JEAN GODIN SAW LA CONDAMINE for the last time in August 1742, just before La Condamine left for Tarqui. They embraced, and Jean asked La Condamine to advise the mission stations strung along the Amazon that he, Isabel, and their first child would soon be following in La Condamine’s footsteps. “I reckoned on taking the same road along the river of Amazons, as much owing to the wish I had of knowing this way, as to insure for my wife the most commodious mode of travelling, by saving her a long journey overland [to Cartagena], through a mountainous country, in which the only conveyance is by mules.”
The expectation of returning home must have helped Jean cope with his sense of loss at watching La Condamine go. He had always looked up to La Condamine, who, even more than his cousin Louis, had appreciated what he had done for the expedition, publicly praising him for the “zeal” he had shown as a signal carrier. Jean and the other assistants—Verguin, Morainville, Hugo, and Jussieu—were also having to face the fact that the expedition had ended, Bouguer and La Condamine were on their way back to France, and yet there was no money for their own return. They had, in some ways, been abandoned by the country they had served for so long.
Although Jean and Isabel had intended to go to France in 1743, the date came and went. They settled for a time in Quito, where Isabel gave birth to their first child, a girl. This was a moment of great joy for the Gramesón family—their first grandchild had arrived—but it turned to sorrow when the baby succumbed at four months to one of the many infectious diseases that so often killed children in colonial South America. Jean, meanwhile, struggled with his business ventures. He dabbled in the textile business and lost money in an ill-fated term as a tax collector. He had obtained the right to collect a 2 percent duty on goods, known as an alcabala. The Crown often auctioned this position to the highest bidder, who would then try to make a profit by collecting more than he had paid. This was a risky bet even in the best of times, and Jean had the distinct disadvantage of being French, which only encouraged merchants to ignore him. In early 1744, a devastating epidemic broke out in the Quito area, killing 8,000 in the audiencia, and with Isabel pregnant again, the entire Gramesón clan moved 110 miles south to Riobamba, where they hoped the air was healthier.*
The Riobamba valley, which had so enchanted the expedition members, had been inhabited for several thousand years. When the Incas began their conquest of the Andes, a group known as the Puruhás lived here, many gathered in settlements along a long, beautiful lake, which the Spanish later named Laguna del Colta. The surrounding fields were fertile, and the Puruhás harvested reeds from the shores of the lake to weave mats and baskets. It took the Incas three tries to conquer the proud Puruhás, but once they did, they built a town called Liripamba on the flat plains north of the lake. The buildings in the Inca town were constructed with mortarless stonework and included a temple of the sun and other religious buildings.
Diego de Almagro, Pizarro’s original partner in the conquest of South America, founded Riobamba atop the ruins of Liripamba on August 15, 1534. He constructed it according to the usual Spanish plan, with a plaza mayor and with streets laid out along a rectangular grid. The valley here is slightly higher than at Quito, around 9,000 feet, and the air is further cooled by the nearby presence of Mount Chimborazo, the tallest volcano in the Quito Audiencia at 20,700 feet. Although nights can be chilly, daytime temperatures are warm and springlike, and as early as 1545, a traveler who stopped here, Pedro Cieza de León, waxed eloquent over the town. He was in the midst of a seventeen-year trek by horseback through the viceroyalty, and he found no place he liked as much: “Riobamba is situated in the province of the Puruhás in beautiful fair fields, whose climate, vegetation, flowers and other features resemble those of Spain.”
With its rich soil and pleasant weather, Riobamba attracted a number of eminent families, whose names told of nobility and purity of blood. Also living there were many men who could boast of high military rank—sergeants, captains, and generals of the cavalry or infantry. These families, Ulloa noted in his journal, had “been very careful not to diminish either the luster of their families, or their wealth, by promiscuous alliances, marrying only into one another.” The Maldonados were one such clan in Riobamba, and several others could trace their roots back to the conquistadors. These wealthy families built several churches that were equal in grandeur to any in Quito, and the one that graced the plaza mayor, they liked to boast, had a “steeple that was the tallest in the viceroyalty.”
In 1699, the city was nearly destroyed by an earthquake, which killed more than 8,000 people in Riobamba and other Andean towns along the fault line. But the survivors rebuilt their beloved town, erecting homes of light stone and adobe that were, for the most part, only one-story tall, lest another earthquake strike. In the ensuing decades, Riobamba reached the peak of its flowering, and people in other parts of the viceroyalty spoke of its “splendor.” More than 16,000 people lived in the city, and the surrounding fields were so fertile, sown with clover and various cereals, that—as Ulloa wrote—it created a “landscape elegantly adorned with such an enchanting variety of colours as painting cannot express.” This agricultural bounty was complemented by profits from the textile business. Huge flocks of sheep grazed in the rolling hills above the valley, providing the raw wool for more than twenty textile mills in the district. The town’s location, with Quito to the north, Cuenca to the south, and Guayaquil to the west, also made it a vital transportation hub. All of this economic activity in turn attracted a number of jewelry makers, painters, carpenters, and sculptors, their work gracing the sumptuous parlors and dressing rooms in the homes of the elite.
Most wealthy families in Riobamba owned both a country hacienda and a city house, and that was true of the Gramesóns as well. They acquired a large hacienda called Subtipud in Guamote, a village about fifteen miles south of Laguna del Colta, where they produced potatoes and barley. Isabel also purchased several vegetable gardens in Chambo, which was ten or so miles to the east of Riobamba, and some other small properties in that area. Nearer to Riobamba, she bought several alfalfa fields from Franciscan nuns. The fact that she owned these properties in her own name reflected yet another contradiction of colonial Peru: Although elite women were not supposed to work and were expected to stay sheltered in their homes, they nevertheless did enjoy certain legal rights that provided them with a measure of independence. Such laws were the work of humanists in Spain who, since the sixteenth century, had sought to make Spanish society more equitable and just. Even the marriage dowry theoretically remained the property of the woman; the husband was supposed to safeguard these assets during their lives together, and then it would be returned to her upon his death.
In Riobamba, Jean and Isabel lived on the east side of town, just up from the main square. As their home was on the side of a hill, fifty feet or so above the valley floor, they had a particularly good view of Mount Chimborazo when they stepped out their front door, and if they climbed up the hill a few blocks more, to the top of the ridge, they could see a number of volcanoes in the snow-capped eastern cordillera. To the north was graceful Tungurahua and closer by was rugged Altar, and these volcanoes, forever rumbling and threatening to erupt, were like living entities to the people of Riobamba. One tale handed down from the local Indians told of the three volcanoes being involved in a messy “affair.” Massive Chimborazo was married to slender Tungurahua, but Tungurahua had betrayed Chimborazo in the past, having had a passionate romance with fierce-looking Altar. How could Chimborazo not notice such goings on? One day Chimborazo had looked out over the entire valley and had blown his top in fury, putting an end to the adulterous liaison. And now when Tungurahua spit smoke and fire, locals mused that she must be remembering her old lover and was displaying her anger with Chimborazo for having denied her such pleasure.
Mount Chimborazo. Eighteenth-century drawing by Alexander von Humboldt.
By permission of the British Library.
The constant rumblings of the earth influenced the religious habits of the people of Riobamba as well. They constructed a large statue of the Virgin Mary atop a nearby mountain, and from this lofty perch she looked over the town and protected them from nature’s wrath. On holy days, the priests would lead a procession to the foot of the statue, the people of Riobamba hopeful that their veneration of the Virgin would keep them safe.
While social life in the town centered on the church, as it did in all Peruvian cities, the people enjoyed their games too. Dice and cards were common pastimes, bullfights were held in the plaza mayor at regular intervals, and the city was known throughout the audiencia for its cockfights. The young boys in town also crowded neighborhood plazas to play un juego con una pelota (a game with a ball), which led church fathers at times to complain about their rowdiness. An attorney for the San Augustín Church wrote to the cabildo,
There are a great number of young people of bad habits that have established a ball game that has demoralized the spirituality of my convent. They block the street where they gather, and so many are they that they impede the path to the church and that doesn’t allow us to celebrate mass.… Furthermore, the ball strikes the convent and causes cracks in the walls, all to the disadvantage of said convent.
The Gramesóns prospered in this lively town. General Pedro Gramesón enjoyed a society where so many had titles—at mass, the pews would be crowded with men wearing medals and other insignia that told of their importance. Isabel’s older brother Juan became a priest in the San Augustín order, while her younger brother, Antonio, helped manage Subtipud. Antonio married and some years later became the father of two boys. Isabel’s younger sister, Josefa, also wed, and she became the mother of several children. The one person who struggled in Riobamba was Jean Godin. He helped out with the Gramesón properties and continued to trade in textiles, but his business ventures in Riobamba were as unsuccessful as they had been in Quito. Every year he filed a list of his debtors with the town council, and every year it got longer. He simply was not good at getting people to pay him what they owed.
While he and Isabel never stopped talking about France, the years began to slip by. He continued to work on his grammar of the Incan language, always thinking of the moment he would present it as a gift to the king. Since Isabel spoke Quechua, she was able to help him in this endeavor. But they had set down roots in Riobamba—Isabel’s family was here and she was a property owner as well—and any possibility of going to France was delayed time and again by her repeated pregnancies. They had a second child and then a third, although each time the joy of birth was followed by grief. Neither child lived more than a few days, and with each death Isabel fell into a period of melancholy. Even Jean began to wonder if he would ever see Saint Amand again. His plans for traveling down the Amazon grew ever dimmer, until, in late 1748, he received a letter, written eight years earlier, from his siblings. His father had died, and his family wanted him home at once.
ALTHOUGH PORTUGUESE SLAVE TRADERS had been regularly making their way up the lower part of the Amazon since the early 1600s, by the late eighteenth century, only a few people had ever traveled from the Andes down the river to the Atlantic coast. Indeed, when La Condamine set out, only three or four parties had ever made the 3,000-mile trek, there was no good map of the river, and fantastic tales of Amazon women and El Dorado still swirled about.
The mouth of the Amazon, which is a delta more than 200 miles wide, was discovered by Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, a Spaniard, in 1500. He named it La Mar Dulce, the Sweet Sea. According to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, in which Spain and Portugal divided up the undiscovered world, this part of the New World belonged to Spain. But the coast here was not inviting. To the north were dense forests and swamps, and traveling southeast was difficult because of trade winds and shallow reefs. The Spanish attempted to establish a colony in the mouth of La Mar Dulce in 1531 but quickly gave up, and efforts to explore the Amazon from this direction lay dormant for the next seventy years.
From high up in the Andes, however, the conquistadors could look out at the vast jungle below and dream of riches hidden there. After Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas, everyone was certain that there were other wealthy kingdoms to conquer, and rumors were rampant about El Dorado, where gold was said to be so plentiful that the king covered himself in gold dust and washed it off each evening. There were also stories of a magical land in the jungle where cinnamon trees grew. The bark of this tree could provide a fragrant spice highly valued in Europe.
Lured on by such accounts, Pizarro’s brother, Gonzalo, headed out from Quito in February 1541 at the head of a large army—220 Spaniards in clanking armor and 4,000 Indians—that brought with it 2,000 hogs, 2,000 hunting dogs, and vast flocks of llamas. This expedition was larger than the one Francisco had mounted to conquer the Incas, but it quickly bogged down in the dense rain forest at the base of the Andes, where Pizarro and his men were plagued by incessant rains and hordes of insects. Although this area was sparsely populated, whenever Pizarro did encounter Indians, he tortured them to reveal the location of El Dorado, and if they professed not to know, he had them burned alive or fed to the dogs. Finally, a local chief, having learned of such interrogation methods, told Pizarro what he wanted to hear—there was a fabulous kingdom ruled by a powerful overlord further to the east. Pizarro and his men wandered deeper into the wilderness until, at last, they came upon a navigable river, the Coca, a tributary of the Napo. Here they stopped long enough to build a small boat to carry their supplies and munitions. The horses and men, however, proceeded on foot along the banks of the river, hacking their way through thick brush, and at the end of ten months, Pizarro and his band of men were still only 300 miles from Quito. They were also struggling to stay alive. They had eaten most of their animals, nearly all of the 4,000 Indians had died, and they had not discovered a speck of gold.
On Christmas Day 1541, Francisco de Orellana, who was the second in command, proposed that he take the boat and sixty men and head downstream in search of food. Pizarro agreed, a decision he came to rue, for he never saw Orellana again. At first, Orellana found nothing. There were no settlements along the river, and his troops were reduced to eating their leather belts and the soles of their shoes, which they cooked with herbs. “They were like madmen, without sense,” wrote Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, who accompanied Orellana. But shortly after New Year’s Day, they came upon an Indian village, and after Orellana made peace with its chief, the villagers provided them with “meat, partridges, turkeys, and many kinds of fish.” They had found the food they had been seeking, but they had proceeded so far down the swift-moving river—as much as seventy-five miles each day—that they realized it would be impossible to return to Pizarro. After waiting three weeks to see if he would come to them, during which time they built a second boat, they decided that they had no choice but to go on without the others. Their only plan was to follow the unknown waterway to its end.
As they proceeded down the Napo, they entered a world that was more and more heavily populated, and shortly after they reached the Amazon, in mid-February, they came upon the kingdom of Aparia the Great, who brought them cats and monkeys to eat. Now they began encountering one “nation” after another—first the Machiparos, who were rumored to number 50,000, and then the even larger kingdom of the Omaguas, which stretched for several hundred miles. “We continued to pass numerous and very large villages,” Carvajal wrote, “and the farther we went the more thickly populated and better did we find the land.” The Indian tribes, he reported, kept turtles in pens and often supplied Orellana and his men with eggs, partridges, parrots, fish, and a variety of fruit to eat, including pineapples, pears, plums, and custard apples.
By this point, the Amazon was so wide that they could not easily see from one side to the other. There was an endless horizon of green trees along the riverbank, the water moved languidly along, and lush clouds piled up overhead. In early June, they came upon a great river that flowed into the Amazon from the north, which they named the Río Negro after its inky black color. So powerful was this river that its black water did not completely mix with the Amazon’s brownish current for twenty leagues, Carvajal reported. Here they began to be attacked with some regularity by Indians, who paddled out in canoes to fight, at times firing so many arrows that the Spaniards’ boats looked like porcupines. Even so, Orellana reached the Atlantic in August 1542 with forty-nine of his men still alive. Only eleven had died on the long journey, and eight of the deaths had been due to “natural causes.” While he had not found El Dorado, he had discovered a populated world, where food was abundant and the natives were variously welcoming and hostile. Carvajal also told of a tribe of women warriors on the banks of the river, below the Río Negro, and of an encounter with four giant white men. As a result of his account, La Mar Dulce came to be known as the River of the Amazons.
Gonzalo Pizarro and his men had not fared as well. Left behind in the forest, they were reduced to eating lizards and drinking the blood of their horses, which they cooked with herbs in their helmets. A band of eighty half-naked, emaciated, and slightly crazed men arrived back in Quito in August 1542, Pizarro seething with bitterness toward Orellana, whom he accused of treason. In the fate of the two groups, though, one could see a picture of two wildernesses. Along the foot of the Andes was a dense and forbidding jungle. But after passing through it, one came to the navigable waters of the Amazon, along which game and food could be found. Travel along this waterway, except for attacks from natives, was fairly easy.
Although Spaniards in Peru continued to dream of El Dorado, only a few dared to venture into the jungle after Pizarro’s failed adventure. The next expedition of any note was sent in 1560 by the viceroy of Peru, who did so partly as a way of getting rid of troublemakers in the colony. Three hundred men led by Pedro de Ursúa departed from Lima, heading into the jungle via the Huallaga River and with orders to find El Dorado and conquer the Omaguas. Ursúa brought along his mistress, which stirred up jealousy among his men, and on New Year’s Day 1561, Lope de Aguirre—one of history’s great psychopaths—led a mutiny, killing Ursúa and hatching a plot to return to Peru to conquer it. The route Aguirre took across the Amazon basin to reach the Atlantic is uncertain even today. Either he followed the Amazon to its end, or he turned up the Río Negro, crossed over into the Orinoco River, and followed that waterway north to the Caribbean. What is known is that on July 20, 1561, he seized the island of Margarita, slaughtering anyone who dared to stand in his way. He then launched an invasion of the mainland, where he was defeated by royalist troops and beheaded.
Aguirre’s was the last transcontinental journey through the Amazon basin for nearly eighty years. Heading east from the Andes, through the dense rain forest of the mountains, was so difficult that it seemed to bring ruin to those who tried. However, at the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch, English, and French all established colonies at the mouth of the Amazon, kicking off European exploration of the Amazon from the eastern end. The Portuguese arrived in 1616, setting up a military fort named Belém do Pará. Although this was supposed to be Spanish land, at that time Spain and Portugal were united under one king, and so Spain, struggling to manage its colonies in Peru and Mexico, was only too happy to see the Portuguese take on the settlers from other countries. Over the next ten years, the Portuguese drove the French, Dutch, and English out of the Amazon, and they moved north to the swampy coasts of Guiana.
South of the Amazon, Portuguese settlers along the coast had already carved out huge sugar plantations, and they now looked to the river as a source of slave labor. The Indians, in their words, were “red gold.” Although enslavement of the indigenous people was theoretically illegal, both Spanish and Portuguese law provided the settlers with loopholes to exploit. Settlers were allowed to make slaves out of “prisoners taken in just wars,” and a just war was in the eye of the beholder. They were also allowed to enslave Indians captured by other tribes. The rational for that provision was that the “freed” Indians became their indentured servants who had to work the plantations in order to “repay” the ransom. Once the Portuguese gained control of the river’s mouth, the slave trade exploded and the mass migration of Indians along the Amazon began. Some tribes, such as the Omaguas, moved further upriver to escape, and others fled into the interior.
As the slave traders conducted their hunting expeditions, they expanded Portugal’s control over the Amazon. Although Portugal and Spain may have shared a king, the two countries remained separate, and the Amazon—in the 1630s—was clearly up for grabs. Portugal was laying claim to the vast interior of the continent, which was why, in February 1637, Portuguese military commanders in Pará, on the southern shore of the delta, reacted with alarm when two Spanish Franciscan monks and five Spanish soldiers arrived in their port after having canoed down the river. Were the Spanish going to push forward territorial claims from the west?
The Franciscans had not made their voyage with any such intention. They had left Quito several years earlier in order to establish a mission on the Napo River, but hostile Indians had driven them off, and they had subsequently traveled several thousand miles to Pará. Even so, their visit stirred the Portuguese to mount a huge expedition, under the command of Captain Pedro Teixeira, to march up the river and formally stake Portugal’s claim to it. He led a force of seventy soldiers traveling in a fleet of forty-seven canoes, with 1,200 Indians and Negroes manning the oars, and even after he had reached the end of the navigable part of the Napo River, he and his soldiers continued on, arriving in Quito in October 1638. Their trip had taken a year, and now it was Spain’s turn to be alarmed. The authorities in Quito ordered the Portuguese crew back to Pará but placed several Spaniards on board, including a Jesuit priest, Cristóbal de Acuña, who was told to produce a report on the river. It was the first time that Spain had sought to survey this vast region.
The party left Quito on February 16, 1639, and reached Pará ten months later. Along the way, Teixeira staked out an arbitrary boundary line between the two countries, using a carved log to mark the spot. He also drew up a formal “Act of Possession” to back Portugal’s legal claim to the lion’s share of the Amazon. Meanwhile, Acuña published an account of their voyage in which he sang of the river’s riches and recommended that Spain should occupy all of it. The Amazon, he marveled, had more people than the “Ganges, Tigris, or Nile.” Many of the natives were friendly, and he hailed the Omaguas as the “most intelligent, the best governed on the river.” There were healing drugs to be found in the forest, huge trees that could be harvested for shipbuilding, and fertile riverbanks that could be used to grow manioc, sweet potatoes, pineapples, guavas, and coconuts. The river was swimming with fish, the woods were full of game—including tapirs, deer, peccaries, monkeys, and armadillos—and the lagoons were populated by numerous birds. His was a wilderness that was more bountiful paradise than fearsome jungle. “Settlements are so close together that one is scarcely lost sight of before another comes into view,” he wrote. “It may be imagined how numerous are the Indians who support themselves from so plentiful a country.” Yet lower on the Amazon, closer to the mouth, he found a river undergoing a transformation, its banks emptied by the slave trade, “with no one [left] to cultivate the land.”
Acuña’s book was titled New Discovery of the Great River of the Amazons, and in many ways he provided a straightforward account of what he saw. However, he also gave credence to what he had heard along the way about strange people living inland from the Amazon. He wrote of lands inhabited by giants and dwarfs, and of a race of people whose feet grew backward so that those hunting them would be led astray by their tracks. He confirmed that a tribe of warrior women inhabited this jungle, up north toward Guiana. These tales kept alive the picture of the Amazon as a wilderness that was both bountiful and magical, a world where explorers could indeed find great treasures.
Portugal now had little motivation to rein in its slave trade, which exploded in earnest. Entire tribes were “descended” down the river by slave traders, and the enslaved Indians died in great numbers from disease, despair, and malnutrition. “They killed them as one kills mosquitoes,” protested a Jesuit priest, João Daniel. One after another the Indian tribes disappeared, falling like dominoes as one went upriver. One slave trader complained, in 1693, that it was necessary to travel two months from Pará to find any natives to capture.
Daniel and other Jesuits sought to protect Indians from the slave trade by building missions where they could come and live, and presumably find a safe refuge. However, the Portuguese stations were something of a double-edged sword, for the priests would convert the Indians to Christianity and often force them to adopt Christian ways, thereby destroying their culture and tribal identity. Meanwhile, Spain turned to the Jesuits and their missionary work with a political goal in mind: By encouraging the black-robed priests to build missions along the upper Amazon, Spain could hope to take possession of this region and thus prevent the Portuguese from grabbing an ever greater share of the Amazon. The boundary between the two countries would effectively be established by the mission stations rather than by any formal treaty between the two countries.
Spanish Jesuits erected their first such mission at Borja in 1658, at the foot of the Andes, where the Marañón River* pours through a nasty strait called the Pongo de Manseriche. A little while later, they established a second settlement further downstream at Lagunas, where the Huallaga flows into the Amazon. In 1681, representatives of the Omaguas traveled upriver to Lagunas to request that a missionary be sent to them—they needed protection from the Portuguese slave traders—and the priest who arrived five years later was a memorable, ruddy-faced German, Samuel Fritz. For the next thirty-seven years, he worked along the banks of the Amazon, tending to a “parish” that extended for more than 1,000 miles. During this time, he produced the first somewhat reliable map of the river.
Fritz’s mapmaking journey arose from what is possibly the longest trip ever made in search of medical help. In 1689, he was struck by malaria and for days lay dying in a flooded Yurimagua village. Everyone had fled to higher ground except for a lone boy, who tried to comfort him. Fritz was so weak that lizards and rats ran across his body, and at night his sleep was disturbed by the malevolent grunting of crocodiles outside his hut. At last, he gathered enough strength to get into a canoe and head downriver for help. Once in motion, he stayed in motion, and he traveled more than 2,000 miles to Pará, where the Portuguese promptly arrested him, reasoning that he was a spy. After eighteen months in prison, he was freed by an order from Portugal’s King Pedro II. On his return upriver, with the aid of a few crude instruments, he was able to roughly chart the Amazon. He traveled all the way to Lima, and it was this map, along with Cristóbal de Acuña’s book, that inspired La Condamine to take this route home.
Samuel Fritz’s Map of the Amazon, 1707.
By permission of the British Library.
FROM THE BEGINNING of the French expedition, there had been some talk that the group, as a whole, would return via the Amazon. But as the mission went on and on and the group came to be rent by dissension, that idea faded away. However, La Condamine never lost interest in the route, and as early as 1738, he had initiated the process of obtaining a passport from the Portuguese. “As for the discomforts,” he wrote in his journal in 1741, “I knew these would be great, and everything which I had heard only served to increase the wish I had to experience it for myself.”
At the last minute, La Condamine also coaxed Pedro Maldonado to join him. Maldonado, who had finished his Esmeraldas road by 1742, had initially begged off, his family urging him not to go on such a dangerous venture. By the time Maldonado made up his mind to ignore his family’s advice, it was too late for him to leave with La Condamine, so they decided to take different routes to the river and meet up in Lagunas. Maldonado, leaving from the Riobamba area, would skirt around the base of Mount Tungurahua and head east on foot down a steep gorge that spilled out of the Andes; then he would follow the Bobonaza and Pastaza Rivers to the Amazon. La Condamine, who would be departing from Tarqui after finishing his celestial observations, decided to head south to Jaen, where, after a short journey overland, he could pick up the Marañón. This would allow him to draw a map of the entire navigable part of the Amazon and would also enable him to see whether “the famous strait known under the name of Pongo de Manseriche was as terrible up close at it had been described to me from afar.” In Quito, he noted, they spoke of this passage “only in hushed tones of admiration and fear.”
La Condamine’s journey got off to a rough start in Tarqui. He went to Cuenca to hire mules and porters, but the people there were still furious over his efforts to prosecute Senièrgues’s killers, and most refused to help. When he left on May 11, 1743, for his long journey down the Amazon, La Condamine was accompanied only by a Negro servant, and he was hauling along a sixteen-foot telescope as well as his precious scientific papers. These got soaked when his mule stumbled and fell into a river, and when he arrived in the town of Zaruma, only a short distance south of Tarqui, he was told it was fortunate he had taken an uncommon route, for several friends of Neyra and Leon had been laying “in wait on the high road,” eager to play him a “bad game.”
In Loja, La Condamine stopped long enough to collect nine saplings of the cinchona tree, along with some seeds. He placed the plants in an earthen box, hoping to bring them back alive to Paris. By late June he had arrived in Jaen, and there he paused long enough to summarize all his observations and arc measurements. He gave this report to a local official in case he “should die en route.”
As he expected, his descent into the jungle proved memorable. He had to cross numerous boiling streams and rivers, either by inching his way along the swaying bridges he had always found so nerve-racking or by floating across “on rafts constructed on the spot.” His papers and other goods were stuffed into baskets covered with ox hides, and in the incessant rain, they began to rot and “exhale an intolerably offensive smell.” When he reached the small hamlet of Chuchunga, he hired local Indians to build a balsa raft, and there, at an altitude he calculated to be about 1,500 feet above sea level, he entered the flow of waters out of the Andes that would eventually take him to the Atlantic. The Chuchunga River flowed into the uppermost reaches of the Marañón, where, over the course of the next four days, he encountered one obstacle after another on his way to the Borja mission. At one point, he was caught in a whirlpool for more than an hour, “incessantly whirled about” until four Indians on the riverbank threw him a liana rope and pulled him free. On another occasion, he had tethered his raft to tree branches in order to sleep on it for the night and awoke to discover that the river was dropping so fast that he needed to hurriedly untie his craft, lest it end up “suspended in the air,” dangling by the rope. The river, he determined, fell twenty-five feet over the course of the night, a dramatic illustration of how its flow was affected by rain—or the relative absence of it—along the eastern slopes of the Andes. La Condamine also had to pass through a stretch of riverbank that was home to the Jibaros, a fierce tribe who had fled to this remote region in order to escape from the Spanish, who were forcing them to work in gold mines in the Andes. “Ever since,” La Condamine wrote, “secluded in inaccessible woods, they preserve themselves independent, and impede the navigation of the river.”* Finally, on July 12, he arrived at the infamous Pongo de Manseriche, where the Marañón narrowed from 1,500 feet to 100 feet, the water surging between two huge walls of rock. La Condamine held his breath as his raft gathered speed:
The waters seem to hurl themselves and as they dash against the rocks, deafen the ear with a tremendous noise. … I was flung two or three times violently against the rocks in the course of the different windings. It would have been terrifying if I had not been warned. A canoe would be dashed into a thousand pieces, but since the beams of the raft are neither nailed nor dovetailed together, the flexibility of the lianas, by which they are fastened, have the effect of a spring, and deadens the shock so, that when the strait is passed in a raft, these percussions occur unheeded.
The six-mile straight was nature’s portal into the Amazon. After the Pongo, La Condamine and his raft popped out onto a lazy river, and just as he had once marveled at his first glimpse of Quito, he was now transfixed by the jungle:
I found myself in a new world, separated from all human intercourse, on a fresh-water sea, surrounded by a maze of lakes, rivers, and canals, 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.
La Condamine rafts through the Pongo de Manseriche.
Bibliotheque de l’Institut de France, Paris. Lauros-Giraudon-Bridgeman Art Library.
La Condamine reached Lagunas a week later, where Maldonado, who had experienced “many dangers and great fatigue” on his trek down the Bobonaza, had been waiting for six weeks. There they picked up new transportation, two dugout canoes “42 feet and 44 feet long,” each fashioned from a single tree trunk. Indians paddled from the front of the canoes while La Condamine and Maldonado sat in the rear, each beneath a canopy of palm fronds, and in this relative comfort, they headed out on their 2,400-mile journey, taking notes of the flora, fauna, and human inhabitants, and mapping the Amazon’s course.
La Condamine had brought along the telescope in order to observe Jupiter’s moons, as this would enable him to establish his longitude, and once he had that bearing, he and Maldonado used a compass, watch, and portable gnomon—an instrument for determining latitude from the sun’s position—to plot the river’s course, carefully penciling in on their charts its many bends and turns, its islands, and the tributaries that flowed into it. They also measured the river’s breadth and how fast it flowed, and they tried to determine its depth at various places, although on several occasions, even after letting out a line 600 feet long, they could not find its bottom. “Every instant of my time was employed,” La Condamine joyfully reported. Along the way, he described the many animals he found, including turtles, crocodiles, tigers, monkeys, sea cows, and electric eels. This last creature, he noted, delivered a shock so powerful that it could “lay one prostrate.” They observed blood-sucking bats, toucans, porcupines, sloths, and boars; measured snakeskins longer than fifteen feet; and cataloged exotic insects. He preserved in wine a particularly nasty worm called “suglacuru,” which “grows in the flesh of men and animals to the size of a bean, and occasions intolerable anguish.” La Condamine investigated too the blow-gun and poison arrows that natives used to hunt game, and he figured out why the jungle toxin—which centuries later would gain a valuable place in medicine as the muscle-paralyzing agent curare—did not make the meat inedible:
By a strong puff of the breath, they dart these arrows to the distance of thirty or forty paces, and scarcely ever miss their aim. This simple instrument serves as an admirable substitute among all these savages for firearms. The points of these diminutive arrows, as well as those they shoot from their bows, are steeped in a poison of such activity, that it kills any animal from which the instrument dipped in it may chance to draw blood. We scarcely ever, in going down the river, ate of game killed by other means than these arrows, the tips of which we often discovered in eating, between our teeth. There is no danger from such occurrences, for the venom of this poison is only mortal when absorbed by the blood, in which case it is no less fatal to man than to animals. The antidote is salt, but of safer dependence, sugar.
For the first time ever, the Amazon was being seen through the eyes of an Enlightenment scientist. The chroniclers who had come before him, Carvajal and Acuña, were men of the cloth, and while they had sought to be faithful recorders, they belonged to an earlier age, when the world was seen through the prism of religious teachings and medieval mythologies. La Condamine poked into the tales of El Dorado and Amazon women with reason as his guide. The story of a kingdom with “roofs and walls of gold plates,” he said, was one that “nothing but a thirst for gold could render credible,” and yet he did find a kernel of truth in it. In the past, a fierce tribe called the Manaos had obtained gold from an isolated people living along the Yapurá River, a tributary of the Amazon just above the Río Negro, and they had pounded this gold into plates and other trinkets, which they traded with other nations along the Amazon. Moreover, about 100 miles up the Yapurá River was a small lake, and from these few facts, he concluded, there arose a fantastic tale of a golden city of Manoa on Lake Parima. The Europeans arrived in the Amazon wanting to believe in this story, and Native Americans—by pointing to an El Dorado some distance away—lent credence to it in order to “rid themselves of unwelcome guests.” He came to a similar conclusion about the story of the Amazons. Throughout his trip, he queried natives about this legend, and everyone replied in a similar fashion: There had once been a tribe of women who lived without husbands and who wore green stones, and everyone said they had moved away from the river to a place of low-lying mountains near the sea. This described the hills of Guiana. Thus, La Condamine reasoned, there probably had once been a group of women along the Amazon living without men, but all the other fantastic details—of women who cut off one of their breasts to shoot arrows better or killed their sons at birth—were “probably exaggerations or inventions of Europeans informed of the practices attributed to the Amazons of Asia, and which a fondness for the wonderful may have caused the natives of America, upon learning these tales from them, to interweave in their narratives.”
La Condamine’s investigation of these two tales was evidence, yet again, of his insatiable curiosity. He had been gone from France for more than eight years, but rather than hurrying down the river, he stopped time and again in order to learn about this world. He investigated the course of the Río Negro, and he continued his studies of rubber, observing with delight how the Omaguas used it to fashion a hollow ball, into which they would stick a cane and in this manner manufacture a syringe. He wrote of the resins and oils that flowed from different trees in the jungle, queried a Carmelite priest about how he inoculated natives against smallpox, and gathered samples of the toxic barbasco root that Amazon Indians threw into marshes and small lakes to stun the fish: “While thus torpified,” he wrote, “the fish float on the water and are taken with the hand; by means of these plants, the Americans catch as many fish as they please.” Scientists later followed up on La Condamine’s report to develop an insecticide from this natural toxin, a chemical known today as rotenone.
Maldonado and La Condamine reached Pará on September 19, 1743. The town boasted such amenities that they fancied themselves “at once transported to Europe.” Indeed, having reentered the civilized world, they could now see that their journey had unfolded in three stages: The first and most difficult segment was the descent down the slopes of the Andes to the Amazon, which required travel by foot, mule, balsa rafts, and small canoes. The second was the voyage in dugout canoes from Lagunas through the rest of Spanish territory, to slightly below the Napo River. The third, after crossing the border into Portuguese land, was the trip in a much larger canoe, with fourteen rowers, during which their Portuguese hosts provided them with “courtesies which made us for the time forget we were in the center of America.” Their journey had become progressively easier as they had gone along, and in each of these three segments, they had encountered natives in different stages of change, away from what they had been before the Europeans arrived.
As La Condamine had made his way to Borja, he had scurried through lands newly inhabited by the Jibaros, who had fled from their original homes, higher up in the cloud forests, in order to escape from the Spanish. Maldonado also had encountered many “dangers” as he made his way down the Bobonaza. This strip of jungle on the eastern edge of the Andes had been very sparsely populated when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, but now it was becoming a last refuge for native groups, with some coming down from the Andes to flee the Spanish and others moving upriver to escape the Portuguese. Partly as a result, this was the one part of the wilderness where travelers still had to fear encountering hostile Indians, including a few, La Condamine wrote, who were “man-eaters.”
However, once La Condamine and Maldonado reached the upper Amazon, this worry disappeared. “On the banks of the Marañón there is now no warlike tribe hostile to Europeans, all having either submitted or withdrawn into the interior,” La Condamine reported. Yet along this stretch of the Spanish Amazon, many natives still retained their traditional dress and customs. Around Pebas, the last Spanish mission before the border with Portugal, La Condamine and Maldonado met Indians who put bones through their nostrils and lips, wore feathers through their cheeks, and used narrow cylinders of wood to prolong their ear lobes. “The chief decoration is a large nosegay or tuft of herbs and flowers, which is drawn through this hole, forming most uncommon pendants,” La Condamine wrote. The Omaguas were now living along this part of the river as well. Whereas they had once ruled over a 600-mile stretch of river below the Napo, they were now gathered above it, around the mission station of Saint Joachim de Omaguas. But they too had kept many of their old ways. “Of all the savages who live on the borders of the Amazon River,” La Condamine wrote, “they are the most civilized despite their strange use of flattening their forehead, the artificial length of the ears, and their exceptional liking of witchcraft.” The Omaguas used two boards to flatten the foreheads of their newborns, he noted, in order “to make them more perfectly resemble the full moon.”
A much different scene unfolded once La Condamine and Maldonado entered Portuguese territory. Below the Napo, the banks of the Amazon were silent, even empty. They traveled for several days and nights “without coming across any signs of life.” This was a stretch of river where Acuña, a century earlier, had come upon one village after another, the natives farming and raising turtles in pens. That world was gone. There were five lonely Carmelite missions spaced out along the Amazon between the Napo and the Río Negro, a distance of more than 1,000 miles, and the handful of Indians living in these stations had been thoroughly transformed: The “native women [were] all clad in Britany linen,” and the Indians used “coffers with locks and keys, iron utensils, needles, knives, scissors, combs and a variety of little European articles.” When La Condamine and Maldonado reached the Río Negro, they found that slave traders, known as “redemption troops,” were scouring that river clean as well, every year advancing “farther into the country.” The Jesuit João Daniel estimated that the population along the Amazon and its main tributaries had declined to a thousandth of what it had been 200 years earlier. In his journey down the Amazon, La Condamine had revealed the wonders of a great wilderness and at the same time—somewhat unwittingly—borne witness to the tragic tale of a civilization lost.
La Condamine’s map of the Amazon.
From Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique Méridionale (1778).
LA CONDAMINE AND MALDONADO parted ways in Pará. Maldonado, mindful that the Portuguese had imprisoned Father Fritz as a spy, told the authorities in Pará that he was French, traveling on La Condamine’s passport, and on December 3, he sailed for Portugal. La Condamine traveled by sea canoe to Cayenne, and along the way, the trunk containing his cinchona saplings was swept overboard. In Cayenne, he repeated Richer’s 1672 experiments with the seconds pendulum, and then—fearful that if he traveled on a French boat, he might lose his cherished papers to English pirates—he traveled to Dutch Guiana in order to find passage to Europe on a ship sailing under the flag of the Netherlands. He departed on September 3, 1744, and while his trip across the Atlantic was not uneventful—pirates attacked the Dutch ship twice—he successfully arrived back in Paris on February 23, 1745, a full decade after he had left.
Initially, La Condamine did not receive the welcome he hoped for. Debate over the earth’s shape was fizzling to an end by this time. Not only had Maupertuis returned with his results many years earlier, but the academy had also recently remeasured a degree of arc in France, which had shown that the Cassinis’ earlier work had been in error. Voltaire even made fun of La Condamine with a witty put-down: “In dull, distant places, you suffered to prove what Newton knew without having to move.”
Even so, the academy members understood the larger accomplishments of the mission. As La Condamine told his peers shortly after he returned, knowing that the earth bulged at the equator “furnishes a new argument and demonstration of the rotation of the earth on its axis, a rotation that holds for the entire celestial system.” Their work at the equator, he added, “has put us on the path of even more important discoveries, such as the nature of the universal laws of gravity, the force that animates all heavenly bodies and which governs all the universe.”
La Condamine’s map of his 10-year journey.
From Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique Méridionale (1778).
Furthermore, this advance in physics was just the beginning of what had been achieved by the Peruvian mission. La Condamine’s study of the cinchona tree promised to help Europe improve its use of quinine as an antidote for malaria and other fevers. He had sent back samples of a useful new metal, platinum, and his writings on rubber were stirring imaginative thoughts on how to use it for manufacturing purposes. Europe now had a detailed map of the entire northern part of South America and a naturalist’s view of the Andes and the Amazon. Together these amounted to a grand achievement: The mission had been a transforming moment in the development of science, and it was Voltaire who understood this best. “By all appearances our wise men only added a few numbers to the science of the sky,” he wrote, “but the scope of their work was really much broader.” The mission to Peru, he said, was a “model for all scientific expeditions” to follow.
Title page of La Condamine’s account of the expedition.
From Charles-Marie de La Condamine, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi à l’équateur (1751).
La Condamine’s skills as a writer also brought him a great deal of public adulation. He wrote a colorful account of his travels, complete with a blow-by-blow description of the war of the pyramids and Senièrgues’s murder. As his fame grew, science academies in London, Berlin, Saint Petersburg, and Bologna all made him an honorary member. The one sour note in this chorus of acclaim was sounded, oddly enough, by Bouguer. Long jealous of La Condamine’s popularity, he published an account of their arc measurements in which he disparaged La Condamine’s talents as a scientist, suggesting that he had brought little more than energy to the project. “Bouguer could not disguise his feelings of superiority as a mathematician over La Condamine,” observed one of their peers, Jacques Delille. He “felt that he should be the primary object of public affection.” Bouguer’s unflattering words set off a pointless quarrel that lasted for years, a dispute all the more difficult to comprehend, Delille wrote, because it was “between two men who for several years had slept in the same room, in the same tent, and often in the open air huddled under the same coat, and who in all this time publicly acknowledged a great respect for one another.”
Ulloa and Juan made an equally big splash in Europe upon their return. They had sailed from Callao, near Lima, on October 22, 1744, but on different boats and each with a copy of their papers, a precaution in case one of them did not return safely home. The two left from Callao on French frigates, and while Juan made it back with little difficulty, Ulloa’s ship was attacked by an English vessel, and he was taken to England as a prisoner. However, once the academicians of London understood who was in their prison at Portsmouth, Ulloa was released and named a fellow of the Royal Society of London, its members praising him as a “true caballero” and “man of merit.” This was a rare honor for a foreigner, and even more so for one who had arrived in England in shackles. In 1748, he and Juan became famous throughout Europe when they published a popular five-volume account of their travels, Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional. Their book pulled back the curtain on South America and was translated into German, French, English, and Dutch, the Jesuit scholar Andres Burriel praising it as “one of the best and most useful books that have been published in our tongue.”
Naturally, bits and pieces of this news filtered back to the others still in Peru. Maldonado was made a corresponding member of the Royal Society of London and of the French Academy of Sciences for having traveled the Amazon with La Condamine, and his election made all of Riobamba proud.* But hearing this was bittersweet for Jean Godin and the others, a reminder that they had been forgotten. Of all the assistants, only one, Verguin, had managed to make it back to Europe by the end of 1748. Hugo had married a Quito woman and settled there, writing plaintively to La Condamine that he had “no other wish but to find a way to return to France, to finish his days in his own country.” He subsequently disappeared; by 1748, nobody knew where he was. Morainville, meanwhile, had become the third member of the expedition to die. He had fallen from a scaffold while helping to build a church in Riobamba, a job he had taken to earn money to return home. As for Jussieu and Louis Godin, both had been told by the Quito Audiencia at the end of the expedition that they would not be allowed to leave. Jussieu’s medical skills were needed because a smallpox epidemic had erupted, and the audiencia was so insistent on this point that it promised to imprison anyone who tried to help him go. Louis Godin had been barred from departing because of his debts, and at the request of the Peruvian viceroy, he had taken a position as professor of mathematics at the University of San Marcos in Lima.
Their delayed departures had in turn led to greater heartache. The French Academy prohibited any member from taking an academic post in a foreign country, and Louis Godin’s letter explaining why he had done so never made it to Paris, for the ship carrying his letter was raided by pirates. The French Academy learned about his professorship through a third party and expelled him, thinking that he had voluntarily chosen to leave the service of France. Jussieu, meanwhile, had become broken in body and spirit. When he was finally allowed to leave Quito, he traveled to Lima to see Godin and then headed further south on a plant-hunting expedition, dedicated to his botany, but enveloped in a sadness so profound, he wrote, that his “heart [was] covering itself with a black veil.”
As for Jean, he was hatching a half-crazed plan to bring Isabel, who was pregnant for a fourth time, to France.
HIS FATHER’S DEATH was not the only reason that Jean and Isabel had decided that it was time to leave Riobamba. Events were brewing that suggested the good times for the colonial elite in the village might be coming to an end. Growing social unrest was making all the landowners nervous. The War of Jenkins’s Ear had forced Spain to greatly increase its military spending, and in order to raise that money, the Crown had hiked the duties and taxes that already so oppressed the Indian population. Bitter natives complained that colonial authorities wanted to tax the air they breathed. Some Indians had even taken up arms against their Spanish masters—there had been five revolts in the Andes since 1740. Equally troubling, the local economy was beginning to falter. Jean’s difficulty in collecting debts owed him was simply part of a larger malaise. After Britain sacked Porto Bello in 1740, Spain had shut down its fleet system for carrying goods to Peru and had begun allowing individual ships—including some non-Spanish vessels—to sail to any number of colonial ports. Many trading boats had started sailing around Cape Horn to Lima, loaded with cheap textiles from the mills of Europe, and this competition was driving more than a few obraje owners into bankruptcy.
With such uncertainty in the air, both Jean and Isabel believed that the time was right for moving to Europe. For him it was a chance to return home, and for her—at age twenty-one—it was a dream revived. But there was no easy way to travel to France. One possibility was to head to Lima and find passage on a trading vessel that was planning to sail to Europe via Cape Horn, but that would require both a lengthy journey by land and a very long sea voyage. Heading north from Riobamba to Cartagena offered a slightly better option, yet it would still require several months of travel by mule along the rocky paths of the Andes and over a pass littered with the bones of dead mules, one that, as Bouguer had said, was “never hazarded without the utmost dread.” The third route was the one “opened up” by La Condamine, and next to the other two alternatives, it offered an intriguing possibility. While the first part of the trip would admittedly be arduous—and almost everyone in the Andes spoke of it with fear—once the Amazon was reached, traveling by canoe from one mission station to the next might be fairly pleasant.
Or at least that was the thought, and so Jean concocted a plan: He would travel down the length of the Amazon to see if it would provide a suitable way home, come back up the river to pick up his wife and child, and then—if his scouting voyage had gone well—the three of them could follow this route to France. This meant he would have to travel the length of the river three times, an itinerary that covered more than 10,000 miles and could be expected to take at least two years. Even if all went as hoped, the plan had its evident shortcomings. Yet Jean, looking back on his past adventures, was certain that La Condamine would understand:
Anyone but you, Sir, might be surprised at my undertaking thus lightly a voyage of fifteen hundred leagues,* for the mere purpose of preparing accommodations for a second; but you will know that travels in that part of the world are undertaken with much less concern than in Europe; and those I had made during twelve years for reconnoitering the ground for the meridian of Quito, for fixing signals on the loftiest mountains, in going to and returning from Cartagena, had made me perfectly a veteran.
He left on March 10, 1749, and although he said his good-byes to Isabel with some sadness and reluctance—she was now in her fourth month of pregnancy and was beginning to show—he felt a great deal of excitement, too. He was embarking on an adventure that had brought fame and honor to those who had gone before—Acuña, Father Fritz, La Condamine, and even Maldonado. He intended to make his own observations of the Amazon along the way and gather plants and seeds for the king’s garden. He had also purchased a grammar of the Incan language printed in Lima,* and once he made it to the Atlantic coast, he planned on sending it to the king as a gift. Although the grammar was not his own work, it would make the king’s ministers aware of his interest in Quechua and of the fact that he hoped one day to complete his own study. Jean was nearly thirty-six years old now, and he saw this voyage as a chance to make a name for himself.
His trip downriver went well. He followed Maldonado’s footsteps down the Bobonaza and Pastaza Rivers, and while this part proved difficult, just as it had for Maldonado, once he reached the mission stations on the upper Amazon, the priests treated him warmly. Even though six years had gone by, La Condamine’s visit was still fresh in their minds. Further downriver, the Portuguese Carmelites provided him with the same welcome. “With no other recommendation to the notice of the Portuguese than arose from the remembrance of the intimation afforded by you in 1743,” he wrote La Condamine, “that one of the companions of your travels would follow the same way, I was received in all the Portuguese settlements, by the missionaries and commandants of the forts, with the utmost courtesy.” He reached Pará in September, his seven-month trip down the Amazon having unfolded “without incident,” and the governor of the port, Francis Mendoza Gorjaô, treated him like a visiting dignitary. “He received me with open arms, and insisted on my making his house and table my own during a week that I stopped with him.” Traveling on his own, Jean was at last stepping out into the limelight, or so it must have seemed. While still in Pará, he happily wrote La Condamine of his plan to return upriver to fetch his family as soon as he obtained the necessary passport from Portugal. For this, he had written Antoine-Louis Rouillé, minister of the French navy, asking that he petition the Portuguese on his behalf. Jean was clearly in high spirits, confident that he could obtain the needed papers in fairly short order.
Even so, a letter still needed to travel across the Atlantic and back, and Jean decided to wait for Rouillé’s reply in French Guiana. From Pará, he traveled back upriver to Fort Curupa, located at the head of the Amazon delta. From there he could take the northern arm of the river to the Atlantic (Pará is not on the main course of the river), minimizing the distance he would have to travel in the open sea. In Curupa, thanks to an order from Pará’s governor, he found waiting for him “a large pirogue [canoe] of fourteen oars, commanded by a sergeant of the garrison.” He was getting the royal treatment from the Portuguese, taxied about much in the manner that La Condamine and Maldonado had been. Once the canoe reached the ocean, it hugged the shoreline the rest of the way to French Guiana. He arrived in Cayenne on April 20, 1750, where he was greeted by a surprised—and somewhat baffled—governor, Gilbert Guillouet d’Orvilliers.
D’Orvilliers knew all about the La Condamine expedition, and years earlier he had spent many an evening dining with La Condamine during his stay in Cayenne. But he could not quite understand Jean’s thinking. As he wrote in a June 7 letter to Rouillé, “Monsieur Godin” had come all this way simply to familiarize himself with the Amazon and now intended “by following the same route, to go and get a woman he had married in Riobamba, in Peru.” Rouillé could read between the lines here—in d’Orvilliers’s opinion, this devotion to a Peruvian woman seemed rather extreme—and what made Jean’s intentions even more mysterious was that he was quite broke. “It doesn’t appear that his time in Peru has made him rich,” d’Orvilliers informed the French minister: “He arrived here with nothing at all.”
Indeed, at that moment, at least a few doubts about the wisdom of his plan must have been creeping into Jean’s mind. His trip downriver had taken nearly a year, he was 3,000 miles away from his wife, and he had no money. Moreover, he was a French citizen in need of a passport that would allow him to travel through Portuguese territory a second time, and across a Spanish-Portuguese border that was officially closed. It could take a year to send a letter back and forth to France, and letters were often lost in route. All of those obstacles were now in his way, and given the realities of eighteenth-century colonial politics, he could be certain that others would crop up.
* This is the distance from Quito to Old Riobamba, or the village of Cajabamba today. Modern Riobamba is about ten miles closer to Quito.
* The Marañón is the name used for the upper Amazon.
* The Jibaros later became known for their custom of shrinking the heads of those they killed.
* Maldonado never returned to Riobamba. He died in Europe on November 17, 1748, from a fever, at age forty.
* Fifteen hundred leagues is roughly equal to 4,500 miles; Jean apparently understood the journey to be even longer than it actually is.
* The printing press did not arrive in the Quito Audiencia until 1754.
