Could this color, dyed onto a fluffy ball of unspun wool by a Lebanese industrialist called Joseph Doumet, really be the color of history and legend? The color I had been searching for? It is hard to know. Pliny mentioned several different murex colors, quoting another historian as saying “the violet purple which cost a hundred denarii a pound was in fashion in my youth, followed a little later by Tarentine red. Next came the Tyrian dye which could not be purchased for a thousand denarii a pound.” The latter was, Pliny commented, “most appreciated when it is the color of clotted blood, dark by reflected and brilliant by transmitted light.”20 This, he suggested, was why Homer used the word for purple to describe blood. This pink wool in the National Museum—which I later discovered had involved tin as a mordant, to make the color stick— was not the color of clotted blood, or indeed of anything even vaguely like purple. It was very pretty, I decided, but it did not mark the end of my search.
In his book, Color and Culture John Gage finds the reasons for the purple cult of Rome and Byzantium “very difficult to define,” 21 but he does have an intriguing theory about it. The Greek words for purple seem to have had a double connotation of movement and of change. Perhaps this is accounted for by the many color changes involved in the dyeing process, but it is also, of course, the condition required for the perception of luster and of lustrousness itself. It is a theory borne out by Pliny’s description of clotted blood. And as I have found with so many of the most valuable colors I have gone looking for—especially sacred ochre in Australia, but also the best reds and the velvety blacks and, of course, that precious metal gold—one of the most important elements of their appeal is the way they have shone. It has somehow lifted a color or a substance from the level of secular to sacred—as if, by reflecting back some of the pure light of the universe, it embodies something holy. Or wholly powerful, at least.
As I flew back home the next day it was hard not to be disappointed. Even though this was the “home” of purple, it seemed that, apart from the little shred of experimental evidence at the museum, there was almost nothing of this color left in Lebanon at all. As I had seen so symbolically in Sidon, it seemed that murex had been subsumed into the historical structure of this ancient-modern country, while on the surface it was nowhere to be seen. But a few days later I cheered up on learning of another seashell purple which was perhaps even as ancient as the Mediterranean version but which, extraordinarily, seemed to have lasted right up until the end of the last century—and, if I was lucky, even to the present day.
THE PURPLE OF THE MIXTECS
In a description of their visit to Central America published in 1748, the Spanish brothers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa described how the dyers of Nicoya in Costa Rica extracted purple from shellfish. There were two methods. The first method involved pressing the poor animal “with a small knife, squeezing the dye from its head into its posterior extremity, which is then cast off, the body being cast away.” The second method kept the creature alive. “They do not extract it entirely from its shell but squeeze it, making it vomit forth the dye. They then place it on the rock whence they took it and it recovers, and after a short time gives more humor, but not as much as at first.” However, the brothers reported, if the fishermen got over-enthusiastic and tried the same operation three or four times, “the quantity extracted is very small and the animal dies of exhaustion.”
The ancestors of these Costa Rican dyers were the famous pearlfishers of Queipo. Until about the seventeenth century they used to row to secret locations and then, clutching a heavy stone to their chests, they would sink down to depths of 25 meters or more to harvest their catch—holding their breath for at least three minutes. In 1522 Gil Gonzales de Davila, an emissary of the conquering King of Spain, visited the area, and found both pearls and purple, giving the area a double reputation for luxury. He brought back a dye sample of this purpura for the King, who gave it the grand brand name of New World Royal Purple, and, perhaps remembering the Roman precedent, demanded exclusive use.
In 1915 Zelia Nuttall, an archaeologist who was busy studying a series of ancient cartoon paintings made by the Mixtec people, made a visit to the Mexican seaside town of Tehuantepec. She was instantly struck by the purple skirts worn by some of the richer women in the marketplace, and, although she wasn’t a textile expert, wrote an article about what she had seen. 22 Most women wore hand-woven “turkey-red” skirts with narrow black or white stripes.
But the purple skirts that had attracted her attention were made of two widths of cotton, “united by a fine cross-stitching of orange or yellow,” which—a little patronizingly—she decided revealed a sophisticated understanding of complementary coloring. They cost ten dollars: three or four times the price of the other skirts.
The skirts particularly intrigued her because of the way they echoed some of the pictures she was studying. These were a series of pre-Columbian paintings on deerskin, containing coded information about the people and the gods depicted on them in a very two-dimensional way. The British artist John Constable famously disparaged them, but then, as fans of the codex reassured themselves, in the same speech (which he gave to the Academy of Art in London in 1833) he pronounced the Bayeux tapestry to be almost as bad.
At that time they were owned by an English aristocrat—Lord Zouche of Harynworth—but they are now known as the Nuttall Codex. What Nuttall noticed was how the purpura skirt color was identical to a beautiful purple paint she had seen on the codex, painted more than four hundred years earlier. One page “contains pictures of no fewer than 13 women of rank wearing purple skirts, and five with capes and jackets of the same color.” Even more striking, the codex also included pictures of eighteen people with their bodies painted purple: “in one case it is a prisoner who is thus depicted. In another a wholly purple person is offering a young ocelot to a conqueror, an interesting fact, considering that ocelot-skins were usually sent to the Aztec capital as tribute by the Pacific coast tribes.” And in another it was the high priest—shown twirling fire sticks and performing a sacred rite—who was wearing a closely fitting mauve cap.
One of the weavers in Tehuantepec showed Nuttall a basket full of twisted and dyed cotton thread that had just been brought on mule-back from a town farther along the coast. “Lifting one of the thick skeins, [the weaver] slipped it over her brown left wrist, and proceeded to show how she, as a child, had seen the fishermen at Huamelula obtain the dye from the caracol, or sea-snail.” Even by the time of Nuttall’s expedition the caracols had become so scarce that the fishermen were having to travel farther and farther away, even as far as Acapulco, to fulfill the orders. “Although Tehuantepec matrons still consider one of these somewhat in the light that our grandmothers regarded a black silk dress, as associated with social responsibility and position, fewer and fewer purple skirts are ordered every year, and the younger generation of women favor the imported and cheaper European stuffs,” she wrote. “Not more than about twenty purple garments were woven at Tehuantepec last year, and it is probable that before long the industry will be extinct.”
Her prediction, she would have been glad to discover, was premature. In the British Library I found a brief academic monograph23 that described a successful Mexican dyeing expedition ten years before. So, armed with several photocopies of the article, I set off with a friend for the Pacific coast of Mexico, hoping I was not a decade too late to find the mysterious sea snails that weep purple tears.
Popocatepetl, the volcanic guardian of Mexico City, was spewing forth its red anger as we flew down to Puerto Escondido, making for a bumpy journey. The volcano-fuelled turbulence had the unwelcome side effect of tipping a smelly cargo of fish over my bag. I had come to find sea creatures, and it was, I thought pragmatically as I double-washed my luggage, perhaps a good augur for my search that they had already come to find me.
Puerto Escondido means “hidden port,” although in the past twenty years or so the place has been very much unhidden by the hordes of surfers and sun-seek
ers who descend every season, and evidently support whole families of T-shirt sellers. It is not a promising place to look for old traditions of any kind. A few boats go out to sea every night, arriving back at dawn for a fish auction on the sand, but most people there are outsiders, come to cash in on tourist dollars. A few locals had heard vaguely of the purple: Alfonso, a teacher of Spanish who we saw sitting open-shirted every morning at Carmen’s coffee shop looking for new customers among the tourists, said he had heard the snails were sometimes known as “margaritas.” My friend—a food writer who carried a compass to determine which location would be perfect for cocktails facing the sunset every evening—brightened visibly, but this was, apparently, nothing to do with salt around the edges of their shells. Alfonso wished us mucha suerte—good luck—in our search, and told us we’d need it. Later Gina at the tourist office reinforced the good-luck wish. “I think almost nobody does that dyeing anymore,” she said. But she told us to look out for two local characters called Juan and Lupe, describing them as “Puerto Escondido’s first surfers: still here, still hippies.” I would recognize them by their black Labrador retrievers, she said, and by their red-blue hair, colored apparently with Mexico’s natural sea dye. I imagined them as latter-day New World Hercules, walking their dogs along the beach and discovering purple. But during our two days in the town I didn’t spot them. They were probably sleeping, Gina said.
On the third day we hired a white VW Beetle and set off into the interior. The coast may be where the dye is, but the dyers have often been from inland. In the old days, before there were buses, teams of men used to set off from their villages in the mountains every November to walk the 150 kilometers down to Puerto Angel. In their knapsacks there would be bleached cotton skeins entrusted to them by women in the surrounding area. The men would stay at the coast, slinging their hammocks between palm trees on the beach every night, until the rough early springtime weather made their search too perilous to continue. Every few years one or two dyers would die, swept out to sea by freak waves, but most would return home with their threads now permanently purple and reeking of sea garlic.
The first town we reached was Jamiltepec, about 60 kilometers from Puerto Escondido. According to my article it was there that Santiago de la Cruz, one of the last remaining dyers of Mexican purple, ran a small artisan shop. But when we asked, neither the shopkeepers nor the taxi-drivers had heard of Santiago or—more worryingly—of any handicrafts shops. Wondering whether we might have travelled halfway round the world for nothing, we ate lunch at a street-side taquería beside the Jamiltepec marketplace. News of our search had already travelled around the marketplace, and one of the many women crowding round to watch us eat said she knew someone who might have heard of Santiago. She called over an old man, who nodded and led us through the stalls until we reached a tiny shop. It was about the size of the Phoenician stalls I had seen in their ruined state in Byblos, although this one was concrete and wouldn’t last the centuries. There was a woman there who was, promisingly, surrounded by shawls with mauve tassels. She told us Santiago was at home, but he would be at the shop in the late afternoon. Her name was Ofelia, and she was his sister.
We spent the time going into Pinotepa Nacional, a market town that houses many of the 350,000 Mixtec people in Mexico. It has a large covered marketplace—and it was there that I found the clothes I was looking for: the same purple, red and blue striped skirts, or posahuancos, that had so attracted Nuttall’s admiration eighty-five years earlier. It was mainly the older women who were wearing them. Until recently Mixtec women used to go topless, but now they wear gaudy floral aprons to cover up. I asked an elderly onion seller whether I could take a photograph of her purple skirt. She shook her head, but then we both heard a chorus of disapproval from the butcher’s shop behind us. Two young women who were working there spoke teasingly to her: “Go on, don’t be a spoilsport,” they seemed to be urging in Mixtec. So she shrugged and smiled for the camera, after which her young friends cheered.
In the late afternoon we made our way back to Jamiltepec. Santiago was sitting in his chair, embroidering a white shirt. He glowed with pleasure when he heard that we had come from Hong Kong to find him. “You are lucky,” he said sternly. “I’m an old man. I could have been dead by now and then how would you find the caracola?” He was a young-looking fifty-one-year-old, but he had been ill with diabetes for the past eight years. “Una tortilla per día,”—just one tortilla a day—he groaned, shaking his head at the gastronomic tragedy. Santiago had become interested in the indigenous dyeing traditions sixteen years earlier, when he had first gone to find the mollusks, accompanying an old man who had once been one of the regular itinerant purple-collectors. Since then he had gone whenever he could. Local people thought he was eccentric, but he ignored them. He agreed to take us down to the purple coast the next day, although he warned we might have a problem getting a fishing boat to take us. “It is dangerous: we have to go with other people. One to find, and one to watch. People die doing this.”
We met him just after dawn, and set off to the coast. As we drove he told us of the three colors of the caracola dye—a curious echo of the Mexican flag, though with a seashell rather than an eagle at its center. “First it is white,” he said. “And then it becomes green, and then it finishes as purple or red, which we call morado .” Because of the white, the process is called milking. In 1983 a Japanese company that called itself Purpura Imperial was given a contract by the Mexican government to collect purple for kimonos, he said. But they killed the snails rather than preserving them as the Mixtecs did, and eventually, after several years of lobbying by environmentalists, the contract was retracted and the Mixtecs were given the exclusive rights to dye with purpura in Oaxaca.
Japan has a long history of celebrating purple: violet has traditionally been the color of victory in competitions, it is the color of the cloth used by Shinto priests to wrap the most precious objects of the temple, and it is the color of the costume and tassels of the highest-ranking sumo referee. They call it murasaki (which sounds astonishingly similar to “murex”), and this was the adopted name of the author of the great work of eighth-century literature, The Tale of Genji, who called herself Lady Murasaki or Lady Purple. The Japanese had their own purple-giving shellfish— Rapana bezoar—but it was very rare and most purple was made with a plant from the borage family called murasaki-so —in English, gromwell.24 It is hardly surprising, then, that they were willing to pay a fortune for Mexican purple. Although perhaps the company had not bargained for the diplomatic problems it would cause and clearly had not cared about the environmental ones.
At a police checkpoint we turned right, toward Zapotalito, where most inhabitants are the descendants of escaped African slaves who founded their own free communities on the Mexican Pacific. It is a dusty fishing village, lined with houses where pigs and chickens roam. Santiago stopped at one house, and came out a few minutes later, amazed at our luck. “There is never a spare boat,” he said, shaking his head, “but today we have mucha suerte. My friend has been painting his launch, so he didn’t go out fishing this morning. His son will takes us out after breakfast.” Santiago had been on about five purple expeditions with foreigners in the past decade. He remembered one couple who had accompanied him for the husband’s research. They had taken one look at a local restaurant in Zapotalito and walked out, noses wrinkling in spousely unison, announcing that they could not possibly eat there because of the wife’s delicate stomach. “Are your stomachs delicate?” he asked us. We assured him not, and we had a day of sampling excellent fresh fish—even for breakfast.
As soon as the tide was right we met the four boys who were to take us. They had green acrylic splashes on their bare feet from their boat-painting. We sped through the lagoon, past the fishing hamlet of Cerro Hermoso—Pretty Hill—and out into the open sea. Hold on tight, they said. The water was not rough, but I took hold of the seat politely. “No, really tight.” And then, as we bobbed in the waves and waited
and then bobbed a little bit more, I suddenly understood. A big wave rose up behind us, Fabian the driver thrust the motor to maximum, and we surfed in on its crest, landing with a judder on the white sand of a deserted beach, distracting a flock of vultures from their lunch of giant turtle.
We headed toward the rocks, which fringed the coast for as far as we could see, and started looking, even though I was not very sure what I was looking for. Santiago was the first to find a caracola or sea snail: it was the size of a Matchbox toy car and, unlike the spiky Lebanese murexes, it was rounded and dark gray. He picked it up and blew on it. “Look,” he said, and as we all gathered round it started to weep as if with fury at being removed from its rock. The tears swiftly became milky white, and Santiago rubbed it gently against the skein of white thread he had wrapped loosely around his shoulder. It was a simple way of getting over the problem that purple was a pigment not a dye: strictly speaking, Santiago was not dyeing the cloth—he was painting it.
As he had promised, it made a stain that was fluorescent lime green, which within a few minutes turned yellow and then purple, like a bruise. The dye is a naturally light-sensitive compound—the purple appears in reaction to the sunshine, otherwise it stays green. It is curious to think that this natural chemical compound could, if anybody had ever found a way of fixing it, have been used to make the world’s first photographs. We could have inherited ancient photo-images of Aztec rituals or thousand-year-old baby pictures, all held in crazy hallucinogenic color contrasts with this organic dye. For a moment, as I took a picture of Santiago happily holding his little shell, I imagined the image developed as a violet wash, with lime-green spots where the shadows lay.
Color Page 40