“God has preserved me when alone amid perils …. “
Isabel Godin was not an Amazon, but what she lacked in training in swordplay and bow and arrow, she more than made up in strength, character, determination, and resilience, qualities which helped her confront and endure the Amazonian jungles.
She was born in 1728 in Riobamba, of the Viceroyalty of Perú, now central Ecuador. Her father was Don Pedro Gramesón y Bruno, a Spanish official of some renown in Riobamba. She was well educated and spoke fluent Spanish, French, and Quechua, in addition to ancient Inca communication methods still in use by certain Indian tribes at the time.
(Riobamba was completely destroyed and buried by the earthquake of 1797, years after Isabel’s departure. The city was rebuilt about 20 kilometers northeast of its original site.)
In 1741, at the age of 13, she married the French naturalist, Jean Godin des Odonais, who accompanied the great French explorer, Charles-Marie de La Condamine on his journeys of exploration in South America. Jean Godin was 28. This was not seen as anything unusual in that era or even up to relatively recent times in North and South America. My grandfather (from Massachusetts) was 19 years older than my grandmother (from Cuba). My father was 14 years older than my mother. Ronald Reagan was 14 years older than Nancy Reagan. Boaz was clearly older than Ruth, having called her “my daughter” and also having praised her for not having gone after younger men. Ad infinitum.
In 1749, upon receiving news of his father’s death, Jean Godin decided to return to France with his family. His plan was to travel to French Guiana, in the extreme northeast of South America, about 500 miles east of the Venezuela border, via the Amazon to sort of “prepare the way” for his wife and children. He would then return to Riobamba for his family.
However, the Portuguese and Spanish authorities would not allow him to return through their territories. These infuriating bureaucratic machinations were as common then as they are now. Humboldt’s big dream of sailing via the Orinoco to the Amazon was thwarted by such civil servants (Humboldt). Godin could travel to France without his wife and children. Or he could remain stuck in French Guiana. He decided to remain. He wrote increasingly intemperate letters to Europe, pleading for safe passage back to Riobamba. All without success. Most of his bile was reserved for the Portuguese, something he came to regret as, eventually, it was a Portuguese vessel which was given permission to transport him west on the Amazon to Iquitos and back again. But Godin was by then so concerned about his letters strongly criticizing Portugal, that he feared assassination and excused himself while requesting the ship go on up the Amazon without him and wait for his wife and children to reach it.
That was in 1765. Sixteen (16) years since he last saw his wife and children. Eight months later, the ship docked at Iquitos, the highest point of river transportation. Months after that, word reached Isabel that a ship in Iquitos waited for her and her children to take her to her husband in French Guiana.
During those years, Isabel had had no news from her husband. By all accounts she had been a beautiful young lady whose visage now reflected almost twenty years of the strain of not having heard from her husband and the loss of her four children to the scourges of the tropics: malaria, yellow fever, smallpox, and dysentery. After years of false alarms and false hopes, she sent her slave, Joachim, whom she had purchased from a slaveholder she had considered too cruel, to go to Iquitos and confirm the news.
Joachim did as ordered and returned — two years later — to confirm that, “It is true, su Merced, the vessel is there and your husband, although ill, is alive in Cayenne [French Guiana].”
See the image of a map of the Amazon (below) to get an idea of the distance and hardships between Riobamba and Iquitos. This helps explain how it could take two years to go and bring back news.
And now, with confirmation from her trusted servant that her husband was indeed alive and waited for her across the continent, she immediately determined to embark on a journey that no one, even in the bloom of youth, could look upon “except with unmitigated horror, a journey down the whole of the Amazon.”
She sold what property she could, and the rest she entrusted to her brother. She also went about selecting those who would accompany her and by October, 1769, she was ready to commence the trek.
Her father, Don Pedro, decided to precede her to arrange for such comforts as he could devise. Don Pedro was elderly but vigorous, having survived epidemics of the tropics in his many years of service in Riobamba. He went to Baños and arranged for portage for his daughter. At points along the trail, he arranged for caches of food. This he did all the way to Canelos, “the outpost of God,” seven days’ journey from Baños. He requested the monks receive his daughter and her party and provide all the necessities they might require. He also received confirmation from Christianized Jivaro Indians who agreed to convey her in their canoes from Canelos to Andoas, the next mission down the Río Pastaza. At Andoas, other canoes would be provided to take Isabel and her party 400 miles down the Pastaza to Lagunas and from hence to Iquitos, where the galiot would board them and transport them down the Amazon across the continent.
He went on to Lagunas to await her arrival there, but not before sending a message: “Hija mía, all is in readiness. Canoes and men to paddle them are waiting at the village of Canelos. The roads are bad. Keep down the amount of baggage and the members of your party. The canoes and space therein are limited.”
In October, 1769, almost four years after the ship’s original departure, and twenty since Jean Godin’s trip to French Guiana, Isabel Godin began what became an unprecedented expedition across Andes mountains and down to the Amazon Basin. Accompanying her were her nephew, Joachin (10), two brothers, three mestizo servants — Rosa, Elvia, and Heloise — three Frenchmen, her black slave, Joachim, and a company of 32 Andean Indians.
The party traversed the gorges and trails from Riobamba to Canelos in seven dreadful days of interminable rains, seemingly bottomless mud, falling branches, and crashing trees. Surely, they felt, this would be the worst of the journey. At Canelos, they’d be on canoes down the broad Pastaza River and then down the giant Amazon River. However, they had not counted on smallpox having decimated the village. When Isabel’s party stumbled into Canelos, they found it utterly deserted: most had died, the rest had fled. Houses and huts were still smoldering since all had been set on fire to purify the air, as the Indians believed.
Upon waking the next morning, with few hours’ sleep, Isabel confronted the news that the Andean Indians had deserted them during the night. However, four of the original inhabitants of Canelos had returned and had agreed to help the party with payment in advance, which Isabel agreed to.
There was only one canoe and a raft. A great amount of their food could not fit and so was left behind; the rest was put on the raft which was manned by the Indians while what remained of the party boarded the canoe. The river was too full of debris and rapids to travel at night, so they camped on the banks. The following morning, the party saw that the Indians had deserted. Surely Isabel regretted having paid them in advance.
The Frenchmen urged a return to Riobamba. Isabel would not hear of it. She had not undertaken this journey to then turn back. Besides, to paddle against an 8-knot current would need far more manpower than they had. They were about 5 days from Andoas, which they could make on the raft and canoe.
The river here was about half a mile wide, deep, and fast flowing. Isabel’s brothers piloted the raft, which was swiftly caught in the current and headed rapidly downriver. The canoe, piloted by Pierre, one of the Frenchmen, followed. A few hours into that day’s journey, a breeze blew his hat into the river, he lost his balance reaching out for it. and fell into the water. He did catch his hat and waved it aloft as he surfaced. However, a floating log struck him on the head and he disappeared under the dark waters, never to be seen again.
The river became more swift and filled with rapids and increasing dangers. Towards the end of the day, as they were turning to the banks to camp for the night, the canoe struck a floating log, dipped its bow into the river, throwing them all overboard. As they were close to shore, no one drowned in that mishap. Joachim helped Isabel ashore and then went back into the waters for the rest, bringing each in, and finally bringing the canoe in as well. As for the raft, as much food as possible was salvaged before it was completely destroyed by floating debris.
That night, around the fire they had built they decided Joachim and one of the remaining Frenchmen would travel as quickly as possible down the river to Andoas and seek help and food to bring back to the rest. This was a great risk to those who remained as they would be left with no means of transportation. But the party felt they had no choice. The next morning, Joachim and the Frenchman struck off, leaving Isabel, her 10-year-old nephew, Joachin, her two brothers, the three mestizo women servants, and the remaining Frenchman.
Expecting help to come soon, they were careless with the remaining food that first week. By the end of the second week, Isabel was spending most of her time caring for Joachin who was rapidly wasting away. The men hunted and gathered wood and the women sought tubers and birds’ eggs on which to feed. They battled mosquitos and black flies: “They itched and scratched until the blood flowed and until most of them were half mad.”
The Frenchman developed signs of madness which climaxed when he awoke one night to find a vampire bat sucking the blood out of his toe. He screamed and went utterly berserk. The others were in an uproar and by dawn Isabel Godin decided they had waited long enough and ordered the building of a raft. This done, they placed their meager belongings thereon and themselves climbed aboard, as if dragging their wasted bodies. The women sat in the center with the sick boy; the three men pushed it out into the fast river where it promptly struck a submerged tree.
The raft split into pieces and all were thrown into the river. All supplies and belongings were lost. Incredibly, they made it back to shore, but Joachin was already at death’s door and died that night, not having opened his eyes since coming ashore from the destroyed raft. The party did not have enough strength left to bury him.
Rosa, one of the mestizo servants, died overnight. Heloise walked off into the jungle in a delirium and never returned. The older brother expired as he recited his rosary. The Frenchman and other brother had already died, their bodies set upon by ants. The remaining servant died also.
Isabel Godin lay between the decaying bodies, fully expecting to die there. But two days later, seeing she still lived, she remembered her husband, who called her “my cherished wife,” whom she had not seen for 20 years and who waited for her. She later remarked that the memory of her husband, the father of the children she had lost, infused her with strength and propelled her to rise from among the dead, putrefying bodies. With a knife she cut the shoes off her dead brothers, fashioned crude sandals therefrom, and, with a machete in one hand and a staff in the other, she set off, with an unsteady pace into the jungle. As she slogged off, she thought she heard someone calling her, but believed it was delirium and kept going.
It was not delirium. It was Joachim who had returned and to his horror, had found the bodies, unrecognizable for utter decay. He could not even count how many there were but assumed Isabel was among them. He, utterly bereft, knelt to pray quickly, because the stench was overpowering, and left, headed back downriver, in a canoe manned by 4 mission Indians who tapped tapped tapped on their canoe messaging ahead downriver to Andoas, “Mme Godin and her party are dead. All perished in the jungle.” There he reported more fully on what he had seen. Don Pedro, having lost a daughter, two sons, and a grandnephew, received the news very badly and never fully recovered. The news made its way to French Guiana where Jean Godin learned his “cherished wife” was gone forever.
Doña Isabel’s dark brown hair had turned white, her skin, depigmented, made her look ghostly, floating among the trees and vines. Counting from the days of Joachim’s macabre discovery, she wandered, alone, in the jungles, for nine days. She could not say how she could have endured it other than the thought of reuniting with her husband gave her strength. Not to mention her unquenchable spirit.
One night, she stumbled onto three Shimigai Indians sitting around a fire. They were so frightened they began to run away but were held back by her otherworldly voice asking them to stay, in Quechua, a language they could understand. She told them to take her to the mission in Andoas.
She then collapsed.
It took a month for her to recover sufficiently to travel on to Lagunas. On the way there she stopped in Loreto where a missionary, seeing her utter emaciation, and noting that a journey down the Amazon would be a very arduous one, suggested she return to Riobamba, which was far closer. Her reply gives us an indication of this woman’s indomitable spirit:
“I am, Padre, surprised at your proposal. God has preserved me when alone amid perils in which all my companions perished, in my wish to rejoin my husband. Having begun my journey for this purpose, if I were not to prosecute my first intention, I should esteem myself guilty of counteracting the views of Providence and rendering useless the assistance I have received from the dear Indians and their wives, as well as the kindness which you, kind Father, have given me….”
She and her father, Don Pedro, sailed 2,000 miles down the Amazon. Jean Godin sailed on a small vessel and boarded the boat to embrace his wife. He later wrote:
“On board this vessel, after twenty years’ absence and a long endurance on either side of alarms and misfortunes. I again met with a cherished wife whom I had almost given over every hope of seeing again. In her embraces I forgot the loss of the fruits of our union: nay, I even congratulated myself on their premature deaths, as it saved them from the dreadful fate which befell their uncles in the wood of Canelos beneath the eyes of their mother, who certainly would never have survived the sight.”
Two years later, Don Pedro, Joachim (the now freed black slave), Jean Godin, and his wife, Isabel Godin, sailed to France.
Her husband preceded her in death by a few months in 1792. She hardly ever talked about her ordeal. Some days, her servants would see her holding or fingering a piece of cloth, looking at it, saying nothing.
