The Lost Lady of Amazon: The Story of Isabela Godin and Her Epic Journey
by Anthony Smith
Constable £16.99, pp189

In an age when people think nothing of hopping on a plane for a long weekend in Rio de Janeiro and even Saga Holidays is running river cruises up the Amazon, it is perhaps difficult to grasp the extent of the obstacles and dangers facing the earliest travellers to the South American continent. But if ever a story served to put that three-hour delay at Heathrow into perspective, the story of Isabela and Jean Godin is it.

Travelling with a French scientific expedition to Peru in 1735, Jean Godin fell in love with and married 13-year-old Isabela, daughter of the local Spanish governor. After several years of married life, Godin, homesick for his native France, set off to find a safe route across the continent to French Guiana from where he planned to secure a passage back to France for his young family.

However, on arrival in Guiana after a daring river trip down the Amazon, Godin was mortified to discover that neither the Spanish nor Portuguese authorities would grant him permission to travel back up the river to collect his wife and family. Stranded on the wrong side of the continent, he pestered the authorities relentlessly until after an incredible 21 years, the King of Portugal sent a boat to bring Godin's wife and family downriver to meet him.

By the time Isabela enters the story, she is no longer the dark-eyed girl her husband left behind, but a middle-aged woman who has lost her three children to smallpox. Where Godin's river journey was uneventful, Isabela's is beset by mishaps from the start. One by one the 42 members of her travelling party desert her or succumb to sickness or starvation until eventually Isabela is left alone without food or shelter in the rainforest where she is found weeks later, wandering naked and half-mad, by a party of Indians.

The tale has all the makings of a good yarn, with treacherous Frenchmen, brave Indians, capsized boats, disease and madness all set against the backdrop of 'the world's most dreaded jungle'. Mix in the romantic element of a devoted husband and wife separated by the vagaries of politics and a vast, inhospitable continent and it's small wonder that the plight of Isabela and Jean became the talk of fashionable salons in eighteenth-century Paris.

Using letters written by the luckless Godin to a friend in France, Anthony Smith has pieced together the story in impressive detail. Thus we learn that Isabela was wearing only a torn blouse and the soles of shoes cut from her dead brother's feet when the Indians found her, and that her jungle ordeal left her with a nervous tic, blotchy skin (a result of insect bites) and a melancholic air.

Smith's historic scene-setting is equally thorough, with plenty of background detail on the early explorations of the New World. Where the source material is thin - namely when Isabela is lost in the jungle - Smith allows himself to fill in the gaps with occasionally mawkish flights of fancy. But on the whole this is a gripping story - a drama with a curiously domestic feel, whose protagonist is not an intrepid explorer or gung-ho adventurer but an ordinary, middle-aged, middle-class woman thrust into an extraordinary situation.