The Miraculous Fever-Tree

by Fiammetta Rocco

  A strong emetic of antimony was then administered, but the King could be persuaded to swallow only a little of it, so they gave him a full dose of sulphate of zinc as well as some strong purgatives and a succession of clysters, an early kind of suppository or enema. His hair was shorn, and pungent blistering agents were attached all over his head. Amazingly, given such treatment, Charles soon recovered consciousness, and his doctors pronounced him out of danger for the moment.

  In the evening, the King’s doctors met once more to discuss how to relieve the ‘humours’ on his brain. They gave him remedies to make him sneeze, as well as a preparation of cowslip flowers and sal ammoniac, or smelling salts, and applied noxious plasters to his feet.

  Early the next morning another consultation was held, with no fewer than twelve physicians present. The King complained of a pain in his throat, and his jugular vein was drained of a further ten ounces of blood. By the following morning the doctors were so pleased with the progress of their treatment that they contented themselves with ordering the patient to take a therapeutic rest for the day, which at the time was a most unusual prescription.

  Despite this, the convulsions returned in the evening, and Charles was given a drink known as ‘Spirit of Human Skull’, a fashionable concoction the ingredients of which remain uncertain. The physicians noticed that there was a cycle to the convulsions, and some of them suggested that the King was suffering from an intermittent or tertian fever. The remedy, they insisted, was the Peruvian bark.

  The Privy Council, which was by now quite confused by the many and varied diagnoses that had been suggested, were informed. One of the Councillors, Lord North, asked, ‘Could anything be worse?’

  One of the physicians answered him: ‘We now know what to do.’

  ‘And what is that?’ asked North.

  ‘To give the cortex,’ replied the doctor, meaning the Jesuit bark. The attending physicians did as he suggested, but to no avail. Within two days the King was dead.

  That quinine had failed to save Charles II’s life did not, as might have been expected, destroy the reputation of the miracle drug. Talbor’s success with the Jesuit powder, and the blessing that the English and French kings had given to this exotic cure, had already done much to spread its renown and ensure that it would not quickly fall from fashion. But as quinine grew more popular, new problems developed. The greater the demand, the more likely it was that unscrupulous merchants would adulterate pure quinine with other bitter-tasting barks, or sell foul substitutes for it. The most vexing problem, then, was how to ensure that adequate supplies of pure quinine reached Europe.

  Talbor may have succeeded in immortalising the bark, but it would be other men who would cross the ocean to seek out the tree from which it came, which no one in the Old World had yet seen.

  5

  The Quest – South America

  ‘The Peruvian bark should be taken with a very little quantity of Laudanum; Children should take it in Chocolate well sweetned.’

  SIR HANS SLOANE, President of the Royal Society, 1727–41

  Six months to the day after the death of Charles II, Sir John Evelyn paid a visit to the Chelsea Physic Garden.

  In the twelve years since it had been laid out in the village green on the north bank of the Thames, the garden had become such an attraction for Londoners that its owners, the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries, had been forced to build a brick wall around it to keep out interlopers. In 1680, John Watts was appointed to manage the garden. Watts was no ordinary gardener. Trained as an apothecary, he was also a plantsman, an entrepreneur and a prosperous merchant who in time would forge the Chelsea Physic Garden’s links with horticulturists in a number of other countries. But the first task he set himself was to build a heated greenhouse. With this he hoped to expand the garden’s production of herbs such as mint, sage, pennyroyal, sweet marjoram and rue, and ‘foreign as well as native plants’ including ‘nectarines of all sortes, Peaches, Apricotes, cherryes and plumes of several sorts of the best to be Gott’.

  Early greenhouses, so named because they were meant to conserve evergreens in winter, were stone or brick buildings with tiled roofs and glass windows all along one side. They had long been in use throughout northern Europe, where the winters were long and only the hardiest of plants survived outside. But heated greenhouses were something quite new, and Mr Watts’ new example was what Evelyn wanted to see most. His drinking companion Sir Hans Sloane, the naturalist and later generous patron of the Physic Garden, who once summoned his friends to help him dissect an elephant on the lawn in front of his Chelsea house, had been to see it a year earlier, and had been waxing lyrical about it ever since. In a letter to a friend Sloane wrote that Watts ‘has a new contrivance. He thinks to make, by this means, an artificial spring, summer and winter.’ Later Sloane reported to the same friend that the greenhouse had proved highly successful, and that the severe winter had ‘killed scarse any of his fine plants’.

  On 6 August 1685 Evelyn wrote in his diary: ‘I went to Lond: to see Mr Wats, keeper of the Apothecaries Garden of simples at Chelsey, & what was very ingenious the subterranean heate, conveyed by a stove under the Conservatory, which ws all vaulted with brick; so as he leaves the doores & windowes open in the hard[e]st frosts, secluding onely the snow & c:’ Equally, if not more, interesting to our eyes over three centuries later is what Evelyn found in Watts’ new greenhouse: ‘a collection of innumerable rarities […] Particularly, besides many rare annuals the Tree bearing the Jesuits bark, which had don such cures in quartans’.

  Evelyn was understandably intrigued. Not more than a hundred books on herbs and plants had been published in Europe at that time, and hardly any of them contained any details of the flora to be found in the furthest corners of the Spanish Empire. No one could travel to South America without the express permission of the King of Spain, and nothing on South America could be published without it first being submitted for censorship to the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the Council of the Indies and the Casa de Contratación, which controlled all trade with the Spanish world. Every bookseller in Spain was required to furnish a list of all the books he offered for sale, and was forced to destroy any that the Inquisition condemned; such was its power. As a result, Europeans knew as little about South America, its people, its landscape and its natural life as they knew about the moon.

  Evelyn’s throwaway observation of ‘the Tree bearing the Jesuits bark’ is the first mention we have of a live cinchona plant outside South America. It is not to be found in the famous Gardeners Dictionary written by Watts’ successor Philip Miller and published in 1731; botanical historians assume that by then the cinchona tree in the Chelsea Physic Garden was dead.

  Nor is anything known about how it arrived at the Chelsea Physic Garden, or who brought it. Transporting plants across long distances in the seventeenth century was far more difficult than transporting dried bark and keeping it from becoming mildewed. The journey, by mule and then by sea, was long and arduous, and the cinchona, which thrived in the damp, forested climate of the high Andes, would not have taken easily to the hot, salty humidity of life at sea level. The glass-domed Wardian case that would later be used to keep plants healthy onboard ship without wasting precious supplies of fresh water had yet to be invented. But someone had taken the trouble to care for Mr Watts’ precious tree, watering it and keeping its roots and leaves in good order throughout a journey that would have lasted the better part of a year. Or perhaps the explanation was far simpler: gardeners and horticulturists often collect seeds while travelling abroad, and the enterprising European plantsmen of the late seventeenth century were no exception. Perhaps the tree was germinated in Chelsea from seeds brought home in someone’s pocket.

  The effort was a pointer, though, to things to come. For the story of quinine over the next two centuries is overwhelmingly about the naturalists who crossed the ocean to find the cinchona tree and study it in its natural habitat; and, later, about the merchants who used all t
heir ingenuity and guile to acquire its seeds, even stealing them and smuggling them abroad on occasion, in order to plant cinchona elsewhere and harvest it on a commercial scale.

  Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia – where the cinchona tree grew in the wild – were all part of the Spanish Empire, yet it was not a Spaniard who first went in search of the cinchona tree, but a Frenchman. And he began by wanting to measure the circumference of the earth.

  Charles-Marie de la Condamine was a wealthy and well-connected Parisian, with thin lips and flared nostrils that would have given his face an air of haughty disdain had it not been for his open smile and his unflagging enthusiasm for everything that was new. He had become well known at an early age for his passion for science and mathematics, but his particular fascination was for geodesy, the geometric measuring of the earth’s surface.

  Shortly after la Condamine was elected to France’s Académie Royale des Sciences, that august body became embroiled in a dispute over whether the earth was flattened at the poles or elongated, and more egg-shaped. The argument had begun with Sir Isaac Newton, who believed the earth was a globe that grew flatter the further north you travelled, and bulged at its middle. Ranged against Newton and his followers was the French Astronomer Royal, Jean Dominique Cassini, who long before had evolved a theory which held that ‘Man infests a globe which lengthens in the direction of the polar diameter. The world is a prolate spheroid, lengthened at the poles, pulled in at the equator, much as a pot-bellied man might pull in his girth by taking in a few notches in his belt.’ Like la Condamine, Cassini was a member of the Académie Royale des Sciences. Newton was trespassing on the Académie’s territory. What was more, he was an Englishman.

  But the issue was far more than one of intellectual machismo or simple national pride. At stake was the future of navigation, cartography and trade, even of science itself. Cassini and the French navy, together with the Académie, had spent much time trying to ensure that their charts were as accurate as possible. To achieve this they needed to know the exact length of a degree of latitude. Through triangulation, another academician, Jean Picard, in 1669 measured the meridian of an arc of one degree between Sourdon, near Amiens, and Malvoisine, south of Paris, and found it to be 69.1 miles. But this measure could be universally applied only if the earth were a perfect sphere. It was clear that further proof of the planet’s shape was needed.

  Picard completed his measurements at the same time that Christian Huygens, a Dutchman, brought his newly patented pendulum clock to Paris. In 1672 Cassini sent Picard to French Guyana, on the north-east coast of South America, with one of Huygens’s clocks, only for Picard to discover that it beat more slowly there. In order to keep perfect time at the equator, the pendulum of a clock set in Paris, at 49° latitude, had to be shortened. The reason, as we now know, is that the earth’s bulge at the equator decreases the pull of gravity. In an effort to settle the matter once and for all, the Académie determined to measure the length of a degree of latitude at the North Pole and at the equator, and compare the results.

  They had no trouble in deciding on Lapland to stand in for the North Pole, but where should they choose for the equatorial measure? Africa was still largely unexplored, the lower Amazon was a quagmire, Borneo unopened. Much of the rest of equatorial Asia lay within the influence of the Dutch, mercantile rivals and Protestants to boot. Solidly Catholic Peru was the answer, and Charles-Marie de la Condamine the man to lead the expedition, not least because he was prepared to pledge 100,000 livres of his own money to help finance it. From then on, when his friend Voltaire wrote to him he would address him always as ‘Mon très ambulant philosophe …’.

  In order to travel through South America, la Condamine had first to secure the permission of King Philip V of Spain. Despite great opposition from the Council of the Indies, who feared – rightly as it turned out – that a French expedition to the interior of South America might in the long run undermine Madrid’s power there, the King acceded. But he insisted the expedition be accompanied by two Spanish naval officers, Captain Jorge Juan y Santacilla, a mathematician, and the King’s spokesman, the twenty-year-old Captain Antonio de Ulloa, another noted mathematician, who would one day be appointed Governor of Louisiana. Their job was to report back to Madrid on the Frenchmen’s activities as well as on the ‘state of the colonial empire’. Secret instructions were sent to all the places they might visit: local officials were to give the French visitors all the help they needed, but they were to be careful not to permit them to ‘poner los ojos en la Tierra’ – in other words, they would not be allowed to see too much.

  As it turned out, the Spaniards found nothing untoward to report. But the King had also wanted, Ulloa wrote, ‘to give his own subjects a taste for the … sciences’. In that, Philip V had been inspired. The expedition would foster in Spain a longing for intellectual as well as physical expansiveness, for geography, biology and botany, and a yearning for the country to take its place among the great scientific nations of the world. That yearning, in turn, would greatly influence the study of the cinchona tree in years to come.

  In July 1735, after a nine-week voyage from La Rochelle, la Condamine disembarked with his instruments at Cartagena de las Indias, in what is now Colombia. Cartagena was already a great fortress city, and along with Puertobelo in Panama and Vera Cruz in Mexico, one of the three gateways to the Americas. In addition to the two Spanish officers, la Condamine was accompanied by ten other Frenchmen, including a young botanist named Joseph de Jussieu, who began right away to scour the surrounding hills for fruits and flowers with which to begin a botanical collection. His role in acquainting the world with the cinchona tree would be as tragic and ill-fated as la Condamine’s would be fruitful and lucky.

  In March of the following year, having reached Guayaquil on Peru’s north-western coast, the same port where Dona Pheliziana and her fellow charterers would commission the construction of the Conde twelve years later, la Condamine unpacked his precious measuring instruments for the first time. It was frustrating work. The heavy, drizzling garúa fog was almost permanently settled on the coast, which meant that the sun was visible only in the evening, and not in the morning, depriving the measurers of ‘the correspondent observations of which we were in want’. The cloudy sky and constant rain prevented them from observing the eclipses of the satellites of Jupiter, and only a brief break in the weather permitted them to observe the end of a complete eclipse of the moon. In addition, the food was poor and the insects were a constant menace. Soon the expedition members began to find each other very irritating.

  La Condamine was more than happy to take a break from measuring and accompany a new friend, a mathematician and cartographer named Don Pedro Maldonado, up the Río Esmeraldas to the interior of the Audencia de Quito, the region that lay to the east and north-east of the viceroyalty of Peru. Surrounded by exotic birds like the toucan with its ceaseless song, ‘Dios te dé, Dios te dé’, and vegetation such as he had never seen, la Condamine quickly became fascinated by the region’s plants and trees. An Indian brought him a strange piece of stretching ‘cloth’ called caoutchouc. This was rubber. He watched the Indians gather milk from scars they had cut in the local hevea trees, and was amazed at how the latex solidified. Noticing that the new material was water-resistant, he fashioned a covering out of it for his Hadley octant and other instruments to keep them safe from the humid tropical air. Later he would be the first man to carry samples of rubber back to Europe.

  His head full of new discoveries, la Condamine put his fellow measurers out of his mind. Accompanied by the adventurous Maldonado, he penetrated deeper into the jungle that flanked the Río Esmeraldas. The explorers’ instruments lay at the bottom of their forty-foot dugout, in between bananas, long, parsnip-shaped yuca, rice, beans and several chickens, their legs tied to prevent them escaping, which from time to time would rise up and cluck in loud vexation. The travellers drank masato, a pale sugary beer made from fermented plantain mash. At Maldonado’s insistence, la
Condamine traded in his tattered stockings and grey greatcoat for a pair of local woollen pants and a poncho, learning to gather it about him when he climbed upwards to avoid tripping over it. La Condamine mapped the courses of the Esmeraldas, collected plants for the expedition botanist Joseph de Jussieu, and picked up a shiny metal which was neither gold nor silver, but was known by the local name of platino.

  Soon the explorers left the river valley and began climbing. Local guides, small men who painted themselves entirely red, led them through the Esmeraldean forest towards the hills. Rain fell without cease, usurping the sun’s place as the measure of time. Above their heads was green, underfoot it was black, with thick mucky sediment. At every step their feet sank into ooze. Little light penetrated the dense foliage; mud and fallen trees carpeted the trail, except where a running brook turned it into a quagmire. Drenched, miserable, hungry and exhausted, la Condamine’s only solace was the protection offered to his instruments by the rubber cloth the Indians had given him by the Esmeraldas.

  Slowly the party emerged above the jungle, and the plants around them began to change. Gone were the thick, matted forest and the tightly laced lianas. La Condamine had no need of a thermometer to tell him that the temperature was falling, and that he was entering a different isometric zone; the proof was there in the greenery surrounding him. On the steaming plains below, the explorers had seen bananas and palms. As they climbed, these gave way to tree ferns, red and purple gentians and thin trees with gnarled, twisted trunks covered in moss.

  And then, on 14 February 1737, while exploring the area around Loxa armed with notes supplied by de Jussieu, la Condamine saw for the first time the tree the locals called quinquina, from which the Jesuits derived their miraculous bark. He sat by the roadside and sketched a branch with its leaves, flowers and seeds. The drawing would accompany the memoir, Sur l’Arbre du Quinquina, he sent back to the Académie in Paris, which was published in its journal in 1738. It was the first description Europeans had had of the living tree, and when the great Swedish taxonomist Linnaeus read of la Condamine’s observations, he gave the quinquina tree a new name, Cinchona, as a tribute to the legendary Countess of Chinchón.