La Condamine’s map of the Amazon.
From Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique Méridionale (1778).
LA CONDAMINE AND MALDONADO parted ways in Pará. Maldonado, mindful that the Portuguese had imprisoned Father Fritz as a spy, told the authorities in Pará that he was French, traveling on La Condamine’s passport, and on December 3, he sailed for Portugal. La Condamine traveled by sea canoe to Cayenne, and along the way, the trunk containing his cinchona saplings was swept overboard. In Cayenne, he repeated Richer’s 1672 experiments with the seconds pendulum, and then—fearful that if he traveled on a French boat, he might lose his cherished papers to English pirates—he traveled to Dutch Guiana in order to find passage to Europe on a ship sailing under the flag of the Netherlands. He departed on September 3, 1744, and while his trip across the Atlantic was not uneventful—pirates attacked the Dutch ship twice—he successfully arrived back in Paris on February 23, 1745, a full decade after he had left.
Initially, La Condamine did not receive the welcome he hoped for. Debate over the earth’s shape was fizzling to an end by this time. Not only had Maupertuis returned with his results many years earlier, but the academy had also recently remeasured a degree of arc in France, which had shown that the Cassinis’ earlier work had been in error. Voltaire even made fun of La Condamine with a witty put-down: “In dull, distant places, you suffered to prove what Newton knew without having to move.”
Even so, the academy members understood the larger accomplishments of the mission. As La Condamine told his peers shortly after he returned, knowing that the earth bulged at the equator “furnishes a new argument and demonstration of the rotation of the earth on its axis, a rotation that holds for the entire celestial system.” Their work at the equator, he added, “has put us on the path of even more important discoveries, such as the nature of the universal laws of gravity, the force that animates all heavenly bodies and which governs all the universe.”
La Condamine’s map of his 10-year journey.
From Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique Méridionale (1778).
Furthermore, this advance in physics was just the beginning of what had been achieved by the Peruvian mission. La Condamine’s study of the cinchona tree promised to help Europe improve its use of quinine as an antidote for malaria and other fevers. He had sent back samples of a useful new metal, platinum, and his writings on rubber were stirring imaginative thoughts on how to use it for manufacturing purposes. Europe now had a detailed map of the entire northern part of South America and a naturalist’s view of the Andes and the Amazon. Together these amounted to a grand achievement: The mission had been a transforming moment in the development of science, and it was Voltaire who understood this best. “By all appearances our wise men only added a few numbers to the science of the sky,” he wrote, “but the scope of their work was really much broader.” The mission to Peru, he said, was a “model for all scientific expeditions” to follow.
Title page of La Condamine’s account of the expedition.
From Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi à l’équateur (1751).
La Condamine’s skills as a writer also brought him a great deal of public adulation. He wrote a colorful account of his travels, complete with a blow-by-blow description of the war of the pyramids and Senièrgues’s murder. As his fame grew, science academies in London, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, and Bologna all made him an honorary member. The one sour note in this chorus of acclaim was sounded, oddly enough, by Bouguer. Long jealous of La Condamine’s popularity, he published an account of their arc measurements in which he disparaged La Condamine’s talents as a scientist, suggesting that he had brought little more than energy to the project. “Bouguer could not disguise his feelings of superiority as a mathematician over La Condamine,” observed one of their peers, Jacques Delille. He “felt that he should be the primary object of public affection.” Bouguer’s unflattering words set off a pointless quarrel that lasted for years, a dispute all the more difficult to comprehend, Delille wrote, because it was “between two men who for several years had slept in the same room, in the same tent, and often in the open air huddled under the same coat, and who in all this time publicly acknowledged a great respect for one another.”
Ulloa and Juan made an equally big splash in Europe upon their return. They had sailed from Callao, near Lima, on October 22, 1744, but on different boats and each with a copy of their papers, a precaution in case one of them did not return safely home. The two left from Callao on French frigates, and while Juan made it back with little difficulty, Ulloa’s ship was attacked by an English vessel, and he was taken to England as a prisoner. However, once the academicians of London understood who was in their prison at Portsmouth, Ulloa was released and named a fellow of the Royal Society of London, its members praising him as a “true caballero” and “man of merit.” This was a rare honor for a foreigner, and even more so for one who had arrived in England in shackles. In 1748, he and Juan became famous throughout Europe when they published a popular five-volume account of their travels, Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional. Their book pulled back the curtain on South America and was translated into German, French, English, and Dutch, the Jesuit scholar Andres Burriel praising it as “one of the best and most useful books that have been published in our tongue.”
Naturally, bits and pieces of this news filtered back to the others still in Peru. Maldonado was made a corresponding member of the Royal Society of London and of the French Academy of Sciences for having traveled the Amazon with La Condamine, and his election made all of Riobamba proud.* But hearing this was bittersweet for Jean Godin and the others, a reminder that they had been forgotten. Of all the assistants, only one, Verguin, had managed to make it back to Europe by the end of 1748. Hugo had married a Quito woman and settled there, writing plaintively to La Condamine that he had “no other wish but to find a way to return to France, to finish his days in his own country.” He subsequently disappeared; by 1748, nobody knew where he was. Morainville, meanwhile, had become the third member of the expedition to die. He had fallen from a scaffold while helping to build a church in Riobamba, a job he had taken to earn money to return home. As for Jussieu and Louis Godin, both had been told by the Quito Audiencia at the end of the expedition that they would not be allowed to leave. Jussieu’s medical skills were needed because a smallpox epidemic had erupted, and the audiencia was so insistent on this point that it promised to imprison anyone who tried to help him go. Louis Godin had been barred from departing because of his debts, and at the request of the Peruvian viceroy, he had taken a position as professor of mathematics at the University of San Marcos in Lima.
Their delayed departures had in turn led to greater heartache. The French Academy prohibited any member from taking an academic post in a foreign country, and Louis Godin’s letter explaining why he had done so never made it to Paris, for the ship carrying his letter was raided by pirates. The French Academy learned about his professorship through a third party and expelled him, thinking that he had voluntarily chosen to leave the service of France. Jussieu, meanwhile, had become broken in body and spirit. When he was finally allowed to leave Quito, he traveled to Lima to see Godin and then headed further south on a plant-hunting expedition, dedicated to his botany, but enveloped in a sadness so profound, he wrote, that his “heart [was] covering itself with a black veil.”
As for Jean, he was hatching a half-crazed plan to bring Isabel, who was pregnant for a fourth time, to France.
HIS FATHER’S DEATH was not the only reason that Jean and Isabel had decided that it was time to leave Riobamba. Events were brewing that suggested the good times for the colonial elite in the village might be coming to an end. Growing social unrest was making all the landowners nervous. The War of Jenkins’s Ear had forced Spain to greatly increase its military spendin
g, and in order to raise that money, the Crown had hiked the duties and taxes that already so oppressed the Indian population. Bitter natives complained that colonial authorities wanted to tax the air they breathed. Some Indians had even taken up arms against their Spanish masters—there had been five revolts in the Andes since 1740. Equally troubling, the local economy was beginning to falter. Jean’s difficulty in collecting debts owed him was simply part of a larger malaise. After Britain sacked Porto Bello in 1740, Spain had shut down its fleet system for carrying goods to Peru and had begun allowing individual ships—including some non-Spanish vessels—to sail to any number of colonial ports. Many trading boats had started sailing around Cape Horn to Lima, loaded with cheap textiles from the mills of Europe, and this competition was driving more than a few obraje owners into bankruptcy.
With such uncertainty in the air, both Jean and Isabel believed that the time was right for moving to Europe. For him it was a chance to return home, and for her—at age twenty-one—it was a dream revived. But there was no easy way to travel to France. One possibility was to head to Lima and find passage on a trading vessel that was planning to sail to Europe via Cape Horn, but that would require both a lengthy journey by land and a very long sea voyage. Heading north from Riobamba to Cartagena offered a slightly better option, yet it would still require several months of travel by mule along the rocky paths of the Andes and over a pass littered with the bones of dead mules, one that, as Bouguer had said, was “never hazarded without the utmost dread.” The third route was the one “opened up” by La Condamine, and next to the other two alternatives, it offered an intriguing possibility. While the first part of the trip would admittedly be arduous—and almost everyone in the Andes spoke of it with fear—once the Amazon was reached, traveling by canoe from one mission station to the next might be fairly pleasant.
Or at least that was the thought, and so Jean concocted a plan: He would travel down the length of the Amazon to see if it would provide a suitable way home, come back up the river to pick up his wife and child, and then—if his scouting voyage had gone well—the three of them could follow this route to France. This meant he would have to travel the length of the river three times, an itinerary that covered more than 10,000 miles and could be expected to take at least two years. Even if all went as hoped, the plan had its evident shortcomings. Yet Jean, looking back on his past adventures, was certain that La Condamine would understand:
Anyone but you, Sir, might be surprised at my undertaking thus lightly a voyage of fifteen hundred leagues,* for the mere purpose of preparing accommodations for a second; but you will know that travels in that part of the world are undertaken with much less concern than in Europe; and those I had made during twelve years for reconnoitering the ground for the meridian of Quito, for fixing signals on the loftiest mountains, in going to and returning from Cartagena, had made me perfectly a veteran.
He left on March 10, 1749, and although he said his good-byes to Isabel with some sadness and reluctance—she was now in her fourth month of pregnancy and was beginning to show—he felt a great deal of excitement, too. He was embarking on an adventure that had brought fame and honor to those who had gone before—Acuña, Father Fritz, La Condamine, and even Maldonado. He intended to make his own observations of the Amazon along the way and gather plants and seeds for the king’s garden. He had also purchased a grammar of the Incan language printed in Lima,* and once he made it to the Atlantic coast, he planned on sending it to the king as a gift. Although the grammar was not his own work, it would make the king’s ministers aware of his interest in Quechua and of the fact that he hoped one day to complete his own study. Jean was nearly thirty-six years old now, and he saw this voyage as a chance to make a name for himself.
His trip downriver went well. He followed Maldonado’s footsteps down the Bobonaza and Pastaza Rivers, and while this part proved difficult, just as it had for Maldonado, once he reached the mission stations on the upper Amazon, the priests treated him warmly. Even though six years had gone by, La Condamine’s visit was still fresh in their minds. Further downriver, the Portuguese Carmelites provided him with the same welcome. “With no other recommendation to the notice of the Portuguese than arose from the remembrance of the intimation afforded by you in 1743,” he wrote La Condamine, “that one of the companions of your travels would follow the same way, I was received in all the Portuguese settlements, by the missionaries and commandants of the forts, with the utmost courtesy.” He reached Pará in September, his seven-month trip down the Amazon having unfolded “without incident,” and the governor of the port, Francis Mendoza Gorjaô, treated him like a visiting dignitary. “He received me with open arms, and insisted on my making his house and table my own during a week that I stopped with him.” Traveling on his own, Jean was at last stepping out into the limelight, or so it must have seemed. While still in Pará, he happily wrote La Condamine of his plan to return upriver to fetch his family as soon as he obtained the necessary passport from Portugal. For this, he had written Antoine-Louis Rouillé, minister of the French navy, asking that he petition the Portuguese on his behalf. Jean was clearly in high spirits, confident that he could obtain the needed papers in fairly short order.
Even so, a letter still needed to travel across the Atlantic and back, and Jean decided to wait for Rouillé’s reply in French Guiana. From Pará, he traveled back upriver to Fort Curupa, located at the head of the Amazon delta. From there he could take the northern arm of the river to the Atlantic (Pará is not on the main course of the river), minimizing the distance he would have to travel in the open sea. In Curupa, thanks to an order from Pará’s governor, he found waiting for him “a large pirogue [canoe] of fourteen oars, commanded by a sergeant of the garrison.” He was getting the royal treatment from the Portuguese, taxied about much in the manner that La Condamine and Maldonado had been. Once the canoe reached the ocean, it hugged the shoreline the rest of the way to French Guiana. He arrived in Cayenne on April 20, 1750, where he was greeted by a surprised—and somewhat baffled—governor, Gilbert Guillouet d’Orvilliers.
D’Orvilliers knew all about the La Condamine expedition, and years earlier he had spent many an evening dining with La Condamine during his stay in Cayenne. But he could not quite understand Jean’s thinking. As he wrote in a June 7 letter to Rouillé, “Monsieur Godin” had come all this way simply to familiarize himself with the Amazon and now intended “by following the same route, to go and get a woman he had married in Riobamba, in Peru.” Rouillé could read between the lines here—in d’Orvilliers’s opinion, this devotion to a Peruvian woman seemed rather extreme—and what made Jean’s intentions even more mysterious was that he was quite broke. “It doesn’t appear that his time in Peru has made him rich,” d’Orvilliers informed the French minister: “He arrived here with nothing at all.”
Indeed, at that moment, at least a few doubts about the wisdom of his plan must have been creeping into Jean’s mind. His trip downriver had taken nearly a year, he was 3,000 miles away from his wife, and he had no money. Moreover, he was a French citizen in need of a passport that would allow him to travel through Portuguese territory a second time, and across a Spanish-Portuguese border that was officially closed. It could take a year to send a letter back and forth to France, and letters were often lost in route. All of those obstacles were now in his way, and given the realities of eighteenth-century colonial politics, he could be certain that others would crop up.
* This is the distance from Quito to Old Riobamba, or the village of Cajabamba today. Modern Riobamba is about ten miles closer to Quito.
* The Marañón is the name used for the upper Amazon.
* The Jibaros later became known for their custom of shrinking the heads of those they killed.
* Maldonado never returned to Riobamba. He died in Europe on November 17, 1748, from a fever, at age forty.
* Fifteen hundred leagues is roughly equal to 4,500 miles; Jean apparently understood the journey to be even longer than it a
ctually is.
* The printing press did not arrive in the Quito Audiencia until 1754.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Continent Apart
THE CIVILITIES THAT JEAN GODIN had known in Quito and Riobamba were largely absent from French Guiana in 1750. This was a stretch of the South American coastline where few wanted to live. More than 200 inches of rain fall annually, and during the colonial period, before drainage ditches were dug, much of the coastal strip was underwater in the rainy season and during high tides. The swamps gave rise to clouds of insects, and they were populated by crocodiles and deadly snakes. Bushmasters, fer-de-lance, rattlesnakes, coral snakes, and the mighty anacondas all found this a delightful habitat, making the Guiana forest much more dangerous than the Amazon basin. The coastal lowlands give way to grasslands and a dense rain forest, with the distant mountains rising to 2,600 feet. Monkeys, giant anteaters, sloths, and an array of cats—jaguars, pumas, and ocelots—lived in these woods. Not surprisingly, Guiana became known as the “wild coast” of South America.
The English were the first to attempt to colonize the land, settling along the Oyapock River in 1604. They were defeated by disease, starvation, and the fierce Carib Indians, who later became feared for their cannibalism. The French established a permanent settlement on Cayenne in 1635, but for the next sixty-five years few settlers bothered to come—this was no promised land. In 1700, the d’Orvilliers family assumed governorship of the colony, and under its leadership, France began to make a more concerted effort to populate the area. Slaves were brought from West Africa, and colonists began to carve out plantations where they grew cotton, coffee, spices, and sugarcane. But such efforts proceeded at a very slow pace, and in 1750, Cayenne and the handful of other settlements in the colony remained isolated outposts, with few cultural amenities. The heat, humidity, and poisonous snakes made it seem like a purgatory, and indeed, in the nineteenth century, France established a penal colony in Guiana for its worst criminals.
The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon Page 19