By Lisa O’Donnell, Journal Reporter

THOMASVILLE - In the winter of 1769, Isabel Godin lay dying on a forest floor near the Bobonaza River in colonial Peru. The corpses of her two brothers and nephew rotted next to her. Her clothes hung in tatters. Bug bites covered her face.  Maggot burrowed under her skin.
     Dry lumps formed in her throat, causing her to gasp for breath.
   Godin was lost in the middle of what is now the Ecuadorian rain forest - a massive expanse of jungle thick with jaguars, venomous snakes, cannibals, extreme changes in weather and stinging, swarming insects.
     As she withered in the jungle, an inner voice implored her to get up.  She staggered to her feet and blazed a path through the rain forest with a machete.  More than a week later, natives canoeing the Bobonaza discovered her and nursed her back to health.
     Godin then traveled the length of the Amazon River in a dugout canoe, an, within months, was reunited with her husband, whom she had not seen in 20 years.
     Word of Godin’s remarkable 3,000-mile journey created a sensation in Europe at the time.  Today, it has largely been forgotten. 
     In his new book, The Mapmaker’s Wife, writer Robert Whitaker tells the story of the Godins. His vivid account of Isabel Godin’s journey was made possible with the help of Cary and Grace Kanoy of Thomasville. The Kanoys own Core Expeditions, an adventure-travel company they run from their home.  The company specializes in trips to Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.
     Whitaker’s trip would take them to a part of Ecuador they had never explored.
     “This trip was in an area where tourists don’t go,” Cary Kanoy said. “We saw incredible potential.”

Map-making mission
     Isabel Godin was a refined woman of Spanish-French descent whose family belonged to colonial Peru’s upper class.
     She was 13 years old when she married Jean Godin in 1741.  Jean Godin was part of a French mapmaking team that arrived in Peru in 1735. Its mission was to take measurements from the equator to help determine the exact shape of the world.
     The Godins settled in what is today Cajabamba, a town in the Andes highlands.
     In 1749, Jean Godin decided that he was ready to return to France with his wife and new child. But he was not sure of the best route back to France.  His plan was to travel the length of the Amazon River to French Guiana, then return for Isabel and their child. He estimated that the journey would take two years.
     Jean Godin arrived in French Guiana a year after leaving Isabel. Attempts to return to Cajabamba to retrieve his family were thwarted by the Portuguese and Spanish governments, which controlled the territories he needed to pass through.
   Godin settled in French Guiana and continued to ask for permission to go back to get his family.
     Twenty years later, at the age of 41 Isabel Godin decided to make the journey on her own.  Her only child had died of small pox, never having known her father.  In Godin’s sheltered life, she had never learned to swim, and she rarely ventured outside.
     Her traveling party included 31 natives who carried supplies and such items as dishes, jewelry, lace underwear and gold-buckled shoes in reed baskets. Several native porters carried her aloft in a chair.

     Disaster struck within a few weeks of setting out. The natives fled.  The Bobonaza River, which feeds into a tributary of the Amazon, was swift-flowing in those days. When a guide drowned, she refused to get back into the boat. 
     The party split up. One group decided to float upriver in a dugout canoe to get help. When that group did not return soon enough, Godin, her brothers and a nephew decided to walk through the jungle to find help, only to discover the bones of the young girls and the slave--all victims of a jaguar or cannibal attack.
     Almost four years after they reunited, Isabel and Jean Godin moved to France.  Jean Godin died in 1792 and Isabel died six months later.
     Today a small, decaying statue of Isabel Godin stands in Cajabamba.

A new expedition
     In the summer of 2002, Cary and Grace Kanoy received an e-mail asking whether they would be interested in leading an expedition through a remote region of Ecuador.
     The e-mail sender was Whitaker, a nationally acclaimed journalist and author who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Price, one of journalism’s highest prizes.
     Whitaker was researching a book he was writing about Isabel Godin and needed a guide to help him retrace the most harrowing leg of Godin’s journey--roughly 350-mile section stretching from the Andes town of Cajabamba down the Bobonaza and into the Peruvian village of Santo Tomas de Andoas. 

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 “I needed to see the river in order to describe it, to sort of experience the terrain,” Whitaker said. “As I tried to describe what it was like for Isabel to go down the river, I needed to understand what environment she was in, what the landscape was like, what the bugs were like. What were the things you would see. Some of that had been described in some of the writing, but it needed to be fleshed out. I couldn’t tell the story unless I made the journey.  It was utterly critical to doing the book.”
     Though Whitaker lived in Ecuador for a few years and is fluent in Spanish, this was not a trip that he could undertake alone. He needed and adventurous and resourceful guide service.
     The Kanoys fit the bill.  They also were the only guide company willing to make the trip.
     Whitaker sent his e-mail to about eight guide companies specializing in Ecuador.  Just two responded. Once the other guide service learned more about Whitaker’s plans, it dropped out.
     The Kanoys were intrigued.  This was a chance to scout a new section of Ecuador and give their company a boost in the competitive world of adventure travel.
     First, they had to convince whitaker that they could handle this difficult assignment.
     More that 200 years after Godin’s journey, the landscape along the Bobonaza remains harsh and largely uninhabited. Natives still make the dense jungle their home. But oil companies have attempted to bully their way on their land for exploration, making the natives suspicious of outsiders.
     Grace Kanoy researched Godin’s trip and began contacting people familiar with this region of Ecuador.

     Cajabamba, the starting point of Godin’s journey is about 110 miles south of Quito the capital.
     “ I did a mass search on that region, and from there, I cold-called people and asked; ‘What do you know?’” Grace Kanoy said. “It’s one thing to get a topographical map, but you have no idea.  The Amazon is not a predictable place.”
     She knew that the Bobonaza was navigable during certain times of the year.  At other times, it could be too shallow or rise to dangerous levels from sudden rain.  But it was difficult making contact with the local people they would need to help them get down the river. People in the region do have daily access to telephones and e-mail.
     The Kanoys kept in touch with Whitaker and relayed to him what they had learned. He was impressed with their energy and understanding of the region, and hired them for the job.
     The Kanoys assembled a 15-day itinerary that began on Oct. 1, 2002, 233 years from the day that Godin began her journey. Cary Kanoy’s goal was to give Whitaker a change to see some of the same things that Godin would have seen on her trip.

Assembling a team
     Cary Kanoy arrived early and used his extensive contact to round up a team to float down the Bobonaza.
     He enlisted the support of Ricardo Alzamora, a longtime friend who lives in Ecuador, Luis Hernandez, a former colonel in the Ecuadorian army, and Tito Machoa and Marlon Santi, who are from the traditional village of Sarayacu on the upper part of the river.

     Hernandez was familiar with this part of Ecuador, and used his considerable influence to help guide the party past the military posts along the river.
     Machoa and Santi navigated the group’s 25 foot dugout canoe down the river. The two men are Kichwa, native group that lives in Saraycu. They were familiar with the river and helped explain the expedition’s intent to other native groups along the river.
     “This is a tense area with a lot of things going on with the government and military and the rain forest natives,” Kanoy said. “You need an invitation to get in.”
     Kanoy and Whitaker covered the first part of Godin’s journey on mountain bikes.  A nearby mountain was spitting volcanic ash, which covered the road. They pedaled over small footbridges that spanned deep gullies.
     In Canelos, Kanoy and Whitaker met the rest of their traveling party, loaded up the canoe with supplies, and headed down the Bobonaza.
     One guide stood in front of the canoe with a pole and watched for logs.  A second guide operated a motor on the back of the boat. Along the way, Whitaker told stories about Godin. 
     Down river, the traveling party explained their intentions to a native group’s tribal council.   
     They were later treated to a meal that included rain forest deer and a fermented drink, which they consumed in great quantities.
     Like Godin, they camped along beaches. At one point, they considered camping near a lagoon so they could experience how Godin had slept in such a swampy area. After nightfall, the bugs came out in hordes and the campers fled to the riverbank, where the air moves freely.

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