The Mapmaker's Wife (28 page)

La Condamine’s journey got off to a rough start in Tarqui. He went to Cuenca to hire mules and porters, but the people there were still furious over his efforts to prosecute Senièrgues’s killers, and most refused to help. When he left on May 11, 1743, for his long journey down the Amazon, La Condamine was accompanied only by a Negro servant, and he was hauling along a sixteen-foot telescope as well as his precious scientific papers. These got soaked when his mule stumbled and fell into a river, and when he arrived in the town of Zaruma, only a short distance south of Tarqui, he
was told it was fortunate he had taken an uncommon route, for several friends of Neyra and Leon had been laying “in wait on the high road,” eager to play him a “bad game.”

In Loja, La Condamine stopped long enough to collect nine saplings of the cinchona tree, along with some seeds. He placed the plants in an earthen box, hoping to bring them back alive to Paris. By late June he had arrived in Jaen, and there he paused long enough to summarize all his observations and arc measurements. He gave this report to a local official in case he
“should die en route.”

As he expected, his descent into the jungle proved memorable. He had to cross numerous boiling streams and rivers, either by inching his way along the swaying bridges he had always found so nerve-racking or by floating across
“on rafts constructed on the spot.” His papers and other goods were stuffed into baskets covered with ox hides, and in the incessant rain, they began to rot and “exhale an intolerably offensive smell.” When he reached the small hamlet of Chuchunga, he hired local Indians to build a balsa raft, and there, at an altitude he calculated to be about 1,500 feet above sea level, he entered the flow of waters out of the Andes that would eventually take him to the Atlantic. The Chuchunga River flowed into the uppermost reaches of the Marañón, where, over the course of the next four days, he encountered one obstacle after another on his way to the Borja mission. At one point, he was caught in a whirlpool for more than an hour, “incessantly whirled about” until four Indians on the riverbank threw him a liana rope and pulled him free. On another occasion, he had tethered his raft to tree branches in order to sleep on it for the night and awoke to discover that the river was dropping so fast that he needed to hurriedly untie his craft, lest it end up “suspended in the air,” dangling by the rope. The river, he determined, fell
twenty-five feet
over the course of the night, a dramatic illustration of how its flow was affected by rain—or the relative absence of it—along the eastern slopes of the Andes. La Condamine also had to pass through a stretch of riverbank that was home to the Jibaros, a fierce tribe who had fled to this remote region in order to escape
from the Spanish, who were forcing them to work in gold mines in the Andes.
“Ever since,” La Condamine wrote, “secluded in inaccessible woods, they preserve themselves independent, and impede the navigation of the river.”
^*
Finally, on July 12, he arrived at the infamous Pongo de Manseriche, where the Marañón narrowed from 1,500 feet to 100 feet, the water surging between two huge walls of rock. La Condamine held his breath as his raft gathered speed:

The waters seem to hurl themselves and as they dash against the rocks, deafen the ear with a tremendous noise. … I was flung two or three times violently against the rocks in the course of the different windings. It would have been terrifying if I had not been warned. A canoe would be dashed into a thousand pieces, but since the beams of the raft are neither nailed nor dovetailed together, the flexibility of the lianas, by which they are fastened, have the effect of a spring, and deadens the shock so, that when the strait is passed in a raft, these percussions occur unheeded.

The six-mile straight was nature’s portal into the Amazon. After the Pongo, La Condamine and his raft popped out onto a lazy river, and just as he had once marveled at his first glimpse of Quito, he was now transfixed by the jungle:

I found myself in a new world, separated from all human intercourse, on a fresh-water sea, surrounded by a maze of lakes, rivers, and canals, penetrating in every direction the gloom of an immense forest. … New plants, new animals, and new races of men were exhibited to my view. Accustomed during seven years to mountains lost in clouds, I was wrapped in admiration at the wide circle embraced by the eye, restricted here by no other boundary than the horizon.

La Condamine rafts through the Pongo de Manseriche.

Bibliotheque de l’Institut de France, Paris. Lauros-Giraudon-Bridgeman Art Library
.

La Condamine reached Lagunas a week later, where Maldonado, who had experienced “many dangers and great fatigue” on his trek down the Bobonaza, had been waiting for six weeks. There they picked up new transportation, two dugout canoes “42 feet and 44 feet long,” each fashioned from a single tree trunk. Indians paddled from the front of the canoes while La Condamine and Maldonado sat in the rear, each beneath a canopy of palm fronds, and in this relative comfort, they headed out on their 2,400-mile journey, taking notes of the flora, fauna, and human inhabitants, and mapping the Amazon’s course.

La Condamine had brought along the telescope in order to observe Jupiter’s moons, as this would enable him to establish his longitude, and once he had that bearing, he and Maldonado used a
compass, watch, and portable gnomon—an instrument for determining latitude from the sun’s position—to plot the river’s course, carefully penciling in on their charts its many bends and turns, its islands, and the tributaries that flowed into it. They also measured the river’s breadth and how fast it flowed, and they tried to determine its depth at various places, although on several occasions, even after letting out a line 600 feet long, they could not find its bottom. “Every instant of my time was employed,” La Condamine joyfully reported. Along the way, he described the many animals he found, including turtles, crocodiles, tigers, monkeys, sea cows, and electric eels. This last creature, he noted, delivered a shock so powerful that it could “lay one prostrate.” They observed blood-sucking bats, toucans, porcupines, sloths, and boars; measured snakeskins longer than fifteen feet; and cataloged exotic insects. He preserved in wine a particularly nasty worm called “suglacuru,” which
“grows in the flesh of men and animals to the size of a bean, and occasions intolerable anguish.” La Condamine investigated too the blow-gun and poison arrows that natives used to hunt game, and he figured out why the jungle toxin—which centuries later would gain a valuable place in medicine as the muscle-paralyzing agent curare—did not make the meat inedible:

By a strong puff of the breath, they dart these arrows to the distance of thirty or forty paces, and scarcely ever miss their aim. This simple instrument serves as an admirable substitute among all these savages for firearms. The points of these diminutive arrows, as well as those they shoot from their bows, are steeped in a poison of such activity, that it kills any animal from which the instrument dipped in it may chance to draw blood. We scarcely ever, in going down the river, ate of game killed by other means than these arrows, the tips of which we often discovered in eating, between our teeth. There is no danger from such occurrences, for the venom of this poison is only mortal when absorbed by the blood, in which case it is no less fatal to man than to animals. The antidote is salt, but of safer dependence, sugar.

For the first time ever, the Amazon was being seen through the eyes of an Enlightenment scientist. The chroniclers who had come before him, Carvajal and Acuña, were men of the cloth, and while they had sought to be faithful recorders, they belonged to an earlier age, when the world was seen through the prism of religious teachings and medieval mythologies. La Condamine poked into the tales of El Dorado and Amazon women with reason as his guide. The story of a kingdom with “roofs and walls of gold plates,” he said, was one that
“nothing but a thirst for gold could render credible,” and yet he did find a kernel of truth in it. In the past, a fierce tribe called the Manaos had obtained gold from an isolated people living along the Yapurá River, a tributary of the Amazon just above the Río Negro, and they had pounded this gold into plates and other trinkets, which they traded with other nations along the Amazon. Moreover, about 100 miles up the Yapurá River was a small lake, and from these few facts, he concluded, there arose a fantastic tale of a golden city of Manoa on Lake Parima. The Europeans arrived in the Amazon wanting to believe in this story, and Native Americans—by pointing to an El Dorado some distance away—lent credence to it in order to “rid themselves of unwelcome guests.” He came to a similar conclusion about the story of the Amazons. Throughout his trip, he queried natives about this legend, and everyone replied in a similar fashion: There had once been a tribe of women who lived without husbands and who wore green stones, and everyone said they had moved away from the river to a place of low-lying mountains near the sea. This described the hills of Guiana. Thus, La Condamine reasoned, there probably had once been a group of women along the Amazon living without men, but all the other fantastic details—of women who cut off one of their breasts to shoot arrows better or killed their sons at birth—were
“probably exaggerations or inventions of Europeans informed of the practices attributed to the Amazons of Asia, and which a fondness for the wonderful may have caused the natives of America, upon learning these tales from them, to interweave in their narratives.”

La Condamine’s investigation of these two tales was evidence, yet again, of his insatiable curiosity. He had been gone from France for more than eight years, but rather than hurrying down the river, he stopped time and again in order to learn about this world. He investigated the course of the Río Negro, and he continued his studies of rubber, observing with delight how the Omaguas used it to fashion a hollow ball, into which they would stick a cane and in this manner manufacture a syringe. He wrote of the resins and oils that flowed from different trees in the jungle, queried a Carmelite priest about how he inoculated natives against smallpox, and gathered samples of the toxic barbasco root that Amazon Indians threw into marshes and small lakes to stun the fish:
“While thus torpified,” he wrote, “the fish float on the water and are taken with the hand; by means of these plants, the Americans catch as many fish as they please.” Scientists later followed up on La Condamine’s report to develop an insecticide from this natural toxin, a chemical known today as rotenone.

Maldonado and La Condamine reached Pará on September 19, 1743. The town boasted such amenities that they fancied themselves “at once transported to Europe.” Indeed, having reentered the civilized world, they could now see that their journey had unfolded in three stages: The first and most difficult segment was the descent down the slopes of the Andes to the Amazon, which required travel by foot, mule, balsa rafts, and small canoes. The second was the voyage in dugout canoes from Lagunas through the rest of Spanish territory, to slightly below the Napo River. The third, after crossing the border into Portuguese land, was the trip in a much larger canoe, with fourteen rowers, during which their Portuguese hosts provided them with “courtesies which made us for the time forget we were in the center of America.” Their journey had become progressively easier as they had gone along, and in each of these three segments, they had encountered natives in different stages of change, away from what they had been before the Europeans arrived.

As La Condamine had made his way to Borja, he had scurried through lands newly inhabited by the Jibaros, who had fled from
their original homes, higher up in the cloud forests, in order to escape from the Spanish. Maldonado also had encountered many “dangers” as he made his way down the Bobonaza. This strip of jungle on the eastern edge of the Andes had been very sparsely populated when the Spanish conquistadors arrived, but now it was becoming a last refuge for native groups, with some coming down from the Andes to flee the Spanish and others moving upriver to escape the Portuguese. Partly as a result, this was the one part of the wilderness where travelers still had to fear encountering hostile Indians, including a few, La Condamine wrote, who were “man-eaters.”

However, once La Condamine and Maldonado reached the upper Amazon, this worry disappeared.
“On the banks of the Marañón there is now no warlike tribe hostile to Europeans, all having either submitted or withdrawn into the interior,” La Condamine reported. Yet along this stretch of the Spanish Amazon, many natives still retained their traditional dress and customs. Around Pebas, the last Spanish mission before the border with Portugal, La Condamine and Maldonado met Indians who put bones through their nostrils and lips, wore feathers through their cheeks, and used narrow cylinders of wood to prolong their ear lobes.
“The chief decoration is a large nosegay or tuft of herbs and flowers, which is drawn through this hole, forming most uncommon pendants,” La Condamine wrote. The Omaguas were now living along this part of the river as well. Whereas they had once ruled over a 600-mile stretch of river below the Napo, they were now gathered above it, around the mission station of Saint Joachim de Omaguas. But they too had kept many of their old ways.
“Of all the savages who live on the borders of the Amazon River,” La Condamine wrote, “they are the most civilized despite their strange use of flattening their forehead, the artificial length of the ears, and their exceptional liking of witchcraft.” The Omaguas used two boards to flatten the foreheads of their newborns, he noted, in order
“to make them more perfectly resemble the full moon.”