Perhaps what attracted me to read this book was its subtitle: “A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon”— especially the last part, that bit about the Amazon.
Not that I am adverse to reading about love and murder, but because of the fact that as a young boy I spent several of my summer vacations at the edge of the Amazon rainforest.
But the book’s “Amazon” is is not today’s Amazon jungle, “El Oriente.” It is the Amazon jungle and my native country of Ecuador as they existed during the mid-eighteenth century, when Ecuador was still part of the Viceroyalty of Perú.
The story takes place at a time when a fierce debate raged in Europe between the “Newtonians” and the “Cartesians” about the earth’s precise shape and circumference. An argument that probably could be resolved by taking some exact measurements in a region very close to the equator.
It is the latter fact, that made the present Ecuador with its majestic, at times impassable, Andes mountains and its unforgiving Amazon jungles the focal point and the destination of an expedition of French scientists.
Their mission: to once and for all settle the conflict about the shape of the earth, and “to reveal the mysteries of a little-known continent to a world hungry for discovery and knowledge”
What could have been, even for those days, a somewhat “routine” scientific expedition becomes a decade-long drama with all the elements of—yes, even in those days—politics, and also science, Spanish colonial period social and society customs, human endurance, intrigue, sheer survival and, finally, love and murder.
As a bonus, the author, Robert Whitaker, treats the reader, throughout the factually based story, to easy to understand principles of astronomy, mathematics, and mapmaking, all intertwined with magnificent descriptions of Ecuador’s astonishing natural beauty and with historical facts of the eighteenth-century Spanish colonies and Inca culture.
While the nation of Ecuador has drastically changed since the days of “The Mapmaker’s Wife,” the unbelievably beautiful and diverse fauna and flora deep in the region of Amazon tributaries probably have not changed much. Neither have some of the dangers and hardships which the mapmaker’s wife experienced during her epic journey almost 300 years ago.
The Mapmaker’s Wife, by Robert Whitaker, published by Bantam Dell (www.bantamdell.com)
Photo: Courtesy Internationalrivers.org
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.