The Mapmaker's Wife (8 page)

The New World was a place where the fanciful plots and exotic creatures of medieval romances had sprung to life. Barely twenty years had passed since Cortés had departed from Cuba with his 600 men, and the conquest of two great indigenous empires was complete. The men of Castile could now get down to the business of living in
the manner of aristocrats and nobles, just as they had pictured themselves in their dreams.

The warrior women of the Amazon.

Fotomas/Topham/The Image Works
.

T
HIS HISTORY
, so literary and imaginative, was the mold that made Peru. The society was organized in ways that reflected the ambitions of an Amadís knight, and 200 years later, that remained the case. Spaniards and Creoles relied on Indians and slaves for labor, and the men turned to lower-class women—Indians, mulattos, mestizos, and slaves—for sexual conquest. This practice was so common, an eighteenth-century writer noted, that
“it is considered a shame to live without a concubine.” However, the Spanish men of Peru expected their own daughters and wives to remain “pure” and “honorable” and demanded that they live sheltered lives.

Elite women in Peru rarely ventured outside their homes unless accompanied by a servant. Inside the house, they were bound by customs that reflected Moorish influences. Rather than sit on chairs, the women would crouch on cushions. They would
“spend almost whole days in this manner,” one eighteenth-century writer noted, “without altering their posture, even to eat, for they are served apart, on little chests.” Custom barred their participation in dinner conversations as well, partly because it was thought that whatever they had to say would be trivial. Wives were legally bound to obey their husbands, and the man’s authority was such that he was allowed to hit her. As a Peruvian who had beaten his spouse told a tribunal in 1609,
“If sometimes I had put my hands on her, it would have been with moderation and in the spirit of correcting some of her imperfections and trying to scare her a little, which is permissible to a husband according to the law.”

The cloistering of upper-class girls in colonial Peru began when they reached six or seven years of age. Up until that age, they might be spoiled in every way imaginable. But then they were sent off to a convent school, an often traumatic event. The girls were not allowed to wander outside the cloister, and even their visitors had to be approved by the headmistress. The curriculum reflected societal
wishes that they be groomed to be dutiful wives: They were taught homemaking skills such as sewing, embroidering, and cooking, and every day they recited fifty Hail Mary’s and studied the life of the Virgin Mary, the nuns seeking to instill in them the virtues of purity, humility, and charity.

A distinguished woman in Quito with her Negro slave.

By Vicente Alban. Museo de America, Madrid, Spain. Bridgeman Art Library
.

There is no historical record of the name of the convent school that Isabel Gramesón attended. But the schools were all much the same, and it is easy to imagine the moment she entered the cloister and the gates clanged shut behind her. She must have felt bewildered and a little frightened. She had been plucked from her family, and now this austere place was to be her new home. Her future seemed to stretch out before her in a predictable way, and yet fate can be fickle: A band of French scientists would soon arrive in Quito, and in the years ahead, that would lead her to think anew about life’s possibilities.

*
Although “Creole” is commonly used today to refer to people of mixed blood, in eighteenth-century Peru it was used to describe people of white blood born in the colony.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Mapmakers

A
LTHOUGH THE
F
RENCH
A
CADEMY
of Sciences had decided by late 1733 to send an expedition to the equator, it was not until May 15, 1735, that Louis Godin and nine others gathered at La Rochelle, ready to depart for the New World. The port that spring day was a frenzy of activity. There was box after box of luggage and scientific equipment to bring aboard the
Portefaix
, a naval frigate that would transport them across the Atlantic. The three academy members who were to lead the expedition—Louis Godin, Pierre Bouguer, and Charles-Marie de La Condamine—were quite different in temperament, which was reflected in how they were keeping busy. Godin, a large man, was chatting with the locals who had come to see them off. Bouguer, looking rather pale, was fretting over the handling of his instruments. La Condamine was energetically directing the loading of the boat—clearly, he was taking charge of the trip’s logistics.

At thirty-one years of age, Godin was the youngest of the three, and yet, because he had proposed the voyage, he was its official
leader. His resume was impressive even by academy standards. As a youth, he had done such brilliant work in mathematics and astronomy that he had been elected to the academy at the age of twenty-one. His colleagues there found him imaginative, ambitious, and tireless in his pursuit of knowledge, with a biting wit.
“He knew how to intersperse humor into the most serious of matters,” a colleague wrote years later. “He was sometimes accused of taking his vivacity too far, but it was never more than a passing thing for him.” During his first years at the academy, Godin had edited an eleven-volume history of the institution, which had made him a member of its inner circle. He had also published papers on the aurora borealis, planetary orbits, and lunar eclipses.

In preparation for the mission, Godin had traveled to London to consult with Edmond Halley, England’s best-known astronomer. There he hired an English artisan, George Graham, to construct several scientific instruments. Graham had provided the expedition with telescope-equipped quadrants for measuring angles, a zenith sector for celestial observations, and a seconds pendulum to gauge gravitational pull at the equator. Godin had also commissioned a French craftsman, Claude Langlois, to make an iron bar one toise in length, which would serve as the expedition’s ruler. A toise was six Paris feet (6.39 English feet), and its exact length, as established in 1668, was that of an iron bar set in the foot of the stairs of the Grand Châtelet in Paris. All of these instruments had to be exquisitely calibrated, made more precisely than any that Graham or Langlois had built before. Otherwise, the margin of error in the French scientists’ measurements—given that any bulging or flattening at the equator was not very pronounced—would render their findings meaningless.

These preparations had left Godin buoyed with optimism. Halley had voiced his enthusiasm for the mission, and Graham had been eager to lend his expertise. The willingness of the English to contribute to the expedition was evidence that this scientific excursion truly was, as the French Academy had so often claimed, “of interest to all nations.” Godin expected that he would be gone from
his wife and two children for three or four years at most, not an unreasonable time for an expedition that involved travel to such a distant place.

Pierre Bouguer.

By Jean-Baptiste Perroneau. Louvre, Paris, France. Bridgeman Art Library
.

Unfortunately, Bouguer, thirty-seven years old, was not similarly enthused—or at least he did not want anyone to think he was. He had been quite clear with the academy: Because of his weak health and his hearty
“dislike for sea voyages,” he had told them, he had “no intention of taking part in such an enterprise.” But other academy members had begged off, and Bouguer, once he had milked the situation for a dollop of flattery from his peers, had grudgingly agreed to go. And the mission, it was true, was certain to benefit from his scientific acumen. A child prodigy in math, he had been made a royal professor of hydrography at age fifteen. Over the next twenty years, he had written on such diverse topics as the best
method for rigging sailing ships, the making of celestial observations at sea, and the use of a barometer to determine altitudes. He was both a perfectionist and a sourpuss, traits not uncommon to brilliant minds, and the academy, partly to convince him to join the expedition, had made him its “resident astronomer.” This was a title that assured Bouguer the trip would be worth his while—if successful, the lion’s share of the scientific credit would probably be his.

La Condamine, thirty-four, was in many ways the antithesis of Bouguer. Although he was not the equal of either Godin or Bouguer as a scientist, he was a fearless adventurer who loved nothing more than finding himself in a difficult spot in a foreign country. He came from a wealthy family with ties to the Bourbon monarchy; his father was a district tax collector. As a youth, he had been an indifferent student, and at age eighteen he had left the academic world in order to join the military, eager to fight in an ongoing campaign against Spain. There, he had become famous for his relentless curiosity. At the siege of Rosas in the Pyrenees, he had climbed a hill and set up a telescope to observe the battle, his scarlet coat making him such a visible target that enemy soldiers immediately blasted away. His fellow French soldiers had to beg him to come down, uncertain whether to applaud his bravery or to chide him for his recklessness.

Although La Condamine escaped that day, the war left him physically marked. Struck by smallpox during the campaign, the
“extensive scarification of his face” made him horribly shy around women, observed his academy biographer, Jacques Delille. “It did not occur to him that he might be pleasing to anyone, and he was still naïve enough to think that one could do without being cared for.” For a time after the war, La Condamine devoted all his energies to science, and in 1730 he was admitted to the academy as an assistant chemist. But ever the restless type, he grew bored with laboratory science and turned his attention to geography, a discipline that would give him an opportunity to travel. He sailed with a French naval fleet to the Barbary Coast, a trip that turned into a year-long tour of northern Africa and the Middle East. In Turkey,
he was arrested for refusing to pay a bribe solicited by an official in the port of Bassa. He was so enraged that following his release, he traveled to Constantinople to demand an apology. He remained there for five months, hounding Turkish authorities until they finally admitted their mistake. Upon his return to France in 1732, he presented the academy with an engaging account of his trip, which, Delille wrote, “earned him the reputation of a competent mathematician, an observant traveler, and a good storyteller.”