The Mapmaker's Wife (41 page)

I was not able to use the letter which your Grace had given me addressed to the Governor because I did not have the opportunity to give it to him. Please let me know if there is any way I can serve your Grace and trust that I will do so. May God keep your Grace for many years.

Pebas, April 21 of ’70. From this mission of Maynas.

I kiss your Grace’s hands and remain your most devoted and trusted servant.

Doña Isabel Gramesón

This is the only document written in Isabel’s hand that history has preserved, and in it, she asks that her loyal slave be freed.

I
SABEL WAS NOW IN THE CARE
of the Portuguese, and a few days later, she met her father in Loreto. Theirs was a tearful reunion, and the general, who had always planned to return to Riobamba, decided that he would accompany Isabel to Oyapock. He had lost two sons and a grandson, which left him
“penetrated with the most lively grief,” and he could not bear the thought that anything more might happen to Isabel, whom God, it seemed, had miraculously spared.

In order to speed their trip, Rebello “doubled the number of oars.” He also regularly sent out canoes to hunt for fish and game. During the ten-week journey, Isabel “wanted for nothing to render her comfortable, not even the nicest delicacies.” Isabel regained some of her strength during this time, although at one point her thumb swelled to a hideous size, apparently from a thorn that had been lodged
inside for months and had finally erupted into an infection.
“It was proposed to take off the thumb,” Jean later reported, but “care and fermentation” finally brought the swelling down, sparing the need for amputation, although Isabel never regained full use of it.

When they reached Fort Curupa, Rebello was relieved of his duty and replaced by a Captain Martel. Rebello had proven himself to be a man of uncommon patience and generosity, deserving in every way of Jean’s gratitude. Now the party only had to exit the Amazon and scurry along the coast to Oyapock. But as the galliot entered the Atlantic, it lost one of its anchors, “at a spot along the coast where the currents are very violent,” and Martel decided that it was unsafe to go any further. Fate had thrown up one final obstacle to Isabel and Jean’s reunion. Martel, who had moored his galliot in a bay, sent ahead a canoe to Oyapock, where Jean had been waiting for more than five years for the Portuguese to return.

With the galliot stalled, Isabel began to feel quite anxious. Twenty-one years had passed since she and Jean had last seen each other, and she was no longer the young woman he remembered. She was thin, her face had been permanently scarred by the botflies and other insects of the jungle, and her hair was gray. Would her husband flinch when he saw her? More than a week passed while the galliot bobbed in the gentle waters of the bay, and then, on July 18, a small boat, with sails up and several men at the oars, rushed toward them. This was the very craft that Jean had built sixteen years earlier, hoping to travel up the Amazon, and then suddenly he was climbing up the galliot’s rope ladder:

On board this vessel, after 20 years absence, and a long endurance on either side of alarms and misfortunes, I again met with a cherished wife, whom I had almost given over every hope of seeing again. In her embraces I forgot the loss of the fruits of our union, nay, I even congratulated myself on their premature death, as it saved them from the dreadful fate which befell their uncles in the wood of Canelos beneath their mother’s eye, who certainly could never have survived the sight.

Later, in a letter to La Condamine, Jean marveled at the wonder of it all:

Were it told in a romance that a female of delicate habit, accustomed to all the comforts of life, had been precipitated into a river; that, after being withdrawn when on the point of drowning, this female, the eighth of a party, had penetrated into unknown and pathless woods, and traveled in them for weeks, not knowing whither she directed her steps; that enduring hunger, thirst, and fatigue to very exhaustion, she should have seen her two brothers, far more robust than her, and a nephew yet a youth expire by her side and she yet survive; that, after remaining by their corpses two whole days and nights, in a country abounding in tigers and numbers of dangerous serpents, without once seeing any of these animals or reptiles, she should afterwards have strength to rise, and continue her way, covered with tatters, through the same pathless wood for eight days together till she reached the banks of the Bobonaza, the author would be charged with inconsistency; but the historian should paint facts to his reader, and this is nothing but the truth. The truth of this marvelous tale is attested by original letters in my hands, from many missionaries on the Amazon, who felt an interest in this event, and by other proofs.

Jean and Isabel reached Oyapock on July 22, 1770. This was not long after Joaquín had returned to Quito, and such was the flow of time and information in colonial Peru that even as people throughout the Quito Audiencia were learning of her tragic death, the long-suffering couple was at last joyfully reunited.

*
According to Jean’s account, Isabel arrived on the riverbank around January 10, 1770. However, she did not reach the mission station of Andoas until mid-February at the earliest. This would mean that the Indians had stayed with her on the riverbank for about a month before they all departed. But Jean’s account also suggests that Isabel and the four Indians, following their chance encounter, departed almost at once for Andoas. If so, Isabel had wandered much longer than she believed—either with her brothers or alone—and it was around the first of February when she stumbled back upon the Bobonaza. The true timetable probably lies somewhere in between.

*
In 1770, Ash Wednesday—the start of the forty days of Lent—fell on February 28. Thus, at the very earliest, Isabel reached Andoas in mid-February, which might still be seen as the “time of Lent.” That date also fits with documented dates of her arrival in villages further downriver.

*
An alternative spelling for Joaquín.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Saint Amand

F
OR 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.”