Although he was only twenty-eight, Markham was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, thanks to his friend, the Society’s President Sir Roderick Murchison. His account of his Peruvian trip, Cuzco and Lima, had been widely reviewed when it was published in early 1856. Ambitious, well connected and supremely self-confident, Markham began an energetic letter-writing campaign in support of botany for Britain – with the aim of having himself appointed to lead the expedition to South America to secure the best varieties of cinchona.
Many years later, Markham would be captivated by the story of the Countess of Chinchón. Unwilling, perhaps out of snobbishness, to accept that it might not be true, he did much to promote the tale in the English-speaking world. In 1886 he even went so far as to try to persuade the International Botanical Congress to change Linnaeus’ botanical nomenclature of the tree from the erroneous Cinchona to Chinchona.
It is characteristic of Markham that he should be attracted to a story that had a countess as its heroine. His fondness for titles, and the natural ease he displayed when cultivating men of influence, were the result of an early unconscious training. Three years before Markham was born in Yorkshire in 1830, his father, a clergyman, had been appointed canon at Windsor Castle. With the job came a house within the castle walls, and by the time Clements was a young boy his father was dining every Sunday with the King and Queen, wearing evening dress with knee-breeches, silk stockings and shoes with silver buckles. Canon Markham would bring back to his family bonbons from the royal table, and an endless supply of gossip.
At the age of twelve, Markham was sent to Westminster School, the alma mater of many earlier Markhams. He was already showing an interest in geography, devouring accounts of polar voyages, and also history. By that time he had written a history of England, geographies of various countries including Peru, studies of astronomy and a number of short biographies. At the same time he met Lord Ellesmere, like Murchison – and indeed Markham himself – a future President of the Royal Geographical Society. Both Ellesmere and the masters at Westminster encouraged Markham to write further.
Soon after, Markham was introduced to another man who would further his career. At a dinner given by his aunt, the Countess of Mansfield, he met Rear-Admiral Sir George Seymour, then a Lord of the Admiralty, who suggested that Markham enter the Royal Navy and accompany him on his flagship to the Pacific. Less than a month later, having taken an exam that consisted merely of writing down the Lord’s Prayer, Markham was enrolled as a naval cadet and assigned to HMS Collingwood. On 20 July 1844, Markham’s fourteenth birthday, the Collingwood sailed out of Portsmouth harbour.
Over the next six years, Markham would travel as far afield as the Falklands, Chile, Peru, Tahiti, Hawaii, and even the Arctic. He read and reread accounts of the voyages of William Dampier, Captain James Cook, and W.H. Prescott’s Conquest of Peru (1847). Despite the excitement he felt at each new stop, he grew increasingly disenchanted with what he saw as the random and excessive cruelty of the Navy. In 1851, after several attempts, he finally persuaded his father to allow him to resign his commission. But it was not until he returned to Britain that he told his family of his ambition to return to the place that had so captured his imagination when he first docked there as a young naval cadet in January 1845: Peru.
On 20 August 1852, a month after his twenty-second birthday, Markham set out once again from Windsor. He never saw his father again; he would learn of his death the following year when he returned to Lima after his journey through central Peru and read his father’s obituary in an old copy of The Times. Having left home, Markham proceeded to Liverpool, and from there crossed to Halifax with two former messmates from the Collingwood. When he shook hands with them at Windsor, Nova Scotia, ‘and really started on my Peruvian expedition’, he wrote later, ‘I felt that then I finally left the navy.’
Markham’s principal aim during his travels in Peru was to learn as much as possible about the Incas. He had already developed a number of theories about their origins and culture, which he wanted to test by visiting, measuring, drawing and describing the ancient ruins that dotted the Peruvian landscape. He was also fascinated by the Spanish conquest, in particular by the Inca chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), whose writings he had pored over even though he had only a second-rate translation. But it was impossible for him not to be moved by the dynamic optimism with which Peru, and in particular Lima, had been seized in the years following its independence from Spain in 1825.
Markham’s itinerary would take him across the isthmus of Panama, where the railway that preceded French efforts at dredging a canal was still being built. Where there was no line, a road – ‘the most execrable in the world’—provided the only way ahead. The climate, as attractive to the mosquito as it was unpalatable to human beings, was as bad as ever. ‘We were overtaken by heavy showers,’ Markham wrote in his journal, ‘the rain coming down in buckets, clothes being converted into a soaking sponge, and so we went on – heavily, despondently.’
Life improved when Markham docked at Callao. He found Lima little changed since he had last seen it in 1847, although he noted that the say y manto dresses – with their narrow pleated skirts and their odd hood arrangement that covered the head and face, leaving only one eye showing – were no longer to be seen, having fallen from fashion in the meantime. He dined, thanks to numerous introductions from London, with the cream of Limena society, and attended a ball in the finest house in the city. Finally he set off on horseback on his journey. Asked by a passing colonel, as he left town, whether he was going to pasear as far as Magdalena, three miles distant, Markham replied, ‘No! To Cuzco,’ which was three hundred miles away. ‘Caramba,’ replied the colonel, clearly impressed. ‘Dios guarda vos.’
Markham’s travelling kit closely resembled that which Agustino Salumbrino and the other Jesuit fathers had used when setting off from San Pablo a century and a half earlier. He also took with him a sextant, hygrometer, telescope and, thanks to an Englishwoman who was concerned about his welfare, three pots of sardines.
The influence of the Jesuits was still clearly visible to Markham, though they had been banished from the country eighty-five years before. As he left the coast and began to climb towards the cordillera and Cuzco, Markham passed well-tended estates, vineyards, sugar mills and handsome churches, all of which had been built by the Jesuits. By the time he reached the Peruvian montana, the area on the eastern slopes of the Andes where the cinchona grows, he was well acquainted with Peru’s agricultural economy. There he saw trees of India rubber, vanilla, indigo, balsam, cinnamon and sarsaparilla; indeed, many of the products that formed the bulk of the cargo Dona Pheliziana Barbara Garzan had watched being loaded aboard the Conde at Guayaquil in 1748.
It was in the montana, where the spurs of the Andes reach down into the vast tropical forest of the Amazonian basin below, that Markham caught sight of his first cinchona tree one day in early May 1853: ‘Gradually the slopes covered with long grass were exchanged for a subtropical vegetation. There were many beautiful flowering plants. I here saw a cascarilla tree and afterwards another. The species was Cinchona ovata, not a valuable kind, but it made me acquainted with the genus.’
Five years later, when, back in England, he began campaigning to be named as the head of the cinchona expedition to South America, Markham wrote to the Under-Secretary of State for India. Although he was no botanist, he described at some length how he had learned Spanish and Quechua, and how well he knew the bark forests of Peru and the landowners of the eastern cordillera. He also argued that it was essential for the leader of such an expedition to be a man ‘whose heart [was] really in the business’. The more he thought about it, the more fired up Markham became about the possibilities that John Forbes Royle’s proposal to his superiors at the East India Company had suggested. ‘I gave the subject most careful consideration,’ he wrote later, ‘and being convinced that this measure would confer an inestimable benefit on British India, and on the world generally
, I resolved to undertake its execution.’
Markham’s own suggestion was that the India Office should finance four separate expeditions to gather the eight most valuable varieties of cinchona growing in the Andes. In addition to both Bolivian calisayas and the two varieties of red bark growing in Ecuador, he proposed that plant collectors should be sent to Peru and to Colombia. ‘If the thing is worth doing,’ he wrote to the India Office, ‘it is worth doing well.’
In the end, three expeditions only were approved: Markham’s own, a second one to Huánuco, also in Peru, and a third to Ecuador. This last, it was decided, should be led by the moss man, Richard Spruce.
While Clements Markham was climbing through the ranks of the British Civil Service, trading a titbit of information here or extracting a favour there, Richard Spruce was focusing all his attention on the miraculous abundance of the Amazon. It seemed that everywhere he turned he spotted not just his beloved mosses, but new flowers, canes, grasses, ferns, trees, lichen and palms, not to mention animals and birds, many of which had never previously been recorded. ‘Here our grasses are bamboos sixty or more feet high,’ he wrote to his family. ‘Our milkworts are stout woody twiners, ascending to the highest tops of trees … Instead of your periwinkles, we have here handsome trees exuding a most deadly poison. Violets are the size of apple trees … Daisies borne on trees like Alders.’
Spruce’s first introduction to the economic potential of cinchona came from a druggist named Daniel Hanbury, whose family ran a thriving pharmaceutical business in Spitalfields, in the East End of London. In 1856, Spruce received a letter of introduction from Hanbury. It had been forwarded to South America by the botanist George Bentham, who described Hanbury as ‘a young man of great abilities who has devoted himself much to pharmacology and is anxious on the question of cinchona etc upon which he writes to you’. Hanbury urged Spruce to collect young cinchona plants and also the ‘old bark’, that was rich in alkaloids: ‘Botanical specimens of Cinchona & its allies, accompanied by small, authenticated specimens of bark, could not fail to meet with some demand here and on the continent in quarters where the general herbarium would not be subscribed.’
Three years later, when Spruce received the stiff envelope containing the commission from the India Office, he had been in South America for nearly ten years. His health, never good, caused him much trouble. Furthermore, he was broke, for he never charged his subscribers overmuch for the specimens he sent them. In March 1857 he had set out on a trek, in the midst of revolution, from the town of Tarapoto, in northern Peru, along the steep banks of two rivers that swirled and fell in muddy cascades down the western slope of the Andes, into Ecuador. This ghastly journey lasted 102 days, leaving him shrunken and emaciated from lack of food. Before that, in 1853, he had tramped through the floodwaters at the edge of the Amazon, where bloodsucking bats – ‘midnight bloodletters’, he called them – left large patches of dried-up blood, drawn from previous travellers, on the floor of his room. He had turned north at the rubber boom-town of Manaus and canoed over much of the Río Negro, through the country explored by the German botanist Baron von Humboldt fifty years before, and as far as the cataracts of the Orinoco River in southern Venezuela. The spray of the waterfall ‘dashes in one’s face, and [the] roar drowns one’s voice’, he wrote. Mosquitoes, known locally as zancudos, were a constant scourge for both Spruce and his guides. ‘If I passed my hand across my face,’ he wrote from the town of Esmeraldas, at the foot of Mount Duida, to a friend back in England, ‘I brought it away covered with blood and with the crushed bodies of gorged mosquitoes.’
At Maipures, further up the Orinoco, the mosquitoes were so bad that Spruce was forced to wear gloves and to tie his trousers down over his ankles. ‘I constantly returned from my walks with my hands, feet, neck, and face covered with blood, and I found I could nowhere escape these pests.’ Even eating in that place was no pleasure. ‘Many times there is no sitting down to eat a meal, but one must walk about, platter in hand, and be content to eat one’s food well peppered with mosquitoes.’
Like everyone else at the time, Spruce made no connection between mosquitoes and malaria. For someone who complained so much about his health, he travelled with remarkably little in the way of medicine. Yet, if he hadn’t had a small bottle of quinine with him on that trip up the Orinoco, he would surely have died. After only a few days at Maipures, Spruce began to feel unwell: ‘I had violent attacks of fever by night, with short respites in the middle of the day, and on the second night, on stepping out of my hammock, I was seized with vomiting … I passed a dreadful night, and in the morning I resolved to seek better aid.’ A local comisario and his nurse advised certain local pills, one a violent purgative, which would surely have exacerbated Spruce’s symptoms. He refused to touch his small store of quinine – perhaps he did not really believe he had malaria, and was afraid to waste what little quinine he had with him. In any event, when his condition showed no signs of improving after two weeks, he changed his mind.
At first he took only two or three grains. As his symptoms improved, he increased the dose, until by the nineteenth day he was taking six grains at least four times a day. The effect was, as it almost always is at high dosage, virtually instantaneous. His fever fell and his appetite returned. Within two days he was able to sit at table; within a week he was dining on tapir. Soon after, he asked a visiting manufacturer of feather hammocks he knew, Antonio Diaz, to help him get back downriver to San Carlos. ‘A few weeks ago I thought I would never write to you more,’ Spruce later confessed to Bentham. ‘In seeking the wherewithal to sustain life, I came within little of meeting with death.’
Spruce’s encounter with malaria left him not just physically weak, but poor as well. Six years later this helped seal his determination to take on the India Office commission, which he did swiftly, asking just £30 a month – £10 more than he usually received from his subscribers – as a salary. Although he would in later years come to regret having accepted so little, Spruce then had eyes only on the immediate future. ‘I have been entrusted by the India Government,’ he wrote from his new base at Ambato in eastern Ecuador, a short distance south of Mount Cotopaxi, to his colleague John Teasdale in April 1859, ‘with the charge of obtaining seeds and young plants of the different sorts of cinchona (Peruvian Bark) found in the Quitonian Andes for transporting to our Eastern possessions, where it is proposed to form plantations of these precious trees on a large scale. This task will occupy me (if my life be spared) the greater part of next year.’
Having recovered from the perilous journey along the eastern Andes to Ambato, Spruce was ready to seek the cinchona. He hired an Indian guide named Bermeo, ‘who had worked a good deal at getting out cascarilla’, and set out with mules and horses to scout about. Although he found much else to interest him, including a lush oasis of vegetable-ivory palms and a small tree called Palo del Rosario which he said had never been described before, Spruce was disturbed by the extent to which the cinchona trees had been destroyed. He found several lying on the ground, and the only one still standing had been stripped of its bark ‘near the root, so that it was dead and leafless’. He did not give up, though. Through the good offices of James Taylor, an English doctor he met in Ambato, and funds put forward by the British Consul, Spruce was after much negotiation able to lease a large acreage of forest belonging to a former President of Ecuador, General Juan José Flores, a patient of Dr Taylor’s. For a rental of $400, Spruce would be allowed to take as many cinchona seeds and plants as he liked, on condition that he did not touch any of the bark.
He secured the services of four Indians who were used to working in the bark forests, and began loading up provisions of potatoes, peas and barley meal, as well as the boxes of precious botanical equipment. The expedition used the tough Andean bulls called cabrestillos, whose cloven hoofs made them more secure than mules on the slippery inclines they would have to traverse while passing beneath the summit of Mount Chimborazo. Leaving winter behind on the
eastern side of the Andes, Spruce and his guides headed westwards across a saddle towards Guaranda. The vegetation—hassocks of stipa and festuca – gave the landscape a grey, barren air. But there were hundreds of other plants: lupins, calceolarias, coloured violets and geraniums, as well as brightly coloured green shoots that grew merrily out of the carcases of old, cutdown trees. These were cinchonas that had been harvested by earlier cascarilleros, but which were being lovingly tended by the Indians who now knew their true worth.
Having reached the small hamlet of Limón, where the finest clutch of red-bark cinchonas was once known to have grown, Spruce first stopped to kill one of the bulls so as to have a supply of dried beef, then set about visiting all the bark trees in the vicinity. He was glad to see that many had reached their full size, and that most of these boasted a thick crop of flowers and the beginnings of the seed capsules he was hoping to empty. As June turned to July, the weather became cooler, with ‘a good deal of mist and fog’. The capsules were attacked by maggots, and many of them started to turn mouldy. ‘I began to fear we should get no ripe seeds,’ Spruce wrote later in his journal. Things grew worse when he found one morning that two of the best trees had been stripped completely bare by the people of Limón, who had heard that he wanted to buy seeds. ‘I immediately went round to the inhabitants and informed them that the seeds would be of no value to me unless I gathered them myself.’
Spruce found about two hundred trees in the valleys around Limón. Only two or three of these were saplings, the remainder being regrowth from old trees that had been cut down earlier. He was unable to find a single young plant under these trees. Many seeds germinated in cane fields, where they failed to survive the frequent weeding, or in pastures where they were grazed by cattle. The bark hunters or cascarilleros, Spruce learned, rarely went out before the month of August because of the fog. Once out on the slopes, though, they worked fast, cutting down trees and digging out many of the roots in order to strip off the bark with a machete, in much the same way that oak used to be stripped in England. They then built a stage about three feet high, known as a tendál, for drying the bark, taking special care that neither rain nor the fire below the tendál posed any danger. Once the bark was dry they carried it to a nearby depot, where they were paid $20 per quintal, about one hundred pounds.
The Miraculous Fever-Tree Page 21