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

by Robert Whitaker

  Despite this harsh environment, the French academicians hoped to measure angles to distant points with an amazing accuracy. Their quadrant, two feet in diameter, was built with reinforced iron to make it steadier, and Langlois had calibrated the instrument so that a degree could be divided into minutes (1/60 of a degree) and seconds (1/3,600 of a degree). The French academicians hoped to make measurements accurate to ten seconds, readings that they could verify by determining if the three angles added up to 180 degrees, plus or minus thirty seconds. Without this precision in the angular measurements, their subsequent calculations of the lengths of the sides of the triangle would not be sufficiently exact. But Mother Nature was not cooperating. There were few moments when it was calm enough to set up the quadrant, and during those brief interludes, Bouguer reported, “we were continually in the clouds, which absolutely veiled from our sight every thing but the point of the rock upon which we were stationed.” Only once or twice were they able to glimpse through their binoculars the markers they had erected at the ends of the Yaruqui baseline. They spent one week on the summit, then a second and a third, and all the while their health deteriorated. “Our feet were swelled and so tender,” Ulloa wrote, “that walking was attended with extreme pain. Our hands were covered with chilblains; our lips swelled and chapped, so that every motion, in speaking or the like, drew blood. Consequently we were obliged to a strict taciturnity and but little disposed to laugh, an extension of the lips producing fissures, very painful for two or three days together.” Their slaves were in equally bad shape, and several “vomited blood.”

  Finally, on September 6, after twenty-three days on “this rock,” they came down from Pichincha, defeated. They set up a camp lower on the mountain, humbled by this encounter with the great Andes. “The mountains in America are in comparison to those found in Europe what church steeples are to ordinary houses,” La Condamine sighed. It took them three months to complete their angular measurements from lower down on the mountain, and this, as they all knew, was simply the first of several dozen field stations they would have to inhabit. The year 1737 had nearly come to an end. By this time, Bouguer had hoped they would be ready to return to civilized France, and yet their “severe life,” as Ulloa dubbed it, had only just begun.

  WITH THE FIRST SET of triangles completed, Jean Godin’s role became more defined. After Couplet’s death, he had become the youngest member of the expedition, expected to run errands for the three academicians and otherwise be at their beck and call. Most of the other assistants had specific tasks to do or were not even expected to stay with the academicians. Jussieu was off collecting plants, Senièrgues was tending to patients in Quito, and Hugo’s primary role was caring for the instruments, repairing them or even constructing new ones as the need arose. Morainville at times traveled with Jussieu, drawing the plants he collected. That left only Verguin and Jean Godin to regularly assist the three academicians, and Godin was being sent to and fro with such frequency that, as he would later write, he was becoming a “veteran” at moving around the Peruvian landscape. Now that they had come down from Pichincha, Jean was assigned the duty of signal carrier. His job was to head out in advance of the others to set up markers at the triangulation points they had mapped out earlier. One or the other of the two parties, La Condamine’s or Louis Godin’s, would then catch up, setting up a new observation post where Jean had placed the marker. He might stay a short while with them, running errands as they did their critical observations, and then he would scurry on ahead, traveling alone or perhaps with a single servant. He crisscrossed the Andean valley numerous times as he performed this task, bouncing back and forth between the two cordilleras. As he did so, he suffered all the hardships and difficulties that the academicians recorded in their daily journals, although he was often without the solace of companionship. A French historian later wrote what it was like for Jean:

  He was always in movement along a meridian line of around 300 kilometers, climbing massive mountains crossed by torrents, walking along the sharp edge of precipices, or through ravines along the banks of the rivers. In these areas in a primitive state, where every step represented a victory of valor and of physical strength, he acquired strength of will and familiarized himself with the country and with the Indians.

  This was the sort of life that fostered independence and self-reliance, and a touch of bitterness, too. La Condamine, Bouguer, and his cousin Louis may also have been suffering hardships, but they were almost certain to be hailed for their achievements upon their return to France. But how would he leave his mark? He had left Saint Amand thinking that perhaps he would study the language of the indigenous people in Peru, which had been Quechua throughout the Andes since the time of the Incas. And now, out and about as he was, running errands and carrying signals to distant posts, he often spoke with the local Indians. He began to pick up the Quechua vocabulary, and his ambitions turned more concrete: He would one day produce a grammar of the Incan language, which he would present to the French Academy of Sciences or even to the king of France.

  And so his life went: Young Jean spent many of his days and nights in isolated camps, and there, alone and confronting the most frigid conditions, his tent battered by snow and hail, he would scribble the new words of Quechua he had learned into his notebook, struggling to understand how the Indians put these words together into sentences to describe the rugged land they inhabited.

  AS THE EXPEDITION headed south from Quito, starting in early 1738, the two groups—La Condamine’s and Louis Godin’s—worked increasingly apart. The tensions between the three academicians remained, and rather than simply dividing the labor of triangulation, each group began producing its own measurement of a meridian line stretching south across the Andes. But this separation, Bouguer reasoned in a letter to the academy in Paris, was not such a bad thing, for the duplication would make for the “strongest and most convincing proof possible.” The two groups were still collaborating in some ways. In the region around Quito, they had plotted off different triangles, but south of the city they “shared” some triangles, each checking the other’s work.

  The problems they encountered were numerous, and one that slowed both groups was that they could not keep intact the wooden pyramids they were using as markers. Each pyramid was covered with a light-colored cloth to make it more visible, and to work, the academicians would set up a quadrant atop this pavilion, sighting through the instrument’s telescope similar markers off in the distance. But when the pyramids were not being “carried away by tempests,” Bouguer reported, they were being taken by Indians, who had other uses for the timber and ropes. Jean Godin was not always able to watch over the pyramids until the others arrived, and even when the main party arrived at a camp, the local Indians were apt to creep in at night and grab what they could. After La Condamine and Bouguer rebuilt one of their stations seven times, they grew so frustrated that they decided to start using the smaller tents as markers. “Mr. Godin des Odonais preceded us,” La Condamine wrote, “and had these [tents] placed on the two mountain ranges, at designated points, according to the agreed location of the triangles, leaving an Indian to guard them.” While this procedure worked better than erecting the pyramids, the tents also disappeared more than once, stirring the academicians to lash out in their journals against the Indians, whom they disparaged, in the manner of the times, as slovenly “beasts.”

  A field camp in the Andes.

  From Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Mesure des trois premiers degrés du méridien dans l’hémisphere austral (1751).

  With every camp they set up, they had new mishaps and close calls to write about. As they worked on the slopes of towering Mount Cotopaxi, Juan fell into a twenty-five-foot-deep ravine with his mule, luckily escaping with only a few cuts and bruises. Bouguer regularly complained about the nasty conditions, and La Condamine, while riding between two camps, was caught in a fierce storm and had to spend two days in a snow-covered tent without food or water. At last, he used the lens of
his glasses to focus the sun’s rays on a pot of snow, which provided a few drops of water that saved him “from this sad situation.”

  Despite these hardships, the team members explored their world in every way imaginable. They did not limit themselves to their triangulation work, difficult as it may have been. Through their experiments with a pendulum clock, they discovered—just as Newton had predicted—that the earth’s gravitational pull weakened with altitude. They needed to make the seconds pendulum about one-twenty-fourth of an inch shorter at an altitude of 10,000 feet than it was at sea level, which led La Condamine and Bouguer to calculate that a body that weighed 1,000 pounds at the seashore would weigh one pound less atop Pichincha. They also dragged a barometer to the top of Mount Corazon, a volcano 200 feet higher than Pichincha. Atop the summit, their “clothes, eyebrows and beards covered in icicles,” they figured that no humans had ever “climbed a greater height.” They “were at 2,470 toises [15,794 feet] above sea level,” La Condamine wrote, “and we could guarantee the accuracy of this measurement to four or five toises.”* Their experiments with the barometer were paying off, as Bouguer had come up with a “very simple rule” for using barometric pressure to calculate altitude. Air pressures at higher elevations, he had concluded, “alter in a geometrical progression, while the heights of places are in arithmetical progression.” His method for determining the height of a mountain involved taking a reading at its base and at its summit, and then applying the logarithmic rule he had devised.

  The French scientists were men of the Enlightenment at play. They investigated the climate of the Andes, the expansion of metals in response to variation in temperature, the speed of sound at high altitudes, the rocks and plants, and Inca ruins. Ulloa, meanwhile, was fascinated by some of the clever methods the Indians had devised for navigating this landscape. The road south of Quito regularly crossed ravines several hundred feet deep, and at several of these the Indians had built a “cable car” of sorts, known as a tarabita. Men and animals alike were winched across the ravine, riding in a leather sling attached to the cable, which was a rope made from twisted strands of leather. One such tarabita they came upon was strung at a height of more than 150 feet, the river below charging through a boulder-strewn gully.

  As might be expected, all of this activity stirred a great deal of gossip among the locals. The behavior of these visitors was so strange. They climbed to absurd heights on the mountains, peered into odd-looking instruments, and furiously scribbled away in their notebooks. Their three-week stay atop Pichincha had earned them the reputation of being “extraordinary men,” La Condamine noted, and there were whispers among some of the Indians that these strangers were superior beings, shamans of a sort. At a camp near Latacunga, a group of four men even got down on their knees to pray to them. Could they use their powers to help them locate a lost mule? When Ulloa told them they had no such knowledge, the Indians refused to believe him. “They retired with all the marks of extreme sorrow that we would not condescend to inform them where they might find the ass, and with a firm persuasion that our refusal proceeded from ill nature, and not from ignorance.” Others, Ulloa added, were convinced that they were prospectors looking for gold. Wasn’t Mount Pichincha rich in minerals? Hadn’t Atahualpa buried his treasure there? And wasn’t that the reason that everyone came to this land, to get rich?

  Inca artifacts.

  From Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional (1749), from the 1806 English translation A Voyage to South America.

  Bridges in eighteenth-century Peru.

  From Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional (1749), from the 1806 English translation A Voyage to South America.

  Even those of the best parts and education among them were utterly at a loss what to think. … Some considered us little better than lunatics, others more sagaciously imputed the whole to covetousness, and [said] that we were certainly endeavoring to discover some rich minerals by particular methods of our own invention; others again suspected that we dealt in magic, but all were involved in a labyrinth of confusion with regard to the nature of our design. And the more they reflected on it, the greater was their perplexity, being unable to discover any thing proportionate to the pains and hardship we underwent.

  Indeed, as the months passed, the physical hardships began to wear the men down. They moved steadily from one camp to another, their daily lives, Ulloa noted, marked by “continual solitude and coarse provisions.” Their only respite from this difficult life came when they were passing between camps, when they might have time to spend a day in a little town, everyone so starved for the comforts of civilization that “the little cabins of the Indians were to us like spacious palaces, and the conversation of a priest, and two or three of his companions, charmed us like the banquet of Xenophon.” Loneliness was now creeping into their writings, and by mid-October it was clear they needed a respite. Ulloa fell gravely ill and had to be taken to the nearby city of Riobamba. Louis Godin suffered a similar bout of sickness and returned to Quito to recuperate. The expedition was once again short of funds, supplies were low, and Riobamba, a city of 16,000, offered them a civilized place to rest. They had also recently received a cache of letters from France that had delivered an emotional blow and left them wondering how to proceed.

  THE DIFFICULTY IN CORRESPONDING with colleagues in France had led La Condamine, at one point, to complain that he had nearly given up on ever hearing from Paris. The first letter the expedition received arrived in late 1737, shortly after they had come down from Pichincha. In it, Maurepas—the minister who had promoted their expedition to the king—had sought to resolve the ongoing dispute between Godin and Bouguer over the merits of measuring a degree of longitude. Each of the academicians had written Paris to argue his case, and the academy, Maurepas wrote, had agreed with Bouguer’s opinion that it would be a “completely imprudent enterprise.” While Godin had not immediately given up on the idea, his own subsequent experiments on the speed of sound, which he had completed in July 1738, supported the academy’s decision. Godin had determined that sound at this altitude traveled between 175 and 178 toises a second, but that imprecision—of three toises per second—was too great to allow them to use a sound, such as the noise of a cannon being fired, to synchronize watches at two spots along a line measured at the equator. The margin of error would be greater than any difference in distance between degrees of longitude and latitude at the equator, Bouguer noted, and thus “one might even come to believe that the earth is flattened or oblong when in fact it may have a completely different shape.”

  So that issue had been resolved, but now, as a result of letters they had just received, they had to question the merits of proceeding even with their latitude measurements. Maupertuis, they had learned, had already returned with his results from Lapland.

  The Maupertuis expedition had not lacked its own controversies. Maupertuis was a committed Newtonian, as were the other leaders of the expedition, such as Alexis Clairaut. As a result, many in the academy were ready to dismiss their results even before they left, certain that Maupertuis and Clairaut were too biased to do the work fairly. “Do the observers have some predilection for one or the other of these ideas?” asked Johann Bernoulli, the Belgian mathematician who was a supporter of the Cassinis. “Because if they believe that the Earth is flattened at the poles, they will surely find it so flattened. … [T]herefore I shall await steadfastly the results of the American observations.” Despite such skepticism, Maupertuis and six others had gone to Lapland in April 1736 and returned seventeen months later with an answer. They had determined that a degree of latitude in Lapland was 57,437 toises, which was 477 toises longer than a Parisian arc, as measured by the Cassinis in 1718. Thus, Maupertuis told the academy, “it is evident that the earth is considerably flattened at the poles.” Newtonians naturally pounced on this news, Voltaire gleefully praising Maupertuis as the “flattener of the earth and
the Cassinis.”

  But as Bernoulli had predicted, the Lapland results did not end the dispute. Many of the old guard in the academy were outraged, Jacques Cassini complaining that Maupertuis was trying to destroy in one year the work his family had taken fifty years to create. He and others criticized Maupertuis’s work as sloppy and snidely suggested that the expedition members had all taken mistresses in Lapland, evidence that they were moral degenerates. Maupertuis was so disheartened that he hurried away to Germany, where he became president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. “The arguments increased,” he wrote bitterly, “and from these disputes there soon arose injustices and enmity.”

  Even though sour grapes may have affected Cassini’s criticisms, from a scientific point of view, he did have a point. The Lapland expedition had measured only one degree, and upon close inspection, its results did not match up with Newton’s mathematical equations. “This flatness [of the earth] appears even more considerable than Sir Isaac Newton thought it,” Maupertuis admitted. “I am likewise of the opinion that gravity increases more towards the pole and diminishes more towards the equator than Sir Isaac supposed.” Something was not quite right with their measurement. The controversy was still alive. A famous Scottish mathematician, James Stirling, declared that he would “choose to stay [neutral] till the French arrive from the South, which I hear will be very soon.” Similarly, Clairaut, in the letter he wrote to La Condamine, noted that the dispute remained so violent that the Peruvian findings were vital to confirming their work in Lapland.

  Clairaut had meant to encourage La Condamine with such words, but they had the exact opposite effect. Vital to confirming the Lapland work—this was just what the Peruvian team had always feared. They had been away from France three and one-half years, they were still less than halfway done, and they were now in the position of being viewed by history as having come in second, with all the scientific glory going to Maupertuis. Their own experiments with the pendulum had already led them to suspect that Newton was right, that the earth was flattened at the poles and that Cartesian physics would have to be scrapped. Should they continue their triangulation work another year—or longer—simply to bring this debate to a tidier conclusion?