AN ADVENTURE OF HISTORIC MEASURES.

Although failing to determine the earth dimensions, the scientific expedition led by Charles-Marie de La Condamine revealed little-known marvels of South America 

In the bustling heart of modern Quito, the Parque Alameda holds a quiet reminder of a journey that blended Enlightenment with adventure. Before the old observatory, amid streetside photographers booths, a circle of six gray stone busts portrays the members of the Geodesic Expedition of 1736-44--the first scientific expedition from Europe to South America. Led by a former soldier and friend of Voltaire, this group of French and Spanish scientists set out to solve an international puzzle about the shape of the earth. This aim would pit them against intrigues, malaria, huge cultural chasms, and murderous jealousy.

After Copernicus, a question that absorbed scientists was the earth's precise shape. By then it seemed clear from imperfections in navigation that the world was not a perfect sphere. In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton postulated that the diameter through the equator was slightly greater than its axis through the poles, like a squashed grapefruit. In France, the astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini and his son Jacques disagreed: Their measurements of the length of one meridian degree north of Paris and one south of Paris suggested that the equatorial axis was shorter than the polar axis--the opposite of Newton's theory.

The bickering across the English Channel in the name of science lasted for years after both Newton and Cassini had died. Finally, in 1735, the French Academy of Sciences dispatched two expeditions to settle the issue. One would journey north to Lapland (in present-day Sweden and Finland) to measure the length of a meridian degree there. The second, led by Charles-Marie de La Condamine, would do the same at the equator near Quito, in what was then the viceroyalty of Peru. Using both sets of measurements and convoluted calculations, scientists would calculate the earth's diameter on both axes and solve the riddle.

La Condamine might not seem an obvious choice to lead a scientific inquiry: A young aristocrat, he had shown bravery as an eighteen-year-old soldier in the siege of Rosas, in northeastern Spain, in 1719. His biggest accomplishment had been a tour de force of insider trading: When Paris launched a monthly lottery in 1728, he helped his friend Voltaire calculate that if a group bought all the lottery tickets, it could still make a profit from the winnings. Together, their syndicate carried off this sure-win scheme for at least ten months, raking in up to 7.5 million francs of prize money before closing the lottery down in June 1730. In journeys to the Middle East he had also proven to be a capable mathematician and astronomer, as well as an observant traveler.

In fact, La Condamine didn't join the expedition as its leader. That role was taken by the astronomer Louis Godin. Only later, when Godin became overbearing, did La Condamine and a gifted mathematician named Pierre Bouguer step in to manage the task together. Bouguer, a frail academic, hadn't planned on joining the expedition at all; he was recruited at the last minute as a replacement. Amid the frenzied preparations, they received a surprising and invaluable aid: a letter from Spain's King Philip V, granting safe passage and consideration in the Spanish colonies. (The interests of France and Spain found rare common ground in a shared, grievance against the Hapsburgs; the fact that Philip was grandson of the French Louis XIV also helped.) Philip provided an escort of two Spanish naval officers skilled in mathematics, who could also keep an eye on the Frenchmen. On April 14, 1735, the French expedition left Paris for Quito. The Spanish officers, Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan y Santacilia, left from Cadiz.

After fourteen months, stops in Martinique and Cartagena, and a portage across the Panama isthmus, they rendezvoused in the Quito valley in June 1736. Bells rang from the city's elaborate church towers. Children in blue tunics waved bright flags of welcome, and the scientists were greeted by the president of the audiencia, Don Dionisio de Alcedo y Herrera. The visitors found a colonial society sharply and visibly stratified: One-sixth of the thirty-five thousand citizens were Spaniards, whose men wore black cloaks down to the knees; one-third were mestizo, who generally wore the blue cloth of Quito; one-third were pure indigenous Quechua, who wore calf-length white trousers and a poncho-like tunic; African slaves made up the last sixth.

A parade of callers fried into the quarters of the "earth measurers" at the Palacio de la Audiencia, facing the Plaza Mayor. Parties and balls were thrown in their honor, where they absorbed the local fashions. A young officer named Couplet gushed about the women in a letter to his mother: "Every part of the dress of the women of Quito is covered with lace.... Their hair is made up in tresses, which they make into a sort of cross on the nape of the neck; they tie a rich riband, called a balaca, twice around their heads, with the ends forming a kind of rose at their temples.... The people are very charming."

After the hard tropical voyage, La Condamine found Quito's cool Andean climate refreshing, "like Paris in the beautiful days of spring." The Plaza Mayor was cobbled gray, the cathedral rose up against the sky, and nearby the air buzzed with the sounds of commerce.

A colonial center of agriculture and the arts, Quito was thriving. In painting and wood carving, Spanish and indigenous designs blended in the decor of churches and monasteries. Markets overflowed with local crops and new ones like bananas, which galleons had brought from Asia by way of the Canary Islands. Ulloa described the bounty of local fruits from the rich valley between the two cordilleras in a secret report to King Philip, hailing the cherimoya as "the most delicious of any known fruit," and celebrating the sweet granadillas, the sour avocado, and the popular potato. "The fondness of these people for sweetmeats exceeds everything I have ever mentioned of other countries," Ulloa added. "This necessarily occasions a great consumption of sugar and honey."

Before long after their arrival, Quitenos began to puzzle out what really brought the Europeans. Ulloa began keeping tabs on the French and making notes for his intelligence report. The work of measuring an arc of the meridian began. La Condamine's mission was based on the relatively new technique of triangulation: starting from a baseline of known length, he and his group would establish a network of connecting triangles; then they would use the law of sines from trigonometry to calculate the lengths of all sides, and the length of the arc. The earth measurers had one big problem: For their first triangle they needed to mark a level baseline with a 1.95-meter long iron bar called a toise.

In the Andes, finding a level space was no small order. The problem was solved by Don Pedro Maldonado, the governor of Esmeraldas who had joined the expedition in Guayaquil. Maldonado, a mestizo from Riobamba in the central valley, had been inspired by his elder brother, a Jesuit priest, and taught himself mathematics and geography. He had carefully mapped the entire Quito region (see "Unsung Heroes of the Enlightenment," Americas, January/February 1995). Maldonado found a suitable spot northeast of Quito on the desert-like plains of Yaruqui. Another problem was seeing and marking the endpoints of their triangulation efforts. La Condamine complained that, whereas France had clock towers, windmills, and castles, the Andes offered few obvious landmarks. The team hacked its way through bush, crossed deep gorges, and labored over their survey markers, chains, and pendulums (for measuring gravitational force).

The Europeans had hardly started when they suffered their first casualty: Couplet collapsed with malaria. The team physician, Jean Seniergues, tried bloodletting, but the young man died without regaining consciousness. They were all suffering under extreme heat and cold. When one indigenous worker fell ill and died, the others deserted. A visiting delegation from Quito was alarmed by the foreigners' strange instruments; back in Quito they warned the governor that the Europeans were using divining rods to find Incan gold. On top of all that, money was running out.

La Condamine and one of the Spaniards journeyed south to Lima J4to arrange credit--the trip took more than five months. La Condamine would retrace the Avenue of the Volcanoes many more times during the expedition. At one point he took a side trip to Loja, in what is now southern Ecuador, to see its cinchona trees. The team had heard how indigenous people used the tree's bark to reduce fever, and previous travelers had described the tree's small creamy flowers, but it was still new to Europeans. Public health and medicine held a special interest for La Condamine. The epidemics that raged through European cities had marked his face with the scars of smallpox. His visit and observations on cinchona would make Loja the world center for quinine production in the next century, when its use against malaria soared. Even today, towns in the region rely on the cinchona trade.

In April 1738, La Condamine ventured again along the string of volcanoes to Cotopaxi's slopes, in search of a triangulation point that had eluded the expedition earlier. The volcano lay surrounded by a landscape as bare as the moon except for sparse grasses. The snowcapped cone gleamed. The Frenchman trudged up the loose volcanic gravel to the snow, and when his servants deserted him there, he "was reduced ... to passing two days without fire, under a tent covered in snow, and with the impossibility of converting that snow to water for my needs," he later recalled. "I found myself deprived of light, suffering the cold and thirst, on this same volcano where fire and water had caused so much disorder. At the sun's first rays, a heated eyeglass lens saved me from that sad situation."

The earth measurers also saw Cotopaxi in the full bloom of eruption in 1743, when it spouted ashes as far as the sea. Near the foot of the volcano, La Condamine and Maldonado watched ashes rain down "immediately preceded by fine dust-white, red and green--with a disagreeable odor, which itself came ahead of another of fine gravel." La Condamine compared its spewing flames to artillery fire in battles with the English. The expedition slowly marked chain lengths down the cordillera toward Cuenca, some two hundred miles south of Quito. Along the way, they found village festivals with horse races and pantomime skits in which the Europeans were surprised to see themselves neatly parodied. La Condamine wrote:

I saw them several times watching us attentively, when we were taking the height of the sun for gauging our pendulums. This would have been an impenetrable mystery for them: an observer kneeling at the foot of a quarter-circle [marker], head upside down, in an embarrassing pose, taking by one hand a smoke-filled glass, holding by the other the screws at the foot of the instrument, turning alternately his eye to a looking glass and the calculation, to examine the plumbline, running from time to time to watch the minute and the second at a pendulum, writing several characters on a piece of paper, and retaking the first position. Not one of our movements escaped the curious looks of our spectators: When we least expected it, on the arena appeared large quarter-circles of wood and painted paper, imitated well enough; and we saw these buffoons mimicking all with so much accuracy that each of us and myself above all, couldn't help but recognize ourselves. All of that was executed in such a comic manner that I swore I hadn't seen anything more amusing in the ten years of the voyage; and it filled me with such a strong need to laugh that for several moments I forgot my more serious business.

Near the bottom end of their string of triangles, La Condamine took a side trip that owed less to the pressing utilities of science and more to the mystique of the Incas. In Canar, a hillside town famous for its cornfields and "the bravery of its ancient inhabitants," according to Ulloa, the earth measurers saw storm clouds approaching and made camp at a doctor's home. La Condamine proposed to Bouguer that they wait out the gray weather with a trip "to go see at two leagues east of Canar the ruins of an ancient fortress from the time of the Incas, near which I had passed on my voyage to Lima in 1737, but which I was too pressed to examine."

Over several days, an excited La Condamine sketched the layout of the ruins in what remained, until late this century, the most accurate description of Ecuador's most important Inca site. Ingapirca (meaning "Inca wall") is an impressive mortarless stone ellipse--a rare shape in Incan architecture--surrounded by a complex of smaller buildings. Archaeologists still call the exterior structures, apparently a convent, "La Condamine" in his honor, and plaques there call him "Carlos Mario."

What La Condamine took for a fortress is now thought to be a temple used for ceremonial and calendrical functions since long before the Incas. The Canari, whom the Inca conquered, likely made astrological observations from the mountaintop as early as 400 A.D. For over two hundred years before the Incan conquest, Ingapirca was the Canaris' main religious center.

After more than three years, missteps, and frustrating delays, the Geodesic Expedition approached its final measurements in the colonial city of Cuenca. On August 23, 1739, La Condamine recorded, "we all gathered in that city, very busy, all of us, with preparations of astronomical observations that should complete our mission. After two years spent in the mountains leading the life that I've described, we started to enjoy some rest, when the most unforeseen event put us all in the greatest danger."

They entered Cuenca exhausted and anxious. They had received bad news: The expedition to Lapland had already finished and answered the question of the earth's shape: Newton was vindicated. Still, the equatorial measurements could yet prove useful. And the studies of South America's flora and fauna, originally of secondary importance, were gaining new significance.

Along Cuenca's skyline, a long string of church spires, blue and ochre, rests on a sea of rooftops. The straight, gray cobblestone streets made a great impression on Ulloa after the Andes' tortuous paths. Stone steps lead down to the banks of the Tamebamba River.

At the end of August Cuenca held a fiesta that lasted four days--a spectacle in which Cuencanos impressed the Europeans with their fearlessness at being thrown into the air by angry bulls. One day La Condamine went to the Plaza de San Sebastian to watch the spectacle, already well along. He saw Seniergues, "seated peacefully in one of the loges." Seniergues had offered his medical services widely and had become enmeshed in local squabbles. In particular, he presumed to arbitrate a dispute between the family of young Manuela Quesada and her fiance, Diego de Leon. De Leon accused the doctor of having designs on the girl, which enraged the older man (though some sources suggest he was indeed her lover). After that the Grand Vicar of Cuenca fulminated against all the outsiders in his sermons, and the atmosphere grew tense. When La Condamine saw the doctor in the loge with Manuela and her father, he should have predicted trouble. The master of ceremonies, a friend of de Leon, hurled an insult at the doctor. In the heated exchange that followed, the bullfight was canceled.

"We arrived almost at the same moment that Seniergues descended from the loge," La Condamine recalled later. He watched in horror as Seniergues was surrounded and stabbed by a mob, which then turned against the other foreigners. "My door was besieged by a seditious group, which the Jesuit father and his companion [of a nearby monastery] did well to contain," wrote La Condamine. "I had the wounded man carried home to my bed, where he died four days later."

The rest of the expedition holed up in the monastery--perhaps the old monastery on the south side of Cuenca's Plaza de San Sebastian that is now the Museo de Arte Moderno, with red and yellow flowering plants in the courtyards. To add to the disaster, the team's botanical collection, painstakingly assembled over the years by botanist Joseph de Jussieu, was destroyed by a careless servant. Jussieu was driven mad by the loss. La Condamine, obsessed with bringing Seniergues's killers to justice, repeatedly demanded investigations at the highest levels, to no avail. Maldonado finally persuaded him to abandon his quest for vengeful justice in unfamiliar terrain.

The explorers were badly shaken. Yet there remained, after the final triangulation from Cuenca's cathedral tower, the work of determining the exact latitude of the measured arc's endpoints. That meant another trip north to Yaruqui for astronomical bearings. Godin broke with the group and continued his calculations alone. Bouguer found a small error, and in correcting it, set off another long dispute. In 1743, each of the three French scientists finally departed for Europe, separately.

La Condamine chose one more adventure for his return voyage: With Maldonado, he would make the long and dangerous journey down the full length of the Amazon, the first scientific exploration of that route. Along the way they noted how Amazonians used curare as poison, how they tapped an amazing latex from rubber trees, and how they stunned fish by sprinkling a plant-based powder on a stream's surface, as well as other ethnographic details.

In Paris, they were celebrated like homecoming astronauts and hailed by the scientific academies throughout Europe. (By contrast, Ulloa and Juan returned to a frosty reception in Madrid, where a new regime ruled in the wake of Philip's death in 1746. Only after much skepticism did the government publish the officers' report, A Journey to South America, the first account of the New World since the sixteenth century.) Their calculations confirmed what the Lapland expedition had already learned. But more than defining the earth's shape, the South American expedition had expanded the vistas on all that the earth held, for good and bad.

The experience left Jussieu insane. For Maldonado, it meant new tools for South America. In Paris he assembled, according to La Condamine, "two cases filled with designs and models of machines, different types of instruments, that he intended to take to his homeland, where he resolved to introduce the taste for science and the arts; and no one was more capable than he to succeed." But in 1748, on a trip to London for his election to the Royal Society, the man from Riobamba succumbed to measles. He died before turning forty. Bouguer died in 1758, and Godin followed two years later. Several members of the expedition, including Godin's cousin Jean, remained in South America and married women there. Ulloa later became governor of the Louisiana territory.

La Condamine struggled on, deaf and weakened from his travels but still curious, still an engaging raconteur. He campaigned for a standard measurement of length, which was ultimately adopted after his death. He wrote passionately for the cause of inoculation, and experimented with rubber, curare, and quinine. His journal, describing Amazonian knowledge of plants and animals and mountains higher than the Pyrenees (as well as some exaggerations about emeralds), spurred young science adventurers like Alexander von Humboldt to make explorations of their own. He toured the academies of London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Bologna, receiving their homage.

The six busts around the circle in Parque Alameda seem barely able to keep silent. Bouguer casts a wary, sidelong glance. La Condamine's wigged head wears an absurd smile, lips pursed like someone about to pour forth on the nature of Ecuador's oil exploration, the use of geographic information systems, and the decline of amphibians. Perhaps the last words here, however, should be the first words of Ulloa's report of the expedition:

The heart of man is naturally inclined to attempt things, the advantages of which appear to increase in proportion to the difficulties that attend them.... The glory inseparable from arduous enterprises is a powerful incentive, which raises the mind above itself; the hope of advantages determines the will, diminishes dangers, alleviates hardships, and levels obstacles which otherwise would appear insurmountable.

David Taylor lives outside Washington, D.C., and writes about culture and the environment. He is grateful to Philippe Moulier and Nicole Peruyera for help with translation. The editors appreciate the assistance of the Columbus Memorial Library in the reproduction of the drawings from La Condamine's Relation abregee d'un voyage fait dans l'interieur de l'Amerique Meridionale.