What must it be like to not have heard from a beloved husband for twenty years, to have lost three children to yellow fever, to set out on a perilous journey across the Andes and through an avenue of surging waterfalls that even Pizarro struggled with and to wander lost in the deep tropical forest for weeks after losing all her party including members of her family?
This is what happened to Madame Isabella Godin who left Cajabamba near Riobamba in Ecuador in 1769 to attempt to reach her French husband Jean in French Guiana.
Isabella obtained the grand accolade of the first known woman to travel down the length of the Amazon River but it came at great emotional and personal cost to her and she lived out the rest of her life with Jean in Saint-Amand Montrond in central France, by then a white haired and broken lady.
In September 2007 I flew to Quito in Ecuador after a year’s preparation to make the same journey as Isabella Godin and to see for myself why her journey turned into a nightmare. I had already written a screenplay of her story and now I intended to make a documentary.
Old Quito and Saquisili
Old Quito
I took with me a shooting kit consisting of a Sony ZI HD camera, five, 4 – hour batteries, a tripod, boom and 20 hours of tape, this meant that I had to travel light and for the next five weeks while I was away I managed on a small wardrobe and the basic necessities; it was a salutary experience!
Old Quito
I wanted to get a feel for the world of Isabella Godin and took a particular interest in the 18th century architecture in Old Quito which is a UNESCO World Heritage Trust site where pastel- coloured houses and ornate churches line a myriad of steep and narrow streets.
Saquisili
This is a small and important market town with a weekly market that is famous throughout Ecuador where the streets become packed with mostly indigenous people in traditional costume.
Old Quito
Cajabamba to Riobamba
After my travelling companions Julia and Heather arrived from England to join me on the expedition we headed south to Cajabamba which was where Isabella set off from her home there on October 1st 1769. We found the spot where her house had been was now the site of a primary school and a bust of her looked out over the Andes.
Isabella Godin was a refined lady whose family belonged to colonial Peru’s upper class and she was only 13 when she married Jean Godin in 1741 who was a junior member of the French expedition sent to take measurements from the equator to attempt to determine the exact shape of the world.
Jean Godin decided to follow in the footsteps of La Condamine, the leader of the French mapmaking expedition, down the Amazon River to secure a route back to France; this made him one of the first to ever make the journey. He intended to return for Isabella and the children in about two years but he never did because he couldn’t obtain a ship that could travel upstream or obtain permission from the Portuguese and Spanish authorities who controlled the territory.
Filming in the hills near Isabella’s house in Cajabamba with our university student translators and a local family
Filming in the hills near Isabella’s house in Cajabamba with our university student translators and a local family
Instead he wrote letters from French Guiana requesting a galliot with enough oarsmen to make the 3000 mile journey and after almost 16 years of letter writing a ship finally sailed into the harbour at Cayenne with instructions from the King of Portugal to collect the Frenchman’s wife.
Unfortunately Jean had also written letters that compromised him and he became suspicious and wouldn’t board the ship. The captain waited a year and then left without him; anchoring at Iquitos, the furthest most point that a ship can reach on the River Amazon.
It took Isabella four years to depart for the awaiting ship, by then her children had all died and she felt that it would be worth the dangerous journey for the chance to be repatriated with her husband.
We boarded a bus that followed the Chambo River to Riobamba, Isabella took this route carried on a palaquin by 31 mountain Indians with two brothers, three servant girls, her freed slave and three strange Frenchmen who turned up and asked to join her party.
Riobamba to Banos
Julia, Jacki, Magdalena Ortiz and Heather with Isabella’s painting at the Isabella Godin School in Riobamba
While we were still on the same route as Isabella we passed through Riobamba and visited the school named after her.
The staff and students were rather shocked at a female film crew turning up on route of the journey of their school’s namesake. They were so interested that they gave us all the help and I would like to thank the senior management at the school very much for this.
In return for their kindness I asked if I could teach a drama lesson, a subject that is absent on the Ecuadorian school curriculum and the students absolutely loved it. I would go back tomorrow and teach them again if I could. Luckily I had taken my never-fails drama lesson music ‘Witch Doctor’ by Cartoons.
Ecuadorian students enjoy a drama lesson
The statue of Isabella in the school grounds
students during a break
Before leaving Riobamba I managed to track down the historian Carlos Ortiz Arellano who wrote a biography of Isabella called ‘Una Histoire de Amor’ published in 2000. It was lovely to meet him but unfortunately I didn’t find out anything I didn’t already know about her.
I had already visited the Instituto Santiago de Quito English-speaking Intercultural Activity evening on my visit to Riobamba when I first arrived in Ecuador, I was invited back to give a talk on Isabella Godin who surprisingly, the students or staff at the University had never heard of; I understand that her story is now an integral part of their English programme.
We were now travelling through the AVENUE OF THE VOLCANOES in the Andes by local bus and stopped to film within the shadow of Mount Chimborazo shown in these photos. The tracks we followed were used by the local indigenous people and would be little changed since Isabella’s days.
Avenue of the Volcanoes
Avenue of the Volcanoes
Avenue of the Volcanoes
Avenue of the Volcanoes
Filming on the slopes of the active volcano Mount Tungarahua
The 65 miles between Banos and Canelos through the Avenue of the Waterfalls that flow into the River Pastaza and onto the Amazon was a horrible part of the journey for Isabella. It rained all the time and they had no chance to get dry. They were following the River Pastaza by now and their Indians had to cross rivers over wet logs or stop and make bridges themselves and three miles out of Banos they had to pass between two cliffs that were 40’ apart. We travelled in a pick- up truck with Luis Hernandez who had coordinated the next part of the journey for us, we were very lucky to have Luis as he is an ex General with the Ecuadorian army and is extremely experienced in this type of jungle travel; to add to the excitement the votes were being counted in the general elections and from a weak signalled mobile in the jungle Luis heard the news that he been elected to Congress.
Luis sharing sugar cane
Puyo to Canelos
It rained all night in Puyo so when we set off for Canelos for the next leg of our journey we were feeling sympathy with Isabella, who of course would not have had waterproofs or a dry vehicle like us.
Following the Pastaza River and the active Mount Sangay
The Tragedy at Canelos
This is what Isabella and her party should have had waiting at Canelos: three fully laden 40’ dugout canoe with enough forest Indian boatmen and provisions to take her and her party safely to Iquitos to the waiting ship. Instead when they arrived on October 12th 1769 they found the village totally abandoned and burning, unfortunately Isabella’s advance party which included her father, had infected the locals with smallpox ; their own mountain Indians also dropped everything and fled.
Canelos to Sarayacu
Our dugout canoe with eleven people on board moved swiftly down the flooded Upper Bobonaza and we were advised to hang onto balsa wood logs to act as life jackets. I found it terribly exciting as it had been over ten years since I had first discovered her story and now I was actually reliving her journey. The further we went the more likely that it was that we were the first women travellers to travel on the Bobonaza since her.
Waiting to load up
Isabella and her party spent two weeks in Canelos waiting for a dugout canoe to be built by two healthy Indians that she found, they had one boat instead of three so many of her fabulous possessions were left behind including beautiful dresses, pewter and pottery. The two Indians were kind to them and piloted the boat through rough water and built them a shelter and lit a fire in the evening when they camped, but she had paid them in advance and in the area where Sarayacu is today the men disappeared into the jungle and they were, once more, on their own without the skills of survival or even being able to swim to help them.
Sarayacu village including the Shaman
Waiting to load up
Packing up
Ingaro (with the long
hair) and Clever the boatman building a fire for the evening meal on the sandbar
Sarayacu to Andaos
The people of Sarayacu village were lovely to us and as a thank you I have since raised over £200 which is being used to provide materials for the primary school pictured above.
We left in the rain and moved further away from civilisation and spent our first night on a sandbar, perhaps the second night the sandbar we were camped on was Laguna Ispingococha where Isabella’s party perished.
Things went horribly wrong for Isabella’s party here, they tried to leave on the canoe with a sick Indian that they found as the boatman but he drowned and then they all fell in with their belongings, none of them could swim and they dragged themselves ashore.
Two of the strange Frenchmen offered to go on ahead with the canoe and get help and they left without the rest of the party thinking about what they were doing. They never returned and Isabella’s sad party began to die in mid December after one final attempt to escape from the sandbar on a raft which capsized almost straight away.
I spoke to Ingaro, the Shaman’s son who accompanied us all the way to Kapawi from Sarayacu a great deal about how Isabella and her party could have survived. Ingaro showed me many foods they could have collected from the forest and we watched our boatmen fish with bare hands. All they needed was a machete to create firewood and protect themselves and a fire and ways to collect water; but Isabella’s party didn’t appear to try.
They all died by drowning, wandering delirious into the forest, hunger, disease, thirst and possibly at the hand of Jibaro Indians.
What happened to Isabella?
Isabella survived, she plunged into the jungle and wandered semi naked for weeks, nobody is quite sure of the details but she seems to have appeared to some Quechuan Indians in mid January and as she spoke to them in their own language they looked after her and took her to Andaos to recover.
Ingaro and our trusted team of boatmen
Andaos
New Andaos
After being greeted on board the ship that had been waiting for her for nearly five years and seeing her father again, who incidentally had presumed she was dead, they set sail down the Amazon and on July 18th 1770 Jsabella was reunited with her husband who sailed out to meet her at the mouth of the great river.
We boarded a light aircraft in Kapawi and arrived back in Puyo in an hour.
I was glad to have had the opportunity to travel in Isabella Godin’s footsteps and would like to thank all the wonderful people that made it possible.
For more information about the story of Isabela Godin I recommend:
The Mapmaker’s Wife by Robert Whitaker published by Bantam Books The Lost Lady of the Amazon by Anthony Smith published by Constable Books For information on screenplay ‘Whispers on the Wind’ about Isabella’s journey please contact info@pinkgingerfilms.com For details of future public lectures or if you would like Jacki to present her expedition as a lecture for you please contact at above address.
Copies of the 52 min documentary are available, please contact us to order your own copy.
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A FILM MAKER FOR AN EXPEDITION?
PLEASE CONTACT PINK GINGER FILMS
Jacki is an expedition filmmaker trained in camera, lighting and sound techniques at the Documentary Filmmaker’s Group in London and FCP editing at Soho Editors London and has trained with legendary BBC camera man Jeremy Humphries. She is also a qualified teacher with a master’s degree and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Thank you to Daniel Jones, dancer with the English National Ballet for the inspiration to film this expedition.
Crinolines down the Amazon
What must it be like to not have heard from a beloved husband for twenty years, to have lost three children to yellow fever, to set out on a perilous journey across the Andes and through an avenue of surging waterfalls that even Pizarro struggled with and to wander lost in the deep tropical forest for weeks after losing all her party including members of her family?
This is what happened to Madame Isabella Godin who left Cajabamba near Riobamba in Ecuador in 1769 to attempt to reach her French husband Jean in French Guiana.
Isabella obtained the grand accolade of the first known woman to travel down the length of the Amazon River but it came at great emotional and personal cost to her and she lived out the rest of her life with Jean in Saint-Amand Montrond in central France, by then a white haired and broken lady.
Old Quito and Saquisili
I took with me a shooting kit consisting of a Sony ZI HD camera, five, 4 – hour batteries, a tripod, boom and 20 hours of tape, this meant that I had to travel light and for the next five weeks while I was away I managed on a small wardrobe and the basic necessities; it was a salutary experience!
I wanted to get a feel for the world of Isabella Godin and took a particular interest in the 18th century architecture in Old Quito which is a UNESCO World Heritage Trust site where pastel- coloured houses and ornate churches line a myriad of steep and narrow streets.
Saquisili
This is a small and important market town with a weekly market that is famous throughout Ecuador where the streets become packed with mostly indigenous people in traditional costume.
Cajabamba to Riobamba
After my travelling companions Julia and Heather arrived from England to join me on the expedition we headed south to Cajabamba which was where Isabella set off from her home there on October 1st 1769. We found the spot where her house had been was now the site of a primary school and a bust of her looked out over the Andes.
Isabella Godin was a refined lady whose family belonged to colonial Peru’s upper class and she was only 13 when she married Jean Godin in 1741 who was a junior member of the French expedition sent to take measurements from the equator to attempt to determine the exact shape of the world.
Jean Godin decided to follow in the footsteps of La Condamine, the leader of the French mapmaking expedition, down the Amazon River to secure a route back to France; this made him one of the first to ever make the journey. He intended to return for Isabella and the children in about two years but he never did because he couldn’t obtain a ship that could travel upstream or obtain permission from the Portuguese and Spanish authorities who controlled the territory.
Instead he wrote letters from French Guiana requesting a galliot with enough oarsmen to make the 3000 mile journey and after almost 16 years of letter writing a ship finally sailed into the harbour at Cayenne with instructions from the King of Portugal to collect the Frenchman’s wife.
Unfortunately Jean had also written letters that compromised him and he became suspicious and wouldn’t board the ship. The captain waited a year and then left without him; anchoring at Iquitos, the furthest most point that a ship can reach on the River Amazon.
It took Isabella four years to depart for the awaiting ship, by then her children had all died and she felt that it would be worth the dangerous journey for the chance to be repatriated with her husband.
We boarded a bus that followed the Chambo River to Riobamba, Isabella took this route carried on a palaquin by 31 mountain Indians with two brothers, three servant girls, her freed slave and three strange Frenchmen who turned up and asked to join her party.
Riobamba to Banos
While we were still on the same route as Isabella we passed through Riobamba and visited the school named after her.
The staff and students were rather shocked at a female film crew turning up on route of the journey of their school’s namesake. They were so interested that they gave us all the help and I would like to thank the senior management at the school very much for this.
In return for their kindness I asked if I could teach a drama lesson, a subject that is absent on the Ecuadorian school curriculum and the students absolutely loved it. I would go back tomorrow and teach them again if I could. Luckily I had taken my never-fails drama lesson music ‘Witch Doctor’ by Cartoons.
Before leaving Riobamba I managed to track down the historian Carlos Ortiz Arellano who wrote a biography of Isabella called ‘Una Histoire de Amor’ published in 2000. It was lovely to meet him but unfortunately I didn’t find out anything I didn’t already know about her.
I had already visited the Instituto Santiago de Quito English-speaking Intercultural Activity evening on my visit to Riobamba when I first arrived in Ecuador, I was invited back to give a talk on Isabella Godin who surprisingly, the students or staff at the University had never heard of; I understand that her story is now an integral part of their English programme.
We were now travelling through the AVENUE OF THE VOLCANOES in the Andes by local bus and stopped to film within the shadow of Mount Chimborazo shown in these photos. The tracks we followed were used by the local indigenous people and would be little changed since Isabella’s days.
Avenue of the Volcanoes
The 65 miles between Banos and Canelos through the Avenue of the Waterfalls that flow into the River Pastaza and onto the Amazon was a horrible part of the journey for Isabella. It rained all the time and they had no chance to get dry. They were following the River Pastaza by now and their Indians had to cross rivers over wet logs or stop and make bridges themselves and three miles out of Banos they had to pass between two cliffs that were 40’ apart. We travelled in a pick- up truck with Luis Hernandez who had coordinated the next part of the journey for us, we were very lucky to have Luis as he is an ex General with the Ecuadorian army and is extremely experienced in this type of jungle travel; to add to the excitement the votes were being counted in the general elections and from a weak signalled mobile in the jungle Luis heard the news that he been elected to Congress.
Puyo to Canelos
It rained all night in Puyo so when we set off for Canelos for the next leg of our journey we were feeling sympathy with Isabella, who of course would not have had waterproofs or a dry vehicle like us.
The Tragedy at Canelos
This is what Isabella and her party should have had waiting at Canelos: three fully laden 40’ dugout canoe with enough forest Indian boatmen and provisions to take her and her party safely to Iquitos to the waiting ship. Instead when they arrived on October 12th 1769 they found the village totally abandoned and burning, unfortunately Isabella’s advance party which included her father, had infected the locals with smallpox ; their own mountain Indians also dropped everything and fled.
Canelos to Sarayacu
Our dugout canoe with eleven people on board moved swiftly down the flooded Upper Bobonaza and we were advised to hang onto balsa wood logs to act as life jackets. I found it terribly exciting as it had been over ten years since I had first discovered her story and now I was actually reliving her journey. The further we went the more likely that it was that we were the first women travellers to travel on the Bobonaza since her.
Isabella and her party spent two weeks in Canelos waiting for a dugout canoe to be built by two healthy Indians that she found, they had one boat instead of three so many of her fabulous possessions were left behind including beautiful dresses, pewter and pottery. The two Indians were kind to them and piloted the boat through rough water and built them a shelter and lit a fire in the evening when they camped, but she had paid them in advance and in the area where Sarayacu is today the men disappeared into the jungle and they were, once more, on their own without the skills of survival or even being able to swim to help them.
hair) and Clever the boatman building a fire for the evening meal on the sandbar
Sarayacu to Andaos
The people of Sarayacu village were lovely to us and as a thank you I have since raised over £200 which is being used to provide materials for the primary school pictured above.
We left in the rain and moved further away from civilisation and spent our first night on a sandbar, perhaps the second night the sandbar we were camped on was Laguna Ispingococha where Isabella’s party perished.
Things went horribly wrong for Isabella’s party here, they tried to leave on the canoe with a sick Indian that they found as the boatman but he drowned and then they all fell in with their belongings, none of them could swim and they dragged themselves ashore.
Two of the strange Frenchmen offered to go on ahead with the canoe and get help and they left without the rest of the party thinking about what they were doing. They never returned and Isabella’s sad party began to die in mid December after one final attempt to escape from the sandbar on a raft which capsized almost straight away.
I spoke to Ingaro, the Shaman’s son who accompanied us all the way to Kapawi from Sarayacu a great deal about how Isabella and her party could have survived. Ingaro showed me many foods they could have collected from the forest and we watched our boatmen fish with bare hands. All they needed was a machete to create firewood and protect themselves and a fire and ways to collect water; but Isabella’s party didn’t appear to try.
They all died by drowning, wandering delirious into the forest, hunger, disease, thirst and possibly at the hand of Jibaro Indians.
What happened to Isabella?
Isabella survived, she plunged into the jungle and wandered semi naked for weeks, nobody is quite sure of the details but she seems to have appeared to some Quechuan Indians in mid January and as she spoke to them in their own language they looked after her and took her to Andaos to recover.
After being greeted on board the ship that had been waiting for her for nearly five years and seeing her father again, who incidentally had presumed she was dead, they set sail down the Amazon and on July 18th 1770 Jsabella was reunited with her husband who sailed out to meet her at the mouth of the great river.
We boarded a light aircraft in Kapawi and arrived back in Puyo in an hour.
I was glad to have had the opportunity to travel in Isabella Godin’s footsteps and would like to thank all the wonderful people that made it possible.
For more information about the story of Isabela Godin I recommend:
The Mapmaker’s Wife by Robert Whitaker published by Bantam Books The Lost Lady of the Amazon by Anthony Smith published by Constable Books For information on screenplay ‘Whispers on the Wind’ about Isabella’s journey please contact info@pinkgingerfilms.com For details of future public lectures or if you would like Jacki to present her expedition as a lecture for you please contact at above address.
Copies of the 52 min documentary are available, please contact us to order your own copy.
ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A FILM MAKER FOR AN EXPEDITION?
PLEASE CONTACT PINK GINGER FILMS
Jacki is an expedition filmmaker trained in camera, lighting and sound techniques at the Documentary Filmmaker’s Group in London and FCP editing at Soho Editors London and has trained with legendary BBC camera man Jeremy Humphries. She is also a qualified teacher with a master’s degree and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Thank you to Daniel Jones, dancer with the English National Ballet for the inspiration to film this expedition.