The Mapmaker's Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder, and Survival in the Amazon in Around the World in 80 Books

Aug 02, 2008 Kay rated it liked it

Shelves: harrowing-tales, exploration-adventure, world-civ, science, nonfiction, latin_america

A Title in Search of a Book - Alas, the title bears little resemblance to the material betwixt sensational front cover illustration and blurb-infested back cover. Once again, I smell the publishing world's eternal quest for a best-seller at work. This is no Longitude, try as the publishers might to try to cast it into that role.

It is, however, a decently written account of a French scientific expedition to the New World in 1735. Its mission was to measure several arcs of latitude and thus prove A Title in Search of a Book - Alas, the title bears little resemblance to the material betwixt sensational front cover illustration and blurb-infested back cover. Once again, I smell the publishing world's eternal quest for a best-seller at work. This is no Longitude, try as the publishers might to try to cast it into that role.

It is, however, a decently written account of a French scientific expedition to the New World in 1735. Its mission was to measure several arcs of latitude and thus prove (or disprove) Newton's contention that the world was a sphere, flattened at the poles. There's a great deal of scientific background and detail, and it's fairly interesting to those curious about the methods and theories of early mapmakers. It has little to do with "love, murder, and survival in the Amazon," however.

No doubt the PR people reasoned that a plucky female "explorer" would be of more appeal than a tale of contentious French scientists, who seemed to have quarreled their way across one mountain after another during the very long and tedious process of making the minutely exact measurements needed to finish their work. The first five pages of the book open with Isabel (Mapmaker's Wife of title) setting off to cross the continent to join her husband, a minor member of the French expedition whom she'd married some twenty years previously. And then that thread just... vanishes. It's picked up on page 169, but Isabel doesn't undertake her trek until page 226, and she concludes it a mere sixty pages later. Why, then, does the jacket blurb proclaim, "At the heart of the sweeping tale of adventure, discovery and exploration is one woman's extraordinary journey, inspired by her love for the man she had not seen in 20 years"?

Well, I think I know why --- ka-ching! Someone undoubtedly could hear the cash register. "Damsel in distress" sells infinitely better than "quarrelsome French scientists at work."

Sadly, in the rush to make Isabel the "heart" of the tale, the author overlooked the true dramas that would have made potentially more interesting reading -- the story of the faithful slave Joaquín, who loyally undertook a rescue mission on her behalf, for example, or the "Spanish Benjamin Franklin," Antonio de Ulloa, who rose from a secondary position in the original expedition to become one of his country's most eminent scientists. In short, the decision to frame Isabel and Juan, her husband, as the centerpeice of this tale made sense only from a sensational or marketing point of view. Isabel's jungle trek was indeed fascinating reading, but the whole structure of the book was bogged down by numerous asides (some of which, luckily, were of personal interest). I can imagine, though, that many readers wondered where the heck the promised "true tale of love, murder, and survival" went.

The murder, by the way, was a rather minor affair, occupying at most a dozen pages. Basically, an arrogant, hotheaded member of the French expedition was beaten to death by an angry mob. (I couldn't entirely blame them.)

Structurally, the book was unwieldy, and seemed to backtrack upon itself for little rhyme or reason (much like the loops of some of feeder rivers in the Amazon basin). The tale of two members' trek to Pará is outlined once briefly over several pages, for example, and then reiterated in greater detail once again for no discernible reason. Other problems with organization make an already complex narrative even more complex. This is exacerbated by the author's inability to bring historical personages to life. In this respect, he's no David McCullough, who breaths fresh life into just about every fusty historical person his pen touches. No, sadly, Whitaker (the author) never manages to fully engage the reader's imagination or sympathy -- and this is a pity as there's plenty here to fill both the imagination and the human heart. In the vast canvas of characters, there seems to be a gaping hole that poor Isabel -- whose ordeal was truly remarkable -- seems unable to completely fill.

As luck would have it, though, the reading I'd been doing lately served to spark my interest in the book in a number of peripheral ways. I'd recently read an account of the discovery and exploitation of Amazon rubber, and so the botanical aspects of the expedition held my interest. I'd also just finished an account of Henry Morgan's exploits on the Spanish Main, which were contemporary with the latter parts of the narrative and provided an idea of what the Spanish and English were up to in the New World. And finally, a book on important plants in the colonies had fueled my interest in the discoveries of quinine as a cure for malaria as well as giving background on the subjugation of the native peoples and the slave trade. All this recent reading, in effect, buttressed material in the book.

So ultimately, I'd say that aside from misleading marketing and poor organization, this is a fairly interesting book. It's a pity, though, that the central narrative of the expedition was rather lackluster as that was obviously what the author could have rendered best. The tale of Isabel would be best suited for fact-based fiction. She could be convincingly (though not entirely truthfully) cast Katherine Hepburn-like as the woman who never says die in the middle of the jungle, braving all to be with her man. No quarrelsome French scientists, I need hardly add, have a place in that tale!
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