Pedro Vicente Maldonado (c. 1704-1748)

A man born in Riobamba who opened at his own cost, and after a hundred and twenty years of failed royal orders, the road from Quito to the navigable Esmeraldas river; who is met on that coast in a memoir read to the Paris Academy in 1744; who descended the Amazon with La Condamine in 1743; and who died in London in November 1748 days after being received into the Royal Society, leaving two crates of machine models in Paris that he meant to carry home.