The Miraculous Fever-Tree

by Fiammetta Rocco

  Although the cascarilleros knew that the bark was worth money, they had no idea what it was used for. Most of them believed it was transported to foreign countries where it was somehow made into dye that was either, depending on who you asked, the colour of coffee or, even more valuable to the Ecuadoreans, the dark sheen of chocolate. ‘I explained to the people of Limón how it yielded the precious quinine which was of such vast use in medicine,’ Spruce wrote in his journal, ‘but I afterwards heard them saying to one another, “It is all very fine for him to stuff us with such a tale; of course he won’t tell us how the dye is made, or we should use it ourselves for our ponchos and bayetas, and not let foreigners take away so much of it.”’

  Despite their scepticism, the Indians were keen to help. In late July, Spruce learned with some relief that the Wardian cases, the heavy wood and glass boxes in which he planned to transport the young cinchona plants, were finally on their way. Their safe passage was being overseen by Robert Cross, a young gardener whom the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew had sent to South America. He arrived ‘pale and thin’, not to mention anxious, for there was much unrest in the towns, and he had passed many troops along the way.

  Cross set to work taking cuttings of the red bark cinchona. The owner of a nearby chacra, a small farm, had shown Spruce some sprigs that he had cut from the stool of an old tree and stuck into the ground by a nearby watercourse four months earlier, and ‘they had all rooted well’. On 13 August Spruce noticed that some of the finest seed capsules were beginning to burst. An Indian climbed up the tree, and breaking the panicles gently, let them fall on sheets that had been spread on the ground. Cross sowed eight of these seeds, and he and Spruce watched over their hatchlings with all the excitement of parents awaiting the birth of a first child.

  One began to germinate on the fourth day, and at the end of a fortnight four had put forth their first leaves. In time, they all followed. ‘One of the seedlings was afterwards lost by accident,’ wrote Spruce, ‘but the remaining seven formed healthy little plants, and when embarked at Guayaquil, along with the rooted cuttings and layers, bid as fair as any of the latter to reach India alive.’

  In all, Spruce and Cross collected more than 100,000 ripe seeds, and more than six hundred cuttings and seedlings. The seeds they dried in the sun before carefully packing them in boxes with dried leaves. Cross took charge of packing up the seedlings, taking care to wrap each one in wet moss before placing it carefully with the others in a basket that was balanced, one on each side, of a bull. ‘There [were] not a few falls on the way, and some of the baskets got partially crushed by the wilfulness of the bulls in running through the bush; but the greater part of the plants turned out wonderfully fresh.’

  For all the thousands of miles that the seedlings were to cover on their way first to Jamaica and then to England, before departing again for India, it was the early part of their journey by river to Guayaquil that was to prove the most perilous. Intermittent heavy rain and flooding higher up the mountains sent the level of the river shooting up and down ‘so that we had to watch our raft night and day’, wrote Spruce. With the help of three raftsmen wielding heavy wooden oars they swept along, their raft bobbing over the river surface like a dancer. In six hours they had covered nearly twenty-five miles, when the river suddenly narrowed to less than thirty yards, and the raft with its precious cargo was thrust into a boiling sluice that threatened to submerge it.

  Fearful that the Wardian cases might be smashed, Spruce and Cross elected not to put on the glass covers, but to stretch strips of moistened calico over the top of the frame instead. ‘The heavy cases were hoisted up and dashed against each other, the roof of our cabin smashed in, and the old pilot was for some moments so completely involved in the branches and the wreck of the roof, that I expected nothing but that he had been carried away.’ The cases received only a few slight cracks, and none of them had turned over, wrote Spruce. But his greatest worry, as ever, was for his small charges. ‘The leaves of the plants were sorely maltreated,’ he wrote, but they survived happily enough. By the time they were embarked aboard a large steamer at Guayaquil, Spruce’s only concern was that the warm sea atmosphere was making them grow too rapidly.

  While Spruce’s quest, difficult though it had been, was ultimately successful, Clements Markham’s journey across Peru would have quite a different outcome.

  Markham set sail from Southampton on 17 December 1859. Though the weather was grey and windy, the damp sky with its fishy south coast smell was as familiar to the small party as the South American landscape would later prove exotic and frightening. Travelling with Markham were his young wife Minna, a clever, spirited young woman whose sense of adventure and curiosity easily matched her husband’s, and John Weir, the second of the two gardeners seconded by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to ensure the cinchona plants survived in good health. Christmas was spent in the middle of the Atlantic, and by January the growing numbers of brown pelicans whirling about in the air told them they were approaching land. Sometimes by mule and sometimes by rail, Markham’s party crossed the isthmus of Panama, and then, like Robert Cross less than a year earlier, caught the steamer south towards Lima.

  If Markham, who was neither a botanist nor a plantsman like Weir, felt nervous about the task ahead, he showed no sign of it. His old friends in Lima welcomed him as if he had never been away, and a local paper, Commercio de Lima, published a glowing review of his book about Cuzco and the Incas. Between parties and receptions, Markham made himself busy arranging for supplies and transport, and after a month the expedition was ready to begin.

  The party sailed south to Islay on the Pacific coast, then headed inland towards Arequipa. It was the same route Markham had taken seven years earlier, and he still had friends in the pretty hillside town, where he arranged for his wife to stay while he and Weir travelled on. So intent was Markham on forging ahead that he gave little thought to how circumstances, both Peru’s and his own, had changed since his last visit. The young Englishman whose heart had soared at the thought of escaping the suffocating embrace of the Royal Navy, and who had travelled to Peru to study and to learn, was not the man who was returning now. Markham in 1860 came with all the financial and political backing of the Victorian establishment, and much of its self-righteousness as well. ‘In obtaining plants and seeds of the valuable chinchonas from South America, it would have been a source of deep regret to me if that measure had been attended by any injury to the people or the commerce of Peru, Ecuador, or Colombia,’ he would write later. ‘But,’ he went on – adopting the line of thought that justified so much that the Victorians did, from saving the Elgin marbles to forcing Africans to wear European clothes – ‘hitherto they have destroyed the chinchona trees in a spirit of reckless short-sightedness, and thus done more injury to their own interests than could possibly have arisen from any commercial competition.’

  The Peruvians might well have destroyed much of their cinchona forests by cutting down the trees willy-nilly, but they also held their miraculous fever-trees in high regard: when the country became independent in 1825, its national emblem boasted a small woolly vicuna, a horn of plenty and a cinchona tree. By clothing his mission in a mantle of philanthropy, Markham blinded himself to the notion that others might have a different perception of his efforts.

  As Markham left Arequipa and began the climb through the clouds of the cordillera on the western side of the Andes, he had other things on his mind. Both he and Weir had begun suffering terribly from the sorochi, or mountain sickness, that travellers to Cuzco are still warned about today: ‘It began with a violent pressure on the head, accompanied by acute pain and aches in the back of the neck, causing great pain and discomfort, and these symptoms increased in intensity during the night at the Apo post-house, so that at 3 a.m., when we recommenced our journey, I was unable to mount my mule without assistance.’

  Despite the discomfort, Markham and Weir pressed on, drawn as much by the novelties in the landscape as by the chal
lenge they had set themselves. As they crossed stream after stream of freezing clear water, they spied herds of vicuna grazing on the slopes, or galloping along at great speed with their noses close to the ground, ‘as if scenting out the best pastures’. They saw huge numbers of plovers, uttering their discordant notes as they flew overhead before turning to skim the ground in circles. Green parrots chattered unseen in the trees, with partridges and brightly coloured finches. But what really caught their imaginations was the glorious coraquenque, the condor, the ‘royal bird of the Incas’, with its striking black and white wings that had been so vividly described by the Inca chronicler Markham admired so much, Garcilaso de la Vega.

  Markham’s rapture was interrupted only by the mules, which were a constant source of trouble. He had refused to engage an experienced muleteer, thinking to economise by managing the animals himself. He soon found out his mistake. ‘Whenever the brutes had a chance,’ he told his biographer, ‘they would bolt off the road in different directions, bumping their packs against the rocks or endeavouring to roll, which, of course, would soon have smashed everything they were carrying.’

  Markham had hoped that by striking eastwards from the sea he would eventually make his way towards La Paz in Bolivia, where the best Cinchona calisaya trees were known to grow. But by the time he and his party were approaching the Bolivian border, they had more than mountain sickness and mad mules to cope with. Near Crucero, in the western cordillera, they met a red-faced and choleric old man, a former colonel in the Peruvian army named Don Manuel Martel, who had begun spreading the rumour that the English travellers were preparing to steal the Peruvians’ precious bark. Martel, it seemed, had lost a great deal of money in the quinine trade, and he had nothing good to say about Justus Karl Hasskarl, the Dutch agent who had come to Peru in disguise six years earlier in an attempt to smuggle some seedlings to plant in Java. If the Dutchman, or anyone else, ever attempted to take the cascarilla out of the country again, Martel threatened, he would stir up the people to seize them and cut off their feet.

  Finding the border closed as a result of one of the many intermittent disputes between Peru and Bolivia, Markham resolved to restrict his hunt for Cinchona calisaya to the western side of the border. From the mountain town of Sandia, his party headed down into the Tambopata valley. By night, it drizzled without stopping. There was little dry ground on which to pitch a tent, and almost nowhere to light a fire for a cup of tea or beef concentrate. By day, they had to force their way through the forest, slashing through closely matted ferns, fallen bamboos and the roots of enormous trees. Small black flies and other insects stung the exposed skin of their wrists and ears. The men used their machetes to slice at the creepers whose long tendrils twisted around their ankles, threatening to trip them up at every step. After half an hour of hacking and chopping, they would often look back to find they had advanced no more than twenty yards. The sweat ran down their necks, and the sticky yellow mud clung to their boots. In many places the forest was so overgrown, and the foliage so dense, that it was almost dark even at noon, except where a few gaps allowed the sun to shed a pale light across their gloomy surroundings.

  One day followed another as Markham, Weir and their Indian guides searched for cinchona plants. The Indians rolled coca leaves into balls and chewed them while they worked. Markham adopted the same habit, finding that the soothing effect enabled him to climb the steep slopes and to cope more easily without food. For more than a fortnight they searched the cinchona forest, and by early May they had gathered four round bundles of cinchona plants, five hundred in all. It was enough to fill the Wardian cases that were waiting to be despatched to the coast.

  As Markham and his party climbed out of the forest on 12 May, they were stopped by a gang of young men who had been lying in wait for them. Leading them was the son of Don Manuel Martel. The young man shouted at Markham’s Indian guides, accusing them of betraying their nation by helping to convey the plants out of the country. As soon as they reached Sandia, he threatened, the plants would be seized and confiscated. Markham raised his revolver, though he knew that, like everything else he possessed, after spending a fortnight tramping through the Andean undergrowth it was so damp as to be useless. The young man opposite him did not know that, though. Markham looked him in the eye, and let out a steady breath. After a long moment, Martel’s son stepped aside to let Markham and his men pass by.

  Knowing that it was only a matter of time before he would be stopped again, Markham contemplated setting out on foot alone, with the four bundles of plants on his mule. But when he reached Sandia he was approached by a man whose acquaintance he had made on his first trip to the town. If Markham would hand over his gun, the man told him, he would supply him with an Indian guide who could find him fresh beasts and accompany him to Vilque, on the road to Arequipa.

  Markham readily consented to this plan, and despatched Weir with another guide in the opposite direction to throw Martel off the scent. On 17 May he left Sandia with his guide, Angelino Paco, and two mules bearing the precious plants. But it became clear before night fell that Paco had never been away from the valley of Sandia, and had no idea how to find his way across the cordillera. Moreover, when they stopped and opened their bags, Markham found that all his food and his matches had been stolen. That night he shared Paco’s dry maize meal.

  The two men resumed their march at daybreak. For nearly twelve hours they wandered across the grass-covered plains of the high cordillera. At nightfall, they found a deserted shepherd’s hut built of loose stones and thatched with wild grass. It stood no more than three feet high, but both men flung themselves inside it to shelter from the wind and the cold.

  Next morning they found that the mules had wandered off, and it took them three hours to find them and round them up. The mules required constant supervision. If left to themselves, Markham wrote, they would try to lie down and roll over, which would have been ‘fatal to the plants that were strapped on their backs’.

  For more than two weeks Markham shepherded his saplings towards the sea, stopping briefly at Vilque for fresh supplies, and at Arequipa, where he was reunited with the patient Minna. But the party’s arrival at Islay, on the coast, brought little respite. The customs master declared that it was illegal to export the cascarilla plants, and refused to allow them to be shipped without an express order from the Minister of Finance and Commerce. Markham left the saplings behind and caught the first steamer to Lima, hoping that the Ministry would know little about Peru’s ever-shifting rules about trade. Only a few days earlier the President had issued a decree forbidding the export of cinchona, but luckily for Markham, the Minister did not yet know this. After much cajoling, Markham obtained the papers he needed, and promptly left once again for Islay, where he found his plants happily budding and throwing out leaves inside their Wardian cocoons, proof that they had survived their journey across the Andes.

  For all his efforts, Markham’s expedition was not a success. Of the 529 plants he shipped from the forest of Caravaya, nearly half died before he and Weir reached Southampton in August 1860. Instead of taking those that remained to Kew, where they could safely recuperate and grow stronger, Markham insisted that they proceed straight to Bombay and the Nilgiri Hills in south-western India, where they were due to be planted out in the newly established cinchona plantation. It was a terrible mistake. Some of the cases were knocked about in the crossing, and one was dropped into the Red Sea. It was by now late summer, and a hot wind was blowing eastwards from the Sahara. At one point the ship’s engines stalled for more than a day, and the temperature on deck rose higher and higher. On reaching Bombay, Markham discovered that the connecting steamer he had been due to board for Calicut had already left, and he and his precious cargo were left to wait in the heat before being able to continue their onward journey.

  It was not until mid-October that the plants finally reached the government plantations near Mysore. There, with the help of a skilled plantsman, William McIvor, who was the
superintendent of the botanical gardens, they were planted out in fresh soil. But it was too late. By December, exactly a year after Markham had sailed to South America from Southampton, every one of them was dead.

  A copy of a portrait of Sir Clements Markham by George Henry hangs in the Royal Geographical Society. It was commissioned by the governors of Westminster School when Markham was eighty-three, and at his suggestion it includes an illustration of Cinchona officinalis, the highly prized cascarilla fina, and a silver model of Captain Scott pulling his sledge towards the South Pole, the two geographical exploits that made Markham’s reputation. Markham would write at length about his journey to find the cinchonas of South America – his Peruvian Bark, which was published in 1880, runs to more than five hundred pages. Yet neither there, nor in any of the articles he wrote, nor even in his private journals and the two volumes of cinchona notebooks that are lodged with the Royal Geographical Society, does he mention the sad end of his calisaya seedlings.

  One reason may be that he learned that Spruce’s plants were the only ones that had been successfully transplanted in India. More galling, though, was the fact that the seedlings that had been collected by both Spruce and Markham were almost valueless. Rival plantations started by the Dutch in Java would be filled with cinchona trees grown from seeds procured by another Englishman, Charles Ledger, and his Bolivian guide, Manuel Incra Mamani.