The Miraculous Fever-Tree

by Fiammetta Rocco

  La Condamine writes of three types of cinchona, which he distinguishes as white, yellow and red. He was told by his local guides that the trees’ barks had differing febrifuge qualities, with the white possessing scarcely any, and the red being the most potent. Other than that, there was no botanical difference between them; they all grew together in the same locality, although never in a mass, but always isolated from one another and always surrounded by trees of other species. When allowed to attain their prime, they grew taller than most of the trees surrounding them, with a trunk that could attain the thickness of a man’s body. Already, little more than a century after the Jesuits had begun shipping the bark to Europe, la Condamine noted that the large trees from which the first bark had been stripped were dead, and that nearly all the trees around Loxa had been destroyed except the youngest.

  La Condamine’s botanical descriptions were vague, and his drawings lacked precision. But although the exact identity of the species he described would be debated for years afterwards, he is remembered as a hero. The botanist Joseph de Jussieu, however, whose detailed notes first led la Condamine to find the miraculous fever-tree, is now all but forgotten. In 1761 his vast collection of plant specimens, laboriously gathered over a quarter of a century, was stolen in Buenos Aires by a servant who thought the boxes contained money and other valuables. For the next ten years nothing is known of de Jussieu’s movements, but by the time he returned to Paris in 1771 he was insane, unable to remember even his own name. In 1936, to commemorate the centenary of its foundation, a French company that manufactured quinine under the name ‘Trois Cachets‘ published a manuscript by de Jussieu. With one minor exception, it is the only work of his ever to have been published. It is a highly detailed description of virtually all the different major species of Cinchona, and was written in Latin in 1737, the same year la Condamine saw the fever tree for the first time.

  In 1774, the French once again petitioned the King of Spain to send a botanist to South America. Louis XVI’s Chief Minister, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, had two objectives in mind. The first was to try to recoup the material that had been assembled by de Jussieu, whose ill luck was still being lamented by his family and friends at the French court, and the other was to add to the collections of plants that had been pouring into France over the previous decade from India, the South Seas, Madagascar and the Cape of Good Hope. There was, however, almost nothing from South America, and the gap would not easily be filled without Spain’s permission.

  The Spanish King, Charles III, had learned a great deal from the experience of la Condamine’s expedition, and the idea of a major voyage to South America captained by a non-Spaniard left him far from happy. The Englishman Captain James Cook was just completing his second circumnavigation of the globe, and Spain’s scientifically-minded monarch had ambitions to see his kingdom at the forefront of the scientific enlightenment that was flourishing in Europe. Earlier that same year, the King had ordered that a new botanical garden be established on the Prado in the centre of Madrid, to rival similar gardens that were being opened in Vienna, Versailles, Frankfurt, Budapest and Coimbra in Portugal.

  He had also just bought one of the finest natural history museums assembled in Europe, the cabinet of curiosities of Pedro Francisco Davila, a highly educated man who came from Guayaquil but who had lived for nearly a quarter of a century in Paris. When the museum opened to the public in Madrid in 1776, with Davila as its first director, it boasted two magnificent rooms for minerals, two salons of stuffed animals and birds, another hall for displaying insects, and yet another for sea life. A big room was set aside for ‘exquisite rare woods’, and in the middle of it was a stuffed elephant and its skeleton.

  Despite these treasures, the museum was not yet full, and word went out to all the Spanish realms that more exhibits were needed. In particular, the museum required specimens of trees: cinnamon, Paraguayan tea, jalapa (a Mexican climber that yields a purgative drug), cedars, ebony, white balsam, black balsam and the rare tropical hardwoods like campeche, cocobola, violeta, moradillo, paloferro, granadillo – many of whose names appear on the shipping inventory of the Conde. Last, but not least, the museum wanted specimens of the precious cinchona tree from which came the Jesuit bark, which was now known to grow in a sweep across the northern part of the South American continent, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. What better way could there be for Spain to show off its intellectual prowess than to promote a generation of travellers who would bring South America’s scientific trophies back to Europe on its behalf?

  Seen from afar, the exploration of South America might have appeared a relatively simple matter. But as with the first expedition, this new venture would become fraught with tension and troubles – troubles that grew ever more intractable the deeper it penetrated into the interior of the continent.

  The party that set off from Cadiz on 4 November 1777 sailed in one of the best ships in the Spanish fleet, the sixty-cannon Peruano, the same vessel that had carried the Peruvian Jesuits away from Lima a decade earlier. They took with them a substantial library, including several works by Linnaeus and the compilations of some of the earlier explorers in America.

  The aim of the expedition, as ordered by Charles III, was ‘the methodical examination and identification of the products of nature of my American dominions, not only to promote the progress of the physical sciences, but also to banish doubts and falsifications which exist in medicine, painting and other important arts, and to foster commerce, and to form herbaria and collections of the products of nature, describing and making drawings of the plants found in these, my fertile dominions, in order to enrich my Museum of Natural History and the Botanical Garden of the Court’.

  The expedition was led by Don Hipólito Ruiz Lopez, a twenty-three-year-old pharmacist and botanist who had worked for a short time in the King’s botanical garden. Ruiz was a small man with a cupid’s mouth and high arching eyebrows. His hair was brushed down in waves over his forehead, giving his face an air of anxiety. He was already suffering from lung disease and from a depression which only grew worse as he worried about the task that lay before him. For, as one of his sons would later write, Ruiz was ‘very zealous for the glory of the nation’.

  With him was another trained pharmacist, José Antonio Pavón, and Joseph Dombey, a French botanist appointed by Louis XVI. Dombey would grumble a great deal at being paid less than his Spanish colleagues, though they were less inclined to sympathise with him once they discovered that he described them patronisingly in his letters as ‘my two Spanish pupils’.

  Completing the party were two painters, whose task it would be to make reproductions of the flora. They had been selected from among a number of art students in Madrid for their ‘bachelorhood, skill and a gentle disposition’, and were commanded to ‘copy nature exactly, without presuming to correct or embellish it, as some draftsmen are accustomed to do by adding colouring and adornment taken right out of their imagination’. Despite every effort, the publication of the Flora Peruviana et Chilensis would prove a nightmare, and there were many on the expedition who would wish they had never left home.

  Arriving in Lima after an ocean crossing that lasted nearly six months, during which only one other ship was sighted, the expedition found a city of a little over fifty thousand people, dense with monasteries and markets selling all manner of tropical fruits, from papayas to pepinos, and five different kinds of banana. But what most astounded the Europeans was the grinding poverty of the Limenos’ everyday lives, and their longing for little items of luxury to help overcome their difficulties. ‘One sees many ladies riding in their carriages,’ Ruiz wrote in his journal, ‘the mules of which have more to eat than the family. Many wear diamonds but have no daily bread, except when they visit the pawnbrokers. Great numbers of women are loaded down with fine trappings, yet their children go bare. Countless people are dazzlingly dressed, although they are in debt for every stitch in their bodies.’

  For nearly two years the foreigners
foraged around Lima, making drawings and collecting specimens. In April 1780, when the summer torrents in the montaña began to die down, they set off, trailed by a string of pack mules, for the mountains, and the botanists’ virgin land.

  The journey started gently enough, but it became more difficult when they turned north-east into the rocky valley beyond La Oroya. They fought to make themselves heard against the roaring cascade of the Rimac, the same river that made its way to the sea beyond Lima, but fell silent after they saw one of their mules trip and fall into the icy water that immediately swept it away. All but one of the local drivers deserted on the upward climb, and the scientists were forced to become muleteers. Ruiz was fascinated by the Indians he met along the road, and spent much time studying the various methods they used to dye their bright woollen clothes.

  After travelling more than three hundred miles, the party finally reached Huánuco, a small town that lies on the forested eastern slope of the Andes overlooking the jungle. Ruiz was little impressed by Huánuco, which had once flourished as the centre of the feudal estates around. The frogs that lived in the irrigation ditches chirped and croaked all night, and the guinea pigs were host to ‘a tremendous plague of minute fleas, unbearable because of their bites’. Nor was he much taken by the Indians who burned dried manure to keep their huts warm. ‘This is why the houses are always full of smoke and stink unbearably,’ he wrote in his journal in May 1780.

  Ruiz spent much time thinking about how the lives of the Huánuco Indians might be improved: by importing a strict bishop to care for their spiritual life, and by increasing the cultivation of cocoa, coffee, indigo, balsam, vanilla and other tropical products. He pinned most of his hopes, though, on the quina, the quinine-producing bark which grew in the forests surrounding Huánuco, and which rivalled in quality the bark that had so far mostly been found around Loxa, to the north, in what is now southern Ecuador. The three botanists quickly forgot their troubles when they entered the quina forests for the first time. Here, more than three years after they had begun their journey, was the most important tree they had been charged to find.

  They started their exploration of the cinchona forest by setting up camp at Cuchero, a small village set on ‘a small, level shelf on a mountain’ about fifty miles north-east of Huánuco. Early next morning they pressed on. Ruiz wrote in his journal that they ‘crossed a high, narrow slope, dangerous because the pathway up was of sharp rock and very rugged. We spent the night under a boulder, where the three of us could hardly fit. We sat all through the night without a wink of sleep because of the ceaseless roar of the rushing brook and the incessant croaking of the infinite number of little frogs that breed in its waters.’

  The next day, he wrote, ‘we travelled about a league and a half through a trail full of brambles, creepers and other weeds growing across the path from one side to the other. We had to pick our way carefully to avoid falling and getting hurt or being cut to pieces by the spines and prickles of the plants. As a result of the rainstorm the night before, the road had become impassable. The mules could not walk without slipping continuously, though some were so skilful that they put their two front feet together and purposely allowed themselves to slide down on sloping ground. Adding to the difficulties of the road itself were the tangles of branches hindering progress, the narrowness of the hillside paths, and the constant climbing uphill and down.’ Yet Ruiz would not give up. ‘Half a league onwards,’ he wrote, ‘we entered thick woods, on a trail full of ruts and holes … In this locality I discovered Cinchona purpurea, [the] purple quinine tree, the first that I had examined up to that time.’

  The nascent quina industry that Ruiz observed around Cuchero had been started just four years previously, when a passing trader named Don Francisco Renquifo noticed cinchona trees growing wild in the forest. He had previously seen similar trees around Loxa. ‘He gathered some samples of bark,’ Ruiz wrote, ‘took them to Huánuco and showed them to a number of people. He told them that the inhabitants of Loxa carried on a considerable business in this bark, and he insinuated that they, too, might make large sums of money from the stands of cascarilla trees he had found.’ In the year before Ruiz’s visit the area had produced seventy-five thousand pounds of bark, which was sent to a dealer in Lima.

  The harvest was, however, causing serious depredation to the forest, as collectors stripped branches and cut down trees with little heed for the future. The advice that had been carefully passed down by the Jesuits, of planting five saplings for every tree that was cut down, was being ignored in the rush to cash in on the demand for still more bark. The visitors also realised, as they walked through the forest, that much quina was being left behind. ‘We botanists who travelled about in these forests witnessed the considerable waste that the bark gatherers left by not stripping all the bark from the stems and trunks because these parts did not have commercial value,’ wrote Ruiz.

  It was thus that the Spanish botanist, following de Jussieu’s example, hit upon the idea of making quinine extract. He advised the producers in Huánuco to macerate a quantity of chopped-up bark in four parts of water for about forty hours, then to cook it over a low flame until half the liquor had been consumed. The remaining liquid was to be filtered and then cooked once again, until it attained the consistency of caramel-like resin, before being stored in boxes made of the quinine trees themselves, carefully sealed to keep out the humidity. ‘Since that time,’ Ruiz would proudly write twelve years later, ‘others followed their example and more than forty thousand pounds of extract had been shipped to Europe and, as word of its efficacy and lower price spread about, the business stood to increase even more.’

  Although Dombey would soon return to France, Ruiz and Pavón stayed on in South America for another eight years, travelling as far south as Concepción in Chile, where they identified and named Araucaria araucana, the Chilean pine or monkey-puzzle tree, with its deep green spines and its strange configuration of branches. Their explorations were highly successful, but their attempts at making complete notes of what they saw suffered terrible ill luck, as did their efforts to enlarge the King of Spain’s botanical collections.

  A first shipment of specimens, which had been put together even before they left for Huánuco and the quina forest around Cuchero, was lost when the ship in which it was being carried, the Buen Consejo, was captured by a British galleon and its contents dispersed. Then, in 1785, five years after the botanists saw the quina tree for the first time, by which time the two artists on the expedition had completed a significant number of drawings, all their manuscripts were lost when the huts in which the party lived and worked in the jungle at Macora, near Huánuco, were destroyed in a fire. Faced with an ‘absolute volcano’, Ruiz was desperate. ‘I recklessly entered the fire where I knew my papers to be,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘but all was in vain. Circumstances forced me to get out, for the fire was still alive. Going half-crazy, I wanted to kill myself. But finally, overcome by rushing around and shouting, I fell on the ground at midnight exhausted.’ The only thing that was saved from the fire was one of Ruiz’s three parrots, which managed to escape with just its feathers singed.

  Two years later, after the botanists had carefully packed and labelled a new consignment of specimens for shipment to Spain, another jinxed vessel, the San Pedro de Alcántara, ran into trouble. Even before starting its Atlantic crossing, the ship lost more than thirty containers of living plants, swept overboard in the stormy waters off southern Chile. Then, after the captain had carefully repaired his ship in Rio de Janeiro and replaced the deserting mariners, the San Pedro de Alcántara went onto the rocks off the jutting coastline that abuts Peniche, Portugal. Nearly two-thirds of the passengers and crew were drowned, and all of Ruiz and Pavón’s remaining plants and specimens were lost.

  The two botanists returned to Spain in 1788. Despite the losses, they still managed to bring back from Peru and Chile three thousand plant descriptions and more than two thousand drawings, enough for a dozen botanical volume
s. The King who had commissioned the Flora Peruviana et Chilensis, Charles III, had died shortly before their return, but his son Charles IV was very keen that the task his father had left him should be completed. The book must breathe ‘grandeur and magnificence’ worthy of His Majesty, the young King insisted.

  But the project continued at a snail’s pace. Painters and illustrators who were capable of conveying grandiosity and magnificence were difficult to find, and worked very slowly. Money was also a problem. The Spanish exchequer had suffered during the recent war with the English, and there was little left over for extravagances, even if they were ordered by the King. A special fund-raising exercise was organised throughout the Indies, with contributions being sent from as far afield as Cuba, Venezuela and the Philippines as well as Chile and Peru. Yet even this was marred by delays and disputes, and the continuing disagreement between Joseph Dombey and the Spanish botanists would swell into a bitter quarrel over which nation, France or Spain, was the true owner of the drawings and specimens on which the plates of the Flora Peruviana were to be based. At one point this even threatened to put an end to the enterprise altogether. By 1791, only about a dozen plates of the Flora had been completed. In order to placate the authorities, Ruiz set about publishing a small volume on the precious cinchona tree the following year.

  Quinología, o tratado del árbol de la quina ó cascarilla, con su descripción y la de otras especies de quinos nuevamente descubiertas en el Perú, to give its full name, was the first treatise on the miraculous cinchona tree to be published in Europe since la Condamine’s description had been read out to the Académie des Sciences in 1738. Ruiz dedicated Quinología to Count Floridablanca, the Secretary of State who oversaw the construction of the King’s botanical garden in Madrid, who ‘experimenting more than once in the alleviation of [his] precious health through the efficacious beneficence of this Spanish specific [had] contributed by this means to increase more and more its esteem among men’.