The Mapmaker's Wife (42 page)

B
Y THE END OF
1773, only three other members of the expedition besides La Condamine and Jean Godin were known to be still living. Collectively, the fates of the expedition members had played out in ways both admirable and tragic.

Three of the members, of course, had died in South America: Couplet, Senièrgues, and Morainville. Hugo, the instrument maker, simply disappeared there. He had last written to La Condamine in the early 1750s, telling once more of his homesickness for France, and then he was never heard from again. Verguin enjoyed a prosperous career as a naval engineer after his return to France and was still alive in 1773, living in Toulon, when Jean finally made it back home.

Bouguer was the first of the three academicians to die. Unfortunately, his envy of La Condamine soured their relationship for good, and the two never reconciled. But he remained a productive scientist until his death in 1758, at age sixty. In his last decade, he wrote about navigation, invented an instrument called the heliometer for measuring the diameters of planets, and studied the properties of light. This last work earned him posthumous recognition as the “father of photometry.” He never married, reserving his deepest attachment for the Academy of Sciences, where he was the resident astronomer until his death. Because he lacked heirs, he gave most of his money to friends and servants before he died, and in his will, he allocated what remained of his wealth to the poor.

Louis Godin died two years later, and by the end he was something of a broken man. During his years in Lima, while waiting for Peru to give him permission to leave, he had taught math at the University of San Marcos and had overseen the reconstruction of the port of Callao after it was destroyed in a massive earthquake. Upon his return to Paris in 1751, he resumed living with his wife and two grown children, whom he had not seen for sixteen years. For the next twelve months, he petitioned the academy to give him back his seat and his pension. Clearly, he had been unfairly expelled—the academy had done so thinking that he had willingly taken a position with a university in Lima—yet his plea went
unheard. Disappointed, he and his wife moved to Cadiz, where Ulloa and Juan had secured an appointment for him as director of Spain’s naval academy. In 1756, the French Academy of Sciences finally readmitted Godin as a member with “veteran” status, but this bit of justice came too late. His son had recently died from smallpox, and his daughter perished shortly thereafter, which crushed his spirit. Although he had been the nominal leader of the Peruvian expedition, he never published his account of it. In 1760, at the age of fifty-six, he died from an attack of apoplexy.

Jussieu took even longer to return to Paris. After traveling south from Lima in 1748 to La Paz and Lake Titicaca, where he collected plants and aquatic birds, he lived for six years in the famous silver mining town of Potosí. There he taught, practiced medicine, rebuilt the public works system, and oversaw the construction of a bridge. His skills were deemed so valuable that, much as had been the case in Quito, authorities in Potós did all they could to prevent him from leaving. He moved to Lima in 1755, where he provided medical care to the poor but slipped into an ever deeper despondency.
^*
For the next fifteen years, his family constantly begged him to return. Finally, his friends in Lima, alarmed at his deteriorated state, arranged for him to go. Unfortunately, he left behind most of his papers and much of his life’s work was lost.

Jussieu reached Paris on July 10, 1771, and fell weeping into the arms of his brother, Bernard. He moved in with Bernard, but his mind was shattered, and for the next eight years, until his death at age seventy-four, he rarely ventured outside. He never visited the Academy of Sciences, which had elected him a member in 1743. His memory went, as did his eyesight and the use of his limbs, and he died a painful death from gangrene. At his funeral, he was eulogized as a “martyr to botany,” a melancholy man who had never garnered the recognition he deserved.

Juan enjoyed a fairly tranquil life after his return to Spain. The publication of his and Ulloa’s book on their voyage to South America made him well known throughout Spanish society, and he was appointed the squadron commander of the Spanish Royal Armada. For the next twenty years, he devoted his energies to writing about navigation, improving the operations of Spain’s shipyards, and developing the sciences in Spain. He founded an astronomical observatory at Cadiz and established the Friendly Literary Society, which met each Thursday at his house to discuss scientific questions. This group later gave rise to the Royal Society of Sciences of Madrid. He died in 1773 at age sixty.

Ulloa’s post-expedition life was filled with drama. He had been the principal author of
Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional
, and after it appeared, Spain sent him on a tour of Europe to study the roads, canals, and factories of France and other countries. Spain wanted this information to support its modernization plans. At the same time, Ulloa mined his notes from Peru in order to write a second report, this one on the colony’s dark underside. He did not hold back a thing, describing at length the venality of colonial officials, the exploitation of Indians by greedy village priests, and the awful abuses of the mita system. The report, which he titled
Discurso y reflexiones políticas sobre el estado presente de los reynos del Peru
, was a reformist manuscript meant for the Crown’s eyes only. Juan contributed in small ways to the document, which was indeed kept secret until 1826, when an English merchant in Cadiz, David Barry, obtained a purloined copy and published it under the title
Noticias secretas de América
(Secret news of America). The book’s appearance created a storm in Europe similar to the one Las Casas’s book,
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
, had generated in 1542, and the book proved to be of similarly lasting historical importance.

Perhaps in response to his report, Spain appointed Ulloa governor of the troubled Huancavelica province in Peru in 1757. The province contained an important mercury mine and was known to be rife with corruption, with the miners and local officials colluding
to cheat the monarchy out of its royalties. This was an opportunity for Ulloa to put into practice his reformist ideals, but six years later he had reached a point of total defeat, writing the Crown to ask to be rescued from a situation made impossible by
“vexations, mortifications, and rebuffs.” However, rather than allowing him to come home, Spain asked him to assume the post of governor of Louisiana, which Spain had recently obtained from France in the Treaty of Paris. Naturally, the French-speaking Creoles deeply resented this new Spanish rule, and in 1768, they rose up in revolt, forcing Ulloa and his Peruvian wife to flee.

As a colonial administrator, Ulloa had failed utterly. However, once back in Spain, he resumed a productive life as a naval officer, writer, and scientist. He published
Noticias Americanas
, a concise natural history of Spanish America, established a natural history museum in Madrid, and—while fathering nine children—gradually turned himself into a Spanish Benjamin Franklin. He studied electricity and artificial magnetism, observed the circulation of blood in fish and insects, introduced innovations into the printing and paper-making industries, designed surgical instruments, and improved weaving techniques for making fine cashmere woolens. An English visitor to his home in the 1780s told of meeting a humble man surrounded by books, instruments, fossils, guns, and various antiquities—all the clutter of a life of science and adventure, enjoyed by a man with a most curious mind. Ulloa died in 1795 at age seventy-nine.

La Condamine penned an update on the members of the expedition in 1773, and by that time he too was nearing the end of his life. He was almost totally deaf and had suffered from paralysis in his legs for nearly a decade, leading him to quip that he doubted whether he and Jussieu together could be
“reckoned equivalent to one living being.” But while his body may have been giving out, his mind remained as alert as ever.

Partly as a result of his skills as a writer, much of Europe had come to think of the Peruvian mission as the “La Condamine expedition.” In the 1740s and early 1750s, he published three volumes on
the voyage. One was a diary of his ten years abroad,
Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi à l’équateur
. The second was his account of his exploration of the Amazon,
Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique méridionale
, and the third was a scientific treatise on their arc measurements,
Mesure des trois premiers degrés du méridien dans l’hémisphere austral
. In the wake of the books’ success, he became something of a statesman for science, happily corresponding with scholars throughout Europe and lobbying for two pet projects: the establishment of a universal standard of measurement and the use of inoculation practices to protect against smallpox. Inoculation involved deliberately exposing children to mild cases of the disease, which many people thought was mad. Indeed, his relentless advocacy on this topic earned him the nickname “the Don Quixote of inoculation” from those who thought he was surely tilting at windmills with this idea. However, he gradually won over the skeptics, and by the early 1770s the practice was being adopted throughout Europe.

In 1756, La Condamine traveled to Italy, where he researched the ancient measurements of Rome and visited Vesuvius. He also returned from that trip with a papal dispensation to marry his twenty-five-year-old niece. The adventurer who had always thought that his smallpox scars rendered him unlovable had finally found a mate. In 1760, he was elected to the select Académie Française, whose forty members were often described as France’s immortals. His physical infirmities began to slow him down after that, and as his leg paralysis set in, he offered a prize to the scholar who could best explain his illness. He gladly offered himself up as a guinea pig for experiments with electricity that were designed to ease his pain, none of which worked. But he was ever the curious man, and in early 1774, as he prepared to undergo a risky hernia operation, he told the surgeon to perform it slowly because he wanted to make mental notes and report on his experience to the academy. This was before the invention of anesthesia, and yet he was willing to lengthen the operation in order to learn from it. He died on February 4, shortly after this final scientific quest.

Buffon, one of La Condamine’s long-time friends in the academy, eulogized him in this memorable way:

La Condamine may have had faults and shortcomings, but he had the advantage that his faults tended toward respectable qualities and his shortcomings were more than compensated for by his virtues. His faults and shortcomings will be soon forgotten and what will remain will be the memory of all the good he has done for mankind. He was a philosopher and scholar who loved his fellow man, who had a zeal for truth, and who spoke about what he loved.

In the months before he died, La Condamine had indeed shown those words of praise to be true, for he had performed one final act of kindness on behalf of Jean Godin, his faithful signal carrier on the expedition.

I
N
S
AINT
A
MAND
, Jean and Isabel had settled into a peaceful life. While Isabel may have dreamed as a young girl about Paris, that fancy had long since passed, and now she and Jean stayed close to their home in rural France. Jean managed family properties in Odonais and at Epourneaux, and he acquired other lands adjacent to those, which he put to use as vineyards. He also maintained an interest in French Guiana and dashed off more than one letter to Louis XV’s ministers, urging them to develop a cattle industry there. This proposal was seen as having some merit, and for once Jean even received a polite letter thanking him for his recommendations. The correspondence with the Crown reflected the fact that Jean had found a place in society, so much so that his name was known to King Louis XV.

Shortly after Jean’s return to Saint Amand, La Condamine had gone to Louis Phélypeaux de Vrillière, who oversaw the operations of the Academy of Sciences for the king, to request that Jean be given a pension. This was an award, La Condamine told the duke,
that Jean had “well earned by his zeal and toil” in Peru. In an order dated October 27, 1773, the king granted Jean an annual sum of 700 francs, and while the money was important, Louis XV’s words were more so: The pension was for Jean’s service on the expedition
“as official geographer to the King.”
Geographer
. Not signal carrier, not assistant, but “official geographer.” At last, Jean had a title that he could carry to his grave.

Content now in a way that he had never been before, Jean resumed working on his grammar of Quechua. Isabel, with her linguistic skill, presumably helped him with this task. According to a nineteenth-century French historian, the manuscript Jean produced included a substantial lexicon,
“which he prepared in St. Amand up until his death.” However, he was not able to get it published. In the last rejection letter he received, dated July 22, 1787, one of the king’s ministers gently informed him that it would be impossible to have it
“printed at the expense of the King.”