Free The Mapmaker's Wife by Robert Whitaker Page A

so grand in size that it“far exceeds any of the world, at least so much of it as is known to the Spanish nation.”
    As a result of such writings, European cartographers depicted colonial South America in ways that recalled medieval maps of old. One map drawn in the sixteenth century featured a landscape filledwith minotaurs, headless men with eyes in their chests, and bipedal creatures with ratlike heads. While many of these more fanciful items had disappeared from maps by the early 1700s when La Condamine and the others were preparing their voyage, El Dorado and the Amazon women were still present. The great lake described by Sir Walter Raleigh was called Lake Parima, and cartographers located it northeast of Río Negro as a body of water—on some maps—bigger than the Caspian Sea.

    A seventeenth-century map depicting Lake Parima.
    By John Ogilby (1671). Rucker Agee Map Collection of the Birmingham Alabama Public Library .
    Accounts of Peruvian society, which were almost entirely based on life in the port cities of Lima, Guayaquil, and Cartagena, also left readers uncertain of where truth left off and exaggeration began. Peruvian merchants, Carletti wrote, piled treasures“of three and four hundred bars and ingots of silver” beneath theirmattresses and spent “two hundred thousand escudos with greater security and ease than one of us buys a bit of salad.” Even the “common people live much at their ease,” reported a Frenchman, Acarete du Biscay, who slipped into the colony in 1658.“They always go dressed very fine, either in cloth of gold and silver, or in silk trimmed with gold and silver lace.”
    The elite in Peru, the visitors said, busied themselves with the pageantry of society. There were fancy balls to attend and a steady calendar of religious festivals, bullfights, and military parades. At such public events, they noted, the men were ever ready to defend their sense of knightly honor, quick to display daggers or swords to anyone“that should oppose their pleasures or offend them.” In some cities in Peru, Biscay reported, sword pulling was so common that men“wear three or four buff-waistcoats one upon another, which are proof against the point of a sword, to secure themselves from private stabs.”
    Nearly all of the visitors were quite taken by Peruvian women, entranced in particular by the mestizos and mulattos who were mistresses to the rich. In Lima, reported Pedro de León Portocarrero, a Portuguese trader who lived there in the early 1600s, such women liked to“display themselves strolling about in public” and had a ravenous “desire to satisfy their carnal appetites.” In 1714, the Frenchman Amadée Frezier similarly marveled at the lusty Peruvian women. They would sneak out from their homes at night under the cover of their veils for “immodest” purposes, he wrote, performing “the part which men do in France.” At societal events, he added, they favored risqué dresses that left their “breasts and shoulders half naked,” and they were pleased to field “proposals which a lover would not dare to make in France without incurring the indignation of a modest woman.” When it came to “matters of love,” Frezier concluded, Peruvians “yield to no nation.”
    Readers of such literature could conclude only one thing: In the New World, everything was upside down. As one traveler quipped, South America appeared to be a place“where the riversran inland and the women urinated standing up.” The French explorers, however, were eager to sort out fact from fiction and planned to bring back “scientific” accounts of Peru. Existing travelogues, Bouguer declared, were from“persons who have never been induced to a strict examination of what they beheld.”
    T HE POLITICS that had led up to this moment, when Spain was finally going to lift the veil that it had thrown over its colony, dated back to 1700, when the long reign of the Hapsburg kings had come to an end. The last