The Mapmaker's Wife (30 page)

With such uncertainty in the air, both Jean and Isabel believed that the time was right for moving to Europe. For him it was a chance to return home, and for her—at age twenty-one—it was a dream revived. But there was no easy way to travel to France. One possibility was to head to Lima and find passage on a trading vessel that was planning to sail to Europe via Cape Horn, but that would require both a lengthy journey by land and a very long sea voyage. Heading north from Riobamba to Cartagena offered a slightly better option, yet it would still require several months of travel by
mule along the rocky paths of the Andes and over a pass littered with the bones of dead mules, one that, as Bouguer had said, was
“never hazarded without the utmost dread.” The third route was the one “opened up” by La Condamine, and next to the other two alternatives, it offered an intriguing possibility. While the first part of the trip would admittedly be arduous—and almost everyone in the Andes spoke of it with fear—once the Amazon was reached, traveling by canoe from one mission station to the next might be fairly pleasant.

Or at least that was the thought, and so Jean concocted a plan: He would travel down the length of the Amazon to see if it would provide a suitable way home, come back up the river to pick up his wife and child, and then—if his scouting voyage had gone well—the three of them could follow this route to France. This meant he would have to travel the length of the river three times, an itinerary that covered more than 10,000 miles and could be expected to take at least two years. Even if all went as hoped, the plan had its evident shortcomings. Yet Jean, looking back on his past adventures, was certain that La Condamine would understand:

Anyone but you, Sir, might be surprised at my undertaking thus lightly a voyage of fifteen hundred leagues,
^*
for the mere purpose of preparing accommodations for a second; but you will know that travels in that part of the world are undertaken with much less concern than in Europe; and those I had made during twelve years for reconnoitering the ground for the meridian of Quito, for fixing signals on the loftiest mountains, in going to and returning from Cartagena, had made me perfectly a veteran.

He left on March 10, 1749, and although he said his good-byes to Isabel with some sadness and reluctance—she was now in her fourth month of pregnancy and was beginning to show—he felt a
great deal of excitement, too. He was embarking on an adventure that had brought fame and honor to those who had gone before—Acuña, Father Fritz, La Condamine, and even Maldonado. He intended to make his own observations of the Amazon along the way and gather plants and seeds for the king’s garden. He had also purchased a grammar of the Incan language printed in Lima,
^*
and once he made it to the Atlantic coast, he planned on sending it to the king as a gift. Although the grammar was not his own work, it would make the king’s ministers aware of his interest in Quechua and of the fact that he hoped one day to complete his own study. Jean was nearly thirty-six years old now, and he saw this voyage as a chance to make a name for himself.

His trip downriver went well. He followed Maldonado’s footsteps down the Bobonaza and Pastaza Rivers, and while this part proved difficult, just as it had for Maldonado, once he reached the mission stations on the upper Amazon, the priests treated him warmly. Even though six years had gone by, La Condamine’s visit was still fresh in their minds. Further downriver, the Portuguese Carmelites provided him with the same welcome.
“With no other recommendation to the notice of the Portuguese than arose from the remembrance of the intimation afforded by you in 1743,” he wrote La Condamine, “that one of the companions of your travels would follow the same way, I was received in all the Portuguese settlements, by the missionaries and commandants of the forts, with the utmost courtesy.” He reached Pará in September, his seven-month trip down the Amazon having unfolded “without incident,” and the governor of the port, Francis Mendoza Gorjaô, treated him like a visiting dignitary.
“He received me with open arms, and insisted on my making his house and table my own during a week that I stopped with him.” Traveling on his own, Jean was at last stepping out into the limelight, or so it must have seemed. While still in Pará, he happily wrote La Condamine of his plan to return upriver to fetch his family as soon as he obtained the
necessary passport from Portugal. For this, he had written Antoine-Louis Rouillé, minister of the French navy, asking that he petition the Portuguese on his behalf. Jean was clearly in high spirits, confident that he could obtain the needed papers in fairly short order.

Even so, a letter still needed to travel across the Atlantic and back, and Jean decided to wait for Rouillé’s reply in French Guiana. From Pará, he traveled back upriver to Fort Curupa, located at the head of the Amazon delta. From there he could take the northern arm of the river to the Atlantic (Pará is not on the main course of the river), minimizing the distance he would have to travel in the open sea. In Curupa, thanks to an order from Pará’s governor, he found waiting for him
“a large pirogue [canoe] of fourteen oars, commanded by a sergeant of the garrison.” He was getting the royal treatment from the Portuguese, taxied about much in the manner that La Condamine and Maldonado had been. Once the canoe reached the ocean, it hugged the shoreline the rest of the way to French Guiana. He arrived in Cayenne on April 20, 1750, where he was greeted by a surprised—and somewhat baffled—governor, Gilbert Guillouet d’Orvilliers.

D’Orvilliers knew all about the La Condamine expedition, and years earlier he had spent many an evening dining with La Condamine during his stay in Cayenne. But he could not quite understand Jean’s thinking. As he wrote in a June 7 letter to Rouillé, “Monsieur Godin” had come all this way simply to
familiarize
himself with the Amazon and now intended
“by following the same route, to go and get a woman he had married in Riobamba, in Peru.” Rouillé could read between the lines here—in d’Orvilliers’s opinion, this devotion to a
Peruvian
woman seemed rather extreme—and what made Jean’s intentions even more mysterious was that he was quite broke.
“It doesn’t appear that his time in Peru has made him rich,” d’Orvilliers informed the French minister: “He arrived here with nothing at all.”

Indeed, at that moment, at least a few doubts about the wisdom of his plan must have been creeping into Jean’s mind. His trip
downriver had taken nearly a year, he was 3,000 miles away from his wife, and he had no money. Moreover, he was a French citizen in need of a passport that would allow him to travel through Portuguese territory a second time, and across a Spanish-Portuguese border that was officially closed. It could take a year to send a letter back and forth to France, and letters were often lost in route. All of those obstacles were now in his way, and given the realities of eighteenth-century colonial politics, he could be certain that others would crop up.

*
This is the distance from Quito to Old Riobamba, or the village of Cajabamba today. Modern Riobamba is about ten miles closer to Quito.

*
The Marañón is the name used for the upper Amazon.

*
The Jibaros later became known for their custom of shrinking the heads of those they killed.

*
Maldonado never returned to Riobamba. He died in Europe on November 17, 1748, from a fever, at age forty.

*
Fifteen hundred leagues is roughly equal to 4,500 miles; Jean apparently understood the journey to be even longer than it actually is.

*
The printing press did not arrive in the Quito Audiencia until 1754.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Continent Apart

T
HE CIVILITIES THAT
J
EAN
G
ODIN
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.