The Miraculous Fever-Tree

by Fiammetta Rocco

  In the first twelve months of Gorgas’s sanitary rampage, his squads got through a thousand tons of timber and two hundred tons of copper-wire mesh. They burned three hundred tons of sulphur and 120 tons of natural insecticide made from pyrethrum – the entire output of the United States – in an effort to smoke themselves into cleanliness. The results were worth it. In 1905 there were more than two hundred cases of yellow fever in Panama; the following year Gorgas’s team counted only one. Not a single case was registered from 1907 on.

  Gorgas attacked malaria in much the same way as he dealt with yellow fever. He eliminated the breeding ground of the Anopheles mosquito, destroyed their larvae and killed the full-grown mosquitoes. He had the labour force sleep under mosquito nets in rooms whose windows were protected with narrow wire meshing. His final weapon was quinine. Shortly after he arrived, he persuaded the Isthmian Commission to overrule the French ordnance that quinine was too expensive to be given to canal workers; henceforth all the workforce would be protected by quinine.

  In the course of the winter of 1905, Gorgas ordered 2874 pounds of quinine sulphate, enough to treat every worker in the canal zone. He had it administered as a prophylactic, in doses of 0.15 grams twice a day. The white Americans working on the canal were quick to appreciate how well quinine kept malaria at bay and how effective it was in lessening the severity of attacks. Among the Caribbean workers it was far less popular, until Gorgas had the idea of dissolving it in extra-sweet pink lemonade. In making the drug more palatable, he did exactly what the officers of the Indian army had done in creating quinine tonic water half a century earlier, when they added sugar to the bitter quinine they were made to swallow to prevent malaria, then added a little gin to the mixture: the original gin and tonic. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the descendants of a German jeweller based in Geneva, Johann Jakob Schweppe, used their newly patented bubbling device on a mixture of oranges, sugar and quinine. They called it Schweppes Indian Tonic Water.

  It is hard to judge the efficacy of quinine alone in Panama. But Gorgas’s sanitary campaign, combined with his prescription of quinine as a preventive, reduced the incidence of malaria by a considerable degree. In 1906, the year he began his campaign in earnest, 82 per cent of the workforce was found to harbour malaria parasites in their blood. When the canal was completed in 1913, fewer than 8 per cent of workers showed any sign of malaria at all.

  Although no one still knew exactly how the disease was transmitted or how quinine cured it, as at Walcheren, in the Confederacy and on the Niger, the Jesuits’ powder was an essential armament for those engaged in both exploration and warfare. Without it, the expansion of the British Empire, the control of the seas, the extension of trade, war and colonial adventure into the tropics would have followed a very different, and perhaps narrower, path. But quinine was still difficult to obtain, and expensive when it was available. The question of how to ensure a cheap and regular supply was vexing colonial administrators and bounty hunters from as far afield as Chile, Goa and Kew Gardens in London.

  8

  The Seed – South America

  ‘Cinchona succirubra is a very handsome tree, and looking out over the forest I could never see any other tree at all comparable to it for beauty.’

  RICHARD SPRUCE, botanist, 1860

  ‘There is no drug more valuable to man than the febrifuge alkaloid which is extracted from the chinchona tree of South America.’

  SIR CLEMENTS MARKHAM, KCB, FRS,

  Peruvian Bark: A Popular Account of the

  Introduction of Cinchona Cultivation into British India (1880)

  At the time that doctors, merchants and politicians finally became convinced of the crucial role quinine had to play in treating malaria, and therefore in helping military and exploratory expansion overseas, there were still no plants to be found outside the forests of the Andes, nor even any seeds. That was about to change.

  In his memoir about Peru, to which he travelled after being commissioned to find the rich red trees of the Cinchona succirubra and bring seeds and saplings back to Britain, Sir Clements Markham, later President of the Royal Geographical Society, describes the soft-spoken Yorkshire plant hunter Richard Spruce. He was, he writes, ‘an eminent botanist and most intrepid explorer … I shall ever look upon my good fortune in securing Dr Spruce’s able co-operation as the most fortunate event connected with my conduct of the enterprise.’ The two men shared a passion for plants and plant hunting, especially in South America, and for the cinchona tree in particular. Although they worked closely together for only three years, they came to owe each other a great deal, which is why, decades later, Markham intervened with some of his influential political friends in London to secure a pension for the then impoverished and sickly Dr Spruce. Notwithstanding all his efforts, Spruce’s pension turned out to be almost derisory, but in the last years of his life it was his only income.

  Despite their shared Yorkshire heritage, their common interests and the successes they enjoyed together, the two men could not have been more different in character. Clements Markham was a Victorian metropolitan – politically wily and socially ambitious. He demonstrated his achievements in a particularly English way, collecting so many honours to follow his name that, after his knighthood, his Fellowship of the Royal Society and the accolades from Portugal, Brazil, Sweden and Norway, the remainder were briskly dealt with by the mock-humble appendage, ‘etc., etc.’.

  Richard Spruce too could not have been anything but English. A tall north countryman who played the bagpipes, the soft-spoken bachelor was as renowned for his modesty as for his encyclopaedic knowledge of mosses. A photographic portrait taken on his forty-seventh birthday shows a neat man with long legs and diffident lips hidden by a beard that had not yet grown as long as it would in later years. Yet, like so many Englishmen who only truly become themselves when released from the strictures of home, there was another side to Spruce. Finding himself far up the Amazon one night at a small village that was preparing to celebrate the Feast of St John, Spruce was invited to dance by a local dignitary. She happened to be a woman. Later he recalled that when he saw that ‘it was intended to do me honour and that I should be accounted proud if I refused, I led the lady out, first casting off my shoes in order to be on terms of equality with the rest of the performers. We got through the dance triumphantly, and at its close there was a general viva and clapping of hands for the “good white man who did not despise other people’s customs!” Once in for it, I danced all night.’

  Spruce had an innate interest in other people, whatever their customs, but only in South America could he cast off his natural English reserve as easily as he had his shoes on that hot Amazon night. His warmth drew others to him. Twelve years after Spruce first visited the Ecuadorean town of Ambato, between Quito and Guayaquil, his former landlord, Manuel Santander, wrote to him: ‘Come to your Ambato to lay your bones along with ours … Oh if we had you at our side, we should be happy.’

  Richard Spruce first set foot in South America in 1849. He had to wait until he was thirty-two to make the journey, for he was poor, and uncertain whether he could earn his living as a botanist. His interest in the Amazon had been awakened ten years earlier by reading Charles Darwin’s account of his voyage on the Beagle, but his fascination with plants had started when he was a boy. The son of a Yorkshire schoolmaster from Ganthorpe, Spruce lost his mother when he was still young. When Spruce was fourteen, his father married again, and had eight daughters, which robbed the boy of all but the most marginal parental attention. Unable to do much for his only son other than suggest that he follow in his footsteps and become a schoolteacher, the elder Spruce nevertheless encouraged his early interest in plants, and even accompanied him on long walks across the Yorkshire moors.

  By the time he was sixteen, Spruce had drawn up a list, neatly written out in alphabetical order, of 403 plants he had gathered and named from around Ganthorpe. In 1841 he discovered and identified as a new British plant a very rare se
dge, Carex paradoxa. By then he had also begun a study of native mosses. A year earlier, the first edition of Henry Baines’s Flora of Yorkshire had been published, which included no more than four mosses. Yet in a single three-week excursion to Teesdale, the sharp-eyed Spruce identified another 163 mosses and forty-one hepaticae, of which six of the mosses and one Jungermannia were new to Britain.

  Before he left for South America, Spruce spent a year on the border between France and Spain, searching for plants in the Pyrenees. Contemplating his future on his return to London, he was confident he would never have to go back to schoolteaching. The Pyrenean expedition had been the suggestion of the English botanist George Bentham and his friend Sir William Hooker, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, who had learned of Spruce’s existence after his success in discovering the sedge Carex paradoxa.

  The growing passion of the age for science, for cabinets of curiosities and for collecting in general, meant there was an increasing number of wealthy patrons prepared to pay such a fine botanist as Spruce for dried plants that were well preserved and accurately named. Hooker was right to be confident of Spruce’s talent. The young Yorkshireman had taken with him to Spain a guide book which stated categorically that ‘la famille de mousses n’existe pas dans les Pyrénées’. But within a short time Spruce had gathered together 230 hitherto unknown mosses and three hundred species of other choice alpine plants for despatching to purchasers in Britain and on the continent.

  It was Bentham and Hooker, whom he visited on his return to London in 1846, who suggested that the greatest territory still awaiting a skilled naturalist collector such as Spruce was the Amazon. That, the two men insisted, was where he should go next. Within a few months Spruce set sail for Pará, on the coast of Brazil. When he returned to Britain a decade and a half later in 1864, he had collected more than thirty thousand plants.

  The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which Sir William Hooker had schemed for so long to take over and which he ruled with a firm hand and unbridled ambition, had been transformed during the first half of the nineteenth century. It had already grown enormously by 1800 – in 1768, when James Cook’s Endeavour sailed for the South Seas, there were six hundred species of plants in cultivation at Kew; thirty years later the figure had grown to more than six thousand – but at the turn of the century it was still little more than a royal pleasure ground, a botanical sandpit where a gentleman amateur, in this case King George III, could indulge his private passion for natural philosophy and show off to his friends.

  Kew was in many ways similar to that other royal garden that had been created in the middle of the Prado by the Spanish King, Charles III, in Madrid in 1774. If there was any real public function at all to Kew, it was as a symbol of the power and modernity of King George; the garden reflected the dignity of the monarchy, and its vast collection of orchids, palms and rare trees added lustre to the court. ‘When their Majesties resided at Kew,’ wrote a contemporary historian, ‘a Terrace near the river was frequented … with a concourse of nobility and gentry! Stars and ribbons and garters glistened on the eye in uninterrupted succession.’

  After the death of George III in 1820, Kew suffered a brief eclipse. The new King, the urbane George IV, could not abide the thought of mud, and swiftly began building himself a new home, Buckingham Palace, in town. Before long, though, Kew was once again a centre of ambition and ambitious expansion. Britain had already set about a regular annexation of foreign parts – territories in the West Indies and the Orient were followed by Aden in 1839, and New Zealand, Hong Kong, Natal, Punjab and Basutoland in subsequent years. It was natural that a policy of exchanging plants with these newly acquired territories would soon take hold. So too did the tradition of financing botanists to travel abroad. When William Balfour Baikie travelled up the Niger aboard the Pleiad, it was in the company of a former gardener from Kew, Charles Barter.

  By 1840, the tide of economic and political reform that was seeping into every corner of English life had pervaded even Kew’s elegant promenades. That year, the ownership of the gardens was transferred from the direct control of Queen Victoria to Her Majesty’s government. Although no longer owned by the monarch, Kew, and by extension British botany, still enjoyed its royal patronage. One of the earliest acts of the Botanical Society of London, when it was founded in 1836, was to present Victoria with her first banana.

  How Kew flourished under Hooker, its first botanical President, and later his son Joseph, is a parable of the politics of reform and the expansion of empire in nineteenth-century Britain. Central to the garden’s reinvented self was its first imperial project, the British cinchona initiative.

  In 1858 the share announcement of the newly formed Central Africa Company described in some detail how the loss of European life that had always accompanied any foray into Central Africa had deterred many individuals from opening up trade there. That problem, the announcement promised, had now been overcome. Henceforth it would be possible to expand African commerce, to offer scientists and missionaries a wider field for their operations, and thus eventually to improve ‘the moral and material condition of the [African] people’. What made all this possible, the document stated, was the efficacy of quinine in preventing intermittent fever.

  The idea that cinchona might be grown in other European colonies had been suggested as early as the eighteenth century. The Spanish, naturally, were vehemently against such a plan, for it would mean the end of their monopoly. In 1835 it had been proposed that the mountainous parts of India, in particular the Khasia and Nilgiri Hills, might be the place to attempt cinchona cultivation. Nothing more was done at the time, but during the winter of 1852–53 a Dutch botanist, Justus Karl Hasskarl, who had at one time been the superintendent of the Buitenzorg garden in Java, travelled to South America disguised as a German businessman, with the intention of collecting cinchona seeds for planting in Java. Although Hasskarl arrived too late for the flowering season and was forced to wait in Peru for another year, his presence in South America accelerated a race in which Britain, Holland and France sought to secure the best varieties of cinchona for plantations in Asia.

  Early in 1858, five years after Hasskarl’s visit and shortly after the share announcement of the Central Africa Company, British businessmen in Ecuador enlisted the help of the local chargé d’affaires to prod the government on the matter. In lieu of more than £1 million in overdue debt and interest payments, the government of Ecuador had granted to English bondholders 4 ½ million acres of land, which constituted the major asset of the Ecuador Land Company. In a memorial to the Board of Trade in London, the businessmen stated that ‘the transportation of the cinchona tree to India and some other British colonies … forms part of our contemplated undertaking’. The new India Office, which had been created in the wake of the Crown’s assumption of control over the subcontinent after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, offered an enthusiastic endorsement of the scheme.

  Kew was to play a major part in the cinchona initiative, handling the administration of all stages of the project, the systematic collection of the best varieties of cinchona in South America, the germination of seeds in British greenhouses, and the transportation of the plants and their introduction into botanical gardens in British Asia.

  Also crucial to the project were Richard Spruce, who was already collecting plants in South America for his private subscribers, and the as-yet unknighted Clements Markham, who was then employed as a junior clerk at the Board of Control, copying out letters and despatches from India, Persia, Syria and the Orient, but who earlier, in the course of a ten-month visit to Peru in 1852–53, had travelled extensively through the country. Markham was the first Englishman to visit Cuzco, and had taught himself Spanish and even a little Quechua grammar, but his most important claim was that he was one of the few Europeans to have seen a cinchona tree, Cinchona ovata, the species that the Dutch botanist Hasskarl would later try to smuggle to Java, thus starting the race to secure the tree’s best varieties.

&nb
sp; It is likely that Markham, ensconced within the bowels of the Civil Service, with its informal network of spies and bartering of influence, would have heard whispers about the cinchona initiative early on. The Board of Control worked closely with the English East India Company, the powerful enterprise that had come to control most of India by the early nineteenth century, and that had long been an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of growing cinchona on the subcontinent. In 1852, at the same time that Markham was travelling through Peru, and flushed with the success of his Indian pavilion at the Great Exhibition, John Forbes Royle, the Reporter on Indian Products to the East India Company, wrote to his superiors warning them that the Cinchona calisaya forests in South America were being cut down so fast they would soon be destroyed. In March 1857, after Baikie had proved quinine’s virtues as a prophylactic against malaria while sailing up the Niger, Royle again wrote formally to the Company: ‘The almost inappreciable value of the cinchona, commonly called Peruvian bark … is universally acknowledged. Hence it becomes a duty to humanity … to increase the supply of cinchona trees which yield such valuable barks.’

  The Board of Control’s ties with the India Office meant that Clements Markham would have been well aware of the problems that endemic malaria, unchecked and seemingly uncheckable, was causing in India. Even though he was neither a doctor nor a botanist, he would have understood immediately the full implications of Royle’s memorandum, which seemed on the face of it to be simply philanthropic. But to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the problem, Royle’s words had a commercial and political undertone that was all too clear. To ensure the health of Indian workers, a reliable source of quinine, locally and cheaply produced, and easy to administer, was needed. Plants and seeds would be required to start off a plantation, and these would have to come from South America.