to South America to collect measurements at
the equator to settle disagreement over the
true shape of the Earth. A second expedition
led by Pierre-Louis de Maupertuis journeyed
to Lapland in Scandinavia, in 1736 for the
same purpose.
The size of the Earth was less of a mystery
than it had been in 1492, but contention over
its shape pitted French theories that the
spherical globe flattened at the equator
against British scientist Sir Isaac Newton, who
calculated that it was flattened at the poles.
Complications with Spanish authorities and
various mishaps stalled La Condamine in
Quito until 1743, when he learned that New-
ton’s theory had been proven by data collected
by Maupertuis’s expedition. Rather than
return home to France, however, La Con-
damine instead set out on a four-month jour-
neydown the Amazon.
The naturalist, mathematician, and car-
tographer La Condamine and his colleagues
were a stark contrast to the armored troops,
shackled slaves, and livestock that had
accompanied the soldier Pizarro200 years
before. The French explorers carried scientific
instruments. They measured and sounded the
depths of the rivers they encountered in the
Amazonian basin. They observed and col-
lected specimens of plants and animals. In
1751 La Condamine published his account of
this first scientific examination of the Ama-
zon, entitled Journal du voyage fait par ordre
du roi a l’équateur( Journal of the voyage
made by order of the king at the equator).
DISCOVERY AND THE
ENLIGHTENMENT
The scientific direction in which much explo-
ration was heading in 1800 followed the most
potent century of an intellectual movement
called the Enlightenment. Although it began
several centuries earlier, the pace of the
Enlightenment increased dramatically in the
1700s. European thinkers attempted to
understand the natural world and humanity’s
role in it on the basis of reason and scientific
evidence, without appealing to religious
beliefs for explanations. In Columbus’s time,
the discovery of the Americas had been a
shock to many European religious leaders
and the national monarchs with whom they
were closely associated. Previously unknown
continents, peoples, religions, and civiliza-
tions presented a challenge to church leaders,
who had been explaining the order of the
known world solely on the basis of the Bible,
which made no mention of the New World.
Rather than shun the Americas, however,
most European leaders and theologians had
chosen to view the discovery as ripe with
opportunities for economic exploitation and
religious conversion.
Searching for treasure and religious mis-
sionary activities had certainly not ended by- Yet as Europeans became more con-
cerned with understanding the New World—
asopposed to merely emptying it of natural
resources and forcing their religion upon its
original inhabitants—the scientific revolution
accompanying the Enlightenment in the
1600s and 1700s gave explorers an increasing
array of tools for trying to make sense of the
Americas and, for that matter, anywhere else
they traveled. Broad advances were made in
geology, botany, biology, and other natural
sciences, especially after the mid-1600s.
Improved surveying instruments produced
better maps. Taxonomy and nomenclature—
the classifying of plants and animals, and
identifying each species by giving it a specific
name—were formalized by scientists for the
first time in the 1700s.
The New World in 1800 B^171