If before they had been plagued by fog, now they were beset by ants, mosquitoes and flying cockroaches. Condamine wrote with feeling of one particular parasite: ‘They are shaped like a flea, but almost too small for sight ... They live mostly in the dust. They insinuate themselves into the soles of the feet, or toes, and pierce the skin with such subtlety that there is no being aware of them ... [The insect] forms a nest covered with a white integument, resembling a flat pearl, and there enlarges the nest in the toe. There is an absolute necessity of extracting them.’ At the end of a fortnight Bouguer could stand it no longer and insisted they rejoin the other members of the expedition. Condamine concurred. Rather than follow the accepted overland route via Guayaquil to Quito, however, he decided to take a shortcut up the nearby River Esmeraldas. Not only might it be of scientific interest but it would also allow him, in the absence of their Spanish chaperones, Santacilla and Ulloa, to see a bit more of the country. His enthusiasm was boosted by the arrival in their camp of an unexpected visitor: the governor of Esmeraldas, Pedro Maldonado. Three years younger than Condamine, Maldonado was a Quito-born creóle who had travelled up the river several times with a view to making it the city’s main link with the outside world. He was highly intelligent, spoke the native language Quechua, as well as French and Spanish, and was one of the colony’s most accomplished surveyors. When he asked to join Condamine’s expedition the Frenchman accepted with delight. Notwithstanding Maldonado’s expertise, Bouguer said he would rather go to Guayaquil like everyone else. The two men therefore left him to his devices and set out for the Esmeraldas.
The journey, in a 40-foot dugout, was as profitable as Condamine had expected. He travelled through his first jungle, taking notes on the trees and animals. He encountered numerous different peoples, including a population descended from a slave-ship that had foundered off the coast. He took mineral samples, one of which was an unfamilar ore later classified as platinum. He investigated a strange, stretchy substance called caoutchouc, drawn from the sap of a tree, from which he made a waterproof bag for his instruments.* He visited an emerald mine and studied Inca carvings. He acquired a taste for masato, a pungent beverage made of fermented plantains and, following Maldonado’s example, abandoned his European finery for a straw hat, poncho and loose woollen trousers. As they left the Esmeraldas and climbed up the Andes, he recorded the enervating effects of altitude on the human frame – excusing his frequent pauses on the pretext of taking observations. On 4 June they stood at 12,000 feet above sea level, higher than Condamine had ever been in his life. That same day they entered Quito.
The main party was already established – Bouguer would take another six days to arrive – and together they ‘began to deliberate on the best methods of performing our work’. The spot they chose as a baseline for their survey was the flat, desert-like plain of Yarqui, to the north-east of Quito. Before they even reached Yarqui, however, Couplet succumbed to fever and collapsed on 17 September. He died without regaining consciousness. This inauspicious start set the tone for the months to come. Unaccustomed to the searing daytime temperatures and freezing nights of the high Andes, the Frenchmen were constantly ill. Bouguer ‘was in a fit of pique and knew no restraint’. Hugot developed such bad chilblains that he could not work. An Indian servant died, causing the entire contingent of porters to decamp. Only Condamine and Maldonado had any energy for the task, but their efforts were thwarted by officials from Quito who, suspecting that they were looking for buried Inca treasure, interfered so intolerably that Condamine was forced to obtain a directive from the captain-general of Peru. To do that, he had to make a trip to Lima.
He did not mind the diversion: it would give him further opportunities to study the country. And his Spanish chaperones – one of whom accompanied him – did not seem to mind either. In fact, they were as interested as Condamine in the workings of South America, having been ordered secretly to write a report on the state of the colonies. It took Condamine and Santacilia eight months to make the 2,000-mile return journey to Lima. When they returned in July 1737, armed with the necessary paperwork, the team had become acclimatized and the survey began afresh.
Intrinsic to their project was the attainment of height: not only could one see the ground below but, by signalling to parties on a similar eminence, working from a prearranged baseline, one could calculate with accuracy the distance between two points. And from those two points one could extrapolate indefinitely. The scientists became, reluctantly, mountaineers. They scaled the 16,000-foot Pichincha volcano, and spent 23 days there, alternately baked and frozen, while they waited for signals from the surrounding mountains. They proceeded to the plains of Changalli and the Cotopaxi volcano, which shot flames 2,000 feet into the air. From peak to peak they covered most of the Ecuadorian Andes and, four years after they had left France, they were at the point of calculating the precise length of an equatorial degree of latitude. Their studies were halted by a message from Paris: Maupertius had completed his calculations; the world was thicker at the equator than at the Poles; Condamine and his associates could go home.
Condamine insisted they complete their survey. They did so reluctantly, coming to a halt in June 1739 at the town of Cuenca, slightly lower in altitude than Quito. According to Santacilla, the inhabitants ‘were differing somewhat in their genius and manufacture from those of Quito; particularly in the most shameful indolence, which seems natural to them so that they have a strange aversion to all kinds of work. The vulgar are also rude, vindictive, and, in short, wicked in every sense.’ In this provincial town, the surgeon Senièrgues made the mistake of adjudicating on a marital spat. He made the further mistake of attending a bullfight in the company of the wronged woman while the suitor was a member of the audience. He was called out. Leaping into the ring, he drew his sword and pistol. Thereupon, fearing that the bullfight would be cancelled, the audience jumped onto the sand and hacked him to death.
The tumult was so great, and Condamine’s efforts to bring the culprits to justice so strenuous, that the expedition had to retreat to a nearby monastery in fear of their lives. Here Jussieu’s servant accidentally destroyed the botanist’s collection of specimens. The loss of four years’ work affected him so strongly that he had a fit from which he never recovered, spending the rest of his life in a state of semi-derangement. Mabillon later went mad too. Condamine’s expedition was rapidly falling apart. Two men were dead, two were insane, Louis Godin wanted to quit in order to take a post he had been offered by the University of San Marcos in Lima, his cousin Jean Godin des Odonais had fallen in love with a 13-year-old girl in the town of Riobamba, and Hugot wanted to settle in Quito where he had found a wife. As a group, however, they still had one further task to perform: as instructed by the Academy of Sciences, they were to mark the baseline of their survey ‘with monuments of a permanent nature’. The pyramids came naturally to Condamine’s mind, so he drew designs for two such to be erected on the plain of Yarqui. When Hugot heard of the plan he was aghast: ‘Pyramids here? It would be like erecting pyramids on the moon!’
The difficulties were, indeed, enormous. A kiln had to be built to fire the bricks. A six-mile canal had to be dug to provide water for the mortar. They had to sink wooden piles to reinforce the foundations. Slabs of rock had to be quarried from the Andes to provide a long-lasting surface on which could be inscribed the names of Condamine, Bouguer and Louis Godin, plus the dates of the expedition. When the pyramids were finished, each bearing a jaunty fleur-de-lys on its peak, they looked splendid. But Condamine had made a mistake: the inscriptions mentioned neither the King of Spain nor his two captains and the many colonists who had been instrumental in the survey. Furthermore, the fleur-de-lys was a symbol of the French crown and, although Condamine argued (correctly) that it was the emblem of the Bourbons and that the French and Spanish royals were branches of the same family, it appeared as if he was claiming Yarqui for France. Legal proceedings were instituted and for two years the expedition halted its work wh
ile the faintly ridiculous inquiry took its course. In 1742 it was decided that the pyramids could stay, provided that the fleur-de-lys were removed and the inscription altered.*
In the interim, Louis Godin left for Lima, Jean Godin des Odonais married his girl – the whole party, including the stricken Jussieu and Mabillon, attended the ceremony – Pedro Maldonado departed to explore the Amazon, and the draughtsman Morainville was crushed by scaffolding. As for Condamine, Bouguer and Verguin, they were already making preparations for their departure: Bouguer and Verguin were to return to Cartagena; Condamine intended to follow Maldonado down the Amazon. But Condamine refused to leave until he had made one further verification. It was agreed that, on his way to Cartagena, Bouger would take astronomical observations at the equator. Condamine, meanwhile, would take identical observations at Yarqui. Only when he had received the results, and compared them to those of the land surveys, would he consider his duty discharged. In March 1743, aided by Jean Godin des Odonais, who had ridden in from Ríobamba to help his leader on this final mission, Condamine took his readings, sighting his telescope on the same star that Bouguer was simultaneously plotting at the equator. The results of Bouguer’s observations made their way slowly to Yarqui, where Condamine compared them to his own and those of the expedition. Between the astronomical and trigonometrical surveys there was a difference of less than two feet. ‘The arc has been measured!’ Condamine wrote. ‘The intermediate between our two zeniths was effected by us both on the same night. By these simultaneous observations, we attained the singular advantage of being able to ascertain precisely and beyond dispute the real amplitude of an arc of the meridian of three degrees.’ He left immediately for the Amazon, accompanied by two servants, several mules, and his 18-foot telescope.
After several months’ travel he found himself in ‘a new world, separated from all human intercourse, on a fresh-water sea, surrounded by a maze of lakes, rivers, and canals, and penetrating in every direction the gloom of an immense forest ... New plants, new animals, and new races of men were exhibited to my view. Accustomed during seven years to mountains lost in clouds, I was wrapped in admiration at the wide circle embraced by the eye, restricted here by no other boundary than the horizon.’
He worked his way east, assisted by Jesuit priests, whose scattered missions comprised the only European presence in the Amazon basin, and eventually caught up with Maldonado, who been waiting for the past six weeks at the mission of Nauta, on the Rio Huallaga. The two scientists proceeded swiftly downriver, investigating and collecting plants unknown to science. One was varvascu, whose ‘leaves or roots ... when thrown into the water have the faculty of intoxicating fish’. (Two centuries later it would be developed as an insecticide.) Another was the tree whose black resin, curare, the Indians used as a poison to tip their arrows. ‘There is no danger in eating of the flesh killed by such means,’ Condamine wrote, ‘for the venom of this poison is only mortal when absorbed by the blood.’ Learning that the antidote was salt or, preferably, sugar, he shot a chicken with a curare-coated arrow and then applied sugar to the wound to see what happened. He concluded that the antidote worked, for the chicken ‘exhibited no signs of the least inconvenience’. They investigated, too, a supposed connection between the Amazon and the Orinoco: ‘It has been generally suppressed in those maps by modern geographers as if by common consent,’ Condamine wrote, ‘and treated as chimerical by those who were supposed to have the best means of information.’ He did not have a high opinion of the Indians, describing them as ‘voracious gluttons ... pusillanimous and timid in the extreme unless transported by drunkenness ... [There] exist inland tribes of Americans who eat their prisoners.’ But from their reports he concluded that: ‘The positive certainty of an existing communication between the waters of the two rivers... is a geographical fact.’ Yet, as he admitted, he had no idea where it might be, nor did he have the resources to look for it. By 19 September the two scientists were at Para, at the mouth of the Amazon, from where they travelled to Cayenne, in French Guiana, and then to France, where they were reunited in spring 1745 with Bouguer and Verguin. The survey, which should have taken two years, had occupied a decade. And of the ten Frenchmen who had set out, only three had returned.
There was, however, one member still to come. Before Condamine had left the Andes, Jean Godin des Odonais had promised that he would follow him down the Amazon with his wife and four children. He left Ríobamba in March 1749, reaching French Guiana four months later. But, as he explained in a letter to Condamine, it had only been an exploratory journey to prepare the way for his family. The Amazon being under Portuguese control, might it be possible to approach Lisbon for a boat to take him back up again? Condamine forwarded his request to the appropriate authorities. Years passed while the paperwork ground through Lisbon’s tortuous bureaucracy. Godin decided to speed matters by sending plans on how France might wrest the Amazon from Portuguese control. This extraordinarily foolish move backfired. The letter was never acknowledged, from which Godin deduced that it had been intercepted by the Portuguese. Thereafter, he dared not leave Cayenne for fear that he would be imprisoned. In fact, his letter had not been intercepted, and on 18 October 1765 a Portuguese vessel arrived at Cayenne with instructions to ‘bring me to Para, thence transport me up the river as high as the first Spanish settlement to wait until I had returned with my family’. Godin, who had been waiting 15 years for this very thing, now thought it was a plot to lure him from Cayenne. He refused to accept the Portuguese offer, making excuse after transparent excuse, until the French governor lost patience and told the ship to sail without him. In his place would go a man called Tristan d’Oreasaval, who was charged with delivering a package of letters to Godin’s wife, preparing canoes for her journey, and then bringing her reply back to Cayenne. Unfortunately, the letters went astray, and it was not until 1769,20 years after her husband had reconnoitred the Amazon, that Isabella Godin finally learned it was safe to follow him.
Isabella Godin was a resilient woman. She had spent her entire life in a remote Andean town. She had not seen her husband for most of their marriage. During his absence she had lost all of her children. Now, in her forties, she was embarking on a 2,000-mile trip down the Amazon to catch a ship to a distant and foreign continent. She was preceded by her father Don Pedro Grandmaison y Bruno, who arranged palanquins and food depots as far as the village of Canelos where canoes were waiting to carry her to Para. Before proceeding downriver he sent her a warning note: ‘The roads are bad. Keep down the amount of baggage and the members of your party. The canoes and space therein are limited.’
Isabella Godin’s party was already large, comprising herself, her two brothers, her 12-year-old nephew, three women servants and a freed slave named Joachim. At the last moment, ignoring her father’s advice, she took three other men with her. Their names are unknown, but they were Frenchmen who had apparently made their way inland from the Pacific, and one of them claimed to be a doctor. The enlarged group left Ríobamba in late 1769, accompanied by 13 Indian porters. It took just seven days to reach Canelos, but when they arrived they found the village deserted and its houses burning. It had been hit by smallpox. That night the porters fled en masse, leaving the Andeans to their own devices. Isabella Godin took charge. She sent the men after Canelos’s inhabitants, and when they returned with four terrified men she hired them to guide the party downriver.
Don Pedro had promised canoes, but there were only two craft: a 40-foot dugout and a raft for their food and equipment. With these they began their journey. The four Indians lasted only a day, vanishing as soon as darkness fell. Isabella thereupon ordered her two brothers to take charge of the raft, while one of the Frenchmen was given command of the dugout. It was a disastrous experiment: the Frenchman in charge of the dugout fell overboard and drowned; then, towards evening, it hit a log and its occupants were thrown into the water. Leaving Joachim to retrieve the canoe, the others constructed a makeshift cabin and ate a meal of boiled manioc g
arnished by two unfamiliar but turkey-like fowl that the Grandmaison brothers shot. Deserted by their guides, low on food, ignorant of jungle survival, and with no means of transport other than the canoe and the raft, neither of which they knew how to handle, the party was at a loss. The French doctor proposed a solution: he would take the dugout downriver, accompanied by Joachim, and return with help. It was less than four days to the nearest village, Andoas; they would be there and back within ten days. Isabella Godin agreed.
He did not return. For a week Isabella Godin, her family, servants and the remaining Frenchman stayed in their camp, not bothering to ration their supplies in the certainty that the doctor would soon be back. After the second week they cut down their consumption. After a month they were starving. Suspecting that the doctor and Joachim had drowned, Isabella Godin and her party followed them downstream on the raft. Again they were dogged by misfortune. The raft hit a half-submerged tree and broke apart, tipping its occupants and their remaining provisions into the water. They dragged themselves ashore, but it was already too late for Isabella Godin’s nephew: Joaquin Grandmaison died that evening. In the morning they discovered that one of the maids had died in her sleep. Another wandered into the jungle and did not come back. The third also died. So did Isabella’s two brothers and the remaining Frenchman. Isabella Godin was the sole survivor of her family and the expedition. She lay by the bodies for two days, then took a machete and hacked her way into the jungle, heading for Andoas.
The day she left, Joachim arrived at her camp. The French doctor had reneged on his promise and gone downriver as fast as he could. But Joachim had persuaded a team of Andoas canoeists to take him upstream to rescue his employer. He arrived shortly after Isabella Godin had departed. Seeing the corpses, which were now unrecognizable, he returned to Andoas with the news that she was dead.
Off the Map Page 21