The Mapmaker's Wife (39 page)

They were not able to verify the cause of such a lamentable event because they had not found even one person of the [Gramesón] family, and with the countryside being so harsh, with forests empty of all human commerce. The most reasonable Indians formed some ideas of what had happened. They believed that three or four days after the family had been left behind on the beach, they were ravaged either by barbaric Indians or by the fierce tigers that are abundant in these woods. To support the first judgment, they note that they had found in the hut all of their clothing and even their undergarments, which led them to conclude that the infidels killed them during the night, while they were sleeping, killing them all and throwing them into the river.
^*
Plus they found a body torn to pieces in the river. The same
facts could support the second possibility. Being terrorized by tigers, or something else preying on them, they were filled with dread and shock and inadvertently they threw themselves into the river [and drowned], and some of them could also have fled, taking the balsa raft, getting on it and also drowning. All of the Indians and the Negro that went to look for the señora answered with this declaration and swore on the cross that it was true.

Having written up his report, Suasti told Joaquín to carry it to his superior in Lagunas and to the governor of the Maynas district, Antonio Peña, who was located in Omaguas, near the border with Brazil. Suasti entrusted Isabel’s belongings to Rocha, requesting that the Frenchman deliver the jewelry, silverware, and other items to Isabel’s father. Rocha, Bogé, and Joaquín arrived in Lagunas on January 8, 1770, where the priest, Nicolás Romero, declared that
“knowing what I know about these mountains and its inhabitants, it is not at all difficult to imagine these deaths.” They reached Omaguas on January 30, and Peña was similarly convinced, although he thought it most likely that Isabel and the others left behind on the sandbar had been killed
“by the Jibaros Indians.” He then commanded Joaquín to take the papers to officials in Quito in order to inform them of this “tragic happening.”

Joaquín reached the audiencia capital in early May, traveling back to Quito via the Napo River rather than retracing his steps up the Bobonaza. Among the papers he carried was a letter from Rocha and Bogé, which they had signed on December 16 in Andoas, stating that Isabel had promised that she would give him his “card of liberty” once they reached Loreto, where her father was waiting. Although her voyage had come to an awful end, Joaquín had done his part—should he not get the promised card? Joaquín spent three weeks trying to deliver the documents to the audiencia president, Joseph Diguja, but each time he came to Diguja’s office he was turned away, told by Diguja’s assistant that the president was too busy to see him. Then, as Diguja wrote, on May 28, Quito authorities came to him:

It became known that walking in this city was a fugitive Negro who had come from the province of Maynas. He was apprehended and put in jail. There they found in his possession papers and a letter that was for the head of this Audiencia, which give an account of the extraordinary happenings of the disappearance of the Gramesón family that was traveling by the Río Bobonaza in that province.

With Joaquín’s arrest, Spain’s colonial bureaucracy began to turn in its usual tortured way. Joaquín, Diguja concluded, was to be blamed for “having been the one that was conveying the said family.” This slave had even tried to “hide” the various reports “indispensable for verifying” what had happened, Diguja wrote, and yet he now had the nerve to ask for “his liberty.” The audiencia court quickly took up the matter, and it decided that Joaquín was not the only one who should be jailed. The court decided to send to Omaguas a warrant for the arrest of the two Frenchmen on the grounds that they had never obtained a permit for travel to the Maynas province.

The audiencia’s investigation continued for another three months. Joaquín was interrogated, and he confessed that as far as he knew, Isabel and her brothers had left Riobamba without proper travel papers. Although Jean Godin, in 1740, may have secured permission from the viceroy of New Granada authorizing him to travel this route, that permit, the court decided, hardly applied to Isabel and her family in 1769.
“These roads,” wrote a Quito official, are “closed because of their being a route to the Portuguese colony.” The law did not
“permit commerce or even communication” across this border, and anyone who traded “with a foreigner without a license” could “lose his life.” Because Joaquín was one of the
“accomplices in this sinful behavior,” it was only right that he be imprisoned.

Even members of Isabel’s family in Riobamba were asked to explain themselves. Fearful of being fingered as “accomplices,” they did their best to wiggle out of any possible blame. Did Isabel
and her brothers have a proper license for this travel? No, admitted Isabel’s brother-in-law, Antonio Zabala. However, Isabel had left
“upon the orders of Jean Godin”—she was obeying her husband, as Peruvian law expected a woman to do. Nor was it conceivable, he and others swore, that Isabel planned to engage in any illicit trading. She had become very poor in the previous years, they said, and had departed with but a few personal things and a paltry “100 pesos.” The caravan of thirty-one Indian servants and countless mules was conveniently forgotten, and this seemed to mollify the stuffy bureaucrats.

At the end of August, the Quito court wrapped up matters by ordering villages and cities in the mountains of the audiencia—places that might serve as departure points to the Amazon—to post a public warning. Everyone was to understand that travel into the Amazon was prohibited without a permit and that anyone who traded with a “foreigner” there risked being put to death. One town after another—Ambato, Patate, Riobamba, and Baños—dutifully nailed up the warning, and the sudden appearance of this government advisory might have perplexed people had they not been quick to read between the lines. And thus did the news spread throughout the audiencia and to points beyond, as surely as if a town crier had stood in every village’s
plaza mayor
and bellowed out the headline.

Madame Godin, dead.

*
Perhaps the best-known example of this phenomenon occurred in the winter of 1846, when the infamous Donner Party became trapped in the Rocky Mountains. More than two-thirds of the twenty-five men in the group died, mostly from starvation, while only four of fifteen women died, and they succumbed only at the very end of the ordeal.

*
The reasoning here seems to be that if it had been daytime when they were attacked, they would have been wearing their undergarments. But since these items of clothing were found in the hut, the Indians concluded they must have been killed while in their sleep wear.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Deliverance

W
HEN
I
SABEL LEFT THE SCENE
of her brothers’ death, she was so weak that she was able only to
“drag herself along.” That was around the first of January, or possibly a little later, which meant that Isabel had been wandering in the jungle for at least six weeks. In more than 200 years of Amazon exploration, no solo traveler had been lost in the forest for any length of time and emerged alive, and as anyone who was familiar with the jungle could attest, there was little reason to believe that Isabel would be the first. Many years later, when two of Spruce’s companions fled into the woods in order to escape a storm, a single night left them
“half dead with cold, and their clothes and bodies torn and wounded by prickly bamboos and palms.” But Isabel, drawing on an almost unfathomable inner strength, was still putting one foot in front of the other.

At first, she was able only to walk a few hundred yards away from where the bodies of her brothers and nephew lay rotting. Water was her foremost concern, and frequently she stopped to sip drops of the precious liquid from plant leaves, moistening her lips
and throat. Early on the second day, she came upon a stream and dropped thankfully to her knees. Her cupped hands trembled as she brought the water to her lips, her throat so dry that swallowing was difficult. But after two or three handfuls, her throat opened up, and she
“drank as much as she could.”

Isabel was not thinking at all about the best direction to head in. She had stumbled upon water, which was good, and with her thirst at least temporarily allayed, she could focus on finding something to eat. Water, food—all she thought about was how to stay alive. On her third day of wandering alone, her prayers were answered. In a low-lying bush, she came upon a nest that was filled with fresh eggs, a rare find in the rain forest. They may have been partridge eggs, and these, Jean would later relate, she swallowed
“with the greatest difficulty … her esophagus, owing to the want of aliment, having become so much parched and straightened.” This was the most Isabel had eaten in weeks. There were seven or eight eggs, “green and about the size of duck eggs,” in the nest. The following day she came upon some wild fruit, and this, along with “other food she accidentally met with, sufficed to support her skeleton frame.”

These days were not so different from the many that she had spent wandering with her family. She and her brothers had given up all thought of finding their way and had instead spent every moment thinking about food and water. This was still Isabel’s lot. Only now, she was much weaker than she had been before, and she was alone. The loss of companions in a survival situation can break even the strongest person, and as bad as it was for Isabel during the day, it was many times worse at night. When dusk fell, she would find a large tree to lean against, usually one with buttressed roots that flared out from its base, and she would draw her shawl around her for the long vigil. Although she was in a tropical jungle, where the temperature rarely dropped below 75 degrees Fahrenheit at night, in her dilapidated condition she would feel chilled. Ants would begin crawling over her, and so too would the flies and mosquitoes
come, and then she would be engulfed in the noisy blackness of the night.

These moments, as Jean would later write, were the worst for Isabel.
“The remembrance of the shocking spectacle she’d witnessed, the horror of her solitude and the darkness of the night in a wilderness, and the perpetual apprehension of death, which augmented with every instant, had such effect on her spirits as to cause her hair to turn gray.” While the color of her hair probably turned because of a lack of food, the metaphor was apt, for it captured the fact that Isabel, in those long hours, was surely as alone as a human being could be.

I
N HIS 1963 BOOK
They Survived: A Study of the Will to Live
, the English writer Wilfrid Noyce concluded that in desperate situations, where people are confronted with extremes of thirst and hunger,
“often the apparently strong do not come off best in the end.” What seems to count most is an inner psychological strength, which is nurtured by purpose, hope, and spiritual beliefs. These Isabel Godin had in abundance, and she was also experienced in a humble act that Noyce found was practiced by nearly all survivors: prayer.

Survivors of long ordeals regularly report that their will to live was sustained by the
thought
of a specific goal or task they needed to achieve—with such unfinished business, they could not allow themselves to die. The British survival psychologist John Leach found that even a seemingly small task could provide a sense of purpose that would help one live.
“It is surprising the large number of survivors who come through their ordeal with a message for loved ones from their friends who have perished, and with the thought that they must get this message through at all costs.” Similarly, even the most humble hope can provide fuel for the will to live. One survivor of the death camps at Auschwitz reported that early on, he had made a date with a woman prisoner, with the
promise that they would go on the outing after they were free, and that it was the hope of that future date that kept him alive.

Prayer, Noyce found, can provide people in desperate situations with a remarkable resilience. He discovered that this was true even for people who were not religious prior to their ordeal. In addition to fostering hope, prayer gives people a palpable sense that they are not alone and, perhaps more important, helps them escape their physical suffering.

Ensio Tiira, a Finn who in 1953 spent thirty-two days on a raft in the Indian Ocean, including fourteen days alone after his companion died, reported,
“For the whole voyage I’d had the strange feeling that someone else was with me, watching over me and keeping me safe from harm.” After his mate perished, he said, “I felt it more strongly than ever.” Similarly, Ernest Shackleton, the English explorer who in 1916 led a crew of twenty-seven men through seventeen months of cruel Antarctic conditions, declared that as he and two of his men crossed South Georgia Island on foot, the last leg of their desperate journey to find help, a
“fourth walked beside them.” His two companions also spoke of this mysterious “fourth.” The story told in 1972 by sixteen Uruguayans who spent ten weeks marooned in the Andes after an airplane crash was much the same.
“I can assure you that God is there,” one of the survivors told the press. “We all felt it, inside ourselves, and not because we were the kind of pious youths who are always praying all day long. Not at all. But there one feels the presence of God. One feels, above all, what is called the hand of God, and allows oneself to be guided by it.”