Titchener has recently become a consultant to the European Union—which has expressed its intention to limit the pigments used on Euro-tatts. However, the problem is twofold. First, there is something about tattooing that is all about not being part of a world that bureaucrats can bind up in red tape.6 Second, the onus is on the tattooists to prove the pigments are safe “and no chemist in the world will put it in writing: they are much too afraid of getting sued.” As for Caractacus, if he did have tattoos they would probably have been colored with copper pigments, or perhaps iron. Either way the European Union would probably not have approved.
WOAD AND THE MIDDLE CLASSES
It was in fact a European Union-style protectionist policy which caused the greatest problems for indigo merchants wanting to introduce their new dye into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Nobody had bargained for the intense lobbying power of the middle-class woad growers. The medieval German city of Erfurt, including its university, was built on this blue, while many of the most splendid houses in Toulouse were also constructed on the profits from woad. The outside of Amiens Cathedral in northern France shows two woad merchants, carrying a huge sack of blue— testifying to the wealth of the dyers who could afford to help sponsor the construction of the church. The first part of the woad-making process involves taking the fresh leaves, grinding them to a pulp, rolling them into balls the size of large apples and then leaving them to dry in the sun. The French call them cocagne, and even today “pays de cocagne” (which can rather prosaically be translated as “woad balls country”) is a popular metaphor for a land of riches.
“I had men and horses, arms and wealth. What wonder if I parted with them reluctantly?” asked Caractacus some months after his defeat on the Welsh borders, in a famous speech requesting clemency that resulted in him being pardoned and allowed to stay in Rome as a celebrity exile. 7 But 1,500 years later middle-class merchants in Europe were damned if they were going to have to say something similar to the indigo merchants. Of course they fought back—and at the beginning it looked as if they were winning. In 1609 the French government attached the death penalty to the use of indigo rather than woad. In Germany the dyers made annual declarations that they did not use the “devil’s dye.” However, anyone wanting to ban indigo had the problem that—once the dyeing was finished—it was impossible to detect which of the two blues had been used. So the defenders of woad had to rely on the dyers’ honor and—perhaps more reliably—on the gossiping of neighbors.
In England the woad lobbyists managed to get indigo certified as poisonous—it isn’t—and because of this it was officially banned until 1660. Nobody paid much attention, however: in England there was less support for woad than on the Continent as most was imported. It was not that woad did not grow well, but the problem was the drying: the prevailing wind is from the southwest and it seems to bring most of the Atlantic with it. 8 In Britain the law was cheerfully defied from at least the 1630s onward as the gentlemen of the East India Company made sure the dyers of blue were amply supplied with the illegal Indian import. Woad was fine for coloring wool, people found, although adding Asian indigo to the woad vat resulted in a cheaper and stronger color. But to dye the cotton that was now beginning to arrive from India, dyers realized they most certainly needed the stronger vat that came from imported indigo. Most blue vats in Europe were, in fact, a mixture of the two plant extracts.
The commercial dealings of the East India Company men were, reluctantly, supported by the Puritans. What could these stern wearers of black and white do, after all, to get their dark clothes darker and their white clothes whiter? For while woad or indigo are important as “bottom” colors for black dyes (to stop the logwood black from fading quickly in the sunlight) another factor is their ability, in the form of laundry blue, to give white clothes a new lease on life. In poorer parts of India you can sometimes see older gentlemen in the streets radiating what seems to be ultraviolet from their white clothes. A taxi driver in Delhi explained it to me one day: “In India white clothes have to be washed so many times that in the end they are quite blue.” But what a very admirable blue, he added proudly, “and so much better than throwing old white clothes away as you do in your European countries.”
Despite the energetic promotion of indigo from the mid-seventeenth century in Europe, woad wasn’t wiped out—quite. For years it was still often used as a base dye in indigo vats to help the fermentation process—as recently as the 1930s it was used with indigo to dye police uniforms in Britain, and in the past few years the European Union has backed a £2.2 million project to (in its own words) act as “an agronomic blueprint” to establish natural indigo as a commercial product, used in paints, textile dyeing and printing inks. The ten partners—from England, Germany, Finland, Italy and Spain—of this “Spindigo” project are experimenting with woad and other indigo plants to try to overcome the problem that both the supply and quality of natural indigo tend to be inconsistent. This is the possible future for woad. But by the late seventeenth century woad was mainly out, and indigo was very much in.
INDIGO IN THE OTHER INDIES
Many years after hearing my father’s stories of the indigo plantation I found myself in Calcutta. And I couldn’t resist visiting the Tollygunge club. The colonnaded white building was being restored. Men dressed in grubby white dhoti loincloths hung off ladders and swung on chandeliers to restore this place to the grandeur it felt it deserved. There was a distant shout of “fore” from the golf course, and the chef was serving mulligatawny soup and lamb with mint sauce for lunch. But of the indigo—or rather of my childhood vision of indigo—I saw no sign at all. Perhaps I had missed it because I was looking for trees, and as I was to learn later it actually grows as a shrub. But probably it had simply disappeared from view, just as in the early 1600s indigo disappeared from the list of major export commodities from India.
The reason for this disappearance was not because blue was suddenly bad—quite the opposite, it had never been so popular—but because the other Indies had started to grow it, and they could do it more cheaply and better. The European traders may have found a way around the legal injunctions against importing indigo, but this crop was to prove to have other tricks up its sleeve. It wasn’t so much about the sky blue being mixed with stars as about it being mixed with meteoric dust. Soot and dust were nearly the same color as indigo, and unless buyers were careful they found their “nil” (from the Sanskrit) was worth less than they thought. It wasn’t always the indigo farmers’ fault: some of the adulteration happened by accident. But by the seventeenth century Indian indigo had acquired a bad reputation for impurities and the industry had restructured itself for other economic reasons. Indeed, it is ironic that the point at which the English began calling this dye “indigo” from the Greek and not “nil” was when the supplies from India slowed down. In fact, if the dye was going to be renamed in the seventeenth century, it really should have been called “caribeego.”
The French started the West Indies indigo industry—on the islands of Sainte Domingue (now Haiti), Martinique and Guadeloupe. The climate was perfect, but that was not the only reason for indigo’s success. Indigo is a crop that has involved a great deal of misery—because it has usually relied on forced labor. In the West Indies this meant slaves. It was not only the Europeans who did it this way. The Yoruba slaves on the West Indian plantations may well have known indigo cultivation in their home villages in West Africa: there too, for the thousand years or so since it had been introduced by Arab traders, it had usually required slaves to grow it. It was used to honor the god of thunder and lightning, and even today the Yoruba of Nigeria are still famous for their indigo textiles.
By the 1640s Caribbean indigo was eclipsing Indian blue: in 1643 the governor of the East India Company9 called the rival French product “deceitfull and counterfait,” although of course the real problem for him was that it was rather good quality. And then everything changed. By 1745 the English were at war with the French, a
nd suddenly the French source of blue was lost. The English Admiralty started to look elsewhere for suppliers. They could never have expected that their supply problems would be partly answered by a small industry kick-started a few years earlier by a teenage girl with an absent father, a sick mother and a problem with agricultural saboteurs.
Eliza Lucas is a remarkable figure in the story of indigo. 10 She was born in Antigua, where her father was an officer in the English army. In 1738, when she was fifteen, she, her parents and her sister Polly went to live in Charles Town, which she described happily in letters as the “gayest” town in South Carolina (a reputation it maintained: it was to be the place where the scandalous Charleston dance was invented in the 1920s). The plan was to start farming the three plantations they had inherited from Eliza’s grandfather and to make a new life away from the battlefields. But in 1739 Lieutenant Colonel George Lucas was drafted back to Antigua, in preparation for what everyone realized was to be an inevitable showdown with the Spaniards. Eliza’s mother was ill, or at least hysterical, but for him to refuse the commission would have been treason. So he left Eliza in charge of the farms. Father and daughter would write to each other often, and their letters would become part of America’s heritage, but they would never see each other again. George would die eight years later as a prisoner of war in France, and Eliza would become one of the most famous women in early American settler history. This was partly because she was the mother of some of her country’s earliest political sons—Thomas and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. But it was also because of indigo.
Eliza Lucas Pinckney is portrayed in American history books as a certain variety of nation’s mother, an eighteenth-century example to her twentieth-century sisters. She is usually shown as an enlightened young woman who educated her slaves, put family duties first, and most importantly embraced with calm fearlessness those American virtues of risk-taking and hard work. Stories about Eliza make a great deal of how she—as she told a friend in a letter—used to rise at five, “read till Seven then take a walk in the garden or field, see that the Servants are at their respective business then to breakfast.” The first hour after breakfast was spent playing music, the next hour “In recolecting [sic] something I have learned least for want of practise it should be quite lost,” and the rest of the day was spent teaching her sister and two slave girls to read, and in what she called “scheming.” Scarlett O’Hara, eat your fictional heart out: this woman was the real thing—a Southern belle who controlled her life exquisitely. She was as spirited as she was devout, and she got her man—in the form of a lawyer called Charles Pinckney, the grandson of a privateer who had gone to Jamaica in 1688. Pinckney proposed to Eliza a scarcely decent four weeks after his wife died in 1744. They married four months later, when the bride was twenty-one.
But this was in the future. Eliza’s connection with indigo began in 1739 with the arrival of an envelope from Antigua, from which a handful of yellow seeds spilled out. While Eliza was a pragmatist, and her mother a doubter, her father was a dreamer. George Lucas conjured up images of lucrative crops springing fully ripened from the paper twists of seeds he would send tucked into his correspondence. One time he sent alfalfa, another time he believed ginger plants were going to solve the Lucas cash-flow problem. But the one idea that really triggered both their imaginations was indigo. “I have greater hopes for the indigo than any of the rest of the things I have tried,” she wrote.
The first harvests were wildly unsuccessful. For two reasons. The first was the weather: “we had a fine crop of Indigo Seed upon the ground . . . and the frost took it before it was dry,” Eliza wrote apologetically. “I picked out the best of it and had it planted but there is not more than a hundred bushes of it come up.” The second reason was more worrying: sabotage. In 1741 George sent a man called Nicholas Cromwell to help Eliza process the dye—to ferment it in vats and dry it into cakes for export. Cromwell, however, did not want her to succeed—after all, why should he compromise the value of his own family’s crop back home—and he deliberately ruined the vat. He “made a great misery of the process . . . said he repented coming . . . and threw in so large a quantity of Lime water as to spoil the colour,” Eliza recalled many years later in a letter to her son Charles Cotesworth. At the time she had told her father that Cromwell was a “mere bungler,” and had fired him.
The following year, she tried again—Eliza was nothing but determined. And to her dismay the crop was eaten by caterpillars and shrivelled by the sun. The fourth year was even worse, and it was only in 1744 that Eliza produced South Carolina’s first successful harvest of indigo. Later she gave seedlings to other plantation owners—on the theory that if they were going to grow enough South Carolina indigo to supply the needs of English dyers, then they needed to present a united front. By 1750 England was importing 30,000 kilos11 of indigo from the Carolinas, and by 1755 the export total had reached nearly 500 tons. This was not the first time that indigo had been grown in the Americas. There had been some attempts by settlers in the Carolinas before, and other indigo crops had been grown in other southern states. Eliza would have known about these, but perhaps she did not know that other indigo species had been used traditionally by native Americans, and that they might have withstood the weather and insects better than her imported seeds.
For centuries the Mayans in the Yucatán peninsula had made a vivid turquoise for their frescos by mixing a local species of indigo with a special clay called “palygorskite.” Europeans did not understand the way the pigment was made—by trapping indigo molecules in a lattice of clay, and imprisoning them—until 2000.12 It was so bright—as intense as the copper-enamelled tiles on the most beautiful Persian mosques—that up until the 1960s people believed Mayan Blue was made from metal, not from a plant. The Aztecs went one step farther than the Mayans: they used indigo as a medicine as well as a dye, called it iquilite and worshiped it. They also, memorably, daubed their sacrificial victims with it before they pulled out their hearts. 13 When the Spanish arrived and conquered, they banned the death symbolism but kept the pigment.
MAYAN BLUES
The Dominican church of San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya is one of the treasures of the Oaxaca Valley in central Mexico. From the outside it seems like a formal example of early Spanish baroque; but inside it is a sixteenth-century riot of painted flowers and tendrils making a joyful jungle over all the inside walls. It is a celebratory Garden of Eden, and is a striking contrast with the more orderly depictions of nature in most European churches of that time. The designs were painted by indigenous artists. They used their two main native pigments—indigo and carmine—and today the original paints are there, still bright even though they are largely unrestored. But if the colors did not fade inside the church, then they certainly faded from memory outside it. For almost the entire twentieth century, cochineal, indigo and almost all other natural pigments were scarcely even thought about in the Oaxaca Valley, or indeed anywhere else in Mexico. But then in the 1990s there was a change in European and American fashion for so-called “natural” things, and suddenly everyone started looking at the old colors.
It took me an hour to cycle from San Jerónimo church to the village of Teotitlán del Valle. Almost every village in the Oaxaca Valley seems to have its handicraft speciality—one does black pottery, another seems to make its living from beaten metal nativity scenes, while another specializes more modestly in tortillas (and those women walk for miles every morning with a hundred flat breads balanced in baskets on their heads). But Teotitlán is Rugsville, a village with three thousand souls and at least four times that many carpets decorated with Picasso doves, Zapotec zigzags or cute renditions of the Mexican countryside complete with big hats and donkeys.
Benito Hernández’s place is the first homestead I came to after I had turned off the main road. It was a hot day; I wanted a rest and some water before pushing onto the village three kilometers away, and what is more I could see a big sign outside advertising “Natural Dyes.” I coul
dn’t resist, so I dropped in to hear his story. A couple of bored-looking weavers were standing at two looms under a wooden shelter. I was disappointed to see that they were making cheap carpets, using thick synthetically dyed threads. But the sheds behind told a different story. In one corner there were cochineal beetles sitting fatly on prickly pears ready to give up their blood to the carpet cause.
Benito was away tending his fields, so his younger sons, Antonio and Fernando, showed me round. “Pase por aqui,”—pass this way—twelve-year-old Antonio said politely, with the well-practiced air of a tour guide. Together we poked our noses into terracotta pots that lay covered and half buried in the earth. They stank. Antonio took a stick and pulled out a soggy lump of wool from one smelly brew. The dye was from wild mangrove plants, he said, and would turn the wool into the color of coffee. They did not have indigo just then, but he told me that indigo (which his father was apparently cultivating in his own fields) smelled almost the same, although it was of course bluer. I remembered that the year before I had seen a similar pot—terracotta orange and with a heavy lid— in a weaving village on Lombok Island in Indonesia. Smeared around its lip, almost as if it had been caught in the illegal act of drinking the sky, was a light cerulean stain. The villagers would mix the indigo with ash, they told me, to make it alkaline. And sometimes they would keep dipping the wool in and out for a year or more, “to make it as blue as we can.”
Color Page 35