CUENCA WAS NEARLY THE SAME SIZE as Riobamba and had an equally pleasant climate, which made it seem an ideal place to rest. Both groups—La Condamine’s and Louis Godin’s—had in fact been coming and going from Cuenca ever since June, for they had used a bell tower in a church in the city’s plaza mayor as a triangulation point. Yet when they returned on August 23, they found the city all stirred up, like a bee’s nest that had been disturbed. Tensions were so high that Senièrgues, who had been living in Cuenca since March, did not dare go out in public without a loaded pistol.
Since the expedition had left Quito, Senièrgues had rarely been with the others. As they moved south through the mountains, he had regularly gone ahead to the nearest city in order to hang out his shingle as a traveling doctor. In one town, he had removed cataracts from a rich merchant, who had rewarded him with a princely sum. Senièrgues, La Condamine wrote, perhaps with a touch of envy, was making a “fortune” in the New World. Initially, Senièrgues had enjoyed similar success in Cuenca, but then he foolishly became involved in a lover’s quarrel.
One of Senièrgues’s patients, Francisco Quesada, had a beautiful daughter, Manuela, who had recently been jilted by her fiancé, Diego de Leon. Leon, a guitar-playing Lothario, had dumped Manuela for the daughter of Cuenca’s mayor, Sebastián Serrano. In order to get free of his marriage contract with Manuela, he had promised to pay her family a sum of money. But then he reneged, and the Quesadas asked Senièrgues if he would help collect the debt. This was clearly a delicate situation, and to complicate matters, as Senièrgues was making his initial overtures to Leon, he moved into the Quesadas’ house, prompting a great deal of gossip in town about what the doctor’s real motives might be.
Senièrgues’s initial discussions with Leon went poorly. Even though Leon had jilted Manuela, he still felt jealous on hearing rumors linking Senièrgues and his former girlfriend. Negotiations broke down completely after one of Leon’s slaves came to the Quesadas’ house and “loudly insulted” Senièrgues. As La Condamine later recounted, his friend immediately went looking for Leon: “Senièrgues stopped Leon at a street corner and picked a fight with him. Leon, for an answer, pulled out a loaded pistol, which did not prevent Senièrgues from advancing with his saber in his hand toward Leon, with such a rush that he took a false step and fell. Those that accompanied Leon intervened and separated the two.”
This scene was soon being reenacted in every bar in Cuenca. The local men—would-be comics all—took turns mimicking the clumsiness of the great doctor, falling over their feet in an exaggerated way while shouting out a few words of badly pronounced French. And there things might have ended, except that a few of Leon’s friends continued to boil over with anger, a sentiment that gradually spread. No one could understand what the French were doing in their town in the first place, and now they were wooing their women and threatening people with their swords. Could this be allowed to stand? A local priest, Juan Jiménez Crespo, asked a Cuenca judge to start a criminal investigation of Senièrgues. His crime, Crespo declared, was that he had stayed overnight in the house of an unmarried woman. The priest also denounced the French from his pulpit, further whipping up ill feelings toward the doctor, and such was the foul mood of Cuenca when La Condamine and the others arrived on August 23, hoping for a little peace and quiet.
EVER SINCE ARRIVING IN MANTA, the expedition members had been running into this darker side of Peru, where violence was constantly in the air. In Quito, the French had enjoyed the parties thrown for them and had been impressed by the fine clothes and refined manners of the Quito elite. But only a few blocks away from the elegant plaza mayor, they had discovered, “troublesome activities” began. There they found mestizos and others stumbling about drunk, thieves so bold that they would “snatch a person’s hat off” and run, and, most disturbing of all, Indians being dragged about by their hair as they were taken to work in the obrajes, or textile mills. Ulloa and Juan were carefully compiling notes on this aspect of Peru as part of their planned report to the king of Spain, and Cuenca, they wrote, was a particularly hard place: The men “have a strange aversion to all kinds of work. [Many] are also rude, vindictive, and, in short, wicked in every sense.”
At the root of this “evil,” as Ulloa and Juan dubbed it, was an economic system built on the forced labor of Indians. In the colony’s early years, the exploitation of the Indians had been accomplished through the encomienda laws, which placed entire native villages under a Spaniard’s control. However, this gave the spoils of Indian labor to a few, and the Crown quickly realized that the resulting concentration of wealth would nurture an aristocracy so powerful that it could challenge the authority of a distant monarchy. Spain passed legislation making it difficult for encomenderos to pass their encomiendas on to their descendants, and by the end of the sixteenth century, it had put in place a new system of compulsory labor.
Indians in mita service mining silver.
By Theodore de Bry. Private collection/Bridgeman Art Library.
The labor law, which was known as the mita, required a percentage of the population in every Indian village to work for several months each year in mines, textile mills, and haciendas owned by the colonists. The responsibility for doling out this labor to the colonists was left up to the corregidors, who were agents of the Crown. The Indians were paid fixed wages for their work, which made the mita, in the eyes of the Spanish monarchy, fair and just. But as Ulloa and Juan documented, the reality in eighteenth-century Peru was quite different:
Work in the obrajes begins before dawn when each Indian enters his assigned room. Here he receives his work for the day. Then the workshop overseer locks the doors, leaving the Indians imprisoned in the room. At noon he reopens the doors to allow the laborers’ wives to deliver a scant meal for their sustenance. After this short interval, the Indians are again locked up. In the evening when it is too dark to work any longer, the overseer collects the piecework he distributed in the morning. Those who have been unable to finish are punished so brutally that it is incredible. Because they seemingly do not know how to count any lower, these merciless men whip the poor Indians by the hundreds of lashes. To complete the punishment, they leave the offenders shut up in the room where they work or place them in stocks in one of the rooms set aside as a prison.
The physical abuse of Indians conscripted into mita service was never-ending. Those who kicked too much while being dragged off to work were tied by their hair to a horse’s tail and brought in that manner to the shop. Ever since the 1500s, authorities had required Indians to keep their hair long so that they could be shunted about in this way. The whip used to punish the Indian laborers, Ulloa and Juan added, was “about a yard long, a finger’s width or a bit less, made of strands of cowhide twisted together like a bass guitar string, and hardened.” When a whipping was ordered, the Indians were
commanded to stretch out on the ground face down and remove their light trousers. They are then forced to count the lashes given them until the number set by the sentence has been inflicted. After getting up, they have been taught to kneel down in front of the person who administered the punishment and kiss his hand, saying, “May God be pleased, and may He give you thanks for having punished my sin.”
At times, in order to inflict more pain, the overseers would light two bundles of maguey stems on fire and then beat the bundles together “so that the sparks fall on the victims’ open flesh as they are being whipped.”
Indians assigned to work on rural haciendas fared only slightly better. They would be assigned the task of caring for a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle, and although they might not be subjected to the same steady physical abuse that obraje workers were, they were certain to lead hopelessly impoverished lives. In theory, Spain had outlawed the enslavement of Indians, but the way the system worked ensured their bondage. A shepherd caring for a flock of 1,000 sheep was paid fourteen to eighteen pesos a year. Out of this, Ulloa and Juan found, the Indian was expected to pay a tribute—an annual tax that all Indians between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five were expected to pay—of eight pesos. Each month, the Indian laborer was also forced to buy a 100-weight bag of corn at inflated prices, which cost him a total of nine pesos annually. If a sheep died or wandered off, the shepherd had to pay for it. In this manner, an Indian drafted into the mita ended up perpetually in debt and thus “remains a slave all his life,” Ulloa wrote.
This exploitation of Indian labor colored every aspect of Peruvian culture. Since those at the top of the rigid caste system looked down upon manual labor, so did those lower on the totem pole, and every group sought to dominate the one below it. The Creoles and Spaniards looked down on everyone who was not white, mulattos and mestizos fancied themselves better than Negroes, and everyone lorded it over the Indians. Even slaves could be seen dragging Indians about by their hair, and at one home Ulloa and Juan visited, slaves went out into the street and corralled Indians to do their work.
The clergy in Peru—save for the Jesuits, Ulloa and Juan reported—were equally abusive and corrupt. They were supposed to save the Indians’ souls, but their attention more often than not was focused on a decidedly worldly concern: making money. Clergy would bid for the right to tend to a parish and then apply “all their efforts to enriching themselves.” Priests would not say mass until they had received gifts, and Indians who did not bring a gift or lacked goods to give were whipped. One priest reported that while traveling through his parish over the course of the year, he collected more than 200 sheep, 6,000 chickens, 4,000 guinea pigs, and 50,000 eggs, all of which were profitably resold.
An Indian porter carrying a Spaniard.
Museo de America, Madrid, Spain.
All of this produced a society in which violence was ever-present. The French had seen it often. While in Quito, La Condamine wrote, “[T]here were times when there would not be a week that passed, and sometimes not a single day, without some murder taking place.” Bouguer’s slave had been killed, and while the expedition was working around Riobamba, even the mayor of that graceful city was “stabbed by a mulatto in broad daylight in the center of town.” Creoles and Spaniards carried swords and pistols, and nearly everyone else went about armed with a knife. At the top of Peruvian society, people worried about whether they were being addressed with the proper grammatical form, and young girls were taught to be pure and virginal. But beneath that patina of civilization was a very rough society. The French had reason to worry, and now this: Senièrgues was enmeshed in a quarrel, and a five-day festival of bullfighting was set to begin.
SPAIN’S LOVE FOR BULLFIGHTING dated back to the Middle Ages, the ritual having become popular during the Reconquest. In its earliest incarnation, several nobles mounted on horseback and armed with long lances would fight a bull that had already been repeatedly stabbed by commoners on foot. Later, the bullfight evolved into a more dramatic form in which a lone toreador faced the animal head on, killing it with a single thrust of his sword. The spectacle evoked both a sense of violence and sexual prowess, and when a bullfight was held to celebrate a noble’s wedding, it was viewed as a fertility ritual, the bull’s sexual potency transferred in the killing to the groom. In the early eighteenth century, France and other European countries under the influence of the Enlightenment began to scorn the bullfight as a barbaric relic of the past, but in Spain, where medieval values still held sway, it became more deeply ingrained than ever. “Bullfights,” remarked the Spanish writer Fray Luis de León, “are in the blood of the Spanish people.”
During a festival, passions tended to rise with each passing day. The bullfights in Cuenca were being staged in a makeshift arena erected in San Sebastián Plaza on a bluff high above the Rio Tomebamba, and each afternoon, long before the gates opened, men and women would gather, eagerly awaiting the spectacle that was about to unfold. On the morning of the fifth day, August 28, Crespo denounced the French once again in his sermon, and by that afternoon, there was a palpable tension in the air, as though everyone knew that something was going to happen.
All of the members of the expedition went to the corrida that day. La Condamine, Bouguer, Morainville, and one or two others had been invited to sit with Gregorio Vicuna, the priest of San Sebastián Church, which graced the square where the bullfight was being staged. A former corregidor of Cuenca joined them in Vicuna’s box. While they were waiting for the festivities to begin, they engaged in small talk about Crespo and his anti-French tirades, La Condamine dismissing the sentiment as coming from a few rabble-rousers led by a priest who “did not have any virtue beyond a grand indifference to the beautiful sex.” As usual, La Condamine was in some ways enjoying their ongoing feud with the locals—everyone in the box understood his subtle dig at Crespo’s manhood—but even he did a double take when Senièrgues entered the stadium with Manuela hanging on his arm. “This was the first time that he had showed up in public with her,” La Condamine later wrote, “and it was, if you wish, imprudent.” But Senièrgues played the moment for all it was worth, slowly strolling to his box, where he took out a handkerchief and made an exaggerated show of dusting off Manuela’s seat.
A murmur of disbelief rose from the crowd. The director of the bullfight, Nicolás de Neyra, rode up to where Senièrgues was seated and angrily told him that his behavior—indeed, his very presence—was disturbing the festival. And, Neyra asked, did Senièrgues understand that neither he, nor anyone else in Cuenca, was afraid of him? More insults were exchanged, and then the French doctor, unable to “contain himself” any longer, threatened to climb down into the ring and give Neyra a thorough beating.
At that, Neyra turned and rode off. The crowd now rained jeers down upon his head for this seeming retreat. The turmoil was mounting, and once outside the ring, Neyra told those gathered for the opening parade that he was calling off the bullfight because Senièrgues had threatened to kill him. “There was,” La Condamine confessed, “nothing that could infuriate the common man more.” As the news that the bullfight had been canceled swept through the crowd, a chant of “Death to the Frenchmen” leapt from their throats, and suddenly Neyra was leading a mob of 200 men, armed “with lances, swords, slings, and guns,” back into the ring. Even the mayor, Serrano, joined Neyra and, stopping before Senièrgues, demanded that he surrender. Others were threatening to clamber into the stands to get at the French doctor, who responded with a blast of Gallic pride: Who, he asked, were Serrano and Neyra to give him such an order? And then he jumped into the ring, holding a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other, all the while promising to “give them a spectacle more interesting than that of the bulls.”
At first, nobody dared to approach Senièrgues. But then, as La Condamine later wrote, the mob surged forward:
Seeing himself surrounded, Senièrgues tried to retire from the scene, always facing his attackers, using his sword and stopping their blows, without receiving a single injury. In that manner, he arrived at the corner of the plaza, next to the fence that served as a barrier to the bulls, persecuted at every step by a hailstorm of stones, from which he tried to protect himself with his arms. The continuous throws of the stones knocked the weapons from his hands, and seeing himself disarmed, he could not think about anything other than fleeing. He retreated through the door that shut the fence, leaving his head and half his body exposed, and while he was like that, the mayor shouted to his followers: Kill him! Too quickly and too well was he obeyed: Senièrgues fell punctured with wounds, and if one is to believe the public testimony, it was Neyra who delivered the mortal thrust.
La Condamine, Bouguer, and the others had all sought to rush to Senièrgues’s aid the moment he had jumped into the ring, but Vicuna had held them back, certain that they too would be killed. With blood having been spilled, chaos was erupting everywhere. Senièrgues stumbled to the patio of a house in the corner of the plaza, the crowd continuing to kick and beat him. The deputy of the town drew his pistol to shoot him in the head, but at the last moment, the owner of the house cried out in protest, taking “up in his arms the wounded man and helping to lay him in a bed.” Meanwhile, those in the stands turned their rage on the other members of the French expedition, including Ulloa and Juan, chasing them into the streets of Cuenca. As they fled, the mob hurled stones at them, and Bouguer was at some point stabbed in the back. “We ran in fear of our life,” La Condamine later recalled, and even as they were scrambling into the sanctuary of a Jesuit’s house, a knife was hurled at Bouguer’s head that barely missed its mark. The priest and his servants quickly barred the door, the mob banging on it and trying to force it open, until at last their fury was spent and they retreated.
The murder scene in Cuenca.
From Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi à l’équateur (1751).
For the next four days, Senièrgues lay dying. He was brought to the home where the others had found refuge and where Jussieu tended to his gaping wounds and to Bouguer’s back. “Senièrgues alone has paid for all of us,” Jussieu wrote in an August 31 letter to his brother. The locals, he concluded, had become enraged by all things French. Bouguer had not been badly injured, but Senièrgues died the next day. The news of his murder spread throughout the colony and even to Europe, although there the details of what happened became somewhat garbled in the retelling. “It seems,” wrote the Scottish mathematician Colin Maclaurin, in a letter to a colleague, “that they were shewing some French gallantry to the natives’ wives, who have murdered their servants, destroyed their Instruments, & burnt their papers.”
LA CONDAMINE AND THE OTHERS had planned to return to the surrounding area to do their astronomical observations. But in the wake of the riot, this seemed the height of folly. On the day that Senièrgues had been stabbed, the mob had eventually descended on the ranking official in town, an assistant to the corregidor, and forced him to promise that the Frenchmen would be made to leave the city. Serrano, meanwhile, had decided that he would direct the investigation of the killing, and as a first step, he told Neyra—the very person who had stabbed Senièrgues—to gather information about the doctor’s criminal activities. Even the arrival of the corregidor of the Cuenca district, who had hurried to town to restore order, did not make the French feel safe. At their urging, he did initiate criminal proceedings against Neyra, Serrano, and Leon, who had been a leader of the mob as it surged through the streets. But he feared that if he arrested them, the town would revolt. Many in Cuenca were toasting Leon for having vanquished his rival, and Neyra, La Condamine wrote bitterly, had been publicly praised “for having done the killing.” All that the corregidor dared to do was send a secret indictment to judges in the Quito Audiencia, which allowed the three ringleaders of the riot to remain at liberty.
Even so, after a few weeks, La Condamine and the others resumed their scientific work, and they did so in and around Cuenca. They were not going to let death threats keep them from completing their measurements.
At first glance, this last step in their mission—apart from the danger that the people of Cuenca presented—seemed simple. Determining latitude by measuring the altitude of the sun or another star was an age-old science. However, as had been the case with their triangulation work, the French savants were intent on making measurements that were accurate down to one second of a degree. That precision had never before been achieved.
The instrument they would use for this purpose was the zenith sector. Rather than measuring a star’s altitude above the horizon, a zenith sector determined the complement of this angle: It measured the difference between the star’s position and a point directly overhead. The sector’s long stationery arm would be aligned along the vertical axis,* while its telescope would be pointed at the star as it crossed the local meridian (the imaginary line of longitude drawn through the observatory and the earth’s two poles). The telescope was attached by a swivel to the sector’s vertical arm, and thus pointing it at the star created an angle that could be measured, which was known as a star’s zenith distance. By taking zenith-distance readings of the same star from different points on a north-south line, astronomers could determine the difference in latitude of those two points.
The academicians had brought a sector with a twelve-foot radius from France, the instrument having been skillfully constructed by Graham in England. However, Louis Godin, anticipating this moment in their work, had asked Hugo to construct a twenty-foot sector, which, since it had a larger radius, could theoretically provide more accurate measurements. La Condamine and Bouguer took the twelve-foot sector to the plains of Tarqui, where they built an observatory during the month of September, while Godin set up his twenty-foot sector in Cuenca, using the bell tower of the church in the plaza mayor as a makeshift observatory. Because the two groups had measured separate meridian lines, they needed to continue working apart. Each would determine the latitudes of the endpoints of its own meridian.
The use of a zenith sector required spending long hours in an awkward position. A pendulum clock can be seen on the observatory wall.
From Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Mesure des trois premiers degrés du méridien dans l’hémisphere austral (1751).
In early October, both groups began making measurements, training their sights on a star in the Orion constellation. However, bad weather slowed their progress. Clouds obscured the night sky for weeks on end, and with Senièrgues’s murder so fresh in their minds, the constant rains cast a pall over the whole enterprise. It was a “series of sad and difficult observations” they were trying to make, La Condamine wrote in his journal, and they were having to conduct them in a “lonely place.” By December, they were still not finished, and it seemed certain that 1739 would close with their spirits flagging. But their gloom was lifted by an unlikely group: Indians and mestizos holding a festival at Tarqui. The brightly costumed Indians, mounted on horseback, performed choreographed dances, and during an intermission, a group of mestizos put on a pantomime that, for the moment anyway, washed away their grief:
They had the talent of mimicking anything they saw and even things they did not understand. I had seen them observing us several times while we took the measurements of the sun to adjust our pendulums. This must have been for them an impenetrable mystery to see a man on his knees at the base of a quadrant, head facing upwards in an uncomfortable position, holding a lens in one hand and with the other turning a screw on the foot of the instrument, and alternately carrying the lens to his eye and to the divisions to examine the plumb line and from time to time running to check the minutes and seconds on the pendulum and jotting some numbers down on a piece of paper and once again resuming the first position. None of our movements had escaped the observations of our spectators and when we least expected it they produced on stage large quadrants made of painted paper and cardboard which were rather good copies and we watched as each of us was mimicked mercilessly. This was done in such an amusing manner that I must admit to not having seen anything quite as pleasant during the years of our trip.
In early January, both groups completed their celestial observations in Cuenca. All they had to do now was perform similar observations in the plains north of Quito, and they would be done. After two long years in the mountains, they looked forward to the relative comforts of that city, where, they knew, friends like Pedro Gramesón would welcome them once again. Jean Godin in particular thought happily about returning to the Gramesóns. Indeed, he went to their home the minute he reached Quito, and he heard from the general this news: Isabel had turned twelve years old, the age when girls in Peru began to wed.
* A plumb line is used to determine the point directly overhead. Gravity will cause a plumb line to point toward the earth’s center, and the extension of that line in the opposite direction identifies the point directly overhead.
