Isabela Godin des Odonais
The sole survivor of a jungle trek, she emerged from the Amazon after twenty years apart from her husband
Isabela Gramesón was born into a wealthy family in Riobamba, then part of the Viceroyalty of Peru and now in Ecuador, and in 1741 she married Jean Godin des Odonais, a French assistant to a scientific expedition measuring the shape of the Earth near the equator. When the expedition finished its work, Jean travelled toward French Guiana to arrange the family's passage home, but colonial border disputes between Spain and Portugal trapped him there, unable to obtain permission to return for his wife. Two decades passed.
By 1769 Jean had arranged a boat to meet Isabela partway down the Amazon, and she set out from Ecuador with her brothers, a doctor and several servants to make the journey to him. The group's guides deserted after a smallpox outbreak killed several porters, and the party pressed on without them into increasingly difficult river country. One by one, from illness, drowning and exhaustion, every member of the expedition died, including all three of her brothers.
Isabela survived alone in the forest for around nine days with no food, before being found, barely alive, by indigenous river travellers who fed and sheltered her and guided her onward. She eventually reached a mission settlement and, months later, was reunited with Jean in French Guiana after twenty years apart. They lived out their remaining years together in France, where her account of the ordeal became widely read.