The Mapmaker's Wife : A True Tale of Love, Murder and Survival in the Amazon

In the first part of the 18th century, the French National Academy of Sciences sent a group of distinguished scientists on a daring, decade-long expedition into the heart of South America in a bid to win the race to measure the Earth. Like Lewis and Clarke's exploration of the American west, this expedition - under the leadership of 34-year-old Charles Marie de la Condamine - was to unveil the heart of a little known continent to a world hungry for knowledge, recording countless new plant and animal species and revealing the inhuman and brutal treatment of the natives at the hands of the Spanish. But it nearly ended in disaster. Scaling the 16,000-foot Peruvian Andes, the scientists faced the depravations and dangers of the rain forest - wild cats, insects, vampire bats - and barely completed their mission. Some went mad, others succumbed to smallpox, one was stoned to death by locals and another was killed in a bullfight. And one - the youngest, Jean Godin - fell in love with a beautiful local girl, Isabel Grameson, and married her. As the expedition neared its end, so Godin wanted to bring his young family back to France. He went ahead alone, again scaling the Andes and travellin

Early 18th century: A decade-long expedition to South America is launched by a team of French scientists racing to prove the circumference of the earth and to reveal the mysteries of a little-known continent to a world hungry for discovery and knowledge. From this extraordinary journey arose an unlikely love between one scientist and a beautiful Peruvian noblewoman. Victims of a tangled web of international politics, Jean Godin and Isabel Grameson's destiny would ultimately unfold in the Amazon's unforgiving jungles, and it would be Isabel's quest to reunite with Jean after a calamitous twenty-year separation that would capture the imagination of all of Enlightenment Era Europe. A remarkable testament to human endurance, female resoursefulness and enduring love, Isabel Gremeson's survival remains unprecedented in the annals of Amazon exploration.