I had recently graduated from college, and I lived for a time in a remote village called Las Manchas on Ecuador’s coast. My girlfriend and I built a bamboo hut on stilts on the outskirts of the village, next to a river emptying into the Pacific, and hoped that we could stay there forever.We couldn’t, of course—the real world got in the way—but I always longed to go back. Researching this book provided me with that opportunity, and I quickly fell in love all over again with that mesmerizing country and its wonderful people.In many ways, the Charles-Marie de La Condamine expedition—which provides the backdrop for this story of Isabel Godin’s adventure in the Amazon—occupies a central place in South American history, akin to the exploration of North America by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Over the course of eight years (1736–1744), La Condamine and eleven others—nine Frenchmen and two Spaniards—collectively wandered far and wide across the continent, studying plants and minerals, climbing to altitudes in the Andes never before reached by Europeans, mapping the Amazon River, and, most important of all, precisely measuring the distance of one degree of latitude at the equator.
