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

by Robert Whitaker

  THE FERTILITY OF THE RAIN FOREST, with its profusion of plants and wildlife, suggests that it should be an easy place to forage for food. Orellana and Acuña, after their voyages down the Amazon, reported that Indians living along the banks had bountiful supplies of food, raising turtles in pens, growing manioc, fishing, and hunting the abundant game. But their mastery over the environment had been achieved over the course of 10,000 years, and in a part of the Amazon basin that was much more habitable than the swampy lowlands near the Bobonaza. Wild Jibaros of the eighteenth century may have hunted in these lowlands, but they built their villages on drier ground, further upriver. Even in that more hospitable environment, nearly all of the available food—other than game—is out of reach, in the top part of the canopy. At ground level, there is little to harvest. Trees and plants are in such fierce competition for light and space that they are armed with a panoply of defenses to prevent their leaves and bark from being consumed.

  The foremost of these are chemical toxins, mainly phenolics, tannins, and alkaloids; this last group is experienced by humans as analgesics, stimulants, and hallucinogens. In the wild, they serve to discourage insects from feeding on a plant’s leaves. As one naturalist has written, the caffeine that we find stimulating and enjoyable “is in reality a form of insecticide.” Indigenous tribes in the Amazon use these compounds in their shaman medicine and also, as La Condamine discovered, as poisons with which they hunt and fish. In addition to an array of chemical defenses, tropical plants may have spiny leaves and jagged stilettos on their trunks to ward off insects. These daggers are in turn covered by lichens and microbes that can easily cause an infection.

  As a result of this plant warfare, the food cycle in the rain forest is an unusual one. High up in the canopy, there may be an abundance of fruit and nuts that can be consumed, since plants may depend on animals to spread their seeds. The fruits and nuts are feasted on by monkeys, sloths, bats, birds, insects, and other denizens of the treetops. But lower down in the rain forest, there is little food available for ground-dwelling herbivores. Most of the ground animals either consume dead vegetable matter, as ants and termites do, or feed on fish, birds, monkeys, and other meat-eaters, with the jaguar at the top of this particular food chain. The American biologist Victor von Hagen, who lived among the Jibaros in the upper Amazon during the 1930s, described how impossible it is to forage for food in this environment:

  All that the primitive has, he has cultivated from indigenous plants in the forest. These he has grown since time immemorial. The jungle yields, in its wild state, practically nothing. To be explicit, there are only four or five foods that may be obtained, irregularly from bountiful nature, and none of these can sustain man, brown or white, over an extended period of time.

  One of the few edibles that can be found in the Bobonaza watershed is the palm cabbage, and that is what Isabel, her two brothers, and Martín were “fain to subsist on,” along with “a few seeds and wild fruit.” After their food ran out, they spent all their daylight hours in search of something to eat. They would fall upon a palm cabbage as though it were a feast, and then they would resume their hunt. Yet they were growing ever more gaunt, and each succeeding day their “fatigue” and their “wounds” increased. “Thorns and brambles” tore at their flesh and clothing, and the insects never let up; every inch of their bodies was covered with bites, which were horribly infected. The jungle was killing them in a thousand small ways.

  They struggled in this way for three weeks, and then a fourth. They were still on their feet in late December. They kept on finding just enough food to keep going a little longer, wandering for a few hours each day to hunt for palm cabbage and then moving on to a new spot, until at last, “oppressed with hunger and thirst, with lassitude and loss of strength, they seated themselves on the ground without the power of rising, and waited thus the approach of death.”

  THE PROCESS OF DYING from starvation is fairly well understood. At first, the body is able to draw on stored carbohydrates and fats as a source of energy. Liver glycogen, which is how the body packs away carbohydrates for emergency use, is broken down to maintain blood glucose levels. Once the glycogen stores are depleted, the body begins to break down muscle tissue to extract amino acids that can be used to make glucose. At the same time, with glucose in such short supply, the body begins to utilize an emergency energy source, ketones synthesized by the liver from fatty acids. The body’s metabolism slows down as well, and the starving person becomes ever more lethargic. Toward the end, speech becomes slurred, and all of the senses start to fail: Hearing dims, eyesight fades, and smell disappears, the body progressively consuming itself until death arrives.

  This was the point of near-death that the Gramesóns had reached. As they lay on the forest floor, too weak to move, all except Isabel, who retained a certain strength, slipped in and out of consciousness. Isabel did what she could to care for her brothers and her nephew, whose pain during these final hours came not from their hunger but from their thirst. The humidity of the jungle drew water from their parched bodies just as it drew moisture from plants, and there, in a rain forest of all places, their agonies were increased by the torments of dehydration. As their saliva dried up, horrible lumps formed in their throats, which they were unable to dislodge no matter how many times they swallowed. Their tongues thickened so much that they gasped for breath. It was as though they were dying not from hunger or even, in the very end, from thirst but from suffocation.

  Martín was “the first to succumb.” Isabel cradled him in her arms, for she still had the energy to sit, with her back against a tree. Their unlucky fate was such that hardly any rain came in those last days, but when it did, Isabel soaked up the water with her shawl and used it to moisten Martín’s forehead and his lips. Her nephew looked so old. His skin had turned purplish, and his eyes had sunk ever deeper into his skull. He seemed to be pleading with her, but he was too weak to speak, the only sound escaping from his lips a low moan. At last his eyes closed, he groaned slightly as his lungs fought for one more breath, and he was gone. His father Antonio and his uncle Juan expired in similar pain over the course of the next couple of days, and then Isabel, having “watched as they all died,” awaited “her own last moments.”

  Because women have a higher percentage of body fat, they tend to outlast men in starvation situations.* Isabel was also short and middle-aged, both factors that affect metabolism in ways that allow a starving person to live a little while longer. And for two days more, Isabel lay “stretched on the ground by the side of the corpses of her brothers [and her nephew], stupefied, delirious, and tormented with choking thirst.” All of the flies and insects of the forest had descended on the three rotting bodies, and they swarmed over her too. She was little more than a living corpse, and she desperately wanted to die. Yet even as she prayed to God for relief, for an end to her suffering, images of Jean began to flit in and out of her mind. At one point, she thought she could hear him calling to her. She was hallucinating, of course, yet it seemed so vivid, and in those moments she felt a surge of willpower, a desire to live. God was sparing her, it seemed, and a boat was waiting to take her to her husband. She was thirsty, she needed to “look for water,” and suddenly a single thought was pushing loudly to the front of her mind: Get up.

  At last, as Jean would later write, Isabel gathered the “resolution and strength” to stand. Her “clothing was in tatters” from the many weeks in the jungle, her blouse so torn to shreds that she was nearly naked from the waist up. Her shoes too were gone. After steadying herself, she saw clearly what she had to do. Taking the machete in hand, she knelt next to the decaying corpses. Antonio’s shoes would now be hers. She “cut the shoes off her brother’s feet,” and hacked away until she had converted them into sandals. Seeing that her clothing was “all torn to rags,” she “took her scarf and wrapped it around herself.” And then Isabel Godin, who only three months earlier had departed from Riobamba dressed in silk, disappeared into the forest.

>   BY THIS TIME, a rescue canoe had long since come and gone from the sandbar where Isabel and the others had been stranded. The scene that Joaquín had found there was as gruesome as the one in the forest. He, Rocha, and Bogé had successfully reached the mission station in Andoas on November 8, “at four in the afternoon.” The resident priest, Juan Suasti, was not there when they arrived, as he was off visiting a village further downriver called Pinchis, and it took Joaquín at least two days, and possibly three, to pull together a crew of Indians willing to go upriver to rescue those left behind. Rocha and Bogé declined to go back, seemingly indifferent to the fate of Isabel and the others, which caused Jean to later write bitterly that Rocha thought “more of his own affairs than forwarding the boat which should recall his benefactors to life.”

  Because they had to row against the current, it took Joaquín and the Andoas Indians fourteen days to reach the sandbar, more than twice as long as it had taken Joaquín, Rocha, and Bogé to come downriver. Suasti described what happened next:

  Filled with hope, they jumped onto the land, the slave [Joaquín] with greater energy than the Indians. But they found no one living. The slave entered the rancho where they had left everyone, and found there the beds of straw strewn about, the clothes scattered about the beach, some human bones without meat on them in the forest, and a cadaver in a dip in the river, without much vestige of a person. There was a balsa raft leaning on the side of the river, and on the bank they could find perhaps the footsteps of three persons.

  Joaquín and the Indians arrived at the sandbar on November 25, and thus the tragic timeline: Isabel and her family must have departed just a few days earlier, and then those staying behind—Juanita, Tomasa, and Antonio—were killed by marauders of some kind from the jungle. Although the cadaver in the river was badly decomposed, Joaquín thought that perhaps it was Antonio, Rocha’s slave. But he also found reason to hope that not all had died. The pile of human bones in the forest was not very big, and there were footprints in the riverbank by the raft, suggesting that several in the group had tried to go on. He ordered the Indians to scour the woods “on both sides of the river to see if they could find some trail,” and he too went in search of his beloved mistress. He was a slave but also a Gramesón—in the culture of eighteenth-century Peru this was his family—and he walked through the wilderness for four days, calling out Isabel’s name every few seconds. He and the Indians searched five or six miles inland, on both sides of the river, but, as Suasti wrote, “all these efforts were in vain.”

  Before departing from the sandbar, Joaquín took an inventory of the items strewn about the beach. Everything that had been there when he had left on November 3 was still to be found, except for the “ax and machete” and a pair of “old trousers.” But Isabel’s jewelry and silverware were still there, as were her fancier clothes, such as a “velvet petticoat,” and these items he gathered up, intending to bring them to her father, who was waiting in Loreto. On the way back to Andoas, they traveled slowly, regularly stopping so that the Indians could hunt for footsteps or any sort of trail in the woods. They spent two weeks making their way downriver in this halting manner, arriving back in Andoas shortly before December 15. Joaquín and the Indians told Suasti what they had found, and he, in turn, summed up the “sad” news for authorities in Quito:

  They were not able to verify the cause of such a lamentable event because they had not found even one person of the [Gramesón] family, and with the countryside being so harsh, with forests empty of all human commerce. The most reasonable Indians formed some ideas of what had happened. They believed that three or four days after the family had been left behind on the beach, they were ravaged either by barbaric Indians or by the fierce tigers that are abundant in these woods. To support the first judgment, they note that they had found in the hut all of their clothing and even their undergarments, which led them to conclude that the infidels killed them during the night, while they were sleeping, killing them all and throwing them into the river.* Plus they found a body torn to pieces in the river. The same facts could support the second possibility. Being terrorized by tigers, or something else preying on them, they were filled with dread and shock and inadvertently they threw themselves into the river [and drowned], and some of them could also have fled, taking the balsa raft, getting on it and also drowning. All of the Indians and the Negro that went to look for the señora answered with this declaration and swore on the cross that it was true.

  Having written up his report, Suasti told Joaquín to carry it to his superior in Lagunas and to the governor of the Maynas district, Antonio Peña, who was located in Omaguas, near the border with Brazil. Suasti entrusted Isabel’s belongings to Rocha, requesting that the Frenchman deliver the jewelry, silverware, and other items to Isabel’s father. Rocha, Bogé, and Joaquín arrived in Lagunas on January 8, 1770, where the priest, Nicolás Romero, declared that “knowing what I know about these mountains and its inhabitants, it is not at all difficult to imagine these deaths.” They reached Omaguas on January 30, and Peña was similarly convinced, although he thought it most likely that Isabel and the others left behind on the sandbar had been killed “by the Jibaros Indians.” He then commanded Joaquín to take the papers to officials in Quito in order to inform them of this “tragic happening.”

  Joaquín reached the audiencia capital in early May, traveling back to Quito via the Napo River rather than retracing his steps up the Bobonaza. Among the papers he carried was a letter from Rocha and Bogé, which they had signed on December 16 in Andoas, stating that Isabel had promised that she would give him his “card of liberty” once they reached Loreto, where her father was waiting. Although her voyage had come to an awful end, Joaquín had done his part—should he not get the promised card? Joaquín spent three weeks trying to deliver the documents to the audiencia president, Joseph Diguja, but each time he came to Diguja’s office he was turned away, told by Diguja’s assistant that the president was too busy to see him. Then, as Diguja wrote, on May 28, Quito authorities came to him:

  It became known that walking in this city was a fugitive Negro who had come from the province of Maynas. He was apprehended and put in jail. There they found in his possession papers and a letter that was for the head of this Audiencia, which give an account of the extraordinary happenings of the disappearance of the Gramesón family that was traveling by the Río Bobonaza in that province.

  With Joaquín’s arrest, Spain’s colonial bureaucracy began to turn in its usual tortured way. Joaquín, Diguja concluded, was to be blamed for “having been the one that was conveying the said family.” This slave had even tried to “hide” the various reports “indispensable for verifying” what had happened, Diguja wrote, and yet he now had the nerve to ask for “his liberty.” The audiencia court quickly took up the matter, and it decided that Joaquín was not the only one who should be jailed. The court decided to send to Omaguas a warrant for the arrest of the two Frenchmen on the grounds that they had never obtained a permit for travel to the Maynas province.

  The audiencia’s investigation continued for another three months. Joaquín was interrogated, and he confessed that as far as he knew, Isabel and her brothers had left Riobamba without proper travel papers. Although Jean Godin, in 1740, may have secured permission from the viceroy of New Granada authorizing him to travel this route, that permit, the court decided, hardly applied to Isabel and her family in 1769. “These roads,” wrote a Quito official, are “closed because of their being a route to the Portuguese colony.” The law did not “permit commerce or even communication” across this border, and anyone who traded “with a foreigner without a license” could “lose his life.” Because Joaquín was one of the “accomplices in this sinful behavior,” it was only right that he be imprisoned.

  Even members of Isabel’s family in Riobamba were asked to explain themselves. Fearful of being fingered as “accomplices,” they did their best to wiggle out of any possible blame. Did Isabel and her brothers have a proper license for
this travel? No, admitted Isabel’s brother-in-law, Antonio Zabala. However, Isabel had left “upon the orders of Jean Godin”—she was obeying her husband, as Peruvian law expected a woman to do. Nor was it conceivable, he and others swore, that Isabel planned to engage in any illicit trading. She had become very poor in the previous years, they said, and had departed with but a few personal things and a paltry “100 pesos.” The caravan of thirty-one Indian servants and countless mules was conveniently forgotten, and this seemed to mollify the stuffy bureaucrats.

  At the end of August, the Quito court wrapped up matters by ordering villages and cities in the mountains of the audiencia—places that might serve as departure points to the Amazon—to post a public warning. Everyone was to understand that travel into the Amazon was prohibited without a permit and that anyone who traded with a “foreigner” there risked being put to death. One town after another—Ambato, Patate, Riobamba, and Baños—dutifully nailed up the warning, and the sudden appearance of this government advisory might have perplexed people had they not been quick to read between the lines. And thus did the news spread throughout the audiencia and to points beyond, as surely as if a town crier had stood in every village’s plaza mayor and bellowed out the headline.