Doubleday £16.99 pp352
In this account of an 18th-century French scientific expedition to the Andes, Robert Whitaker has produced an unlikely page-turner. The narrative never flags and Whitaker is as skilled at evoking the human drama as he is at clarifying scientific matters.
In May 1735, a team of 10 scientists left for the Andean town of Quito, in the viceroyalty of Peru, a Spanish colonial possession that encompassed most of South America. Their purpose was to see if there was a difference between a degree of arc near the equator and a degree of arc in France, and thus to resolve the debate as to whether the earth was cinched at the equator or flattened at the poles. The leaders of the expedition were two mathematicians, Louis Godin and Pierre Bouguer, and Charles-Marie de la Condamine, a geographer and adventurer. Others on the expedition included a surgeon, Seniérgues, and Louis Godin’s 21-year-old cousin, Jean.
Once there, they “marked off meridian lines stretching more than 200 miles, through mountainous terrain and in miserable weather, and their proofs were accurate to within a couple of feet”. This baseline enabled them to calculate the length of a degree of latitude by taking zenith readings from specially constructed observatories at either end. Meanwhile, their work was interrupted by an incident. Seniérgues became embroiled in a love scandal. He was condemned by a local priest for staying overnight with an unmarried woman, flaunted his association with her at a bullfight, and was thereupon murdered by an angry mob. Efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice proved time-consuming and fruitless. After the expedition had concluded its work, Jean Godin, now 28, settled in Peru, marrying Isabel Grameson, a 14-year-old of French, Spanish and Creole extraction, the daughter of a government official and businessman.
La Condamine left in 1742 and returned to the Atlantic via the Amazon, becoming the first Enlightenment scientist to map the Amazon and study its habitat. By 1749, Jean and Isabel wanted to move to Europe. Jean chose to follow La Condamine’s route down the Amazon, but decided to make the journey first on his own before returning to collect his wife and expected child. It proved a fateful decision, for although Jean completed the journey in seven months, it would be 20 years before he saw his wife again. (Indeed, he never saw their child, who died aged 19.) Stranded in French Guiana, unable to obtain a Portuguese passport for the return journey via Brazil, and obliged to support himself with various business ventures, he lobbied La Condamine and the French government to send him on an espionage mission to claim the territory north of the Amazon from the Portuguese. But his letters were either lost or suspended in bureaucratic limbo until, years later, a ship was put at his disposal to go and collect his wife.
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When word reached Isabel that her husband was still alive and had sent for her, she embarked on the perilous 350-mile journey to meet the ship on the upper reaches of the Amazon. Lost in the jungle for several weeks, she miraculously survived its privations (hunger, thirst and multiple insect bites), although her two brothers and a nephew did not. Isabel was finally reunited with her husband and they reached France, where Jean eventually received a pension for his service on the original expedition “as official geographer to the King”. As a testament to frustration, endurance, and mutual devotion, this takes some beating.
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