The Mapmaker's Wife (18 page)

Once La Condamine and Juan were together, they were able to get the expedition back on track. The viceroy wrote them letters of support and assured them that they could safely return to Quito—Araujo would be counseled to that end. La Condamine, meanwhile, used his personal letter of credit to obtain a loan of 12,000 pesos from a British merchant, Thomas Blechynden, who, by a stroke of good fortune for the French, had come to Lima to collect on a debt owed his trading company. La Condamine also obtained a letter from the viceroyalty authorizing the expedition to draw 4,000 pesos from the royal treasury in Quito, and on June 20, he and Juan returned there, ready to get on with the work of triangulation.

W
HILE THESE FEUDS
were playing out, the other members of the expedition had been surveying possible triangulation routes. Louis Godin, who wanted to measure a degree of longitude, had headed west from Quito, while Bouguer scouted out the region to the north, and Verguin and Jean Godin reconnoitered the terrain to the south. Once La Condamine returned, they all agreed that they would head south to measure three degrees of latitude first and worry about measuring one of longitude later.

The triangulation would enable them to measure a distance of 200 miles or so along a north-south line. They would run their triangles—a long-distance tape measure, so to speak—down the Andean valley that had been the old Inca highway. The valley was twenty-five to thirty-five miles broad and lined on both sides by mountains that rose to over 12,000 feet, including a number of individual volcanoes that soared above 16,000 feet. By setting up their triangulation points on the top of peaks or on the sides of the higher volcanoes, they figured that they would have clear lines of sight from one point to the next, making it easy to measure the interior angles of each triangle. Partly because of the tensions between the academicians, they decided to break into two groups and divide the work. La Condamine, Bouguer, and Ulloa would form one party, Louis Godin and Juan the other. The assistants would help both groups.

On August 14, La Condamine’s group set out for the first triangulation point, the summit of snow-covered Mount Pichincha. From there, they expected to be able to clearly see the two ends of their baseline in Yaruqui.
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However, Pichincha is roughly 15,500 feet high, nearly equal to the tallest peak in the Alps, Mont Blanc, which at that time had never been climbed. During their ascent, first by horseback and then on foot, several members of the group
suffered fits of vomiting, and all were
“considerably incommoded by the rarefaction of the air,” Bouguer reported. Ulloa fared the worst, fainting and falling face first into the snow.
“I remained a long time without sense or motion, and, as I was told, with all the appearance of death in my face.” After Ulloa spent a night in a cave, several Indians helped him reach the summit, where the others were huddled up inside a small hut.

The top of the peak was too small to accommodate the large tents they had had made in Saint Domingue. Instead, their “lodging,” as La Condamine referred to the hut in his journal, was about six feet high, made from reeds lashed to posts that served as a frame. Five or six people crowded into it at a time, Verguin and Jean Godin joining La Condamine, Bouguer, and Ulloa in this humble abode. Their Negro slaves were close by in a “little tent,” the two groups camped out on a summit that dropped off steeply on all sides.
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Along with a quadrant for measuring angles, they had brought a thermometer, a barometer, and a pendulum clock to the summit, and during the first few days, they exulted at the opportunity to do science at such an altitude. They charted temperatures that plunged below freezing each morning, hung the pendulum clock from the posts to measure the earth’s gravitational pull at this great height, and marveled at how low the mercury in their barometer dipped.
“No one before us, that I know of, had seen the mercury go below sixteen inches,” La Condamine wrote in his journal. “That is twelve inches lower than at sea level, indicating that the air we were breathing was diluted by almost half of what it is in France, when the barometer goes up to 29 inches.” He calculated that the peak was a “large league” in height (roughly three miles) and that it would take 29,160 steps to climb it from sea level.

At times, they put aside their scientific duties to play around like little kids,
“rolling large fragments of rock down the precipice” to amuse themselves, Ulloa wrote. They were living on top of the world, so high that often they could look down on storms roiling the valley below:

When the fog cleared up, the clouds, by their gravity, moved nearer to the surface of the earth, and on all sides surrounded the mountain to a vast distance, representing the sea, with our rock like an island in the center of it. When this happened, we heard the horrid noises of the tempests, which then discharged themselves on Quito and the neighboring country. We saw the lightnings issue from the clouds, and heard the thunder roll far beneath us, and whilst the lower parts were involved in tempests of thunder and rain, we enjoyed a delightful serenity, the wind was abated, the sky clear, and the enlivening rays of the sun moderated the severity of the cold.

But for the most part they suffered, and horribly so. They were pounded regularly by snow and hail, the wind so violent that they feared being blown from the summit should they dare step outside the hut. They spent whole days inside, each trying to warm his hands over a “chafing dish of coals.” They ate a “little rice boiled with some flesh or fowl,” Ulloa noted, and had to boil snow for water. Even a swig of brandy in the evenings did not do anything to chase away the cold, and they soon gave up even this comfort.

The nights were long on the mountain. Each afternoon, at five or so, an Indian servant would fasten the door shut with a leather thong and then hurriedly descend to a cave lower down, where the Indians kept a perpetual fire. The academicians and their assistants would now be shut in for the next sixteen or seventeen hours, their imaginations haunted by the noise of howling winds, the “terrible rolling of thunder,” and crashing rocks. Most mornings, the hut was covered with a “thick blanket of snow,” La Condamine wrote, with such a wall of ice forming against the door that they could not
push it open. The Indians usually arrived at nine or ten to dig them out, but one morning—their fourth or fifth on the mountain—no one came. They hollered for help, but the winds were so fierce that their Negro slaves either did not hear them or were in such pain, with swollen feet and hands,
“that they would rather have suffered themselves to have been killed than move,” Ulloa wrote. At last, a lone Indian arrived at noon to free them. All of the other Indians had fled, unwilling to endure such hardship any longer, even though they were being paid several times the going rate for their labor.

Despite this harsh environment, the French academicians hoped to measure angles to distant points with an amazing accuracy. Their quadrant, two feet in diameter, was built with reinforced iron to make it steadier, and Langlois had calibrated the instrument so that a degree could be divided into minutes (1/60 of a degree) and seconds (1/3,600 of a degree). The French academicians hoped to make measurements accurate to ten seconds, readings that they could verify by determining if the three angles added up to 180 degrees, plus or minus thirty seconds. Without this precision in the angular measurements, their subsequent calculations of the lengths of the sides of the triangle would not be sufficiently exact. But Mother Nature was not cooperating. There were few moments when it was calm enough to set up the quadrant, and during those brief interludes, Bouguer reported,
“we were continually in the clouds, which absolutely veiled from our sight every thing but the point of the rock upon which we were stationed.” Only once or twice were they able to glimpse through their binoculars the markers they had erected at the ends of the Yaruqui baseline. They spent one week on the summit, then a second and a third, and all the while their health deteriorated.
“Our feet were swelled and so tender,” Ulloa wrote, “that walking was attended with extreme pain. Our hands were covered with chilblains; our lips swelled and chapped, so that every motion, in speaking or the like, drew blood. Consequently we were obliged to a strict taciturnity and but little disposed to laugh, an extension of the lips producing fissures, very
painful for two or three days together.” Their slaves were in equally bad shape, and several “vomited blood.”

Finally, on September 6, after twenty-three days on “this rock,” they came down from Pichincha, defeated. They set up a camp lower on the mountain, humbled by this encounter with the great Andes.
“The mountains in America are in comparison to those found in Europe what church steeples are to ordinary houses,” La Condamine sighed. It took them three months to complete their angular measurements from lower down on the mountain, and this, as they all knew, was simply the first of several dozen field stations they would have to inhabit. The year 1737 had nearly come to an end. By this time, Bouguer had hoped they would be ready to return to civilized France, and yet their “severe life,” as Ulloa dubbed it, had only just begun.

W
ITH THE FIRST SET
of triangles completed, Jean Godin’s role became more defined. After Couplet’s death, he had become the youngest member of the expedition, expected to run errands for the three academicians and otherwise be at their beck and call. Most of the other assistants had specific tasks to do or were not even expected to stay with the academicians. Jussieu was off collecting plants, Senièrgues was tending to patients in Quito, and Hugo’s primary role was caring for the instruments, repairing them or even constructing new ones as the need arose. Morainville at times traveled with Jussieu, drawing the plants he collected. That left only Verguin and Jean Godin to regularly assist the three academicians, and Godin was being sent to and fro with such frequency that, as he would later write, he was becoming a “veteran” at moving around the Peruvian landscape. Now that they had come down from Pichincha, Jean was assigned the duty of signal carrier. His job was to head out in advance of the others to set up markers at the triangulation points they had mapped out earlier. One or the other of the two parties, La Condamine’s or Louis Godin’s, would then catch up, setting up a new observation post where Jean had placed
the marker. He might stay a short while with them, running errands as they did their critical observations, and then he would scurry on ahead, traveling alone or perhaps with a single servant. He crisscrossed the Andean valley numerous times as he performed this task, bouncing back and forth between the two cordilleras. As he did so, he suffered all the hardships and difficulties that the academicians recorded in their daily journals, although he was often without the solace of companionship. A French historian later wrote what it was like for Jean:

He was always in movement along a meridian line of around 300 kilometers, climbing massive mountains crossed by torrents, walking along the sharp edge of precipices, or through ravines along the banks of the rivers. In these areas in a primitive state, where every step represented a victory of valor and of physical strength, he acquired strength of will and familiarized himself with the country and with the Indians.

This was the sort of life that fostered independence and self-reliance, and a touch of bitterness, too. La Condamine, Bouguer, and his cousin Louis may also have been suffering hardships, but they were almost certain to be hailed for their achievements upon their return to France. But how would he leave his mark? He had left Saint Amand thinking that perhaps he would study the language of the indigenous people in Peru, which had been Quechua throughout the Andes since the time of the Incas. And now, out and about as he was, running errands and carrying signals to distant posts, he often spoke with the local Indians. He began to pick up the Quechua vocabulary, and his ambitions turned more concrete: He would one day produce a grammar of the Incan language, which he would present to the French Academy of Sciences or even to the king of France.

And so his life went: Young Jean spent many of his days and nights in isolated camps, and there, alone and confronting the most frigid conditions, his tent battered by snow and hail, he would
scribble the new words of Quechua he had learned into his notebook, struggling to understand how the Indians put these words together into sentences to describe the rugged land they inhabited.

A
S THE EXPEDITION
headed south from Quito, starting in early 1738, the two groups—La Condamine’s and Louis Godin’s—worked increasingly apart. The tensions between the three academicians remained, and rather than simply dividing the labor of triangulation, each group began producing its own measurement of a meridian line stretching south across the Andes. But this separation, Bouguer reasoned in a letter to the academy in Paris, was not such a bad thing, for the duplication would make for the
“strongest and most convincing proof possible.” The two groups were still collaborating in some ways. In the region around Quito, they had plotted off different triangles, but south of the city they “shared” some triangles, each checking the other’s work.