Free The Mapmaker's Wife by Robert Whitaker Page B

Hapsburg king of Spain, Charles II, was a sickly and haunted man—many in Europe considered him an inbred imbecile—and as he lay dying, childless, he had selected Philip of Anjou to be his successor. Philip was the great-grandson of Philip IV of Spain and the grandson of France’s Louis XIV, a Bourbon king. He had blood ties to both monarchies.
    With a member of the Bourbon family on the Spanish throne, France seemed poised to gain coveted trading rights with Peru. It established a trading company, the Compagnie Royale de la Mer Pacifique, to carry out this commerce, and in 1701, Spain gave French ships permission to buy supplies in its colonial ports. However, the Council of the Indies, in Madrid, which governed colonial matters, privately seethed over this French influence, as did England and the Netherlands, which worried that the two Catholic countries were merging into a superpower. England and the Netherlands declared war, and when the War of the Spanish Succession finally came to an end in 1713 with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht, Spain and France were forced to agree to keep their countries separate. Philip V renounced any right he might have to the French throne upon the death of Louis XIV, and England was granted a commercial monopoly over the African slave trade to the New World.
    After that, Philip V governed in a way that pleased Spanish isolationists. He refused to grant the French full trading privileges with Spain’s colonies, and shortly after Louis XIV died in 1715, thetwo countries even went to war. Philip’s embrace of the old guard in Spain also led him to pump new life into the Spanish Inquisition. During his reign, the Inquisition held 782 autos-da-fé, at which thousands of heretics were punished. This revival of medieval ways prompted Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, a reform-minded Benedictine monk, to bitterly complain that“while abroad there is progress in physics, anatomy, botany, geography and natural history, we break each other’s heads and drown our halls with howls.”
    Indeed, in spite of Philip’s Bourbon bloodlines, the old dynamic still held sway in 1733, when the French Academy of Sciences decided to mount its expedition. The French wanted into Peru, and the Spanish wanted to keep them out. The mission, however, provided Louis XV with a sly way to break the stalemate.
    There was no scientific reason that the French had to go precisely to the equator. A trip to their own colony, French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America, would get them close enough to zero degrees latitude to serve their purpose. Measuring an arc there would reveal whether a degree close to the equator was longer or shorter than one in France and thus reveal the earth’s shape. And certainly it would have been easier and quicker to complete this task in a French colony. La Condamine had even argued—with a“sharp voice,” Bouguer recalled—for going to Cayenne in French Guiana. * But La Condamine was naive about the political opportunity at hand, an opportunity that Count Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux de Maurepas, minister of the marine, eagerly laid out for the king. A scientific expedition, he told Louis XV in early 1734, would be above suspicion and yet it would enable France, as a French historian later wrote,“to study the country and bring back a detailed description.”
    Properly briefed, Louis XV wrote his “dear uncle” on April 6, 1734, asking for permission for the French to travel to Peru. He assured Philip V that there was no reason for the Spanish to fret.His mapmakers would simply be making observations“which would be advantageous not only for the advancing of Science, but also very useful to commerce, by increasing the safety and ease of navigation.” How could his uncle stand in the way of such progress?
    Philip’s response showed that he had indeed been hoodwinked, at least in regard to the science. On August 14, 1734, he granted passports to the ten French scientists. He did