In Riobamba, Jean and Isabel lived on the east side of town, just up from the main square. As their home was on the side of a hill, fifty feet or so above the valley floor, they had a particularly good view of Mount Chimborazo when they stepped out their front door, and if they climbed up the hill a few blocks more, to the top of the ridge, they could see a number of volcanoes in the snow-capped eastern cordillera. To the north was graceful Tungurahua and closer by was rugged Altar, and these volcanoes, forever rumbling and threatening to erupt, were like living entities to the people of Riobamba. One tale handed down from the local Indians told of the three volcanoes being involved in a messy “affair.” Massive Chimborazo was married to slender Tungurahua, but Tungurahua had betrayed Chimborazo in the past, having had a passionate romance with fierce-looking Altar. How could Chimborazo not notice such goings on? One day Chimborazo had looked out over the entire valley and had blown his top in fury, putting an end to the adulterous liaison. And now when Tungurahua spit smoke and fire, locals mused that she must be remembering her old lover and was displaying her anger with Chimborazo for having denied her such pleasure.
Mount Chimborazo. Eighteenth-century drawing by Alexander von Humboldt.
By permission of the British Library.
The constant rumblings of the earth influenced the religious habits of the people of Riobamba as well. They constructed a large statue of the Virgin Mary atop a nearby mountain, and from this lofty perch she looked over the town and protected them from nature’s wrath. On holy days, the priests would lead a procession to the foot of the statue, the people of Riobamba hopeful that their veneration of the Virgin would keep them safe.
While social life in the town centered on the church, as it did in all Peruvian cities, the people enjoyed their games too. Dice and cards were common pastimes, bullfights were held in the plaza mayor at regular intervals, and the city was known throughout the audiencia for its cockfights. The young boys in town also crowded neighborhood plazas to play un juego con una pelota (a game with a ball), which led church fathers at times to complain about their rowdiness. An attorney for the San Augustín Church wrote to the cabildo,
There are a great number of young people of bad habits that have established a ball game that has demoralized the spirituality of my convent. They block the street where they gather, and so many are they that they impede the path to the church and that doesn’t allow us to celebrate mass.… Furthermore, the ball strikes the convent and causes cracks in the walls, all to the disadvantage of said convent.
The Gramesóns prospered in this lively town. General Pedro Gramesón enjoyed a society where so many had titles—at mass, the pews would be crowded with men wearing medals and other insignia that told of their importance. Isabel’s older brother Juan became a priest in the San Augustín order, while her younger brother, Antonio, helped manage Subtipud. Antonio married and some years later became the father of two boys. Isabel’s younger sister, Josefa, also wed, and she became the mother of several children. The one person who struggled in Riobamba was Jean Godin. He helped out with the Gramesón properties and continued to trade in textiles, but his business ventures in Riobamba were as unsuccessful as they had been in Quito. Every year he filed a list of his debtors with the town council, and every year it got longer. He simply was not good at getting people to pay him what they owed.
While he and Isabel never stopped talking about France, the years began to slip by. He continued to work on his grammar of the Incan language, always thinking of the moment he would present it as a gift to the king. Since Isabel spoke Quechua, she was able to help him in this endeavor. But they had set down roots in Riobamba—Isabel’s family was here and she was a property owner as well—and any possibility of going to France was delayed time and again by her repeated pregnancies. They had a second child and then a third, although each time the joy of birth was followed by grief. Neither child lived more than a few days, and with each death Isabel fell into a period of melancholy. Even Jean began to wonder if he would ever see Saint Amand again. His plans for traveling down the Amazon grew ever dimmer, until, in late 1748, he received a letter, written eight years earlier, from his siblings. His father had died, and his family wanted him home at once.
ALTHOUGH PORTUGUESE SLAVE TRADERS had been regularly making their way up the lower part of the Amazon since the early 1600s, by the late eighteenth century, only a few people had ever traveled from the Andes down the river to the Atlantic coast. Indeed, when La Condamine set out, only three or four parties had ever made the 3,000-mile trek, there was no good map of the river, and fantastic tales of Amazon women and El Dorado still swirled about.
The mouth of the Amazon, which is a delta more than 200 miles wide, was discovered by Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a Spaniard, in 1500. He named it La Mar Dulce, the Sweet Sea. According to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, in which Spain and Portugal divided up the undiscovered world, this part of the New World belonged to Spain. But the coast here was not inviting. To the north were dense forests and swamps, and traveling southeast was difficult because of trade winds and shallow reefs. The Spanish attempted to establish a colony in the mouth of La Mar Dulce in 1531 but quickly gave up, and efforts to explore the Amazon from this direction lay dormant for the next seventy years.
From high up in the Andes, however, the conquistadors could look out at the vast jungle below and dream of riches hidden there. After Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas, everyone was certain that there were other wealthy kingdoms to conquer, and rumors were rampant about El Dorado, where gold was said to be so plentiful that the king covered himself in gold dust and washed it off each evening. There were also stories of a magical land in the jungle where cinnamon trees grew. The bark of this tree could provide a fragrant spice highly valued in Europe.
Lured on by such accounts, Pizarro’s brother, Gonzalo, headed out from Quito in February 1541 at the head of a large army—220 Spaniards in clanking armor and 4,000 Indians—that brought with it 2,000 hogs, 2,000 hunting dogs, and vast flocks of llamas. This expedition was larger than the one Francisco had mounted to conquer the Incas, but it quickly bogged down in the dense rain forest at the base of the Andes, where Pizarro and his men were plagued by incessant rains and hordes of insects. Although this area was sparsely populated, whenever Pizarro did encounter Indians, he tortured them to reveal the location of El Dorado, and if they professed not to know, he had them burned alive or fed to the dogs. Finally, a local chief, having learned of such interrogation methods, told Pizarro what he wanted to hear—there was a fabulous kingdom ruled by a powerful overlord further to the east. Pizarro and his men wandered deeper into the wilderness until, at last, they came upon a navigable river, the Coca, a tributary of the Napo. Here they stopped long enough to build a small boat to carry their supplies and munitions. The horses and men, however, proceeded on foot along the banks of the river, hacking their way through thick brush, and at the end of ten months, Pizarro and his band of men were still only 300 miles from Quito. They were also struggling to stay alive. They had eaten most of their animals, nearly all of the 4,000 Indians had died, and they had not discovered a speck of gold.
On Christmas Day 1541, Francisco de Orellana, who was the second in command, proposed that he take the boat and sixty men and head downstream in search of food. Pizarro agreed, a decision he came to rue, for he never saw Orellana again. At first, Orellana found nothing. There were no settlements along the river, and his troops were reduced to eating their leather belts and the soles of their shoes, which they cooked with herbs. “They were like madmen, without sense,” wrote Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, who accompanied Orellana. But shortly after New Year’s Day, they came upon an Indian village, and after Orellana made peace with its chief, the villagers provided them with “meat, partridges, turkeys, and many kinds of fish.” They had found the food they had been seeking, but they had proceeded so far down the swift-moving river—as much as seventy-five miles each day—that they realized it would be impossible to return
to Pizarro. After waiting three weeks to see if he would come to them, during which time they built a second boat, they decided that they had no choice but to go on without the others. Their only plan was to follow the unknown waterway to its end.
As they proceeded down the Napo, they entered a world that was more and more heavily populated, and shortly after they reached the Amazon, in mid-February, they came upon the kingdom of Aparia the Great, who brought them cats and monkeys to eat. Now they began encountering one “nation” after another—first the Machiparos, who were rumored to number 50,000, and then the even larger kingdom of the Omaguas, which stretched for several hundred miles. “We continued to pass numerous and very large villages,” Carvajal wrote, “and the farther we went the more thickly populated and better did we find the land.” The Indian tribes, he reported, kept turtles in pens and often supplied Orellana and his men with eggs, partridges, parrots, fish, and a variety of fruit to eat, including pineapples, pears, plums, and custard apples.
By this point, the Amazon was so wide that they could not easily see from one side to the other. There was an endless horizon of green trees along the riverbank, the water moved languidly along, and lush clouds piled up overhead. In early June, they came upon a great river that flowed into the Amazon from the north, which they named the Río Negro after its inky black color. So powerful was this river that its black water did not completely mix with the Amazon’s brownish current for twenty leagues, Carvajal reported. Here they began to be attacked with some regularity by Indians, who paddled out in canoes to fight, at times firing so many arrows that the Spaniards’ boats looked like porcupines. Even so, Orellana reached the Atlantic in August 1542 with forty-nine of his men still alive. Only eleven had died on the long journey, and eight of the deaths had been due to “natural causes.” While he had not found El Dorado, he had discovered a populated world, where food was abundant and the natives were variously welcoming and hostile. Carvajal also told of a tribe of women warriors on the banks of the river, below the Río Negro, and of an encounter with four giant white men. As a result of his account, La Mar Dulce came to be known as the River of the Amazons.
Gonzalo Pizarro and his men had not fared as well. Left behind in the forest, they were reduced to eating lizards and drinking the blood of their horses, which they cooked with herbs in their helmets. A band of eighty half-naked, emaciated, and slightly crazed men arrived back in Quito in August 1542, Pizarro seething with bitterness toward Orellana, whom he accused of treason. In the fate of the two groups, though, one could see a picture of two wildernesses. Along the foot of the Andes was a dense and forbidding jungle. But after passing through it, one came to the navigable waters of the Amazon, along which game and food could be found. Travel along this waterway, except for attacks from natives, was fairly easy.
Although Spaniards in Peru continued to dream of El Dorado, only a few dared to venture into the jungle after Pizarro’s failed adventure. The next expedition of any note was sent in 1560 by the viceroy of Peru, who did so partly as a way of getting rid of troublemakers in the colony. Three hundred men led by Pedro de Ursúa departed from Lima, heading into the jungle via the Huallaga River and with orders to find El Dorado and conquer the Omaguas. Ursúa brought along his mistress, which stirred up jealousy among his men, and on New Year’s Day 1561, Lope de Aguirre—one of history’s great psychopaths—led a mutiny, killing Ursúa and hatching a plot to return to Peru to conquer it. The route Aguirre took across the Amazon basin to reach the Atlantic is uncertain even today. Either he followed the Amazon to its end, or he turned up the Río Negro, crossed over into the Orinoco River, and followed that waterway north to the Caribbean. What is known is that on July 20, 1561, he seized the island of Margarita, slaughtering anyone who dared to stand in his way. He then launched an invasion of the mainland, where he was defeated by royalist troops and beheaded.
Aguirre’s was the last transcontinental journey through the Amazon basin for nearly eighty years. Heading east from the Andes, through the dense rain forest of the mountains, was so difficult that it seemed to bring ruin to those who tried. However, at the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch, English, and French all established colonies at the mouth of the Amazon, kicking off European exploration of the Amazon from the eastern end. The Portuguese arrived in 1616, setting up a military fort named Belém do Pará. Although this was supposed to be Spanish land, at that time Spain and Portugal were united under one king, and so Spain, struggling to manage its colonies in Peru and Mexico, was only too happy to see the Portuguese take on the settlers from other countries. Over the next ten years, the Portuguese drove the French, Dutch, and English out of the Amazon, and they moved north to the swampy coasts of Guiana.
South of the Amazon, Portuguese settlers along the coast had already carved out huge sugar plantations, and they now looked to the river as a source of slave labor. The Indians, in their words, were “red gold.” Although enslavement of the indigenous people was theoretically illegal, both Spanish and Portuguese law provided the settlers with loopholes to exploit. Settlers were allowed to make slaves out of “prisoners taken in just wars,” and a just war was in the eye of the beholder. They were also allowed to enslave Indians captured by other tribes. The rational for that provision was that the “freed” Indians became their indentured servants who had to work the plantations in order to “repay” the ransom. Once the Portuguese gained control of the river’s mouth, the slave trade exploded and the mass migration of Indians along the Amazon began. Some tribes, such as the Omaguas, moved further upriver to escape, and others fled into the interior.
As the slave traders conducted their hunting expeditions, they expanded Portugal’s control over the Amazon. Although Portugal and Spain may have shared a king, the two countries remained separate, and the Amazon—in the 1630s—was clearly up for grabs. Portugal was laying claim to the vast interior of the continent, which was why, in February 1637, Portuguese military commanders in Pará, on the southern shore of the delta, reacted with alarm when two Spanish Franciscan monks and five Spanish soldiers arrived in their port after having canoed down the river. Were the Spanish going to push forward territorial claims from the west?
The Franciscans had not made their voyage with any such intention. They had left Quito several years earlier in order to establish a mission on the Napo River, but hostile Indians had driven them off, and they had subsequently traveled several thousand miles to Pará. Even so, their visit stirred the Portuguese to mount a huge expedition, under the command of Captain Pedro Teixeira, to march up the river and formally stake Portugal’s claim to it. He led a force of seventy soldiers traveling in a fleet of forty-seven canoes, with 1,200 Indians and Negroes manning the oars, and even after he had reached the end of the navigable part of the Napo River, he and his soldiers continued on, arriving in Quito in October 1638. Their trip had taken a year, and now it was Spain’s turn to be alarmed. The authorities in Quito ordered the Portuguese crew back to Pará but placed several Spaniards on board, including a Jesuit priest, Cristóbal de Acuña, who was told to produce a report on the river. It was the first time that Spain had sought to survey this vast region.
The party left Quito on February 16, 1639, and reached Pará ten months later. Along the way, Teixeira staked out an arbitrary boundary line between the two countries, using a carved log to mark the spot. He also drew up a formal “Act of Possession” to back Portugal’s legal claim to the lion’s share of the Amazon. Meanwhile, Acuña published an account of their voyage in which he sang of the river’s riches and recommended that Spain should occupy all of it. The Amazon, he marveled, had more people than the “Ganges, Tigris, or Nile.” Many of the natives were friendly, and he hailed the Omaguas as the “most intelligent, the best governed on the river.” There were healing drugs to be found in the forest, huge trees that could be harvested for shipbuilding, and fertile riverbanks that could be used to grow manioc, sweet potatoes, pineapples, guavas, and coconuts. The river was swimming with fis
h, the woods were full of game—including tapirs, deer, peccaries, monkeys, and armadillos—and the lagoons were populated by numerous birds. His was a wilderness that was more bountiful paradise than fearsome jungle. “Settlements are so close together that one is scarcely lost sight of before another comes into view,” he wrote. “It may be imagined how numerous are the Indians who support themselves from so plentiful a country.” Yet lower on the Amazon, closer to the mouth, he found a river undergoing a transformation, its banks emptied by the slave trade, “with no one [left] to cultivate the land.”
Acuña’s book was titled New Discovery of the Great River of the Amazons, and in many ways he provided a straightforward account of what he saw. However, he also gave credence to what he had heard along the way about strange people living inland from the Amazon. He wrote of lands inhabited by giants and dwarfs, and of a race of people whose feet grew backward so that those hunting them would be led astray by their tracks. He confirmed that a tribe of warrior women inhabited this jungle, up north toward Guiana. These tales kept alive the picture of the Amazon as a wilderness that was both bountiful and magical, a world where explorers could indeed find great treasures.
Portugal now had little motivation to rein in its slave trade, which exploded in earnest. Entire tribes were “descended” down the river by slave traders, and the enslaved Indians died in great numbers from disease, despair, and malnutrition. “They killed them as one kills mosquitoes,” protested a Jesuit priest, João Daniel. One after another the Indian tribes disappeared, falling like dominoes as one went upriver. One slave trader complained, in 1693, that it was necessary to travel two months from Pará to find any natives to capture.
Daniel and other Jesuits sought to protect Indians from the slave trade by building missions where they could come and live, and presumably find a safe refuge. However, the Portuguese stations were something of a double-edged sword, for the priests would convert the Indians to Christianity and often force them to adopt Christian ways, thereby destroying their culture and tribal identity. Meanwhile, Spain turned to the Jesuits and their missionary work with a political goal in mind: By encouraging the black-robed priests to build missions along the upper Amazon, Spain could hope to take possession of this region and thus prevent the Portuguese from grabbing an ever greater share of the Amazon. The boundary between the two countries would effectively be established by the mission stations rather than by any formal treaty between the two countries.
The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon Page 17