Robert Whitaker: The Mapmaker's Wife

If you invested $80 in a reasonably good world atlas and hopped back in time three centuries, you would be in possession of the greatest treasure on Earth. Kings would kill for it.

As with so many things we now take for granted, accurately mapping the world was a hugely difficult business requiring luck, daring, and a lot of hard work from some of the great scientific minds of all time.

The French map-making expedition sent to South America in 1735 was tasked with settling a dispute between the French Academy of Science and the English upstart Isaac Newton.

Academy members had spent their lives developing a theoretical basis for measuring distance, allowing them to produce more accurate maps of Europe than anyone had ever managed before.

Some cities turned out to be hundreds of miles from their previously accepted positions, and France was significantly smaller than older maps had suggested, a fact which Louis XIV did not take well.

Now Newton had come along and announced that the basic physics underlying French cartography was simply wrong. It followed that the world was a different size and shape than the French academy believed, and therefore their maps were distorted.

This became the great scientific controversy of the day.

Reputations could be lost overnight by weighing in on the wrong side. The only way to settle the question was to make accurate star sightings at the equator, and so the academy launched its expedition.

All this is just the starting point for Robert Whitaker's meticulously researched history, because when the mapmakers arrived in Ecuador, one of them, Jean Godin, fell in love.

He married local girl Isabel Grameson and she was indeed a girl — marriageable age in Ecuador being 13 — and the couple planned to move back to France.

Things went disastrously wrong. Godin and his colleagues settled their great scientific question, but not in France's favour. When Godin travelled ahead to ready transport for himself and his wife, politics and bureaucratic errors combined to strand him in French Guiana, on the far side of the continent. He spent the next 20 years trying to get permission to leave.

Finally Isabel, who had never stopped believing in him, decided to travel cross-country through more than 4800km of Amazon rainforest to find him. The impossible journey made her one of the great heroines of her time.

Whitaker tells his astonishing love story well, bringing the attitudes and customs of 18th century France and Ecuador alive on the page and his characters with them. A grand read.

Bantam
$27.95 

* David Larsen is an Auckland reviewer