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

by Robert Whitaker

  As frustrating as this all was, the problems with the zenith sectors enabled La Condamine and Bouguer to pursue other investigations, which turned out to be very fruitful. La Condamine took advantage of the hiatus to travel with Pedro Maldonado along his newly opened road to Esmeraldas. In 1736, La Condamine had stumbled through the rain forest along this route, but now the journey could be fairly easily made. This was progress, and once La Condamine was back in Esmeraldas, he happily renewed his study of a thick, white liquid called caoutchouc, which Indians took from the hevea tree. On his first visit to Esmeraldas, he had noticed that local Indians poured caoutchouc between shaped plantain leaves, let it harden, and then used it “for the same purpose we use waxcloth.” La Condamine fashioned a waterproof pouch for his scientific instruments from this amazing material, sent back samples of it to France, and, in collaboration with Maldonado, wrote a monograph on its properties, helping to introduce rubber to Europe. La Condamine also came upon an Indian tribe that used a curious white metal to make jewelry, and when metallurgists in France received a sample of it from him, they immediately saw that this “platinum” was going to be very useful. La Condamine was in his element again, mining the New World for plants and minerals—quinquina, rubber, platinum—that would, in the years ahead, lead to important advances in medicine and industry.

  He and the others chalked up numerous achievements during this time. After his trip to Esmeraldas, La Condamine collaborated with Verguin and Maldonado to produce a map of the Quito Audiencia that was far more accurate than any that had been drawn before. With Bouguer, he continued conducting experiments on the speed of sound and on the expansion and contraction of materials in response to temperature changes. The two observed solar and lunar eclipses, calculated the “obliquity of the ecliptic”—the tilt of the earth toward the sun—and investigated the strength of the magnetic attraction to both poles. “It matters not on what place of the earth we stand,” Bouguer concluded, “we shall always feel the action of one pole as powerfully as the other.” Perhaps most important of all, La Condamine came up with the idea of using the “length of a seconds pendulum at the equator, at the altitude of Quito” as a “natural measurement.” This would be a ruler defined by the gravitational pull of the earth rather than something arbitrary like a king’s foot, and it could provide a standardized measurement for all nations. “One wishes that it would be universal,” La Condamine wrote, giving voice to a sentiment that, fifty years later, would inspire France to invent the meter.*

  As a final adventure, La Condamine and Bouguer climbed the Pichincha volcano in June 1742. The crater was about a mile away from the summit where they had camped in 1736. They struggled once again with the elements, and at one point, La Condamine, while hiking apart from Bouguer, became lost. The night closed in on him, he was soaking wet and his feet were stuck in the “melting snow,” and once more he showed how resourceful he could be:

  I tried in vain to keep moving my feet so as to provide them some heat and by around four in the morning I could no longer feel them at all and feared they had frozen. I remain convinced that I would not have escaped this danger, which was difficult to foresee when setting off for a volcano, if I had not come upon a successful solution involving the bathing of my feet in a natural bath, the nature of which I shall leave to the reader’s imagination.

  After returning from that climb, La Condamine and Bouguer were ready to say their last good-byes to Quito. Hugo had reengineered their sectors for one final round of celestial observations. Bouguer would go north to their observatory at Cotchesqui (near Yaruqui), while La Condamine would head south to Tarqui. They planned to make simultaneous observations of the same star and exchange results by messenger. After they were done, Bouguer intended to head to France via Cartagena, while La Condamine was planning to go down the Amazon. Only a few had ever traveled from the Andes to the Atlantic coast via this great river, and certainly no scientist ever had. Pedro Maldonado was contemplating joining him, although his friends and family were begging him not to go, warning him that it was much too dangerous.

  By this time, both of La Condamine’s legal imbroglios had concluded, although not quite to his satisfaction. A year earlier, he had won a victory in his pursuit of Senièrgues’s killers, the Quito prosecutor in the case deciding that he would seek the death penalty for Leon, Neyra, and Serrano. However, that decision had not been at all popular in Cuenca, and when authorities had tried to arrest the killers, only Leon could be found and put in jail. The Quito court subsequently pronounced the three guilty but commuted their death sentences to eight years of exile, a decision that everyone in Cuenca could accept because, as La Condamine bitterly wrote, “no one obeyed it.”

  The war of the pyramids, as locals called La Condamine’s dispute with Ulloa and Juan, had come to a similar confused end. After his initial argument with the two Spaniards in 1740, La Condamine had erected the monuments without listing their names, since they had insisted on being described as academicians. He also carved a fleur-de-lis, the French coat of arms, on the two pyramids, which of course brought him more trouble. In late 1741, Ulloa and Juan had made a brief visit to Quito, and when they discovered that the pyramids had been built in this manner, they filed suit, arguing that the inscription and presence of the fleur-de-lis “insulted the nation of Spain and his Catholic Majesty personally.” The first judge to review the case ordered the pyramids destroyed. A second judge set that order aside and ruled that the inscription had to be changed—the names of the two Spaniards had to be added and they were to be described as participants, not assistants. In addition, the judge ordered La Condamine to carve the escutcheon of the Spanish monarchy above the French coat of arms. But that was not the end of the matter. On July 10, 1742, the Quito Audiencia issued a third decision: The escutcheon and the names of Ulloa and Juan were to be inscribed, but La Condamine would be allowed to call them assistants. This lengthy court battle led Isabel’s uncle to quip that “justice in Quito is constant and perpetual because the trials never end,” and indeed, the Quito Audiencia also sent the matter to the Council of the Indies in Madrid for further review.*

  In late August, La Condamine wrapped up a few last matters in Quito. He had a bronze ruler made that was the length of a seconds pendulum at the equator, which he placed into a marble tablet and gave to the Jesuits. This commemorative, humble in kind, was eagerly welcomed. He also sold his quadrant, and in order to do the same with his tent, he set it up in Quito’s plaza mayor, a spectacle, he reported, that “attracted the attention of the ladies of the city, which I had foreseen and whom I was pleased to honor.” Even at this moment of good-bye, the rich women of Quito still viewed the French expedition through romantic eyes.

  La Condamine and Bouguer spent the next six months in their respective observatories, and this time they found that their zenith measurements were consistent from one day to the next. Their instruments were working well, and when they exchanged letters in early 1743, it was evident that at last they had a cohesive result. The two ends of their meridian were three degrees, seven minutes, and one second apart in latitude. Since their meridian was 176,940 toises long, this meant that the distance of one degree of arc was 56,749 toises (68.728 miles). There could be no doubt now about the earth’s shape. Maupertuis had found that an arc of meridian in Lapland was 57,497 toises. A degree of arc clearly lengthened as one went north from the equator, proving, La Condamine wrote, “that the earth is a spheroid flattened toward the poles.” Newton—and not the Cassinis—had been right.

  Louis Godin, Ulloa, and Juan finished their celestial observations a year later. The War of Jenkins’s Ear fizzled to an end, allowing the two naval officers to return to Quito and resume working with Godin, and the trio concluded that a degree of arc at the equator was 56,768 toises. This was only nineteen toises different from the number obtained by La Condamine and Bouguer; the similarity of the results was evidence that both groups had done their work well. Indeed, more than 200 years later, geod
esists would find that their measurements were amazingly accurate, much superior to the ones Maupertuis had made in Lapland.

  La Condamine’s inscription on a marble tablet advocating the use of the seconds pendulum as a universal measurement.

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

  So much had happened that would have caused lesser men to give up. As Ulloa wrote, theirs had been a mission marked by a “series of labors and hardships, by which the health and vigor of all were in some measure impaired.” But they never had, and the fact that they had kept on until they achieved these results spoke volumes about their character. La Condamine and the others may have been deeply flawed human beings—often vain, fractious, and petty—but they had proven themselves to be men of resolve and courage, Enlightenment scientists through and through.

  * Santa Fe de Bogotá was the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, which Spain had created in 1717, carving it out from the northern part of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The Quito Audiencia was shifted out of Peru and into Granada in 1739.

  * The War of Jenkins’s Ear had its roots in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, when Britain obtained the right to have one British merchant ship a year trade with Spain’s New World colonies. That very limited right blossomed into a much larger English smuggling enterprise, which the Spanish Guardias Marinas was constantly trying to rein in. In 1731, Spain detained a British ship, captained by Robert Jenkins, that was allegedly loaded with contraband. Jenkins insulted the Spanish commander, who responded—or so the story went—by cutting off Jenkins’s ear with a sword, spitting into the severed organ, and vowing that he would like to do the same to England’s King George II. In 1738, Jenkins recounted his tale to the House of Commons, even presenting to them his carefully pickled ear, and the furor was such that England declared war on Spain.

  * The meter is also a “natural measurement,” for it was defined as one-ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole.

  * In 1747, the Spanish Crown ordered the pyramids destroyed. As a result, the exact location of the baseline was lost. In honor of the 100-year anniversary of the La Condamine expedition, Ecuador rebuilt the pyramids in 1836, but it lacked the information to erect them on the proper spot.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Down the Amazon

  JEAN GODIN SAW LA CONDAMINE for the last time in August 1742, just before La Condamine left for Tarqui. They embraced, and Jean asked La Condamine to advise the mission stations strung along the Amazon that he, Isabel, and their first child would soon be following in La Condamine’s footsteps. “I reckoned on taking the same road along the river of Amazons, as much owing to the wish I had of knowing this way, as to insure for my wife the most commodious mode of travelling, by saving her a long journey overland [to Cartagena], through a mountainous country, in which the only conveyance is by mules.”

  The expectation of returning home must have helped Jean cope with his sense of loss at watching La Condamine go. He had always looked up to La Condamine, who, even more than his cousin Louis, had appreciated what he had done for the expedition, publicly praising him for the “zeal” he had shown as a signal carrier. Jean and the other assistants—Verguin, Morainville, Hugo, and Jussieu—were also having to face the fact that the expedition had ended, Bouguer and La Condamine were on their way back to France, and yet there was no money for their own return. They had, in some ways, been abandoned by the country they had served for so long.

  Although Jean and Isabel had intended to go to France in 1743, the date came and went. They settled for a time in Quito, where Isabel gave birth to their first child, a girl. This was a moment of great joy for the Gramesón family—their first grandchild had arrived—but it turned to sorrow when the baby succumbed at four months to one of the many infectious diseases that so often killed children in colonial South America. Jean, meanwhile, struggled with his business ventures. He dabbled in the textile business and lost money in an ill-fated term as a tax collector. He had obtained the right to collect a 2 percent duty on goods, known as an alcabala. The Crown often auctioned this position to the highest bidder, who would then try to make a profit by collecting more than he had paid. This was a risky bet even in the best of times, and Jean had the distinct disadvantage of being French, which only encouraged merchants to ignore him. In early 1744, a devastating epidemic broke out in the Quito area, killing 8,000 in the audiencia, and with Isabel pregnant again, the entire Gramesón clan moved 110 miles south to Riobamba, where they hoped the air was healthier.*

  The Riobamba valley, which had so enchanted the expedition members, had been inhabited for several thousand years. When the Incas began their conquest of the Andes, a group known as the Puruhás lived here, many gathered in settlements along a long, beautiful lake, which the Spanish later named Laguna del Colta. The surrounding fields were fertile, and the Puruhás harvested reeds from the shores of the lake to weave mats and baskets. It took the Incas three tries to conquer the proud Puruhás, but once they did, they built a town called Liripamba on the flat plains north of the lake. The buildings in the Inca town were constructed with mortarless stonework and included a temple of the sun and other religious buildings.

  Diego de Almagro, Pizarro’s original partner in the conquest of South America, founded Riobamba atop the ruins of Liripamba on August 15, 1534. He constructed it according to the usual Spanish plan, with a plaza mayor and with streets laid out along a rectangular grid. The valley here is slightly higher than at Quito, around 9,000 feet, and the air is further cooled by the nearby presence of Mount Chimborazo, the tallest volcano in the Quito Audiencia at 20,700 feet. Although nights can be chilly, daytime temperatures are warm and springlike, and as early as 1545, a traveler who stopped here, Pedro Cieza de León, waxed eloquent over the town. He was in the midst of a seventeen-year trek by horseback through the viceroyalty, and he found no place he liked as much: “Riobamba is situated in the province of the Puruhás in beautiful fair fields, whose climate, vegetation, flowers and other features resemble those of Spain.”

  With its rich soil and pleasant weather, Riobamba attracted a number of eminent families, whose names told of nobility and purity of blood. Also living there were many men who could boast of high military rank—sergeants, captains, and generals of the cavalry or infantry. These families, Ulloa noted in his journal, had “been very careful not to diminish either the luster of their families, or their wealth, by promiscuous alliances, marrying only into one another.” The Maldonados were one such clan in Riobamba, and several others could trace their roots back to the conquistadors. These wealthy families built several churches that were equal in grandeur to any in Quito, and the one that graced the plaza mayor, they liked to boast, had a “steeple that was the tallest in the viceroyalty.”

  In 1699, the city was nearly destroyed by an earthquake, which killed more than 8,000 people in Riobamba and other Andean towns along the fault line. But the survivors rebuilt their beloved town, erecting homes of light stone and adobe that were, for the most part, only one-story tall, lest another earthquake strike. In the ensuing decades, Riobamba reached the peak of its flowering, and people in other parts of the viceroyalty spoke of its “splendor.” More than 16,000 people lived in the city, and the surrounding fields were so fertile, sown with clover and various cereals, that—as Ulloa wrote—it created a “landscape elegantly adorned with such an enchanting variety of colours as painting cannot express.” This agricultural bounty was complemented by profits from the textile business. Huge flocks of sheep grazed in the rolling hills above the valley, providing the raw wool for more than twenty textile mills in the district. The town’s location, with Quito to the north, Cuenca to the south, and Guayaquil to the west, also made it a vital transportation hub. All of this economic activity in turn attracted a number of jewelry makers, painters, carpenters, and sculptors, their work gracing the sumptuous parlors and dressing rooms in the homes of the elite.

  M
ost wealthy families in Riobamba owned both a country hacienda and a city house, and that was true of the Gramesóns as well. They acquired a large hacienda called Subtipud in Guamote, a village about fifteen miles south of Laguna del Colta, where they produced potatoes and barley. Isabel also purchased several vegetable gardens in Chambo, which was ten or so miles to the east of Riobamba, and some other small properties in that area. Nearer to Riobamba, she bought several alfalfa fields from Franciscan nuns. The fact that she owned these properties in her own name reflected yet another contradiction of colonial Peru: Although elite women were not supposed to work and were expected to stay sheltered in their homes, they nevertheless did enjoy certain legal rights that provided them with a measure of independence. Such laws were the work of humanists in Spain who, since the sixteenth century, had sought to make Spanish society more equitable and just. Even the marriage dowry theoretically remained the property of the woman; the husband was supposed to safeguard these assets during their lives together, and then it would be returned to her upon his death.