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

by Robert Whitaker

  She died the following year, and Isabel was thrust into the role of the family matriarch, helping her father run Subtipud. She also had to manage the properties that she and Jean owned. But her mother’s death came just as she sent Carmen off to a convent school in Quito, and suddenly her house overlooking the town square seemed emptier than ever. Her family’s financial problems deepened in those years, too. In 1755, her father and her brother had won at auction a five-year right to collect (and keep) taxes from seven local villages, promising to pay 775 pesos annually for this privilege. But as a result of the economic depression that settled over the area, they were unable to recoup even this modest amount in 1758 and 1759. The final straw came when a former corregidor of Riobamba, Bruno de Urquizu, died owing them 1,200 pesos. Antonio and his father applied to audiencia authorities for relief, requesting that their annual fee of 775 pesos be lowered, but their plea was turned down, and Don Pedro was forced to cover the shortfall. Yet even this setback did not convince Antonio to give up the tax collection business, and in the early 1760s, as the economy continued to falter, he was forced to declare bankruptcy and beg the court for mercy: “I will always better your fortune and will have property [in the future] with which I can do that,” he declared. But the court decreed that such promises of future payment would not do and sent him to jail, his imprisonment an example of just how far the family’s fortunes had fallen.

  Social unrest was also increasing throughout the central highlands. There had been eleven armed uprisings by Indians in the 1750s in colonial Peru, and in the early 1760s, such rebellions began occurring every six months or so. The Indians wanted better working conditions in the mines and an end to the mita system of forced labor. This was the early stage of a rebellion that would eventually claim the lives of more than 100,000 Indians, and in 1764, it erupted full-blown in Riobamba. Armed Indians from the countryside stormed into the city from the south and took over the Santo Domingo and San Francisco plazas, which became the scene of trench warfare. Blood spilled across bricked squares that were normally filled with boys playing ball, and everyone took the rebellion as a sign that the colonial order that had reigned for 200 years, one that had served the elite so well, was perhaps coming to an end.

  As these many years passed, Isabel naturally came to think less often of Jean. She turned thirty-six in 1764, the year of the Indian rebellion. By colonial standards, she was no longer a young woman. Carmen had returned from convent school and was now of a marriageable age. Her childhood had passed, and with it their dream of moving to France. But they did have each other, theirs a mother-daughter bond that brought great comfort to them both. They attended mass daily, their servants always a step behind. Isabel’s faith had always sustained her: She recited her Hail Mary’s and felt reassured by the presence of the Virgin of Sicalpa, the statue high on the mountain, looking out over her town. And deep in her heart, she never gave up all hope that Jean would return. She knew that miracles could occur; she had even witnessed proof of that a few years earlier. In 1759, the image of a patron saint had suddenly appeared before the parishioners of San Sebastián Church. The apparition triggered a great celebration, the town council ordering candles to be lit in every square. Isabel felt the presence of God in her life, which gave her the strength to renew her prayers.

  AFTER JEAN’S ABORTIVE TRIP to the Amazon, he settled down in French Guiana in a way that he had not previously. He needed to earn a living. He moved from Cayenne to Oyapock, a tiny village on the river that marked the boundary between French Guiana and Brazil. He built a house on stilts and hunted manatee, a large sea mammal that feeds on sea grasses and was abundant in the Oyapock estuary. The animal was highly prized for its meat, and it also gave a valuable oil. In addition to his manatee enterprise, he drew up plans for a timber business, which he put into operation in 1763.

  Archival records provide only a smattering of details about his life during this period. Oyapock was a miserable frontier town, with only a few other white colonists, and Jean lived there isolated from most of the world—even Cayenne was several days away by boat. He appears to have given up any hope of gaining recognition for his scientific investigations or for his grammar of the Incan language, and there are hints, in a letter written by Governor Fiedmont (who had replaced d’Orvilliers), that he became somewhat quarrelsome, bitter over his fate. This was not a life that he had ever imagined for himself, staring night after night across the river at the dark forest that separated him from his family. He would stew like that for months on end, and then he would take out his feather pen and once again plead for help: “I renewed my letters every year, four, five, and even six times, for the purpose of obtaining my passports,” he wrote years later, “and constantly without effect.”

  Not even La Condamine wrote back. The silence of his friend and mentor was almost too much to bear. Perhaps, Jean reasoned, La Condamine’s failure to write was due to the war that had erupted on three continents. France and the other European powers were battling over their colonial territories, a fight that was also taking place on the open seas. His letters must have been getting “lost or intercepted,” and La Condamine later confirmed that such had been the case. During the Seven Years’ War, which concluded with the Treaty of Paris, signed on February 10, 1763, La Condamine did not receive a single one of Jean’s many missives. Jean was writing letters that disappeared into a void, and yet he continued to take pen in hand, as though by sheer obsessive persistence he could get someone to respond to him.

  France exited from the war a humiliated nation. In the Paris accord, it was forced to cede Canada and all of its territory east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, and it also lost several of its islands in the West Indies. Great Britain had emerged as the world’s foremost colonial power, while France’s overseas empire had dramatically shrunk. The bitter defeat demanded that France do something to regain its pride, and in 1763, Étienne-François de Choiseul, who had replaced Rouillé as minister of foreign affairs, decided that new resources should be devoted to French Guiana, which was one of its few remaining colonial possessions in the New World.* He sent 12,000 colonists to settle the mouth of the Kourou River, northwest of Cayenne, but this enterprise was so badly planned—and the arriving settlers so naive—that they brought ice skates instead of farm tools. Within two years, most had died from fever and starvation.

  The arrival of the new colonists, however, stirred Jean’s hopes. France was in need of a triumph and a way to reassert its power and influence. It held just a tiny corner of South America, a mere speck on the map, while lowly Portugal was the master of the Amazon. There was a new and compelling reason to dust off his old plan for seizing the Amazon, and this time, in a letter he wrote to Choiseul on December 10, 1763, he was very blunt about what it would require. As he later confided to Fiedmont,

  I provided [Choiseul] with a very detailed account of how, in the blink of an eye, without giving [the Portuguese] the time to know what had happened, one could take over one side of the river, taking precautions to keep it. I also gave him the means of doing this according to the nature of the place. I would intercept the navigation of this river and all communication with the city of Pará until peace has been made.

  Jean, of course, had an ulterior motive. France’s seizure of the northern banks of the Amazon would enable him to go upriver to get Isabel. But no sooner had he sent the letter than he started feeling nervous about it. He lived on the border with Portugal; what if his neighbors discovered his plan? He had entrusted the letter to a missionary who was returning to France, and he had begged the man to deliver it “by hand to Choiseul.” But he knew well that letters crossing the Atlantic had a way of not arriving at their destination, and when the king’s vessel returned to Cayenne five months later, without a word of reply from the minister, his worries flared. On June 1, 1764, he begged Choiseul for a reply:

  Sir,

  In December 1763, I had the honor of writing you a letter, which contained a project that might be of
interest to you. Not having received any news, I am anxious to know if you received it, as it may have had the misfortune of taking another route and falling into the hands of foreigners, which would be most unfortunate for the trip I have to make, and for the project itself. If you have received the letter, you will understand why I have taken the liberty to send you this and why I also dare to ask that you inform me as to its status.

  Respectfully,

  Your most humble and obedient servant, Godin

  Over the next several months, his fears grew into full-blown paranoia. He began to cast about for someone new to write to, anyone who might comfort him, and in his desperation, he seized upon a bit of idle gossip he had heard. There was a certain Count d’Herouville who was said to be “in the confidence of Monsieur Choiseul.” On September 10, 1764, Jean wrote to d’Herouville, and for once, he succinctly summarized his plight:

  I was, Sir, associated with the gentlemen of the Academy of Sciences who, in 1735, undertook the mission in Peru. I went down the Amazon in 1749 in order to reach Cayenne. Mr. De La Condamine, of the same Academy, and whom you surely know, will speak on my behalf. It is necessary that I go back up this river to fetch my family in the province of Quito and to bring them here. Dare I, Sir, hope for the good fortune of a moment of your attention?

  There was little reason for Jean to believe that this letter would elicit a response. D’Herouville did not know him; he was just grasping at yet another flimsy straw. He had urged France to seize the northern banks of the Amazon, he had volunteered to lead a military boat up the Amazon in order to do “research,” he had offered himself as a spy and a bounty hunter, and he had built his own boat—all to no avail. His letter to d’Herouville was little better than tossing a bottle containing a message into the ocean.

  Yet a year later, Governor Fiedmont hurriedly called him to Cayenne. A Portuguese boat had arrived in port with a story that Jean would want to hear—and one that Fiedmont did not at all trust.

  The boat, a decked galliot with sails and “manned with thirty oars,” was commanded by a captain of the garrison at Pará. His name was Rebello, and he had come, he said, upon the order of the king of Portugal, to transport Jean up the Amazon “as high as the first Spanish settlement,” where he would wait until Jean returned with his family. He would then bring them back to Cayenne. Fiedmont had listened to this and, as he reported to Choiseul, concluded the obvious: Rebello was a spy. “This behavior by our touchy and cruel neighbor on behalf of [Godin] did not surprise me, as I am persuaded that it is nothing more than a pretext to cover up their curiosity about what is going on here and to prevent us from using a similar pretext for going there to learn about their side. I thought it was my duty, nevertheless, to receive this officer.”

  Fiedmont laid out his doubts to Jean. The arrival of the 12,000 settlers in Kourou, he said, was causing “much suspicion and distrust” among all of French Guiana’s neighbors. Jean could go with Rebello, but he should know that nobody in France had told him to expect the Portuguese boat. How could the king of Portugal order such a thing without first informing Paris?

  The galliot departed from Cayenne in late November 1765 with a nervous Jean on board. Perhaps, he thought, his letter to d’Herouville had finally borne fruit. Perhaps the “generous nobleman” had gone to Choiseul and that had set off a chain reaction: Choiseul had written to the Portuguese ambassador, the ambassador to Portugal’s king, and the king to Pará. That was certainly possible. But on the way to Oyapock, where they planned to stop for a short while so that he could tie up some loose ends, Fiedmont’s suspicions fed his own, and he began to panic. He was alone among the Portuguese, “in the midst of a nation against which I have worked so hard,” he told himself. He would engage Rebello in talk, and it seemed that the Portuguese captain responded with slightly malevolent double entendres. “Something is going on in this boat,” Jean worried, and then, just before they reached Oyapock, he and the captain had a conversation that seemed to confirm his worst fears. He had told Rebello that in Oyapock he would like to pick up “a Negro and a couple of whites” to accompany him on the journey, and yet the captain had refused. There might be room for a Negro or two, but not for a white. What was Jean to make of this?

  “The whites that I would have brought along are not great persons,” Jean told Rebello. “They would have found enough space.”

  Jean did not know what to do. When they docked in Oyapock, he decided to stall for time. He tried to keep his suspicions from Rebello—he did not dare chase this boat away—and yet he feared that if he went upriver, his life would be in danger. It all made sense. “I’ve worked against this nation and I must scrutinize the tiniest things,” he confided to Fiedmont in a letter. “I fear my letter [to Choiseul] has not been delivered; it has fallen into foreign hands and I am lost. Who will assure me that some evil soul has not turned this to his profit in the [Portuguese] Court?” Jean feigned that he was ill, and told Rebello that he had suffered a “nasty fall in the woods while going to the lumberyards of my Negroes.” It could be a month or more before he could travel.

  While waiting for Fiedmont to reply, Jean came up with a new strategy to divine Portugal’s true motives. Rebello was eager to depart—a number of his oarsmen had fled to the woods in a bid for freedom—so Jean suggested that Rebello proceed to Pará without him. When Jean recovered his health, he would come to Pará to “take advantage” of the king’s “generous” offer to transport him up the Amazon. But Rebello’s answer once again convinced Jean that something was amiss: “He’ll hear nothing of going ahead, and responds that he must, at all costs, conduct me [to Pará] for that is why he came here,” Jean told Fiedmont. “This man wants to overpower me here. What will they do when they are in their home territory?”

  Jean wrote this last letter to Fiedmont on December 28, 1766. He felt utterly paralyzed. He feared that if he went with the Portuguese, he would be murdered or imprisoned as a spy. But if he let the galliot go without him, his hopes of ever seeing Isabel again would vanish. “Please do me the honor, Sir, of giving me your thoughts on this matter,” he begged Fiedmont. The governor, though, was tired of the whole affair. He wanted the galliot gone from French Guiana. Jean needed to make a decision. Either go or not go. At last, Jean came up with a compromise proposal for Rebello. Since he remained too “ill” to go, could he instead send a friend of his, “to whom I might entrust my letters, and who might fill my place in taking care of my family on its return?”

  Much to Jean’s surprise, Rebello agreed. And once he did, Jean’s fears began to vanish. He now saw everything in a different light. He reasoned that he could thank d’Herouville for his change in fortune. It was due “to the kindness of this nobleman” that the ship had arrived. Quickly, he selected a long-time friend, Tristan d’Oreasaval, to go in his stead. He provided d’Oreasaval with money for the journey and a packet of documents, which included letters to his wife and the recommendation that he had obtained in 1752 from the father general of the Jesuits. He had safeguarded Visconti’s letter for so many years, always praying that the day would come when he could use it. The plan was straightforward. Rebello would escort d’Oreasaval to Loreto, the first mission in Spanish territory. After dropping him off, Rebello would retreat across the border to Tabatinga, a Portuguese mission, and patiently wait there. From Loreto, d’Oreasaval would canoe 500 miles upriver to Lagunas, the capital of the Maynas district in the Quito Audiencia, and hand the letters to the father superior. The Jesuits would then carry the packet to Isabel in Riobamba.

  Everything had fallen into place. Jean felt his hopes soar, and on January 25, 1766, the galliot sailed from Oyapock. In seven months or so, it would reach Loreto, and this vessel, as Jean now happily declared, was under the command of a military officer who was nothing less than a “knight of the order of Christ.”

  THE RUMOR THAT ARRIVED nine months later in Riobamba was so vague as to be almost cruel. Isabel’s brother Juan had heard it first, that a vessel might be
waiting for them at Loreto, and that Jesuits might be in possession of letters from her husband, who—or so it was rumored—was alive and living in French Guiana. Isabel and Carmen had clung to each other; could this be true? Juan went to Father Terol, the priest who had married Isabel and Jean, to find out what he could, and together the two priests called on Jesuits in Quito. With the Jesuits’ assistance, they were able to piece together a trail of sorts. A man named Tristan had delivered letters to a Father Yesquen in Loreto, who had handed them off to a second priest, who had given them to a third, and now these documents were quite lost. But while the Jesuits were certain that letters of some sort had been sent Isabel’s way, they were of two minds about the vessel. Some, Juan told his sister, “give credit to [it], while others dispute the fact.”

  Isabel did the only thing she could. She sent a trusted family slave, twenty-three-year-old Joaquín Gramesón,* to investigate. He left in January 1767 and returned three months later, exhausted and with no news at all. Authorities had ordered him back to Riobamba because he lacked the proper papers for travel into the Amazon. After resolving that problem, Isabel sent him out once again. It was close to 2,000 miles to Loreto and back, and twenty-one months passed before Joaquín returned. But this time he brought back certain news: He had personally spoken to d’Oreasaval, a boat was indeed waiting for her and Carmen, and Jean was indeed anxious for them to arrive in Cayenne.

  This was the news that Isabel had been waiting to hear for so long … and yet by the time Joaquin returned, it was bittersweet. While he had been gone, Carmen—in April 1768—had died of smallpox. Isabel’s hope was always that she, Jean, and Carmen would all be reunited. When Joaquin had left on his journey, Carmen had asked Isabel to tell her once more the stories she had heard as a child about her father and about how he and her mother had met. And now Isabel knew for sure that Jean had come back to get them, yet Carmen lay buried in the local cemetery, her nineteen years framing the time that she and Jean had been apart.