THE CIVILITIES THAT JEAN GODIN had known in Quito and Riobamba were largely absent from French Guiana in 1750. This was a stretch of the South American coastline where few wanted to live. More than 200 inches of rain fall annually, and during the colonial period, before drainage ditches were dug, much of the coastal strip was underwater in the rainy season and during high tides. The swamps gave rise to clouds of insects, and they were populated by crocodiles and deadly snakes. Bushmasters, fer-de-lance, rattlesnakes, coral snakes, and the mighty anacondas all found this a delightful habitat, making the Guiana forest much more dangerous than the Amazon basin. The coastal lowlands give way to grasslands and a dense rain forest, with the distant mountains rising to 2,600 feet. Monkeys, giant anteaters, sloths, and an array of cats—jaguars, pumas, and ocelots—lived in these woods. Not surprisingly, Guiana became known as the “wild coast” of South America.
The English were the first to attempt to colonize the land, settling along the Oyapock River in 1604. They were defeated by disease, starvation, and the fierce Carib Indians, who later became feared for their cannibalism. The French established a permanent settlement on Cayenne in 1635, but for the next sixty-five years few settlers bothered to come—this was no promised land. In 1700, the d’Orvilliers family assumed governorship of the colony, and under its leadership, France began to make a more concerted effort to populate the area. Slaves were brought from West Africa, and colonists began to carve out plantations where they grew cotton, coffee, spices, and sugarcane. But such efforts proceeded at a very slow pace, and in 1750, Cayenne and the handful of other settlements in the colony remained isolated outposts, with few cultural amenities. The heat, humidity, and poisonous snakes made it seem like a purgatory, and indeed, in the nineteenth century, France established a penal colony in Guiana for its worst criminals.
When La Condamine had arrived in Cayenne, he had fallen into a deep languor, the only time during his ten-year journey that his energy slackened. But Jean was revitalized. After fifteen years, he was glad to be back in French territory, in a colony governed by his king. In the first weeks and months after his arrival, he set enthusiastically to work, organizing his papers and writing up a report titled Mémoire sur la navigation de l’Amazone, which he sent to Rouillé. Having spent so many years in the shadows of others, he did so with a touch of overeagerness, trying to make a name for himself, and he ended up offering rather cheeky political advice to the minister. France, he wrote, should grab the northern banks of the Amazon. It could then share the river with the Portuguese, using it as a trade highway to the riches of Peru:
France’s interest in navigation along the Amazon lies in its immense commercial potential, touching upon all the provinces of the realms of Peru, with Spain hardly being able to do anything about it, given the infinite number of rivers, all navigable, flowing into the Amazon. I see also other interests for France in having the northern banks of the Amazon. For example, there are cacao, cloves, sarsaparilla, balm of copahu, vanilla, and precious woods for building. The Portuguese have built a substantial commerce out of all this, all maintained by the government at Pará.… Your Majesty could establish in this colony a shipbuilding works, the wood there is perfect. Your Majesty would get great use from this because the wood costs nothing.
Although Jean did not explicitly state that French Guiana should expand its boundaries into the neighboring Portuguese territories, that was the obvious implication of his report. “If France had a foothold in the Amazon,” he concluded, “this colony would become the most flourishing in the world.” This was a rather bold thing for someone in his position to say—after all, he had left France as a lowly assistant on the Peruvian mission—and a bit foolish, too. If his report were to fall into the hands of the Portuguese, it could cause a diplomatic furor, and even if Rouillé received it safely, he might be angered at the risk that Jean had taken. But Jean was apparently blind to these subtleties, and he eagerly sent off his report to Rouillé in June 1750, placing it in the hands of the captain of the king’s vessel L’Aventure. He also sent along a collection of seeds he had gathered on his journey down the Amazon, as well as the grammar of the Incan language. He addressed this packet of New World treasures to Georges Leclerc de Buffon, who was the keeper of the Jardin du Roi in Paris and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. All in all, a productive first six weeks in French Guiana, or so Jean felt, and he was confident that he would soon hear news that his passport to Peru was ready.
Invigorated, he plunged ahead into a new scientific investigation. La Condamine, of course, was his model, and much as La Condamine had done with his studies of cinchona and rubber trees, Jean now took a careful inventory of the forests of Cayenne. He tested the various woods for their buoyancy and their resistance to insects and to find out how well they held nails, and he described how the various trees could be used to create a prosperous shipbuilding enterprise. The black cedar, he determined, was excellent for planking, while copahu was ideal for masts “owing to it being light and pliable.” He noted which trees produced oils of potential value, and lauded in particular the merits of the cumaru tree, which “produces a fruit and a nut and almond, the odor of which is very agreeable and which produces an oil that is very good for treating dysentery.” He finished this scientific treatise, Mémoire sur differents bois dans l’ile de Cayenne, on September 24, 1750, and in November, when another ship sailed to France, he mailed it to the academy, together with bottles of the tree oils. He also shipped a large trunk of wood samples “appropriate for construction purposes” to Rouillé and asked once again for a passport.
All that Jean had to do now was be patient. The king’s vessel was expected to return in early 1751, and he passed the months trying to make himself useful to Governor d’Orvilliers, the other colonists, and the local Indians. He taught them about the various woods he had studied and how they could be put to use, and he was, by all accounts, a welcome addition to the colony. “He was well regarded by the Jesuits, and had the ear of other colonists and the Indians,” wrote a nineteenth-century French historian, Henri Froidevaux. The governor of French Guiana, Froidevaux added, treated Jean “with consideration.”
When the king’s ship reappeared in the port on March 26, 1751, Jean was there to greet it. There would be letters from La Condamine, Buffon, and Rouillé, he was certain, and perhaps advice on how he should proceed. He had made it clear that he was placing himself at the service of both the Crown and the French Academy of Sciences. What would La Condamine, to whom he had written several times, think of his work? And would Buffon, having received his gift of a grammar, want to know more about his own studies of Quechua? Maldonado had been made a “corresponding” member of the French Academy of Sciences; perhaps such an honor would now be his. Best of all, his passport would be on the ship, and he would soon be on his way back to Isabel, and, God willing, their healthy child. At last the gangplank dropped, and the captain of L’Aventure strode toward the dock. But when their eyes met, the captain shrugged and held out his empty hands.
Crushed, Jean wrote anew to Rouillé, this time with a touch of panic:
My Lord,
I had the honor of writing to Your Grace in the month of June 1750 on the occasion of the vessel L’Aventure sailing to the port of Rochelle. I took the liberty of including my report on the potential utility that navigation of the Amazon would bring to this colony. I touched also on other advantageous points for our country. Last November, I had the honor of submitting to Your Grace a small trunk containing 14 or 15 types of wood that I deem appropriate for building. I asked Your Grace to please examine them. I conclude that these little parcels never made it into your hands, since I have not had the pleasure to receive word from the vessel of the King, which was at anchor here in this port on March 26, to know if Your Grace received them and found them useful, which was the sole reason for giving my opinion.
Once more, Jean asked Rouillé for a passport. For the first time, he also requested money:
I beg you and implore of your justice to take into consideration the request that I take the liberty of making—that I be paid for having spent the best part of my life in service during our mission in Peru. This will help me survive for the remainder of my days by reimbursing the costs of my travel, if it is judged appropriate. I have the honor to extend my deep respect, Sir, Your Grace.
Your very humble and obedient servant,
Godin
Cayenne, April 8, 1751
Although Jean had no way of knowing it, this time the creaky wheels of the French bureaucracy began to turn. When Rouillé first received Jean’s April 1751 letter, he had handled it in the same way he had the earlier ones: He had put it in a pile of papers that he planned to get to at some future date, scribbling on the top, “We have not yet responded to him.” And there Jean’s plea may have languished, had it not been for La Condamine, who was proving himself to be a true and loyal friend. La Condamine lobbied Rouillé on Jean’s behalf, and he also personally called on Portugal’s ambassador to France, Commander La Cerda, who provided him with a letter of recommendation for Jean to take to the governor in Pará. In addition, the ambassador promised La Condamine that Lisbon would send a passport for Jean directly to Pará.
Jean received La Condamine’s letter in early 1752, and in it, La Condamine also provided him with news from Riobamba, which somehow had reached him in France. Isabel had given birth to a girl in August 1749, and both mother and daughter were said to be in good health. Other encouraging letters had arrived on the boat as well. The father general of the Jesuits in Rome, Ignatius Visconti, had written him a letter of recommendation that he could give to Jesuits living along the Amazon, Father Visconti requesting that the priests “facilitate, on my account, the travels of Mr. Godin, both for himself and for any others who accompany him.” Best of all, Rouillé had written to say that all was now in place for him to return:
I write, Sir, to Monsieurs d’Orvilliers and [deputy-governor] Lemoyne to ask that they facilitate, in so far as possible, the voyage that you must undertake to Quito, passing through the Portuguese and Spanish colonies that are established along the Amazon River. I pointed out to them that the King finds it well that d’Orvilliers gives you the letters of recommendation for the governors of these colonies. I hope that this will turn out satisfactorily for you.
Jean quickly began preparing for the journey. It had been nearly three years since he had left Riobamba, and now his return was just a matter of sailing upriver. He figured that it would take him six or eight months—he would be back in Riobamba by August or September. He hurriedly wrote to the governor in Pará, informing him that he would be arriving shortly to pick up the passport that had been sent from Lisbon. But before Jean had time to depart, he received a stunning note from Pará. “I inquired of the governor of that place for news [of the passport],” Jean wrote, in a letter to La Condamine, “and he replied that he had no knowledge of them.”
Faced with this rebuff from the governor in Pará, Jean—or so it seems in hindsight—should have considered other ways to return to Riobamba. The papers he needed for travel up the Amazon were lost in Portugal’s bureaucracy, and prompting Lisbon into action from French Guiana would be nearly impossible. Two years of effort to secure a passport had gone for naught. And other possibilities did exist. He could have sailed on L’Aventure to France and made arrangements from there to return to Peru. Or he might have tried to make his way along the coast to Cartagena. Yet Jean, as evidenced by his writings, never gave such options much thought. Instead, he stubbornly clung to his plan to return via the Amazon. He now approached d’Orvilliers with a new proposal: He would make the trip upriver as a servant of the colony. He would chase down slaves in Brazil who had escaped from French Guiana, and he would, in the manner of a spy, gather “intelligence” on how the Amazon might be seized and on the riches that could be had by opening this trading route to Peru. He would also bring back shoots from cinchona and cinnamon trees, with the hope that these two species could be cultivated for great profit in French Guiana. In return, he asked that the colony provide him with a military boat staffed with a commanding officer and troops.
By any standard, Jean was proposing a far-reaching colonial adventure. While it might be possible for a boat to slip past Portugal’s military forts on the lower part of the river, if it were discovered, Portugal would undoubtedly treat the incursion as an act of war. Yet both d’Orvilliers and his deputy, Lemoyne, while voicing some “reservations” about Jean’s plan, wrote to Rouillé to request that France fund it. Godin, they noted, would bring back plants that if cultivated, “would be a source of riches,” and France could also hope that he would find a method for “transporting gold and silver out of Peru.” In a letter dated June 14, 1753, Lemoyne even pleaded with Rouillé for a quick reply: “I implore you, Sir, to indicate to me whether I can inform him that he will be reimbursed for the expenses that he may incur in doing research that would be useful for the colony.”
The proposed “research” mission was clearly meant to serve the expansionist goal articulated by Godin in his earlier letter to Rouillé, in which he had urged France to consider seizing the northern banks of the Amazon. Although this was a startling proposal, geography did provide a rationale for it. During the seventeenth century, Guiana had been seen as a region that extended to the Amazon. Moreover, while Portugal may have established missions along the river, its colonization efforts had been focused mostly along the coastline south of Pará. The wild area north of the Amazon was still there for the taking, and the river could easily be seen as a natural dividing line between colonies. France and Portugal could share “ownership” of the Amazon. Portugal, for its part, had spent the last 150 years grabbing an ever greater part of the Amazon basin, at Spain’s expense. Now it was France’s turn to lay claim to more than just a tiny corner of the continent.
Having gained the support of d’Orvilliers and Lemoyne, Jean had reason to be newly optimistic. D’Orvilliers, in his June 19 letter, had even assured the minister that Crown expenses would be kept to a minimum. “Only a small portion of the costs for this expedition will fall on the King, who will cover the costs of the boat and of the officer and the troops that will accompany [Godin]. The cost for the outfitting will fall on those who have slaves to reclaim.” It was no longer just Jean urging this bold plan on Rouillé. So too were the officials who governed French Guiana. Yet their letters were met with the same silence that had greeted Jean’s earlier ones. A handful of ships from France sailed into Cayenne in 1753 and 1754, but none brought a reply from Rouillé.*
A sense of desperation came over Jean, prompting an even wilder idea: He would build a boat of his own, a small, single-masted vessel known as a tartan. He would sail this to Pará, and armed with his letters of recommendation, he would convince the governor of Pará to allow him to proceed without a passport. There was a touch of madness in this plan, but surprisingly, the military commander of Cayenne, Monsieur Dunezat, approved of it. In a May 10, 1755, letter to Rouillé, Dunezat explained his decision:
Godin asked me for permission to go to Pará to request passports from the Court of Portugal and to make the necessary contacts for his trip to Quito. His requests, together with the protests of colonists who have fugitive Negroes in Pará, have convinced me to give him permission and to charge him with capturing the fugitive Negroes of this colony which may be in the province of Maragnon, where he will go from Cayenne, before going on to Quito.
Jean set sail toward the end of 1755, and he made it as far as the “mouth of the Amazon” in his small craft. But there, with waves spilling over his boat and the wind blowing him out to sea, he lost his courage and hope. His vessel was in a “poor state,” he was still a good distance from Pará, and he no longer could see how this plan could possibly succeed. The Portuguese might well throw him into prison as a spy, just as they had done to Father Fritz. Even if he were allowed to continue his trip, Dunezat expected him to round up slaves who had escaped from French Guiana. None of this seemed likely to bring him to Isabel and the child he had never seen. Overwhelmed by a sense of defeat, he turned his leaky boat back toward Cayenne. Nothing had worked as he had hoped, he had tried again and again to get back upriver, and he no longer had the slightest idea how to set things right.
WHEN JEAN LEFT RIOBAMBA in March 1749, Isabel expected him to be gone for at least two years. She had promised Jean that she and their child, soon to be born, would be waiting patiently for his return. In August she gave birth to a girl, Carmen del Pilar, and by all accounts, she focused all of her attention on her. Upper-class mothers in colonial Peru typically left much of the daily nurturing of an infant to servants, but not Isabel. She doted on Carmen, determined that her baby would survive the scourges that had taken their first three children. Carmen was living proof that a family was waiting to be reunited, and as she grew into a toddler, Isabel spent hours telling her about her father, that he had come to Peru as part of a great scientific expedition, and that they would all one day be moving to France. This was the dream she constantly wove for her daughter, and as Carmen turned three and then four years old, Isabel tutored her in French—the language, Isabel was certain, that Carmen would eventually be schooled in.
Events unfolded slowly in eighteenth-century Peru, and so at first it was not too surprising to Isabel that Jean did not reappear in 1751 or 1752. Gossip had filtered back into Riobamba that Jean had safely passed through the Jesuit missions in the Peruvian Amazon. But after that? Nothing. Jean had simply disappeared. Every time her brother Juan came to town—he was a priest at a church in Pallatanga now—she would look to him for news, hoping that a bit of information had perhaps made its way up the missionary grapevine. But he never had any. No letter from Jean ever arrived,* and when four years of separation turned into five, and then five into six, Isabel’s doubts grew. So did her loneliness. At times, she would walk to the top of the hill and look to the east, toward Mount Altar and Mount Tungurahua, as though she expected Jean to appear at any moment, climbing up out of the jungle. But other times she felt overwhelmed by her melancholy and remained for long hours in the darkness of her house. She heard too the crueler whispers in town, that the handsome Jean Godin, he of the great La Condamine expedition, had surely long since returned to France, having forgotten all about his Riobamban wife.
During this period, the Gramesón family as a whole suffered one setback after another. Their old way of life was slipping away. The decline in the textile industry caused by the flood of cheap imports from Europe was having a domino effect. Obrajes closed, and that meant the market for wool suffered, which in turn depressed trade throughout the colony. The Gramesóns kept their hacienda near Guamote, where Indian laborers harvested potatoes and fattened animals for slaughter, and family finances were good enough that in 1756, Isabel’s mother, Doña Josefa, was able to buy several homes in town, next to La Concepción Church. But that same year, in a legal filing dated July 20, Doña Josefa informed the town council that the wealth she had inherited was nearly gone. Her husband, “el General Don Pedro de Gramesón y Bruno,” had squandered her extensive dowry.
She died the following year, and Isabel was thrust into the role of the family matriarch, helping her father run Subtipud. She also had to manage the properties that she and Jean owned. But her mother’s death came just as she sent Carmen off to a convent school in Quito, and suddenly her house overlooking the town square seemed emptier than ever. Her family’s financial problems deepened in those years, too. In 1755, her father and her brother had won at auction a five-year right to collect (and keep) taxes from seven local villages, promising to pay 775 pesos annually for this privilege. But as a result of the economic depression that settled over the area, they were unable to recoup even this modest amount in 1758 and 1759. The final straw came when a former corregidor of Riobamba, Bruno de Urquizu, died owing them 1,200 pesos. Antonio and his father applied to audiencia authorities for relief, requesting that their annual fee of 775 pesos be lowered, but their plea was turned down, and Don Pedro was forced to cover the shortfall. Yet even this setback did not convince Antonio to give up the tax collection business, and in the early 1760s, as the economy continued to falter, he was forced to declare bankruptcy and beg the court for mercy: “I will always better your fortune and will have property [in the future] with which I can do that,” he declared. But the court decreed that such promises of future payment would not do and sent him to jail, his imprisonment an example of just how far the family’s fortunes had fallen.
Social unrest was also increasing throughout the central highlands. There had been eleven armed uprisings by Indians in the 1750s in colonial Peru, and in the early 1760s, such rebellions began occurring every six months or so. The Indians wanted better working conditions in the mines and an end to the mita system of forced labor. This was the early stage of a rebellion that would eventually claim the lives of more than 100,000 Indians, and in 1764, it erupted full-blown in Riobamba. Armed Indians from the countryside stormed into the city from the south and took over the Santo Domingo and San Francisco plazas, which became the scene of trench warfare. Blood spilled across bricked squares that were normally filled with boys playing ball, and everyone took the rebellion as a sign that the colonial order that had reigned for 200 years, one that had served the elite so well, was perhaps coming to an end.
As these many years passed, Isabel naturally came to think less often of Jean. She turned thirty-six in 1764, the year of the Indian rebellion. By colonial standards, she was no longer a young woman. Carmen had returned from convent school and was now of a marriageable age. Her childhood had passed, and with it their dream of moving to France. But they did have each other, theirs a mother-daughter bond that brought great comfort to them both. They attended mass daily, their servants always a step behind. Isabel’s faith had always sustained her: She recited her Hail Mary’s and felt reassured by the presence of the Virgin of Sicalpa, the statue high on the mountain, looking out over her town. And deep in her heart, she never gave up all hope that Jean would return. She knew that miracles could occur; she had even witnessed proof of that a few years earlier. In 1759, the image of a patron saint had suddenly appeared before the parishioners of San Sebastián Church. The apparition triggered a great celebration, the town council ordering candles to be lit in every square. Isabel felt the presence of God in her life, which gave her the strength to renew her prayers.
AFTER JEAN’S ABORTIVE TRIP to the Amazon, he settled down in French Guiana in a way that he had not previously. He needed to earn a living. He moved from Cayenne to Oyapock, a tiny village on the river that marked the boundary between French Guiana and Brazil. He built a house on stilts and hunted manatee, a large sea mammal that feeds on sea grasses and was abundant in the Oyapock estuary. The animal was highly prized for its meat, and it also gave a valuable oil. In addition to his manatee enterprise, he drew up plans for a timber business, which he put into operation in 1763.
Archival records provide only a smattering of details about his life during this period. Oyapock was a miserable frontier town, with only a few other white colonists, and Jean lived there isolated from most of the world—even Cayenne was several days away by boat. He appears to have given up any hope of gaining recognition for his scientific investigations or for his grammar of the Incan language, and there are hints, in a letter written by Governor Fiedmont (who had replaced d’Orvilliers), that he became somewhat quarrelsome, bitter over his fate. This was not a life that he had ever imagined for himself, staring night after night across the river at the dark forest that separated him from his family. He would stew like that for months on end, and then he would take out his feather pen and once again plead for help: “I renewed my letters every year, four, five, and even six times, for the purpose of obtaining my passports,” he wrote years later, “and constantly without effect.”
Not even La Condamine wrote back. The silence of his friend and mentor was almost too much to bear. Perhaps, Jean reasoned, La Condamine’s failure to write was due to the war that had erupted on three continents. France and the other European powers were battling over their colonial territories, a fight that was also taking place on the open seas. His letters must have been getting “lost or intercepted,” and La Condamine later confirmed that such had been the case. During the Seven Years’ War, which concluded with the Treaty of Paris, signed on February 10, 1763, La Condamine did not receive a single one of Jean’s many missives. Jean was writing letters that disappeared into a void, and yet he continued to take pen in hand, as though by sheer obsessive persistence he could get someone to respond to him.
France exited from the war a humiliated nation. In the Paris accord, it was forced to cede Canada and all of its territory east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, and it also lost several of its islands in the West Indies. Great Britain had emerged as the world’s foremost colonial power, while France’s overseas empire had dramatically shrunk. The bitter defeat demanded that France do something to regain its pride, and in 1763, Étienne-François de Choiseul, who had replaced Rouillé as minister of foreign affairs, decided that new resources should be devoted to French Guiana, which was one of its few remaining colonial possessions in the New World.* He sent 12,000 colonists to settle the mouth of the Kourou River, northwest of Cayenne, but this enterprise was so badly planned—and the arriving settlers so naive—that they brought ice skates instead of farm tools. Within two years, most had died from fever and starvation.
The arrival of the new colonists, however, stirred Jean’s hopes. France was in need of a triumph and a way to reassert its power and influence. It held just a tiny corner of South America, a mere speck on the map, while lowly Portugal was the master of the Amazon. There was a new and compelling reason to dust off his old plan for seizing the Amazon, and this time, in a letter he wrote to Choiseul on December 10, 1763, he was very blunt about what it would require. As he later confided to Fiedmont,
I provided [Choiseul] with a very detailed account of how, in the blink of an eye, without giving [the Portuguese] the time to know what had happened, one could take over one side of the river, taking precautions to keep it. I also gave him the means of doing this according to the nature of the place. I would intercept the navigation of this river and all communication with the city of Pará until peace has been made.
Jean, of course, had an ulterior motive. France’s seizure of the northern banks of the Amazon would enable him to go upriver to get Isabel. But no sooner had he sent the letter than he started feeling nervous about it. He lived on the border with Portugal; what if his neighbors discovered his plan? He had entrusted the letter to a missionary who was returning to France, and he had begged the man to deliver it “by hand to Choiseul.” But he knew well that letters crossing the Atlantic had a way of not arriving at their destination, and when the king’s vessel returned to Cayenne five months later, without a word of reply from the minister, his worries flared. On June 1, 1764, he begged Choiseul for a reply:
Sir,
In December 1763, I had the honor of writing you a letter, which contained a project that might be of interest to you. Not having received any news, I am anxious to know if you received it, as it may have had the misfortune of taking another route and falling into the hands of foreigners, which would be most unfortunate for the trip I have to make, and for the project itself. If you have received the letter, you will understand why I have taken the liberty to send you this and why I also dare to ask that you inform me as to its status.
Respectfully,
Your most humble and obedient servant, Godin
Over the next several months, his fears grew into full-blown paranoia. He began to cast about for someone new to write to, anyone who might comfort him, and in his desperation, he seized upon a bit of idle gossip he had heard. There was a certain Count d’Herouville who was said to be “in the confidence of Monsieur Choiseul.” On September 10, 1764, Jean wrote to d’Herouville, and for once, he succinctly summarized his plight:
I was, Sir, associated with the gentlemen of the Academy of Sciences who, in 1735, undertook the mission in Peru. I went down the Amazon in 1749 in order to reach Cayenne. Mr. De La Condamine, of the same Academy, and whom you surely know, will speak on my behalf. It is necessary that I go back up this river to fetch my family in the province of Quito and to bring them here. Dare I, Sir, hope for the good fortune of a moment of your attention?
There was little reason for Jean to believe that this letter would elicit a response. D’Herouville did not know him; he was just grasping at yet another flimsy straw. He had urged France to seize the northern banks of the Amazon, he had volunteered to lead a military boat up the Amazon in order to do “research,” he had offered himself as a spy and a bounty hunter, and he had built his own boat—all to no avail. His letter to d’Herouville was little better than tossing a bottle containing a message into the ocean.
Yet a year later, Governor Fiedmont hurriedly called him to Cayenne. A Portuguese boat had arrived in port with a story that Jean would want to hear—and one that Fiedmont did not at all trust.
The boat, a decked galliot with sails and “manned with thirty oars,” was commanded by a captain of the garrison at Pará. His name was Rebello, and he had come, he said, upon the order of the king of Portugal, to transport Jean up the Amazon “as high as the first Spanish settlement,” where he would wait until Jean returned with his family. He would then bring them back to Cayenne. Fiedmont had listened to this and, as he reported to Choiseul, concluded the obvious: Rebello was a spy. “This behavior by our touchy and cruel neighbor on behalf of [Godin] did not surprise me, as I am persuaded that it is nothing more than a pretext to cover up their curiosity about what is going on here and to prevent us from using a similar pretext for going there to learn about their side. I thought it was my duty, nevertheless, to receive this officer.”
Fiedmont laid out his doubts to Jean. The arrival of the 12,000 settlers in Kourou, he said, was causing “much suspicion and distrust” among all of French Guiana’s neighbors. Jean could go with Rebello, but he should know that nobody in France had told him to expect the Portuguese boat. How could the king of Portugal order such a thing without first informing Paris?
The galliot departed from Cayenne in late November 1765 with a nervous Jean on board. Perhaps, he thought, his letter to d’Herouville had finally borne fruit. Perhaps the “generous nobleman” had gone to Choiseul and that had set off a chain reaction: Choiseul had written to the Portuguese ambassador, the ambassador to Portugal’s king, and the king to Pará. That was certainly possible. But on the way to Oyapock, where they planned to stop for a short while so that he could tie up some loose ends, Fiedmont’s suspicions fed his own, and he began to panic. He was alone among the Portuguese, “in the midst of a nation against which I have worked so hard,” he told himself. He would engage Rebello in talk, and it seemed that the Portuguese captain responded with slightly malevolent double entendres. “Something is going on in this boat,” Jean worried, and then, just before they reached Oyapock, he and the captain had a conversation that seemed to confirm his worst fears. He had told Rebello that in Oyapock he would like to pick up “a Negro and a couple of whites” to accompany him on the journey, and yet the captain had refused. There might be room for a Negro or two, but not for a white. What was Jean to make of this?
“The whites that I would have brought along are not great persons,” Jean told Rebello. “They would have found enough space.”
Jean did not know what to do. When they docked in Oyapock, he decided to stall for time. He tried to keep his suspicions from Rebello—he did not dare chase this boat away—and yet he feared that if he went upriver, his life would be in danger. It all made sense. “I’ve worked against this nation and I must scrutinize the tiniest things,” he confided to Fiedmont in a letter. “I fear my letter [to Choiseul] has not been delivered; it has fallen into foreign hands and I am lost. Who will assure me that some evil soul has not turned this to his profit in the [Portuguese] Court?” Jean feigned that he was ill, and told Rebello that he had suffered a “nasty fall in the woods while going to the lumberyards of my Negroes.” It could be a month or more before he could travel.
While waiting for Fiedmont to reply, Jean came up with a new strategy to divine Portugal’s true motives. Rebello was eager to depart—a number of his oarsmen had fled to the woods in a bid for freedom—so Jean suggested that Rebello proceed to Pará without him. When Jean recovered his health, he would come to Pará to “take advantage” of the king’s “generous” offer to transport him up the Amazon. But Rebello’s answer once again convinced Jean that something was amiss: “He’ll hear nothing of going ahead, and responds that he must, at all costs, conduct me [to Pará] for that is why he came here,” Jean told Fiedmont. “This man wants to overpower me here. What will they do when they are in their home territory?”
Jean wrote this last letter to Fiedmont on December 28, 1766. He felt utterly paralyzed. He feared that if he went with the Portuguese, he would be murdered or imprisoned as a spy. But if he let the galliot go without him, his hopes of ever seeing Isabel again would vanish. “Please do me the honor, Sir, of giving me your thoughts on this matter,” he begged Fiedmont. The governor, though, was tired of the whole affair. He wanted the galliot gone from French Guiana. Jean needed to make a decision. Either go or not go. At last, Jean came up with a compromise proposal for Rebello. Since he remained too “ill” to go, could he instead send a friend of his, “to whom I might entrust my letters, and who might fill my place in taking care of my family on its return?”
Much to Jean’s surprise, Rebello agreed. And once he did, Jean’s fears began to vanish. He now saw everything in a different light. He reasoned that he could thank d’Herouville for his change in fortune. It was due “to the kindness of this nobleman” that the ship had arrived. Quickly, he selected a long-time friend, Tristan d’Oreasaval, to go in his stead. He provided d’Oreasaval with money for the journey and a packet of documents, which included letters to his wife and the recommendation that he had obtained in 1752 from the father general of the Jesuits. He had safeguarded Visconti’s letter for so many years, always praying that the day would come when he could use it. The plan was straightforward. Rebello would escort d’Oreasaval to Loreto, the first mission in Spanish territory. After dropping him off, Rebello would retreat across the border to Tabatinga, a Portuguese mission, and patiently wait there. From Loreto, d’Oreasaval would canoe 500 miles upriver to Lagunas, the capital of the Maynas district in the Quito Audiencia, and hand the letters to the father superior. The Jesuits would then carry the packet to Isabel in Riobamba.
Everything had fallen into place. Jean felt his hopes soar, and on January 25, 1766, the galliot sailed from Oyapock. In seven months or so, it would reach Loreto, and this vessel, as Jean now happily declared, was under the command of a military officer who was nothing less than a “knight of the order of Christ.”
THE RUMOR THAT ARRIVED nine months later in Riobamba was so vague as to be almost cruel. Isabel’s brother Juan had heard it first, that a vessel might be waiting for them at Loreto, and that Jesuits might be in possession of letters from her husband, who—or so it was rumored—was alive and living in French Guiana. Isabel and Carmen had clung to each other; could this be true? Juan went to Father Terol, the priest who had married Isabel and Jean, to find out what he could, and together the two priests called on Jesuits in Quito. With the Jesuits’ assistance, they were able to piece together a trail of sorts. A man named Tristan had delivered letters to a Father Yesquen in Loreto, who had handed them off to a second priest, who had given them to a third, and now these documents were quite lost. But while the Jesuits were certain that letters of some sort had been sent Isabel’s way, they were of two minds about the vessel. Some, Juan told his sister, “give credit to [it], while others dispute the fact.”
Isabel did the only thing she could. She sent a trusted family slave, twenty-three-year-old Joaquín Gramesón,* to investigate. He left in January 1767 and returned three months later, exhausted and with no news at all. Authorities had ordered him back to Riobamba because he lacked the proper papers for travel into the Amazon. After resolving that problem, Isabel sent him out once again. It was close to 2,000 miles to Loreto and back, and twenty-one months passed before Joaquín returned. But this time he brought back certain news: He had personally spoken to d’Oreasaval, a boat was indeed waiting for her and Carmen, and Jean was indeed anxious for them to arrive in Cayenne.
This was the news that Isabel had been waiting to hear for so long … and yet by the time Joaquin returned, it was bittersweet. While he had been gone, Carmen—in April 1768—had died of smallpox. Isabel’s hope was always that she, Jean, and Carmen would all be reunited. When Joaquin had left on his journey, Carmen had asked Isabel to tell her once more the stories she had heard as a child about her father and about how he and her mother had met. And now Isabel knew for sure that Jean had come back to get them, yet Carmen lay buried in the local cemetery, her nineteen years framing the time that she and Jean had been apart.
The decision that Isabel now had to make was not a simple one. A boat may have been waiting for her, but if she were to go, she would be leaving behind all that she had ever known. Her father, her two brothers and her sister, and her nephews and nieces all lived in and around Riobamba. Her children were buried here. This was her home. And to leave meant going on a journey that no woman had ever dared undertake, and one that her family was insistent that she not attempt.
The skinning of an Amazon snake.
From John Pinkerton, ed., A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World, vol. 14 (London, 1813).
To the colonial elite living in the Andes, the jungle was a place populated by savage Indians, terrifying beasts, and deadly disease. The wild Indians in this region, Ulloa and Juan had written, “live in a debasement of human nature, without laws or religion, in the most infamous brutality, strangers to moderation, and without the least control or restraint of their excesses.” There were also “tigers, bastard lions, and bears” to worry about, and poisonous snakes like the cobra and the maca. This latter reptile, Ulloa and Juan reported, was “wholly covered with scales and makes a frightful appearance, its head being out of all proportion to the body, and it has two rows of teeth and fangs like those of a large dog.” Most frightening of all was a man-eating snake that the Indians called jacumama:
It is a serpent of a frightful magnitude and most deleterious nature. Some in order to give an idea of its largeness, affirm that it will swallow any beast whole, and that this has been the miserable end of many a man. … They generally lie coiled up and wait till their prey passes near enough to be seized. As they are not easily distinguished from the large rotten wood, which lies about in plenty in these parts, they have opportunities to seize their prey and satiate their hunger.*
As for the terrain, all of the routes to the Amazon were “extremely troublesome and fatiguing, from the nature of the climate and being full of rocks, so that a great part of the distance must be travelled on foot.” These difficulties had scared Maldonado’s family thirty years earlier when he had been contemplating his trip to the Amazon, and if anything, the trek had since grown more dangerous. Indians throughout the viceroyalty were rising up in protest and had fled in significant numbers into the jungle, emerging periodically to attack outlying Spanish towns. Equally problematic, the Jesuits had recently been expelled from Peru, and it was their mission stations that had been the lifeline through this wilderness.
The expulsion of the Jesuits had been a long time coming. They had come to the New World in 1549 to convert the “heathens,” and this missionary work had often put them into conflict with colonists seeking to exploit or enslave the Indians. The Jesuits had also grown very wealthy in their two centuries in the New World, adding to their predisposition to ignore governmental orders. Portugal ordered them out of Brazil in 1759, and eight years later Spain did the same. While other clergy had replaced the Jesuits in the mission stations along the Amazon, these priests and monks were—as Ulloa and Juan wrote—often utterly shameless in their behavior. Those living in the cities kept concubines, held drunken revelries, and exploited the Indians for financial gain, and these were the religious men that a traveler to Loreto would now have to depend on.
To most in Riobamba, it was inconceivable that a woman would even think of making this trip. Not only did the many physical dangers cry out for Isabel to stay, but cultural norms were an even more powerful restraint. To go would violate values so deep in the Peruvian psyche that they could be traced back to the Reconquest. A woman ventured outside with a maid or a servant by her side or with her husband for an evening of entertainment, and then she scurried back inside. As a descendant of the Godin family would later write: “Her father and her brothers opposed her going with all their power.”
On the other side of the equation, there was only this: The memory of a husband that Isabel had last seen and held twenty years before.
There was much that Isabel had to do before she could depart. She sold her house in Riobamba and her furniture, and made a gift of her other properties—“a garden and estate at Guaslen, and another property between Galté and Maguazo”—to her sister, Josefa. There were also supplies to buy and her many personal belongings to pack. This all took several months, and once her family understood that they could not dissuade her, they rallied to her side. Both of her brothers decided that they would accompany her to Loreto and travel on to Europe. Juan obtained permission from his superiors to go to Rome, while Antonio—newly freed from bankruptcy jail—saw the journey as an opportunity to start a new life. He would take his seven-year-old son Martín with him to France, and once they were settled, he would send for his wife and his other son. Joaquín, the family’s most trusted slave, would go with them to Loreto—Isabel promised to give him his “card of liberty” as a reward once they reached that point. She would also be accompanied by her two maids, Tomasa and Juanita, who were eight or nine years old. Meanwhile, her sixty-five-year-old father decided that he would leave ahead of the others and arrange for canoes to be ready for them as they proceeded from mission station to mission station. He would travel all the way to Loreto and wait there until he knew that his daughter had reached the Portuguese galliot safely. Then he would return to Riobamba.
News of Isabel’s trip quickly spread throughout the audiencia and beyond. Men and women alike began to gossip about the “lady” who was heading off into the Amazon, and in early September this brought to Riobamba an unlikely visitor: A French man named Jean Rocha, who claimed to be a doctor. He had been making his way up the Peruvian coast, with plans to cross Panama and return to Europe via that route, when, on a stop in Guayaquil, he had heard about Isabel’s trip. He was accompanied by a traveling companion, Phelipe Bogé, and a slave, and in return for passage with Isabel, he promised “to watch over her health, and show her every attention.” Isabel initially turned him down—her instincts said that he was not to be trusted—but her brothers convinced her otherwise, telling her that she “might have need of the assistance of a physician on so long a voyage.”
The traveling party was now set: They numbered ten in all, and Isabel hired thirty-one Indians to carry their goods and supplies. The mules were loaded, the people of Riobamba came out to see them go, and Isabel—on the morning of October 1—picked up the hem of her dress and stepped into a waiting sedan chair. The sky was a brilliant blue, the air crisp and clear, and the group headed north out of town, toward snow-capped Mount Chimborazo. The road climbed to the top of a ridge, and once they had left the last houses behind, Isabel summoned up every bit of her will and turned her sights firmly to the east, toward the high cordillera and the jungle beyond.
* Paris’s silence toward its overseas possessions was apparently common. In 1757, the governor of Louisiana complained that he had written fifteen letters without having receiving a single response from Paris.
* This seems surprising until one considers how difficult it would have been for Jean to send a letter from French Guiana to Riobamba. He could not send one to Pará in the hope that it would be passed upriver, for the border between Portugal and Spain on the Amazon was closed. One possibility would have been to send a letter from French Guiana to France, with the thought that it could then be passed on to Spanish officials, who could place it in the care of a Spanish trading vessel, which could carry it to Cartagena or Lima; from there the letter could somehow be taken overland to Riobamba. This was a postal system that was almost certain to break down, and even if it did not, a letter could take years and years to be delivered. Jean’s father died in 1740, and yet his siblings’ letter informing him of the death did not arrive until 1748, and that letter had originated in France.
* Étienne-François de Choiseul served as France’s minister of foreign affairs from 1758 to 1761 and from 1766 to 1770. He was minister of the marine from 1761 to 1766, and during this period his cousin, Cesar-Gabriel, Duc de Choiseul-Praslin, was minister of foreign affairs. However, Étienne-François retained his authority to formulate foreign policy while his cousin served in that position.
* Slaves often took the surname of their owners.
* Today we know this snake, the jacumama, as an anaconda, which is the largest member of the boa constrictor family of snakes. The maca described by Ulloa was a pit viper of some type, perhaps the fer-de-lance or the bushmaster.
