The Mapmaker's Wife (10 page)

As a result of such writings, European cartographers depicted colonial South America in ways that recalled medieval maps of old. One map drawn in the sixteenth century featured a landscape filled
with minotaurs, headless men with eyes in their chests, and bipedal creatures with ratlike heads. While many of these more fanciful items had disappeared from maps by the early 1700s when La Condamine and the others were preparing their voyage, El Dorado and the Amazon women were still present. The great lake described by Sir Walter Raleigh was called Lake Parima, and cartographers located it northeast of Río Negro as a body of water—on some maps—bigger than the Caspian Sea.

A seventeenth-century map depicting Lake Parima.

By John Ogilby (1671). Rucker Agee Map Collection of the Birmingham Alabama Public Library
.

Accounts of Peruvian society, which were almost entirely based on life in the port cities of Lima, Guayaquil, and Cartagena, also left readers uncertain of where truth left off and exaggeration began. Peruvian merchants, Carletti wrote, piled treasures
“of three and four hundred bars and ingots of silver” beneath their
mattresses and spent “two hundred thousand escudos with greater security and ease than one of us buys a bit of salad.” Even the “common people live much at their ease,” reported a Frenchman, Acarete du Biscay, who slipped into the colony in 1658.
“They always go dressed very fine, either in cloth of gold and silver, or in silk trimmed with gold and silver lace.”

The elite in Peru, the visitors said, busied themselves with the pageantry of society. There were fancy balls to attend and a steady calendar of religious festivals, bullfights, and military parades. At such public events, they noted, the men were ever ready to defend their sense of knightly honor, quick to display daggers or swords to anyone
“that should oppose their pleasures or offend them.” In some cities in Peru, Biscay reported, sword pulling was so common that men
“wear three or four buff-waistcoats one upon another, which are proof against the point of a sword, to secure themselves from private stabs.”

Nearly all of the visitors were quite taken by Peruvian women, entranced in particular by the mestizos and mulattos who were mistresses to the rich. In Lima, reported Pedro de León Portocarrero, a Portuguese trader who lived there in the early 1600s, such women liked to
“display themselves strolling about in public” and had a ravenous “desire to satisfy their carnal appetites.” In 1714, the Frenchman Amadée Frezier similarly marveled at the lusty Peruvian women. They would sneak out from their homes at night under the cover of their veils for “immodest” purposes, he wrote, performing “the part which men do in France.” At societal events, he added, they favored risqué dresses that left their “breasts and shoulders half naked,” and they were pleased to field “proposals which a lover would not dare to make in France without incurring the indignation of a modest woman.” When it came to “matters of love,” Frezier concluded, Peruvians “yield to no nation.”

Readers of such literature could conclude only one thing: In the New World, everything was upside down. As one traveler quipped, South America appeared to be a place
“where the rivers
ran inland and the women urinated standing up.” The French explorers, however, were eager to sort out fact from fiction and planned to bring back “scientific” accounts of Peru. Existing travelogues, Bouguer declared, were from
“persons who have never been induced to a strict examination of what they beheld.”

T
HE POLITICS
that had led up to this moment, when Spain was finally going to lift the veil that it had thrown over its colony, dated back to 1700, when the long reign of the Hapsburg kings had come to an end. The last Hapsburg king of Spain, Charles II, was a sickly and haunted man—many in Europe considered him an inbred imbecile—and as he lay dying, childless, he had selected Philip of Anjou to be his successor. Philip was the great-grandson of Philip IV of Spain and the grandson of France’s Louis XIV, a Bourbon king. He had blood ties to both monarchies.

With a member of the Bourbon family on the Spanish throne, France seemed poised to gain coveted trading rights with Peru. It established a trading company, the Compagnie Royale de la Mer Pacifique, to carry out this commerce, and in 1701, Spain gave French ships permission to buy supplies in its colonial ports. However, the Council of the Indies, in Madrid, which governed colonial matters, privately seethed over this French influence, as did England and the Netherlands, which worried that the two Catholic countries were merging into a superpower. England and the Netherlands declared war, and when the War of the Spanish Succession finally came to an end in 1713 with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht, Spain and France were forced to agree to keep their countries separate. Philip V renounced any right he might have to the French throne upon the death of Louis XIV, and England was granted a commercial monopoly over the African slave trade to the New World.

After that, Philip V governed in a way that pleased Spanish isolationists. He refused to grant the French full trading privileges with Spain’s colonies, and shortly after Louis XIV died in 1715, the
two countries even went to war. Philip’s embrace of the old guard in Spain also led him to pump new life into the Spanish Inquisition. During his reign, the Inquisition held 782 autos-da-fé, at which thousands of heretics were punished. This revival of medieval ways prompted Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, a reform-minded Benedictine monk, to bitterly complain that
“while abroad there is progress in physics, anatomy, botany, geography and natural history, we break each other’s heads and drown our halls with howls.”

Indeed, in spite of Philip’s Bourbon bloodlines, the old dynamic still held sway in 1733, when the French Academy of Sciences decided to mount its expedition. The French wanted into Peru, and the Spanish wanted to keep them out. The mission, however, provided Louis XV with a sly way to break the stalemate.

There was no scientific reason that the French had to go precisely to the equator. A trip to their own colony, French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America, would get them close enough to zero degrees latitude to serve their purpose. Measuring an arc there would reveal whether a degree close to the equator was longer or shorter than one in France and thus reveal the earth’s shape. And certainly it would have been easier and quicker to complete this task in a French colony. La Condamine had even argued—with a
“sharp voice,” Bouguer recalled—for going to Cayenne in French Guiana.
^*
But La Condamine was naive about the political opportunity at hand, an opportunity that Count Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas, minister of the marine, eagerly laid out for the king. A scientific expedition, he told Louis XV in early 1734, would be above suspicion and yet it would enable France, as a French historian later wrote,
“to study the country and bring back a detailed description.”

Properly briefed, Louis XV wrote his “dear uncle” on April 6, 1734, asking for permission for the French to travel to Peru. He assured Philip V that there was no reason for the Spanish to fret.
His mapmakers would simply be making observations
“which would be advantageous not only for the advancing of Science, but also very useful to commerce, by increasing the safety and ease of navigation.” How could his uncle stand in the way of such progress?

Philip’s response showed that he had indeed been hoodwinked, at least in regard to the science. On August 14, 1734, he granted passports to the ten French scientists. He did so, he wrote, because the French were desirous of making astronomical observations that had to
“be made at the Equator itself. … It is only on the coast of Peru that they may undertake [such observations] without undergoing great difficulties.” Knowing the precise shape of the earth, he added, would be “useful for navigation in general, and in particular, for the navigation of my subjects.” The French had successfully convinced Philip that the expedition would provide Spain with a practical benefit, even though such a claim was a stretch. While it was true that the expedition would enable cartographers to draw more precise maps, the improvement in accuracy would be modest—the French had already used updated triangulation techniques to develop a fairly reliable estimate of the earth’s circumference. The expedition was designed to answer a more abstract question, one of physics and gravitational forces, but Spain was unlikely to open the door to its colonies for such an abstruse end. However, the advancement of cartography and of the science of navigation were practical ends that every eighteenth-century European monarch desired, and in a letter dated August 20, 1734, Philip promised the French savants every possible support. They could borrow funds from Peru’s treasury, and he would advise his governors in Peru to
“give them all of the assistance, favors and protection that they should require so that they may easily find housing, transportation, and mounts … and pay the just and ordinary prices without any obstacle whatsoever.” Philip, it seemed, was even going to protect the French from the price gouging that most travelers knew to expect.

The whole exchange was very cordial, an uncle replying in a most gracious manner to his “dear nephew.” But Philip also had a
few requests of his own. The French astronomers, he informed his nephew, would have to present their gear for close inspection upon arrival in Santo Domingo and at every other stop in their journey. This was necessary so that they could prove they were “above suspicion of any illegal commerce which might be deemed prejudicial to my Kingdoms.” Nor would La Condamine and the others be allowed to go wherever they wanted in Peru. Their route to Quito was carefully proscribed, and once there, their travel was to be limited to those areas where the scientific work was to be done. Finally, Philip would assign two Spanish military officers to the expedition; they would “assist said Frenchmen in all of the observations they shall undertake.”

In the political arena, everyone understood each other perfectly. The French could go to Peru, but the Spanish officers would keep a close eye on them to ensure that they did not poke their noses where they did not belong. On this expedition, science would be mixed with the gamesmanship of espionage.

B
Y THE MORNING
of May 16, 1735, the
Portefaix
was ready to sail. The frigate’s holds were crammed with the scientists’ goods, La Condamine having checked off hundreds of items from a long inventory list. In addition to the quadrants and zenith sector, their scientific equipment included two telescopes, survey chains, watches with second hands, land and sea compasses, thermometers, a rain gauge, several barometers, a galvanometer, an instrument for measuring the blueness of the sky, and another for determining the boiling point of water. Each of the ten men had his own personal trunk, filled with numerous changes of clothes, toiletries, and powder bags for dressing wigs. They also were bringing along a library of books, surgical instruments, medicines, twelve shotguns, six swords, 225 books of gunpowder, nine barrels of brandy, and six packets of playing cards. Four servants would accompany them, and they planned to buy several slaves at their first stop in the West Indies.

They all knew there was much at stake. They were setting out to explore a continent and pursue a grand scientific quest. What was the earth’s shape? Was Newton or Descartes right? What was the force that kept planets in their orbits? And how could one best know the world? Through concrete observations, as the French had done with their many measurements of an arc? Or through abstract mathematics?

As the
Portefaix
pulled away from the dock, they all stood on deck. For a moment, they looked back at the crowd that had come to see them off. There were the usual waves and shouts of good-bye, and then, in the morning fog, the wooden pier slid from view, and they turned their sights to the open expanse of ocean to the west. La Condamine, Louis Godin, Bouguer, Jean Godin, and the others—all felt excited. Their mission, the French had proudly proclaimed, was “the greatest expedition the world had ever known.”

*
The academy quickly rejected any thought of going to Africa, for it was considered to be populated by “savages.”

CHAPTER FIVE