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

by Robert Whitaker

  Madame Godin, dead.

  * Perhaps the best-known example of this phenomenon occurred in the winter of 1846, when the infamous Donner Party became trapped in the Rocky Mountains. More than two-thirds of the twenty-five men in the group died, mostly from starvation, while only four of fifteen women died, and they succumbed only at the very end of the ordeal.

  * The reasoning here seems to be that if it had been daytime when they were attacked, they would have been wearing their undergarments. But since these items of clothing were found in the hut, the Indians concluded they must have been killed while in their sleep wear.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Deliverance

  WHEN ISABEL LEFT THE SCENE of her brothers’ death, she was so weak that she was able only to “drag herself along.” That was around the first of January, or possibly a little later, which meant that Isabel had been wandering in the jungle for at least six weeks. In more than 200 years of Amazon exploration, no solo traveler had been lost in the forest for any length of time and emerged alive, and as anyone who was familiar with the jungle could attest, there was little reason to believe that Isabel would be the first. Many years later, when two of Spruce’s companions fled into the woods in order to escape a storm, a single night left them “half dead with cold, and their clothes and bodies torn and wounded by prickly bamboos and palms.” But Isabel, drawing on an almost unfathomable inner strength, was still putting one foot in front of the other.

  At first, she was able only to walk a few hundred yards away from where the bodies of her brothers and nephew lay rotting. Water was her foremost concern, and frequently she stopped to sip drops of the precious liquid from plant leaves, moistening her lips and throat. Early on the second day, she came upon a stream and dropped thankfully to her knees. Her cupped hands trembled as she brought the water to her lips, her throat so dry that swallowing was difficult. But after two or three handfuls, her throat opened up, and she “drank as much as she could.”

  Isabel was not thinking at all about the best direction to head in. She had stumbled upon water, which was good, and with her thirst at least temporarily allayed, she could focus on finding something to eat. Water, food—all she thought about was how to stay alive. On her third day of wandering alone, her prayers were answered. In a low-lying bush, she came upon a nest that was filled with fresh eggs, a rare find in the rain forest. They may have been partridge eggs, and these, Jean would later relate, she swallowed “with the greatest difficulty … her esophagus, owing to the want of aliment, having become so much parched and straightened.” This was the most Isabel had eaten in weeks. There were seven or eight eggs, “green and about the size of duck eggs,” in the nest. The following day she came upon some wild fruit, and this, along with “other food she accidentally met with, sufficed to support her skeleton frame.”

  These days were not so different from the many that she had spent wandering with her family. She and her brothers had given up all thought of finding their way and had instead spent every moment thinking about food and water. This was still Isabel’s lot. Only now, she was much weaker than she had been before, and she was alone. The loss of companions in a survival situation can break even the strongest person, and as bad as it was for Isabel during the day, it was many times worse at night. When dusk fell, she would find a large tree to lean against, usually one with buttressed roots that flared out from its base, and she would draw her shawl around her for the long vigil. Although she was in a tropical jungle, where the temperature rarely dropped below 75 degrees Fahrenheit at night, in her dilapidated condition she would feel chilled. Ants would begin crawling over her, and so too would the flies and mosquitoes come, and then she would be engulfed in the noisy blackness of the night.

  These moments, as Jean would later write, were the worst for Isabel. “The remembrance of the shocking spectacle she’d witnessed, the horror of her solitude and the darkness of the night in a wilderness, and the perpetual apprehension of death, which augmented with every instant, had such effect on her spirits as to cause her hair to turn gray.” While the color of her hair probably turned because of a lack of food, the metaphor was apt, for it captured the fact that Isabel, in those long hours, was surely as alone as a human being could be.

  IN HIS 1963 BOOK They Survived: A Study of the Will to Live, the English writer Wilfrid Noyce concluded that in desperate situations, where people are confronted with extremes of thirst and hunger, “often the apparently strong do not come off best in the end.” What seems to count most is an inner psychological strength, which is nurtured by purpose, hope, and spiritual beliefs. These Isabel Godin had in abundance, and she was also experienced in a humble act that Noyce found was practiced by nearly all survivors: prayer.

  Survivors of long ordeals regularly report that their will to live was sustained by the thought of a specific goal or task they needed to achieve—with such unfinished business, they could not allow themselves to die. The British survival psychologist John Leach found that even a seemingly small task could provide a sense of purpose that would help one live. “It is surprising the large number of survivors who come through their ordeal with a message for loved ones from their friends who have perished, and with the thought that they must get this message through at all costs.” Similarly, even the most humble hope can provide fuel for the will to live. One survivor of the death camps at Auschwitz reported that early on, he had made a date with a woman prisoner, with the promise that they would go on the outing after they were free, and that it was the hope of that future date that kept him alive.

  Prayer, Noyce found, can provide people in desperate situations with a remarkable resilience. He discovered that this was true even for people who were not religious prior to their ordeal. In addition to fostering hope, prayer gives people a palpable sense that they are not alone and, perhaps more important, helps them escape their physical suffering.

  Ensio Tiira, a Finn who in 1953 spent thirty-two days on a raft in the Indian Ocean, including fourteen days alone after his companion died, reported, “For the whole voyage I’d had the strange feeling that someone else was with me, watching over me and keeping me safe from harm.” After his mate perished, he said, “I felt it more strongly than ever.” Similarly, Ernest Shackleton, the English explorer who in 1916 led a crew of twenty-seven men through seventeen months of cruel Antarctic conditions, declared that as he and two of his men crossed South Georgia Island on foot, the last leg of their desperate journey to find help, a “fourth walked beside them.” His two companions also spoke of this mysterious “fourth.” The story told in 1972 by sixteen Uruguayans who spent ten weeks marooned in the Andes after an airplane crash was much the same. “I can assure you that God is there,” one of the survivors told the press. “We all felt it, inside ourselves, and not because we were the kind of pious youths who are always praying all day long. Not at all. But there one feels the presence of God. One feels, above all, what is called the hand of God, and allows oneself to be guided by it.”

  At the same time, prayer enables people in dire straits to “turn their thoughts to the outside,” Noyce discovered. They must escape their physical suffering, and prayer is a vehicle that helps that happen. “Energy which but for prayer would be bound,” Noyce wrote, “is by prayer set free.” Moreover, as this occurs, survivors report that a “second self” seems to emerge, one that is disassociated from their suffering self. They find refuge in their daydreams and in their thoughts of their loved ones, and in this manner they are able to catch what Leach calls a “spiritual second wind.” Those who are able to reach this state, both Leach and Noyce concluded, may endure in ways that defy imagination.

  This is what happened to Isabel Godin. After the deaths of her two brothers and her nephew, for two days she waited for God to take her. But then, in some mysterious way, she was called to her feet by the image of her husband and a voice calling out to her. And as she wandered alone in the jungle, “in search of deliverance,” as Jean would later write, she was a
ble to escape from the awful torments of the night through prayer. Had she kept her thoughts on the terrors surrounding her as she settled up against a tree, surely she would have gone mad. She would have felt the ants crawling relentlessly up her neck, imagined poisonous snakes rustling through the bush, and dug her nails into her face to get at the botflies hatching there … her mind needed to be elsewhere, and prayer was what allowed it to fly free. As she huddled within her shawl, she would finger the two gold chains that hung from her neck, as though they were a rosary, and begin to say her Hail Mary’s, over and over again, just as she had learned to do as a child. Such moments of meditation would give way to fitful sleep, and when she awoke, she would begin her daily search for food and water, convinced—as she later told a priest in Lagunas—that the “Almighty had preserved her” another night, that it was his will that she continue on.

  ON WHAT ISABEL COUNTED as her eighth day of wandering alone, she stumbled upon a river of some size, which she took to be the Bobonaza. She spent that night on a small sandbar, and at dawn she “heard a noise at about two hundred paces from her.” There, in clear sight, were “two Indians and their wives pushing a canoe into the water.” Isabel hurried to hide behind a tree. What if they had spotted her? She was only half-clothed and defenseless … were these the man-eating savages that she had been warned about? “Her terror occasioned her to strike into the wood,” Jean wrote, but after observing the two men and their wives for a moment, Isabel had a change of mind. What worse “could possibly befall her than to continue in her present state?”

  The Indians were from Canelos. One was named Antonio, and—as he later told others in Andoas—Isabel stepped out of the forest like a ghost. She was wearing a flimsy pair of sandals and “the pants of a man and a shawl,” and she spoke to them in Quechua. Would they take her to Andoas? She was so weak that she could barely get these words out, and when the Indians gave her some meat, she was unable to swallow it. The two Indian women then prepared a broth for her, and this she was able to get down.

  The Indians also took care of her many wounds. They put a jungle balm on her cuts, and Antonio, as the Andoas Indians would later attest, “took out from her head the worms that had dug into her in the forest.” This required some skill, for the maggots, as the Indians well knew, cannot simply be pulled out. The worm is too firmly anchored in the flesh; if it is tugged at, a part will simply break off, inevitably causing an infection.

  One way to get rid of the botfly maggot, which breathes through a tiny tube that pokes through the host’s skin, is to coax it out with meat. If its breathing tube is covered, the maggot will migrate upward into the meat in its search for air. Another remedy, which the Indians with Isabel probably used, involves rubbing the toxic oil from a green cashew nut over the air hole. This suffocates the maggot, and once its anal hooks loosen their grip, it can be dug out.

  The Indians remained with Isabel on the riverbank, nursing her back to health, for an uncertain length of time—perhaps just a few days or perhaps as long as a few weeks.* On their trip to Andoas, they treated her with “kindness truly affectionate,” Jean wrote, devoting “every attention to her wants.” They cooked her soups and other easy-to-eat foods and made her a bed of palm fronds to lie down on, for she was too weak to sit for any length of time. To drive the insects away, they kept a clay pot of grass and charcoal constantly smoldering, and from time to time, one of the women would sit by her head, fanning her to keep her cool. As the Bobonaza flowed into the Pastaza, they were even greeted by leaping dolphins, which the Indians took as a sign of good luck.

  After about a week of travel, they reached the small mission station. As Isabel stepped from the canoe, nobody—neither the Andoas Indians nor the village priest, Juan Suasti—could believe their eyes. Isabel had been given up for dead nearly two months earlier. Suasti had written up his account of the tragedy, and everyone had concluded that she and the others had been set upon either by tigers or by savage Indians and that anyone who had not been killed in this way had drowned or died in the woods. Yet here she was, so gaunt that her bones were nearly poking through her skin, strangely dressed in a soiled pair of men’s pants and with a torn shawl wrapped around her naked shoulders. “Doña Isabel,” the Andoas Indians later told authorities, had arrived “many days” after having been declared dead, around the “time of Lent.”*

  Suasti ordered the mission-station Indians to bring her a dress and shoes, but “her feet were so swollen and covered with cuts that she was not able to wear them.” As the Indians crowded about Isabel, tears welled in her eyes, and she turned to Antonio and the three others who had rescued her:

  Madame Godin, stripped of almost every thing, not knowing otherwise how to testify her gratitude to the Americans who had saved her life, took from her neck two chains of gold, such as are usually worn in this country, of about four ounces weight, and gave one to each of [the couples], whose admiration at the richness of the present equalled that they would have experienced had the heavens opened before them.

  This, however, was not a scene that particularly moved Suasti. He was, as Jean would write, an example of what had been lost in the missions when the Jesuits were expelled and replaced by secular priests. Many of these secular priests were accustomed to extracting a profit from the natives; giving gold to Indians made as much sense as giving it to mules. Even as Isabel looked on, Suasti “took possession of the chains, and gave the poor Americans in their place about three or four yards of coarse cotton, such as is manufactured in the country.”

  Isabel, “worn out as she was,” did not say anything in protest. He was a priest, and she had been taught to obey the clergy. She also desperately needed to rest, to regain her strength before traveling on. But she could not stay here now. The two Indians and their wives had stayed with her and given her water, fed her and tended to her wounds, nursed her at every moment on their journey to this village. She owed her life to them. Nor did she believe it was chance that had brought her to the Bobonaza at the moment they were passing by. That was an act of Providence. As Isabel would later explain, to remain would be to dishonor God.

  Isabel departed from Andoas the next morning. She told Suasti that she would need a canoe and rowers to take her to Lagunas, 250 miles downriver, and the priest—who was stunned by her insistence on leaving—did help to arrange this transportation. Seven Indians agreed to take her there, and just before she left, a native woman handed her a white cotton dress, which she had apparently made during the night. This was yet one more act of kindness from the “Americans,” and Isabel, who would cherish this simple dress the rest of her life, later sent back a gift to thank her.

  It took them eight days to travel to Lagunas. The Pastaza flowed into the Marañón, and they proceeded on this section of the upper Amazon for a short stretch until they came to the Huallaga, the tributary where Lagunas was located. Isabel’s condition worsened during this trek, and she arrived “with a high fever and very upset.” The village priest, Romero, who was the superior for all the missions in the Maynas district, immediately put her to bed, where she remained for most of the next six weeks.

  Just as everyone in Andoas had been, Romero was astonished to see Isabel arrive, and he quickly sent out a canoe to carry the joyous news downriver. Madame Godin, alive! Four weeks earlier, Joaquín and Rocha had brought the news of her death to Omaguas, and that information had reached Pedro Gramesón in Loreto sometime in early February. Devastated, he had begun making plans to return to Riobamba. Captain Rebello, who had been waiting patiently in Tabatinga for nearly four years, had similarly started preparing to head back to Pará. It was essential that this missive from Romero, sent out from Lagunas in late February, make its way downriver rapidly. Fortunately, it arrived before Rebello departed.

  In his letters to the Portuguese captain and to Isabel’s father, Romero requested that d’Oreasaval, who had remained in Tabatinga all this time, come to Lagunas. If Isabel were to travel any further, she would need an escort. How
ever, d’Oreasaval never showed up, yet one more instance of Jean’s friend failing him. But Rocha did appear in Lagunas; he had been in Omaguas when he learned of Isabel’s survival. He must have been disconcerted as well as surprised by this news, for he had not been the most faithful caretaker of Isabel’s goods, which Joaquín had collected from the sandbar. He handed over what he had—“four silver dishes, a silver saucepan, a velvet petticoat, one of Persiana and one of taffety, some linens and other trifles”—and awkwardly muttered that “all the rest was rotten.”

  Already Isabel had felt the sting of seeing Suasti grab the two gold chains from the Indians. Hers was a world in which people were supposed to behave with honor, and yet here was Rocha—who had failed her and everyone else on the sandbar by not returning with a rescue canoe in the promised time—telling a story that could mean only one thing: He had stolen her precious things. Perhaps he had already sold them, or perhaps he still had them. But clearly, once it seemed that she had perished, he had seen an opportunity for profit. How, Isabel asked, was it that “bracelets, snuff-boxes, rosaries of gold and earrings set with emeralds were subject to rottenness?” Or “silverware and powdered gold?”

  He could only pretend that he knew nothing of such items, and Isabel finally let loose in fury: “Go your way, Sir. It is impossible that I can ever forget that, to you, I owe all my misfortunes and all my losses. Manage henceforth as you may. I am determined you shall make no part of my company.”

  By the end of March, Isabel had recovered to the point that she could resume her travels. But since she was adamant about not traveling with Rocha, she had no escort to take her further downriver other than the Indians from Andoas, and Romero advised her to return to Riobamba. “You are at the beginning of a long and tedious voyage,” he told her, “and if you go ahead, you are likely to incur fresh danger.” He would see to it that she could return “in perfect security” to her home in the Andes. It was in response to this plea that Isabel—who had been reluctant to talk about her ordeal—provided a hint of the faith that had sustained her during her wanderings in the jungle. As Romero recounted in a letter to the governor in Omaguas, Madame Godin was “surprised by his proposal”: