When La Condamine had arrived in Cayenne, he had fallen into a deep languor, the only time during his ten-year journey that his energy slackened. But Jean was revitalized. After fifteen years, he was glad to be back in French territory, in a colony governed by his king. In the first weeks and months after his arrival, he set enthusiastically to work, organizing his papers and writing up a report titled Mémoire sur la navigation de l’Amazone, which he sent to Rouillé. Having spent so many years in the shadows of others, he did so with a touch of overeagerness, trying to make a name for himself, and he ended up offering rather cheeky political advice to the minister. France, he wrote, should grab the northern banks of the Amazon. It could then share the river with the Portuguese, using it as a trade highway to the riches of Peru:
France’s interest in navigation along the Amazon lies in its immense commercial potential, touching upon all the provinces of the realms of Peru, with Spain hardly being able to do anything about it, given the infinite number of rivers, all navigable, flowing into the Amazon. I see also other interests for France in having the northern banks of the Amazon. For example, there are cacao, cloves, sarsaparilla, balm of copahu, vanilla, and precious woods for building. The Portuguese have built a substantial commerce out of all this, all maintained by the government at Pará.… Your Majesty could establish in this colony a shipbuilding works, the wood there is perfect. Your Majesty would get great use from this because the wood costs nothing.
Although Jean did not explicitly state that French Guiana should expand its boundaries into the neighboring Portuguese territories, that was the obvious implication of his report. “If France had a foothold in the Amazon,” he concluded, “this colony would become the most flourishing in the world.” This was a rather bold thing for someone in his position to say—after all, he had left France as a lowly assistant on the Peruvian mission—and a bit foolish, too. If his report were to fall into the hands of the Portuguese, it could cause a diplomatic furor, and even if Rouillé received it safely, he might be angered at the risk that Jean had taken. But Jean was apparently blind to these subtleties, and he eagerly sent off his report to Rouillé in June 1750, placing it in the hands of the captain of the king’s vessel L’Aventure. He also sent along a collection of seeds he had gathered on his journey down the Amazon, as well as the grammar of the Incan language. He addressed this packet of New World treasures to Georges Leclerc de Buffon, who was the keeper of the Jardin du Roi in Paris and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. All in all, a productive first six weeks in French Guiana, or so Jean felt, and he was confident that he would soon hear news that his passport to Peru was ready.
Invigorated, he plunged ahead into a new scientific investigation. La Condamine, of course, was his model, and much as La Condamine had done with his studies of cinchona and rubber trees, Jean now took a careful inventory of the forests of Cayenne. He tested the various woods for their buoyancy and their resistance to insects and to find out how well they held nails, and he described how the various trees could be used to create a prosperous shipbuilding enterprise. The black cedar, he determined, was excellent for planking, while copahu was ideal for masts “owing to it being light and pliable.” He noted which trees produced oils of potential value, and lauded in particular the merits of the cumaru tree, which “produces a fruit and a nut and almond, the odor of which is very agreeable and which produces an oil that is very good for treating dysentery.” He finished this scientific treatise, Mémoire sur differents bois dans l’ile de Cayenne, on September 24, 1750, and in November, when another ship sailed to France, he mailed it to the academy, together with bottles of the tree oils. He also shipped a large trunk of wood samples “appropriate for construction purposes” to Rouillé and asked once again for a passport.
All that Jean had to do now was be patient. The king’s vessel was expected to return in early 1751, and he passed the months trying to make himself useful to Governor d’Orvilliers, the other colonists, and the local Indians. He taught them about the various woods he had studied and how they could be put to use, and he was, by all accounts, a welcome addition to the colony. “He was well regarded by the Jesuits, and had the ear of other colonists and the Indians,” wrote a nineteenth-century French historian, Henri Froidevaux. The governor of French Guiana, Froidevaux added, treated Jean “with consideration.”
When the king’s ship reappeared in the port on March 26, 1751, Jean was there to greet it. There would be letters from La Condamine, Buffon, and Rouillé, he was certain, and perhaps advice on how he should proceed. He had made it clear that he was placing himself at the service of both the Crown and the French Academy of Sciences. What would La Condamine, to whom he had written several times, think of his work? And would Buffon, having received his gift of a grammar, want to know more about his own studies of Quechua? Maldonado had been made a “corresponding” member of the French Academy of Sciences; perhaps such an honor would now be his. Best of all, his passport would be on the ship, and he would soon be on his way back to Isabel, and, God willing, their healthy child. At last the gangplank dropped, and the captain of L’Aventure strode toward the dock. But when their eyes met, the captain shrugged and held out his empty hands.
Crushed, Jean wrote anew to Rouillé, this time with a touch of panic:
My Lord,
I had the honor of writing to Your Grace in the month of June 1750 on the occasion of the vessel L’Aventure sailing to the port of Rochelle. I took the liberty of including my report on the potential utility that navigation of the Amazon would bring to this colony. I touched also on other advantageous points for our country. Last November, I had the honor of submitting to Your Grace a small trunk containing 14 or 15 types of wood that I deem appropriate for building. I asked Your Grace to please examine them. I conclude that these little parcels never made it into your hands, since I have not had the pleasure to receive word from the vessel of the King, which was at anchor here in this port on March 26, to know if Your Grace received them and found them useful, which was the sole reason for giving my opinion.
Once more, Jean asked Rouillé for a passport. For the first time, he also requested money:
I beg you and implore of your justice to take into consideration the request that I take the liberty of making—that I be paid for having spent the best part of my life in service during our mission in Peru. This will help me survive for the remainder of my days by reimbursing the costs of my travel, if it is judged appropriate. I have the honor to extend my deep respect, Sir, Your Grace.
Your very humble and obedient servant,
Godin
Cayenne, April 8, 1751
Although Jean had no way of knowing it, this time the creaky wheels of the French bureaucracy began to turn. When Rouillé first received Jean’s April 1751 letter, he had handled it in the same way he had the earlier ones: He had put it in a pile of papers that he planned to get to at some future date, scribbling on the top, “We have not yet responded to him.” And there Jean’s plea may have languished, had it not been for La Condamine, who was proving himself to be a true and loyal friend. La Condamine lobbied Rouillé on Jean’s behalf, and he also personally called on Portugal’s ambassador to France, Commander La Cerda, who provided him with a letter of recommendation for Jean to take to the governor in Pará. In addition, the ambassador promised La Condamine that Lisbon would send a passport for Jean directly to Pará.
Jean received La Condamine’s letter in early 1752, and in it, La Condamine also provided him with news from Riobamba, which somehow had reached him in France. Isabel had given birth to a girl in August 1749, and both mother and daughter were said to be in good health. Other encouraging letters had arrived on the boat as well. The father general of the Jesuits in Rome, Ignatius Visconti, had written him a letter of recommendation that he could give to Jesuits living along the Amazon, Father Visconti requesting that the priests “facilitate, on my account, the travels of Mr. Godin, both for himself and for any others who accompany him.”
Best of all, Rouillé had written to say that all was now in place for him to return:
I write, Sir, to Monsieurs d’Orvilliers and [deputy-governor] Lemoyne to ask that they facilitate, in so far as possible, the voyage that you must undertake to Quito, passing through the Portuguese and Spanish colonies that are established along the Amazon River. I pointed out to them that the King finds it well that d’Orvilliers gives you the letters of recommendation for the governors of these colonies. I hope that this will turn out satisfactorily for you.
Jean quickly began preparing for the journey. It had been nearly three years since he had left Riobamba, and now his return was just a matter of sailing upriver. He figured that it would take him six or eight months—he would be back in Riobamba by August or September. He hurriedly wrote to the governor in Pará, informing him that he would be arriving shortly to pick up the passport that had been sent from Lisbon. But before Jean had time to depart, he received a stunning note from Pará. “I inquired of the governor of that place for news [of the passport],” Jean wrote, in a letter to La Condamine, “and he replied that he had no knowledge of them.”
Faced with this rebuff from the governor in Pará, Jean—or so it seems in hindsight—should have considered other ways to return to Riobamba. The papers he needed for travel up the Amazon were lost in Portugal’s bureaucracy, and prompting Lisbon into action from French Guiana would be nearly impossible. Two years of effort to secure a passport had gone for naught. And other possibilities did exist. He could have sailed on L’Aventure to France and made arrangements from there to return to Peru. Or he might have tried to make his way along the coast to Cartagena. Yet Jean, as evidenced by his writings, never gave such options much thought. Instead, he stubbornly clung to his plan to return via the Amazon. He now approached d’Orvilliers with a new proposal: He would make the trip upriver as a servant of the colony. He would chase down slaves in Brazil who had escaped from French Guiana, and he would, in the manner of a spy, gather “intelligence” on how the Amazon might be seized and on the riches that could be had by opening this trading route to Peru. He would also bring back shoots from cinchona and cinnamon trees, with the hope that these two species could be cultivated for great profit in French Guiana. In return, he asked that the colony provide him with a military boat staffed with a commanding officer and troops.
By any standard, Jean was proposing a far-reaching colonial adventure. While it might be possible for a boat to slip past Portugal’s military forts on the lower part of the river, if it were discovered, Portugal would undoubtedly treat the incursion as an act of war. Yet both d’Orvilliers and his deputy, Lemoyne, while voicing some “reservations” about Jean’s plan, wrote to Rouillé to request that France fund it. Godin, they noted, would bring back plants that if cultivated, “would be a source of riches,” and France could also hope that he would find a method for “transporting gold and silver out of Peru.” In a letter dated June 14, 1753, Lemoyne even pleaded with Rouillé for a quick reply: “I implore you, Sir, to indicate to me whether I can inform him that he will be reimbursed for the expenses that he may incur in doing research that would be useful for the colony.”
The proposed “research” mission was clearly meant to serve the expansionist goal articulated by Godin in his earlier letter to Rouillé, in which he had urged France to consider seizing the northern banks of the Amazon. Although this was a startling proposal, geography did provide a rationale for it. During the seventeenth century, Guiana had been seen as a region that extended to the Amazon. Moreover, while Portugal may have established missions along the river, its colonization efforts had been focused mostly along the coastline south of Pará. The wild area north of the Amazon was still there for the taking, and the river could easily be seen as a natural dividing line between colonies. France and Portugal could share “ownership” of the Amazon. Portugal, for its part, had spent the last 150 years grabbing an ever greater part of the Amazon basin, at Spain’s expense. Now it was France’s turn to lay claim to more than just a tiny corner of the continent.
Having gained the support of d’Orvilliers and Lemoyne, Jean had reason to be newly optimistic. D’Orvilliers, in his June 19 letter, had even assured the minister that Crown expenses would be kept to a minimum. “Only a small portion of the costs for this expedition will fall on the King, who will cover the costs of the boat and of the officer and the troops that will accompany [Godin]. The cost for the outfitting will fall on those who have slaves to reclaim.” It was no longer just Jean urging this bold plan on Rouillé. So too were the officials who governed French Guiana. Yet their letters were met with the same silence that had greeted Jean’s earlier ones. A handful of ships from France sailed into Cayenne in 1753 and 1754, but none brought a reply from Rouillé.*
A sense of desperation came over Jean, prompting an even wilder idea: He would build a boat of his own, a small, single-masted vessel known as a tartan. He would sail this to Pará, and armed with his letters of recommendation, he would convince the governor of Pará to allow him to proceed without a passport. There was a touch of madness in this plan, but surprisingly, the military commander of Cayenne, Monsieur Dunezat, approved of it. In a May 10, 1755, letter to Rouillé, Dunezat explained his decision:
Godin asked me for permission to go to Pará to request passports from the Court of Portugal and to make the necessary contacts for his trip to Quito. His requests, together with the protests of colonists who have fugitive Negroes in Pará, have convinced me to give him permission and to charge him with capturing the fugitive Negroes of this colony which may be in the province of Maragnon, where he will go from Cayenne, before going on to Quito.
Jean set sail toward the end of 1755, and he made it as far as the “mouth of the Amazon” in his small craft. But there, with waves spilling over his boat and the wind blowing him out to sea, he lost his courage and hope. His vessel was in a “poor state,” he was still a good distance from Pará, and he no longer could see how this plan could possibly succeed. The Portuguese might well throw him into prison as a spy, just as they had done to Father Fritz. Even if he were allowed to continue his trip, Dunezat expected him to round up slaves who had escaped from French Guiana. None of this seemed likely to bring him to Isabel and the child he had never seen. Overwhelmed by a sense of defeat, he turned his leaky boat back toward Cayenne. Nothing had worked as he had hoped, he had tried again and again to get back upriver, and he no longer had the slightest idea how to set things right.
WHEN JEAN LEFT RIOBAMBA in March 1749, Isabel expected him to be gone for at least two years. She had promised Jean that she and their child, soon to be born, would be waiting patiently for his return. In August she gave birth to a girl, Carmen del Pilar, and by all accounts, she focused all of her attention on her. Upper-class mothers in colonial Peru typically left much of the daily nurturing of an infant to servants, but not Isabel. She doted on Carmen, determined that her baby would survive the scourges that had taken their first three children. Carmen was living proof that a family was waiting to be reunited, and as she grew into a toddler, Isabel spent hours telling her about her father, that he had come to Peru as part of a great scientific expedition, and that they would all one day be moving to France. This was the dream she constantly wove for her daughter, and as Carmen turned three and then four years old, Isabel tutored her in French—the language, Isabel was certain, that Carmen would eventually be schooled in.
Events unfolded slowly in eighteenth-century Peru, and so at first it was not too surprising to Isabel that Jean did not reappear in 1751 or 1752. Gossip had filtered back into Riobamba that Jean had safely passed through the Jesuit missions in the Peruvian Amazon. But after that? Nothing. Jean had simply disappeared. Every time her brother Juan came to town—he was a priest at a church in Pallatanga now—she would look to him for news, hoping that a bit of information had perhaps made its way up the missionary grapevine. But he never had any. No letter from Jean ever arrived,* and when four years of separation turned into fi
ve, and then five into six, Isabel’s doubts grew. So did her loneliness. At times, she would walk to the top of the hill and look to the east, toward Mount Altar and Mount Tungurahua, as though she expected Jean to appear at any moment, climbing up out of the jungle. But other times she felt overwhelmed by her melancholy and remained for long hours in the darkness of her house. She heard too the crueler whispers in town, that the handsome Jean Godin, he of the great La Condamine expedition, had surely long since returned to France, having forgotten all about his Riobamban wife.
During this period, the Gramesón family as a whole suffered one setback after another. Their old way of life was slipping away. The decline in the textile industry caused by the flood of cheap imports from Europe was having a domino effect. Obrajes closed, and that meant the market for wool suffered, which in turn depressed trade throughout the colony. The Gramesóns kept their hacienda near Guamote, where Indian laborers harvested potatoes and fattened animals for slaughter, and family finances were good enough that in 1756, Isabel’s mother, Doña Josefa, was able to buy several homes in town, next to La Concepción Church. But that same year, in a legal filing dated July 20, Doña Josefa informed the town council that the wealth she had inherited was nearly gone. Her husband, “el General Don Pedro de Gramesón y Bruno,” had squandered her extensive dowry.
The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon Page 20