FOR TWO WEEKS AFTER THEY ARRIVED in Oyapock, Jean and Isabel did all they could to show their gratitude to Martel and to his country. The Portuguese vessel needed a new keel and repairs to its sails, and while this work was being done, the Godins entertained Martel. Even Governor Fiedmont traveled from Cayenne to join in the festivities, bringing refreshments and other delights for the dinner table. His arrival also signaled that he was holding out an olive branch to Jean, ending a feud that had been simmering for several years. After Jean had refused to go with Captain Rebello in 1766, Fiedmont—while sharing Jean’s suspicions of the Portuguese at the time—had come to distrust him, and a year later he had written harshly about Jean in a letter to Choiseul in Paris. He had accused Jean of getting rich by cutting down the “king’s forests” in Guiana and trading in rum, along with a few other sins. But now all seemed to be forgiven. This was a time for goodwill, and when Martel departed, Jean sailed alongside the Portuguese galliot in his own boat until they had passed Cape Orange, his way of offering a final salute: “I took my leave of him with those feelings which the polite attention and noble behavior of that officer and his generous nation were so well calculated to inspire in me.”
However, those initial euphoric days soon gave way to a difficult period for Isabel and Jean, one that lasted nearly three years. Isabel fell ill. Those who came to Guiana often became sick, but she was also still recovering from her ordeal. Emotionally too she struggled, as survivors of disasters so often do. She was visited regularly by bouts of melancholy, “her horrible misfortunes being ever present to her imagination,” Jean confessed. He wanted to whisk her away to France, to a new life there, but he was now broke. Far from having made a fortune from his timber and fishing operations, or from the rum trade that Fiedmont had accused him of operating, Jean owed 3,700 francs to the king’s treasury, a debt that he had incurred to fund d’Oreasaval’s trip upriver.
Once again, Jean appealed to the Crown for relief. Toward the end of 1770, he wrote César-Gabriel de Choiseul-Praslin, minister of the marine, detailing all that had happened to Isabel in the jungle. “Might we, Your Grace, ask you to cancel our debt? We find ourselves, after all these hardships and sorrows, unable to fulfill this obligation. Please, my lord, cast your eyes on our painful situation and we shall not cease, both of us, to pray for your good health.” Although this letter found its way into French archives, it did not elicit any relief. By the time it arrived in Paris, the Choiseuls—both the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin and his powerful cousin, the Duc de Choiseul—had fallen into disgrace and were no longer in a position to help.
At the same time, Jean sought to recover the 7,000 francs he had given d’Oreasaval at the start of the trip. Although Isabel advised him not to do it—she had “compassion even for that wretch,” Jean wrote—he sued d’Oreasaval, who he felt had betrayed him. D’Oreasaval had failed to take his letters to Lagunas, and that dereliction of duty had led to the loss of the letters and, from Jean’s point of view, the subsequent tragic turn of events. His friend had stayed all the while in Tabatinga, trading away the 7,000 francs. It was this “infidelity and neglect,” Jean told the court, that had “caused the death of eight persons, including the American who was drowned, and all the misfortunes which befell my wife.”*
Although one could understand Jean’s ire, this was a rather impractical battle to wage. D’Oreasaval had no money. He had arrived back in Cayenne without a cent. The most that Jean could hope for was that the court would agree that he had been wronged, and naturally the lawsuit dragged on and on, delaying his and Isabel’s departure to France.
Over the next two years, however, Jean was able to raise the funds they needed to leave South America. Precisely how is not clear, but a 1772 census of Oyapock reports that the Godin household included seven slaves and their four children, and the fact that he owned so many slaves meant he had a commercial business of some type. They would have provided the labor for whatever timber or fishing operation he had kept going.
Jean also managed to bring his lawsuit against d’Oreasaval to a successful end of sorts. On January 7, 1773, the Superior Court of Cayenne ruled that d’Oreasaval had indeed failed to fulfill his obligations to Jean and ordered him to repay the 7,000 francs. However, as expected, he could not. If Jean had asked the authorities to imprison him for nonpayment of the debt, Jean would have been required, under the law, to pay for d’Oreasaval’s upkeep in jail. “For my part,” Jean later wrote, “I judged it unnecessary to augment the losses I had already sustained.”
On April 21, 1773, Jean, Isabel, and her father sailed from Cayenne. After thirty-eight years, Jean was at last returning home. They were leaving South America behind, and although they could not have known it, back in Riobamba there was a matter close to Isabel’s heart that had come to the happy end she desired. Not only had Joaquín been released from prison, but on May 29, 1771, Isabel’s sister Josefa and her husband Antonio Zabala, acting at Isabel’s request, had given him his “card of liberty,” the Zabalas avowing all “love and good will” toward him.
After arriving in La Rochelle on June 26, Jean, Isabel, and her father traveled straight to Saint Amand, Jean’s home in the center of France. Jean had left a young man and come back an old one—he was sixty now. Many in his family had passed away. Both of his parents were dead, his mother having died in 1750, and his two sisters were widows. But his brother Carlos was still living, and the warmth of his three siblings, who “tenderly received” Isabel and her father, made him happy to be home. They moved into a family house on Rue Hotel-Dieu, near the center of the small town.
They had barely had time to finish unpacking their trunks before a letter from La Condamine arrived, welcoming Jean back. In many ways, Jean’s return brought the expedition to a conclusion, with Isabel’s ordeal being the final chapter in that history, and La Condamine wanted to know all of the details. Rumors about her travails had been circulating in Parisian salons for some time—the idea of a high-society woman lost in such a frightening wilderness was almost beyond comprehension—and La Condamine requested that Jean provide him with a narrative of her journey.
Jean replied on July 28, 1773. His was a lengthy letter, nearly 7,000 words, and it was replete with vivid details. Hailing it as a story that showed what “miracles may be effected by resolution and perseverance,” La Condamine promptly prepared it for publication. His 1745 account of his travels down the Amazon, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique Méridionale, was in the process of being republished, and he added Jean’s letter to the text. When this updated edition of Relation abrégée appeared and was translated into other languages, Isabel’s story left readers throughout Europe mesmerized. An English printer declared that it presented “as extraordinary a series of perils, adventures, and escapes, as are anywhere to be found on record.”
BY THE END OF 1773, only three other members of the expedition besides La Condamine and Jean Godin were known to be still living. Collectively, the fates of the expedition members had played out in ways both admirable and tragic.
Three of the members, of course, had died in South America: Couplet, Senièrgues, and Morainville. Hugo, the instrument maker, simply disappeared there. He had last written to La Condamine in the early 1750s, telling once more of his homesickness for France, and then he was never heard from again. Verguin enjoyed a prosperous career as a naval engineer after his return to France and was still alive in 1773, living in Toulon, when Jean finally made it back home.
Bouguer was the first of the three academicians to die. Unfortunately, his envy of La Condamine soured their relationship for good, and the two never reconciled. But he remained a productive scientist until his death in 1758, at age sixty. In his last decade, he wrote about navigation, invented an instrument called the heliometer for measuring the diameters of planets, and studied the properties of light. This last work earned him posthumous recognition as the “father of photometry.” He never married, reserving his deepest attachment for the Academy of Sciences, where he was the resident astronomer until his death. Because he lacked heirs, he gave most of his money to friends and servants before he died, and in his will, he allocated what remained of his wealth to the poor.
Louis Godin died two years later, and by the end he was something of a broken man. During his years in Lima, while waiting for Peru to give him permission to leave, he had taught math at the University of San Marcos and had overseen the reconstruction of the port of Callao after it was destroyed in a massive earthquake. Upon his return to Paris in 1751, he resumed living with his wife and two grown children, whom he had not seen for sixteen years. For the next twelve months, he petitioned the academy to give him back his seat and his pension. Clearly, he had been unfairly expelled—the academy had done so thinking that he had willingly taken a position with a university in Lima—yet his plea went unheard. Disappointed, he and his wife moved to Cadiz, where Ulloa and Juan had secured an appointment for him as director of Spain’s naval academy. In 1756, the French Academy of Sciences finally readmitted Godin as a member with “veteran” status, but this bit of justice came too late. His son had recently died from smallpox, and his daughter perished shortly thereafter, which crushed his spirit. Although he had been the nominal leader of the Peruvian expedition, he never published his account of it. In 1760, at the age of fifty-six, he died from an attack of apoplexy.
Jussieu took even longer to return to Paris. After traveling south from Lima in 1748 to La Paz and Lake Titicaca, where he collected plants and aquatic birds, he lived for six years in the famous silver mining town of Potosí. There he taught, practiced medicine, rebuilt the public works system, and oversaw the construction of a bridge. His skills were deemed so valuable that, much as had been the case in Quito, authorities in Potós did all they could to prevent him from leaving. He moved to Lima in 1755, where he provided medical care to the poor but slipped into an ever deeper despondency.* For the next fifteen years, his family constantly begged him to return. Finally, his friends in Lima, alarmed at his deteriorated state, arranged for him to go. Unfortunately, he left behind most of his papers and much of his life’s work was lost.
Jussieu reached Paris on July 10, 1771, and fell weeping into the arms of his brother, Bernard. He moved in with Bernard, but his mind was shattered, and for the next eight years, until his death at age seventy-four, he rarely ventured outside. He never visited the Academy of Sciences, which had elected him a member in 1743. His memory went, as did his eyesight and the use of his limbs, and he died a painful death from gangrene. At his funeral, he was eulogized as a “martyr to botany,” a melancholy man who had never garnered the recognition he deserved.
Juan enjoyed a fairly tranquil life after his return to Spain. The publication of his and Ulloa’s book on their voyage to South America made him well known throughout Spanish society, and he was appointed the squadron commander of the Spanish Royal Armada. For the next twenty years, he devoted his energies to writing about navigation, improving the operations of Spain’s shipyards, and developing the sciences in Spain. He founded an astronomical observatory at Cadiz and established the Friendly Literary Society, which met each Thursday at his house to discuss scientific questions. This group later gave rise to the Royal Society of Sciences of Madrid. He died in 1773 at age sixty.
Ulloa’s post-expedition life was filled with drama. He had been the principal author of Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional, and after it appeared, Spain sent him on a tour of Europe to study the roads, canals, and factories of France and other countries. Spain wanted this information to support its modernization plans. At the same time, Ulloa mined his notes from Peru in order to write a second report, this one on the colony’s dark underside. He did not hold back a thing, describing at length the venality of colonial officials, the exploitation of Indians by greedy village priests, and the awful abuses of the mita system. The report, which he titled Discurso y reflexiones políticas sobre el estado presente de los reynos del Peru, was a reformist manuscript meant for the Crown’s eyes only. Juan contributed in small ways to the document, which was indeed kept secret until 1826, when an English merchant in Cadiz, David Barry, obtained a purloined copy and published it under the title Noticias secretas de América (Secret news of America). The book’s appearance created a storm in Europe similar to the one Las Casas’s book, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, had generated in 1542, and the book proved to be of similarly lasting historical importance.
Perhaps in response to his report, Spain appointed Ulloa governor of the troubled Huancavelica province in Peru in 1757. The province contained an important mercury mine and was known to be rife with corruption, with the miners and local officials colluding to cheat the monarchy out of its royalties. This was an opportunity for Ulloa to put into practice his reformist ideals, but six years later he had reached a point of total defeat, writing the Crown to ask to be rescued from a situation made impossible by “vexations, mortifications, and rebuffs.” However, rather than allowing him to come home, Spain asked him to assume the post of governor of Louisiana, which Spain had recently obtained from France in the Treaty of Paris. Naturally, the French-speaking Creoles deeply resented this new Spanish rule, and in 1768, they rose up in revolt, forcing Ulloa and his Peruvian wife to flee.
As a colonial administrator, Ulloa had failed utterly. However, once back in Spain, he resumed a productive life as a naval officer, writer, and scientist. He published Noticias Americanas, a concise natural history of Spanish America, established a natural history museum in Madrid, and—while fathering nine children—gradually turned himself into a Spanish Benjamin Franklin. He studied electricity and artificial magnetism, observed the circulation of blood in fish and insects, introduced innovations into the printing and paper-making industries, designed surgical instruments, and improved weaving techniques for making fine cashmere woolens. An English visitor to his home in the 1780s told of meeting a humble man surrounded by books, instruments, fossils, guns, and various antiquities—all the clutter of a life of science and adventure, enjoyed by a man with a most curious mind. Ulloa died in 1795 at age seventy-nine.
La Condamine penned an update on the members of the expedition in 1773, and by that time he too was nearing the end of his life. He was almost totally deaf and had suffered from paralysis in his legs for nearly a decade, leading him to quip that he doubted whether he and Jussieu together could be “reckoned equivalent to one living being.” But while his body may have been giving out, his mind remained as alert as ever.
Partly as a result of his skills as a writer, much of Europe had come to think of the Peruvian mission as the “La Condamine expedition.” In the 1740s and early 1750s, he published three volumes on the voyage. One was a diary of his ten years abroad, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi à l’équateur. The second was his account of his exploration of the Amazon, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique méridionale, and the third was a scientific treatise on their arc measurements, Mesure des trois premiers degrés du méridien dans l’hémisphere austral. In the wake of the books’ success, he became something of a statesman for science, happily corresponding with scholars throughout Europe and lobbying for two pet projects: the establishment of a universal standard of measurement and the use of inoculation practices to protect against smallpox. Inoculation involved deliberately exposing children to mild cases of the disease, which many people thought was mad. Indeed, his relentless advocacy on this topic earned him the nickname “the Don Quixote of inoculation” from those who thought he was surely tilting at windmills with this idea. However, he gradually won over the skeptics, and by the early 1770s the practice was being adopted throughout Europe.
In 1756, La Condamine traveled to Italy, where he researched the ancient measurements of Rome and visited Vesuvius. He also returned from that trip with a papal dispensation to marry his twenty-five-year-old niece. The adventurer who had always thought that his smallpox scars rendered him unlovable had finally found a mate. In 1760, he was elected to the select Académie Française, whose forty members were often described as France’s immortals. His physical infirmities began to slow him down after that, and as his leg paralysis set in, he offered a prize to the scholar who could best explain his illness. He gladly offered himself up as a guinea pig for experiments with electricity that were designed to ease his pain, none of which worked. But he was ever the curious man, and in early 1774, as he prepared to undergo a risky hernia operation, he told the surgeon to perform it slowly because he wanted to make mental notes and report on his experience to the academy. This was before the invention of anesthesia, and yet he was willing to lengthen the operation in order to learn from it. He died on February 4, shortly after this final scientific quest.
Buffon, one of La Condamine’s long-time friends in the academy, eulogized him in this memorable way:
La Condamine may have had faults and shortcomings, but he had the advantage that his faults tended toward respectable qualities and his shortcomings were more than compensated for by his virtues. His faults and shortcomings will be soon forgotten and what will remain will be the memory of all the good he has done for mankind. He was a philosopher and scholar who loved his fellow man, who had a zeal for truth, and who spoke about what he loved.
In the months before he died, La Condamine had indeed shown those words of praise to be true, for he had performed one final act of kindness on behalf of Jean Godin, his faithful signal carrier on the expedition.
IN SAINT AMAND, Jean and Isabel had settled into a peaceful life. While Isabel may have dreamed as a young girl about Paris, that fancy had long since passed, and now she and Jean stayed close to their home in rural France. Jean managed family properties in Odonais and at Epourneaux, and he acquired other lands adjacent to those, which he put to use as vineyards. He also maintained an interest in French Guiana and dashed off more than one letter to Louis XV’s ministers, urging them to develop a cattle industry there. This proposal was seen as having some merit, and for once Jean even received a polite letter thanking him for his recommendations. The correspondence with the Crown reflected the fact that Jean had found a place in society, so much so that his name was known to King Louis XV.
Shortly after Jean’s return to Saint Amand, La Condamine had gone to Louis Phélypeaux de Vrillière, who oversaw the operations of the Academy of Sciences for the king, to request that Jean be given a pension. This was an award, La Condamine told the duke, that Jean had “well earned by his zeal and toil” in Peru. In an order dated October 27, 1773, the king granted Jean an annual sum of 700 francs, and while the money was important, Louis XV’s words were more so: The pension was for Jean’s service on the expedition “as official geographer to the King.” Geographer. Not signal carrier, not assistant, but “official geographer.” At last, Jean had a title that he could carry to his grave.
Content now in a way that he had never been before, Jean resumed working on his grammar of Quechua. Isabel, with her linguistic skill, presumably helped him with this task. According to a nineteenth-century French historian, the manuscript Jean produced included a substantial lexicon, “which he prepared in St. Amand up until his death.” However, he was not able to get it published. In the last rejection letter he received, dated July 22, 1787, one of the king’s ministers gently informed him that it would be impossible to have it “printed at the expense of the King.”
Details about the years that Jean and Isabel spent together in Saint Amand are sparse. They managed their properties and lived quietly, out of the public eye, even though their story had become so well known. Isabel bore physical scars from her ordeal, her face badly pocked, and that led some in Saint Amand to wonder whether her emotional wounds could ever heal. Isabel rarely spoke about her sufferings in the jungle—she was enigmatic in that regard—and the diary that she kept in Saint Amand, which might have revealed her feelings, was later lost. But there were many aspects of her life in Saint Amand that surely brought her much comfort. Her father, who was ever so dear to her, lived with them until his death in 1780, at age seventy-six. Four priests attended the burial, evidence of the high esteem in which he—and the Godins—were held. Then too there was the solace that she drew from Jean’s enduring love, which he publicly professed when he made out his will in 1776:
I owe to Madame Isabelle Godin, my wife, much regard, both thanks to the happy union that has always existed between us, and because of the suffering she endured in her travels to find me in Cayenne. I give her full title to one quarter of all my goods, with no exception of anything, according to what custom allows me, and am sorry that I cannot give her more.
There was one other joy that enlivened the Godin home on Rue Hotel-Dieu in their final years. At some point—the date is unknown—Isabel’s nephew Juan Antonio came from Riobamba to live with them.* He was Martín’s younger brother, and Jean and Isabel raised him as their own. He quickly adapted to his new country, changing the spelling of his name to Jean-Antoine Grandmaison, and on February 21, 1792, he married a local woman, Magdeleine Picot. They moved into a house on Rue Cheval Blanc, and in the years ahead, they often told their son Gilbert Felix about his famous great-aunt, Isabel Godin.
Jean was too ill to attend the wedding of Jean-Antoine and Magdeleine, and he died nine days later, on the first of March, at eleven in the evening, with Isabel by his side. He was seventy-nine years old. He was buried in a local cemetery, and once he was gone, Isabel’s health quickly began to decline. Her whole life had been entwined with his. She had been eight years old when the French arrived in Quito, and she had married Jean when she was only thirteen. Although they had lived apart for twenty-one years, she had spent much of that time imagining their reunion; he had never been far from her thoughts. The world they had known together for the last nineteen years in Saint Amand was ending too, the monarchy tumbling before revolutionary mobs in Paris. Yet her last months were peaceful. Jean-Antoine visited her often, she was not alone, and—as Jean-Antoine would later relate—from time to time she would take out an ebony box and prop it open on her lap, softly running her fingers over the cotton dress and sandals stored inside.
Isabel died on September 27, 1792, at age sixty-five, and was buried in the same parish cemetery as Jean. Jean-Antoine and his wife Magdeleine had their first child two months later, and the descendants of one of their sons, Gilbert, can still be found living today in the Berry region of France. Isabel’s sandals were handed down as an heirloom, and not long ago, a distant relative of Isabel’s, Marc Lemaire, recalled that as a child he would visit his great-aunt Emma and she would show them off, the sandals “completely flattened and made of some kind of raffia, grey and dusty.” Isabel and Jean’s house in Saint Amand still stands as well, and in the town library there is a copy of the famous letter Jean wrote to La Condamine, telling of his wife’s wanderings in the Bobonaza wilderness.
* Jean was mistaken here. Including the Indian pilot, the correct number of deaths was seven.
* In addition to his usual melancholy, Jussieu began to suffer headaches and dizziness in Potosí, which may have been due to poisoning from the mercury used in the processing of silver from the mines in this notoriously unhealthy town.
* There is no record of how he traveled from Riobamba to France. The most common route at the time would have been overland to Cartagena and from there to Spain.