The Mapmaker's Wife (6 page)

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In other words, the distance from the center of the earth to a pole would be greater than the distance from the earth’s center to the equator.

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To calculate this effect, Newton imagined the centrifugal force exerted on a canal of fluid extending from the earth’s center to a pole and on a similar canal from the earth’s center to the equator. The canal extending to the equator would need to be longer and of greater weight in order to neutralize the increased centrifugal force on this column caused by the earth’s rotation.

CHAPTER THREE

A Daughter of Peru

M
ARÍA
I
SABEL DE
J
ESUS
G
RAMESÓN
was born on January 28, 1728, in Guayaquil, a port city 200 miles southwest of Quito. She was the second of four children, with two brothers and a younger sister, and she had the good fortune to be born to parents who enjoyed both wealth and political influence.

Isabel’s mother, Josefa Pardo de Figueroa, came from a distinguished Spanish family, and she was a distant descendant of a Castilian king, Alfonso XI. Her colonial lineage was similarly impressive. Her ancestors had arrived in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the final years of the sixteenth century, which enabled her to proudly claim, with only a small degree of exaggeration, that she was one of the “daughters of the conquistadors.” As a nineteenth-century historian wrote, Josefa Pardo was
“equipped with a considerable fortune” and rightfully seen as “one of the most gracious women of the Spanish colonies.” Two of her brothers were known throughout Peru. One, Pedro, was a bishop, and the other, José Augustín, was an accomplished writer who served a term as governor of the
Cuzco province and was anointed the Marqués de Valleumbroso—an official title of nobility—by the Spanish Crown.

Josefa’s marriage to Pedro Manuel Gramesón y Bruno in 1724 followed a common pattern for the time. Although the Pardos were part of the colonial elite, they were still Creoles—people of Spanish blood who had been born in the viceroyalty—and in eighteenth-century Peru, Creoles were rarely named to positions of high rank in the government.
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For nearly two centuries, Spain had sent a steady stream of bureaucrats, drawn from the nobility or the military, to govern its South American colony, and prosperous Creoles, in order to maintain access to political power, had made a habit of marrying their daughters to the arriving officials or to Spaniards with good prospects for assuming a position of rank. Twenty-one-year-old Pedro Manuel Gramesón, a military man from Cadiz, Spain, had the latter credentials.

As his last name revealed, Gramesón was of French ancestry. His father had been born in France but by routes unknown had come to serve as a captain in the Spanish military regiment that guarded King Philip V (who was also of French blood). Pedro followed his father into the military, and there he became acquainted with a nobleman, José de Armendáriz, the Marqués de Castelfuerte, who, in early 1724, was picked to be the viceroy of Peru, the top political post in the colony. Gramesón sailed with Armendáriz to the New World, and less than nine months later, he married Josefa Pardo. Much like his friendship with the viceroy, this was a union certain to serve him well. Wealthy Creole families like the Pardos provided their daughters with dowries that included land, jewels, slaves, and thousands of pesos in silver coins.

The Gramesóns flourished in the years that followed. All of their four children survived the childhood scourges that struck down so many in colonial Peru, and Guayaquil provided both
financial and military opportunities for Pedro. The port was a bustling town of 20,000, its economy fueled by import-export trade. Arriving boats dropped off such luxury European goods as wine, brandy, olive oil, and fine silk clothing, and departed with goods produced in coastal areas and in the Andean valleys—timber, cotton, woolen goods, bacon, hams, cheeses, and cocoa. Three forts defended the city, which had been sacked by marauding pirates in 1686 and 1709, and the “foreign company,” composed of men like Pedro Gramesón who were natives of Spain, was reported to have
“the most splendid appearance among the whole militia.” Pedro quickly moved up in rank, and soon everyone who met him was certain to be informed that he was
General
Pedro Manuel Gramesón y Bruno.

Although Guayaquil was a prosperous city, its swampy environs made it a somewhat unpleasant place to live. Insects and rats were a constant torment. The ground, one eighteenth-century writer noted, was of a “spongy chalk,” and
“everywhere so level, that there is no declivity for carrying off the water, and therefore, on the first rain, it becomes one general slough.” Many of the town’s wealthier people viewed life in the Andes as preferable, and so, in 1733, when Armendáriz offered his old friend the chance to be the
corregidor
—or governor—of Otavalo, a township north of Quito, Gramesón jumped at the chance.

A corregidor was an all-purpose government official whose functions ranged from justice of the peace to police chief. He sat on town councils, known as
cabildos
, throughout his district and generally kept his finger in everyone’s business. He also had an exclusive right to sell goods to
los Indios
, a monopoly in trade that could prove very lucrative. Pedro Gramesón fulfilled all the usual duties, and—according to a minor complaint that was filed against him—engaged in some trading that was supposed to be off limits to a corregidor. In 1734, he paid
“300 loads of wheat” for a shipload of clothes from Castile, luxury goods that he then sold at a nice markup to his wealthy friends in Quito. As one of his peers remarked, Pedro Gramesón
“didn’t let pass by any business that was favorable.”

These early years were kind to Isabel as well. She and her siblings enjoyed every privilege. Her parents doted on her, and she was tended to by an Indian maid. Those who met young Isabel, one of her relatives would later write, remarked that
“she was quite precocious and had a very lively and willful character.” But by the end of 1734, Isabel had reached the age when the life of a young girl in Peru underwent a profound change. The colonial elite whisked their six-year-old daughters off to convent schools, where they remained sequestered for the next six or seven years. There, they would be taught to be chaste and virtuous, and—at least in theory—to be a bit timid, too.

The schooling that lay ahead for Isabel reflected cultural values at the heart of Peruvian society, which had a history of a most dramatic sort. The place of women in eighteenth-century Peru arose from a past rooted in the Christian Reconquest of Spain and Spain’s medieval world of knights.

M
OORS SWEPT INTO
I
BERIA
in
A.D
. 711 and conquered most of it within seven years. However, they never gained a firm hold over the harsh plains northwest of Madrid. Soon Christian warriors, riding in from the Asturian mountains to the north and armed with swords, resettled the region. The society that formed here in the ninth and tenth centuries was a rough one. The thin soils would not easily support settled agricultural communities, where culture and education historically thrive. Instead, the terrain encouraged nomadic, pastoral pursuits, like the raising of sheep, which were tended to by rugged men on horseback. Warlords built castles perched on crags and organized legions of fighting men to protect their feudal estates.

During the tenth century, this warring society coalesced into the Kingdom of Castile, which quickly began eyeing the prosperous Moorish states to the south. Militant priests filled the young men of Castile with fervor for a crusade against the infidels, while Castilian kings egged them on with promises of earthly rewards—those
who fought and defeated the Moors would be rewarded with grants of land and titles of nobility. The warrior on horseback could hope to live off the wealth of the land, with the subjugated Moors and peasants supplying goods and tribute.

The first major Moorish city to fall was Toledo, in 1085. A decade later, the most famous Christian hero of the Middle Ages, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as El Cid, conquered Valencia and the surrounding environs. With each new victory, ballads were sung celebrating the feats of these triumphant knights, and soon Castile had come to cherish the notion of the
hidalgo
, a man of great courage and honor who lived for war, and who achieved wealth and nobility through his feats on the battlefield. The man who toiled the fields, who lived by the sweat of his labor, was a man who deserved to be a vassal. In 1248, Castile sacked Seville, near the southern coast, which left Granada as the only Moorish enclave in Iberia.

Although the Castilians may have reviled the Moors’ religion, they nevertheless adopted many Moorish customs. They studied the Moors’ architecture, their city-planning methods, and their commerce. The Castilians took to sitting on the floor and dressing in long flowing robes. Most notable of all, they adopted Moorish attitudes toward women. Arab poets employed fanciful metaphors to tell of a woman’s beauty and of the romantic love that such beauty could evoke in a man, and soon these conventions appeared in Castilian ballads. A woman’s eyes were “bright as the stars above,” her teeth “white as pearls”—these were the features of a heavenly creature who made men swoon. At the same time, she was a temptress who needed to be removed from society. The Castilians, a historian later wrote,
“kept their women sequestered like the Arabs. A
duenna
or elderly chaperon guarded the women of a household much as if they formed a harem.”

After the fall of Seville, Christians, Arabs, and Jews lived side by side in Spain in relative tranquillity for two centuries, a pluralistic society unlike any other in Europe. Ferdinand III, who ruled over Castile in the thirteenth century, called himself the King of Three Religions. The reawakening of a crusade against the Moors began
in 1469 with the marriage of Isabella, heiress to the throne of Castile, to Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon, a Christian kingdom in the northeast corner of Iberia. Isabella was a zealous Catholic, and she was intent on purging her dominion of nonbelievers. In 1478, she and Ferdinand obtained a papal bull allowing them to establish an inquisition into heresy, which initially focused on identifying Jews who were “false converts” to Christianity. The first such “heretics” were burned at the stake in 1481, and a year later, Isabella and Ferdinand launched a full-scale effort to conquer Granada, which was still a Moorish stronghold. Unlike during the earlier era of conquest, in which private militias did most of the fighting, the monarchy now raised a public army to wage war. When Granada fell in 1492, Castilians hailed it as the
“most distinguished and blessed day there has ever been in Spain.”

The seven centuries of Reconquest, which had come to a triumphant end, had molded the Spanish character into a distinct type. Other European countries at this time were moving out of the Middle Ages and into a period of intellectual renaissance. The merchant and the scholar were the types that would lead France, England, Holland, and other societies into the Enlightenment. But in Spain, a militant Christianity had taken hold and produced a society that celebrated the soldier who fought the infidels and then lived off the spoils of his victory. And it was at that moment that all of Spain fell under the spell of “romances of chivalry,” tales that reminded them of their great triumph over the Moors and instilled in them a yearning to do it again.

T
HE PRINTING PRESS
appeared in Spain in 1473, and soon the verse narratives and ballads of an earlier time evolved into wildly inventive novels of errant knights who saved Christian kingdoms from pagan hordes. The first such tale,
Tirant lo Blanch
, was published in 1490, and over the next century, Spanish and Portuguese writers produced more than forty such narratives. The most popular of all the storied knights was Amadís de Gaula, who appeared
on the literary scene in 1508 and whose exploits—and those of his descendants—were subsequently celebrated in a dozen novels.

The Amadís romances, one twentieth-century scholar has observed,
“mirrored with sufficient fidelity the Spanish gentleman’s dream of himself.” The plots were all much the same, Amadís and the other knights regularly marching off to magical lands of a sort that had once appeared on medieval Christian maps. The foreign countries were inhabited by dog-faced monsters, serpents that had human feet, and fighting Amazon women who lived in a land called California. There were giants, centaurs, lions, and dragons to be seen and mountains of gold and silver to be found. Amadís and the other knights of Christendom typically went into battle against great odds, a handful of men against armies of thousands. During the ensuing clashes, the knights, who were often wounded but rarely died, would attack with such ferocity that the ground would turn crimson, littered at every turn with the severed heads and limbs of the vanquished.