MORE THAN TWENTY-FIVE years ago, I fell in love with Ecuador. I had recently graduated from college, and I lived for a time in a remote village called Las Manchas on Ecuador’s coast. My girlfriend and I built a bamboo hut on stilts on the outskirts of the village, next to a river emptying into the Pacific, and hoped that we could stay there forever.
We couldn’t, of course—the real world got in the way—but I always longed to go back. Researching this book provided me with that opportunity, and I quickly fell in love all over again with that mesmerizing country and its wonderful people.
In many ways, the Charles-Marie de La Condamine expedition—which provides the backdrop for this story of Isabel Godin’s adventure in the Amazon—occupies a central place in South American history, akin to the exploration of North America by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Over the course of eight years (1736–1744), La Condamine and eleven others—nine Frenchmen and two Spaniards—collectively wandered far and wide across the continent, studying plants and minerals, climbing to altitudes in the Andes never before reached by Europeans, mapping the Amazon River, and, most important of all, precisely measuring the distance of one degree of latitude at the equator. This last effort was undertaken to answer questions about the earth’s precise shape and to resolve a heated debate—between Newtonians and Cartesians—over the physics that governed the universe. Along the way, several of the expedition members died, one was murdered, and another—Jean Godin—married a Peruvian woman, Isabel Gramesón. Theirs became a legendary story of love and survival.
For reasons that are difficult to understand, this story has never gotten its due in history books. For the most part, the story of the La Condamine expedition has been relegated to chapter status in books on the exploration of South America, and as that brief story has been told and retold, the true history of the La Condamine expedition has become somewhat lost and muddied. Dialogue now and then has been imagined, events separated by years have been folded together for dramatic purposes, and a few incidents have been invented out of whole cloth. Lore has replaced history, so to speak, and when it comes to Isabel Godin, the basic chapter-length story that has been told over the past two centuries is simply mistaken in its most critical details.
The source material that writers have always relied upon for Isabel’s story is a 1773 letter written by her husband Jean Godin, and while that letter is invaluable, he did not have access to information gathered by Peruvian authorities of witnesses to the event. That cache of documents fleshes out her story in a most vivid and surprising way.
To write this book, I relied on a variety of original sources. Journals by four members of the expedition, La Condamine, Pierre Bouguer, and the two Spaniards, Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, provide vivid eyewitness accounts of their eight years in South America. In some instances, I obtained eighteenth-century English translations of their work. In others, I had French documents translated into English. I also found much useful information in various eighteenth-century articles published by the French Academy of Sciences in its yearly journal, Histoire et memoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences.
The story of Jean and Isabel Godin is also well documented, even if much of the material lay forgotten in obscure journals. Jean Godin’s correspondence is one such source. In addition to his 1773 letter to La Condamine, he wrote frequently to friends and to King Louis XV’s ministers while living in French Guiana from 1750 to 1773. Much of this material was published in 1896 by a French historian, Henri Froidevaux, in the Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris. The testimonies gathered by Peruvian authorities in their 1770 investigation of the “Isabel Godin tragedy” were published in 1970 in an Ecuadorian journal, Archivo Nacional de Historia. The translations of those documents are mine.
I am also indebted to historians in Spain, France, and Ecuador who have done archival research on the expedition. In particular, I relied on research by an Ecuadorian scholar, Carlos Ortiz Arellano, for biographical information about Isabel Godin’s early life and her family. It was through his writings, moreover, that I was alerted to the historical documents published in Ecuador’s Archivo Nacional de Historia.
Finally, in order to flesh out this history, I retraced Isabel Godin’s journey in the upper Amazon, and did so in October, the month that she began her journey. In that manner, I hoped to obtain a better sense of the landscape and of the fears that this wilderness can provoke. I went by bicycle from her hometown of Riobamba to Puyo at the base of the Andes, and then by dugout canoe from Canelos to Andoas. That experience was memorable in many ways, and it was one that left me ever more in awe of Isabel Godin.
—Robert Whitaker