rice boiled with some flesh or fowl,” Ulloa noted, and had to boil snow for water. Even a swig of brandy in the evenings did not do anything to chase away the cold, and they soon gave up even this comfort.

  The nights were long on the mountain. Each afternoon, at five or so, an Indian servant would fasten the door shut with a leather thong and then hurriedly descend to a cave lower down, where the Indians kept a perpetual fire. The academicians and their assistants would now be shut in for the next sixteen or seventeen hours, their imaginations haunted by the noise of howling winds, the “terrible rolling of thunder,” and crashing rocks. Most mornings, the hut was covered with a “thick blanket of snow,” La Condamine wrote, with such a wall of ice forming against the door that they could not push it open. The Indians usually arrived at nine or ten to dig them out, but one morning—their fourth or fifth on the mountain—no one came. They hollered for help, but the winds were so fierce that their Negro slaves either did not hear them or were in such pain, with swollen feet and hands, “that they would rather have suffered themselves to have been killed than move,” Ulloa wrote. At last, a lone Indian arrived at noon to free them. All of the other Indians had fled, unwilling to endure such hardship any longer, even though they were being paid several times the going rate for their labor.