The Miraculous Fever-Tree

by Fiammetta Rocco

  Charles Ledger was a short, barrel-chested man with a remarkable tenacity that served him well in his years as a frontiersman in South America. Like so many Europeans who travelled to South America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he relished the freedom offered by a society that observed few rules. To survive he had to be imaginative, resilient and immensely resourceful. Yet he was capable also of harbouring deep resentment, and nothing troubled him more about an enterprise than the sense that while the effort had all been his, the reward went elsewhere. When in later life, having fallen on hard times, he wrote to friends in London asking them to exert their influence to secure him a pension, his letters reveal that for him there was no slight too small to be ignored, no grievance too old not to be recalled. Yet the part he played in obtaining cinchona and introducing it to the world belies any suspicion that he was filled with deep wells of self-pity.

  Like Markham, Ledger was not a trained plant hunter. But by the time he entered the hunt for the cinchona tree he was more adept at the task than Markham would ever be. Born in Bermondsey in south London in 1818, Ledger called himself ‘a true cockney’. His family were traders and merchants working on the fringes of the City of London. He had enough schooling to read and write, but his agility with figures he would pick up on the job. On his eighteenth birthday in March 1836 he sailed for South America, working his passage across the Atlantic and carrying in his pocket two letters of introduction and the fruits of a £10 note that had been given to him by a family friend who happened also to be the Mayor of London. Young Charles had spent his gift on a consignment of steel pens, then quite a novelty, which he would sell for a profit when he arrived in Buenos Aires.

  After more than eight months at sea, Ledger docked at Callao, in northern Peru, the same port that had welcomed the Jesuit pharmacist Agustino Salumbrino almost two and a half centuries earlier. From there he proceeded not to either of the companies to which he would be introduced by the letters he bore in his pocket, but to a third firm he thought he would like more, an enterprising merchant house called Naylor Kendall & Co. Ledger was taken on right away, and put to work as a clerk. He had been teaching himself Spanish out of books while on board ship; now he was made to master book-keeping, administration and everything there was to know about alpaca wool and cinchona bark, the two products that Naylor’s traded most.

  Ledger quickly completed a rudimentary apprenticeship, upon which he was put to work in the warehouse where consignments of merchandise were received from the interior. He learned how to grade cinchona bark and to sort wool according to its quality and colour. And he had to ensure, when the bark was packed up to be sent to Liverpool, that it was properly bundled into the serones, fresh bullocks’ hide sewn with thongs, that would keep it safe from rain and mildew on its journey to Europe, while at the same time never letting it dry out so much that it crumbled into dust.

  Soon Ledger was allowed to travel into the interior. He was sent to Naylor’s second office in Tacna, not far from the southern border with Chile and just down the coast from Islay, where more than two decades later Markham would load up the calisaya plants he had found in Caravaya province in the western cordillera. Before long Ledger was scouting the countryside, making contacts and learning the ways of the Indians who sold him their wool and their bark. He was not slow to realise that while he had to put up with poor food and uncomfortable lodgings, or no lodgings at all, in his efforts to secure fresh produce, most of the profit from his trading went to Naylor’s. Upon becoming engaged to the daughter of a prominent Tacna merchant, he decided to leave the firm, and once married he set up on his own. Naylor’s recognised in Ledger that same spirit of enterprise and independence on which the firm itself had been founded, and its owners were sensible enough to encourage his ambitions rather than try and stop him. Soon he had become one of their biggest suppliers, seeking out new Indian contacts in the rarely-visited areas along the border with Bolivia, who would bring him their bark and wool.

  One of the Indians Ledger liked most was Manuel Incra Mamani, a Bolivian cascarillero he met in La Paz in 1841, the year before he left Naylor’s to set up on his own. Mamani was a small, quiet man, but the readiness with which he was prepared to leave his native valley to work for Ledger made him unusual. The more Ledger came to know him, the more he realised that Mamani made up for his lack of words with an impish sense of humour and a deep knowledge of the forests and valleys in which they travelled. At a glance Mamani could distinguish between different cinchonas that would appear virtually identical to anyone else; on one trip alone he pointed out twenty-nine different varieties – Hugh Algernon Weddell, in his classic book on South American flora Histoire naturelle des quinquinas, published in 1849, described only nineteen. For hours on end, walking alongside Ledger’s mule, chewing coca while Ledger smoked his pipe, Mamani would identify the differences between varieties of cinchona, depending on the shape, size and colour of their leaves, which changed with the season and the age of the tree, and the colour and shape of the flowers when the trees bloomed in December at the beginning of summer. Occasionally they would come across a group of five cinchonas planted in the shape of a cross, and Mamani would fall on his knees, cross himself and offer a prayer to los buenos padres, the Jesuit fathers who so long ago had sought to teach the cascarilleros to replace each tree they cut down with five more.

  The cascarilleros had long since forgotten the priests’ message. The forests were being stripped of their cinchona trees, and no one was giving any thought to ensuring future supplies of bark. As a result, sources of good-quality cinchona were becoming harder and harder to find. Yet demand for the bark continued to increase, as did the price. Two years after Ledger set up as a trader on his own, the Bolivian government issued an edict restricting the cinchona trade to three merchants who together paid fifty thousand silver Peruvian dollars to secure a monopoly for three years. The agreement doubtless enriched the government officials who had signed it; it also gave birth to a resourceful and imaginative trade in smuggled cascarilla. Ledger, whose reputation in the area was growing, and who hoped to identify out-of-the-way virgin places where the best trees could still be found in numbers, was one of the first to become involved. In 1845, a syndicate of Peruvian merchants clubbed together, each contributing five hundred Peruvian dollars to a common fund and providing a servant with a saddle and pack mule to take part in the first expedition. There were two guides. With Mamani as his companion, Ledger struck north from Puno in the company of fifty-five other hopeful smugglers, and headed for the Huánuco valley.

  Despite their efforts, the merchants failed to find a single tree that produced the true calisaya bark. ‘After 57 days of excitement, dangers, toil and disappointment’, Ledger wrote, they returned to Puno. Yet something had happened in the course of that journey that would give Ledger much to think about.

  One night while they were camping high on the eastern cordillera, it was Ledger and Mamani’s turn to take guard. The summer had not yet begun, and it was still quite cool. Mamani sat chewing the inevitable coca leaves, while Ledger drew on his pipe. For a while they watched in silence as the mist slowly drew up to cover the forest below them. Above, the night sky was clear, and the moon bathed the forest and the rocks in a lemony-coloured mist.

  ‘Will we find the true bark, do you think?’ asked Ledger.

  ‘No, señor,’ Mamani answered firmly. ‘The trees that grow here do not see the snowy caps of the cordillera.’

  Ledger dismissed Mamani’s comment. ‘I could hardly contain my laughter at that moment,’ he would later recall.

  The two men bade each other goodnight. Ledger lay on the low camp-bed that Mamani had prepared for him, and pulled his poncho around his shoulders. The moon cast dark shadows upon the trees around him. High above, stars pricked the sky. As the fire died down, Ledger found himself thinking again about what Mamani had said. Mamani could spot cinchona trees just by looking at the forest canopy. He was able to recognise the true cali
saya simply by its foliage, when everyone else found one calisaya indistinguishable from another. Mamani could tell before chewing it which variety a fragment of bark was. He must have had a reason for what he said.

  The next morning, Ledger unfolded the maps he always carried with him and traced the spine of the Andes, and the cordillera that spread like ribs on either side from Quito to Nueva Grande in Colombia, and to Loxa in Ecuador. This was the cinchona’s homeland, along with the valley of Caravaya in Peru where Markham would find his plants, and further south-east into Bolivia. The best red bark came from the regions that were dominated by mountain peaks: Illimani and Sorata, both in western Bolivia, and the massive Chimborazo volcano that Spruce would explore. Around Puno, where Ledger and his syndicate were travelling, the peaks were lower, and as Mamani had said, there was no true Cinchona calisaya to be found.

  Dejected by the failure of the syndicate’s expedition, Ledger turned his hand to trying to make his fortune out of that other South American staple, alpaca, the soft, downy wool of the vicuna. He journeyed through the countryside buying animals here and there, slowly making his way southward towards Chile. He travelled on foot, chivvying his beasts through the high mountain passes, gathering them close around him when the snow proved too deep to pass through, and turning them out into grassy pens whenever he reached spring grazing. He even made preparations to ship his alpaca to Australia, where he thought he might start a new life. Yet the thought of the true calisaya and the curling white petals of the cinchona tree never completely left him. While exploring a possible route for the export of alpaca in the southern summer of 1851, shortly before the young Clements Markham would see his first cinchona in a valley east of Cuzco, Ledger and Mamani were visited by the spectre of the miraculous fever-tree.

  The two men had set off from Puno, just as they had done with the syndicate six years earlier. From there they crossed into the Bolivian Amazon through a region that was so densely forested they had to carve their way through the roots and vines. Not even a mule could find its way through the undergrowth, and Ledger and Mamani were forced to proceed on foot. They walked side by side, both chewing coca to ease the dizziness of walking at such high altitudes. All of a sudden, on the hillside above the riverbank, they saw a group of huge red-bark trees in full bloom. Not even Mamani, in all his years as a cascarillero, had ever seen such a sight. Calisayas usually grew in mixed groups, each one cross-pollinating with another variety close by. Yet here were fifty trees at least, all alike and grouped together in a single cluster. With their lilac-scented flowers and rich red foliage, it must have seemed to the two men that they had stumbled upon some fabulous, fiery jewel.

  As the trees were in flower, it was too early in the season to pick any seeds. In any case, the mountainside where they grew was too steep and too overgrown to be easily reached. Ledger and Mamani could only look helplessly across at them, and then continue on their journey.

  Some years later, Ledger thought again of the calisayas he had seen. By then he was in Australia, having nursed his flock of alpaca onboard ship across the Pacific with the help of Mamani’s son, Santiago. The alpaca had not fared well in their new home. Moreover, having invested £7000 of his own money in the venture and lost it all, Ledger was broke. There was no choice for him but to make preparations to return to South America.

  While in Sydney in 1860, Ledger chanced to read in a local newspaper of Markham’s expedition and the arrival in India of the cinchona seeds. Ledger had, in fact, first heard of the expedition three years earlier, and had written to Markham, though he did not know whether he had ever received his letter. Reading once again about the search for cinchona, however, Ledger realised that Markham had never gone to Bolivia. This could only mean that he had failed to obtain the best calisayas. Santiago Mamani, who was shortly due to return to Peru, was despatched with a letter to his father. Ledger recalled to Manuel Incra Mamani the fifty huge calisaya trees they had seen in flower nine years before. Mamani should leave at once for Bolivia, Ledger instructed, and collect as many seeds as possible. In addition to the letter, Santiago took with him two hundred Spanish dollars. This was just a down payment, Ledger explained. When Mamani returned to Tacna with the seeds, Ledger or his brother-in-law would make him another generous payment. But for the moment this was all he could afford. He had not a penny left.

  Another five years would pass before Ledger, having returned to Tacna, heard a knock at his door late one night in May 1865. Standing on his threshold was Mamani, who had walked more than a thousand miles from Coroico in Bolivia, sustained by nothing more than a little food and a few coca leaves. He reached under his old striped woollen poncho and drew out a small pouch. Loosening the knot that secured it, he poured a thin stream of seeds into Ledger’s hand.

  Mamani had left for Bolivia as soon as Santiago had brought him Ledger’s letter. There he had found the true calisayas, or at least trees very similar to the ones he and Ledger had seen in 1851. But the season was too advanced, the winter was fast approaching, and there were no seeds to be found. Mamani would have to return the following March, when the calisayas would be in flower. This he did, accompanied by his sons, who helped him cut bark from other cinchona trees while they waited for the seedpods to be ready. But in early spring there was a severe frost, and all the best seeds were destroyed. The same thing happened the following year, and again in 1863, and yet once more in 1864. It was not until April 1865 that Mamani was able to collect the seeds for Ledger.

  That year Mamani and his sons watched as the old trees slowly brought forth an unusually large number of beautiful creamy white flowers, like the ones he and Ledger had seen so many years before. The branches were covered with a rough moss that was scarlet and bright silver in colour. There was no frost, and when the underside of the leaves turned a dark purple and the leaves were about to fall, Mamani and his sons collected the ripe seeds. In all, they filled two sacks that together weighed about forty pounds.

  In Tacna, Ledger emptied the seeds onto a sheet. For a month he took them outside and spread them out in the sun, turning them every two hours to make sure they dried evenly. Then he divided the harvest in two, wrapped one half in chinchilla skins, placed them in a box that he covered with hide and addressed it to his brother George in London. Ledger paid Mamani five hundred dollars and gave him two mules, four donkeys and a gun as well as ammunition. If he could gather another twenty pounds of seeds, he told him, he would pay him a further six hundred dollars.

  The box of seeds reached George Ledger towards the end of September 1865. He went immediately to Kew Gardens. Sir William Hooker, Richard Spruce’s sponsor and the main force behind the British cinchona initiative, had just died. His son Joseph, who had replaced him, was sick at home, and George was informed that Markham was also absent. What he did not know was that only a few days before, the government had decided to put an end to Kew’s cinchona activities. The time had come, Joseph Hooker had been informed in an official letter, ‘when your account with this office may be closed’. The cinchona plants and seedlings that had been brought from South America by Spruce were growing nicely in the government botanical gardens in Mysore, and Kew’s job, as carer to the plants that were waiting to be shipped to the colonies, was done. The unfortunate coincidence of this order and Sir William Hooker’s death may explain the indifference shown to George Ledger by the very people he might have expected to seize upon his offerings with enthusiasm.

  On returning from Kew, George called on Harry James Veitch, scion of the great orchid-trading family and director of the Exotic Nursery at Chelsea – just a short walk from the Chelsea Physic Garden to which, nearly two hundred years earlier, Sir John Evelyn had hurried to visit the ‘collection of innumerable rarities [including] the Tree bearing the Jesuits bark, which had don such cures in quartans’. There he found a more attentive listener, who agreed to plant out a few of the seeds. On 2 November he reported to George that they were ‘germinating freely’. Meanwhile, George wrote to the
Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, who, not knowing what to make of his offer of seeds of the true Cinchona calisaya, copied it to Joseph Hooker at Kew.

  George began to panic. The seeds might deteriorate, and he was making little progress. He visited Professor Robert Bentley, an early member of the Pharmaceutical Society and an expert on medicinal plants, giving him some of the seeds. Bentley sent them to the Botanical Society of London. George also gave some seeds as a present to the Society of Arts, who sent them on to Lady Hanbury, a relative of the Daniel Hanbury who had helped Spruce while he was in South America. Finally, Bentley put George in touch with J.E. Howard, a quinine manufacturer in Tottenham in north London. Howard’s friendship with the Ledger family would last until Charles’s death in 1905.

  Howard was the first to appreciate the commercial potential of Ledger’s seeds. Knowing that neither Clements Markham nor any of the other people who were most knowledgeable about cinchona were in London, he suggested that George contact the Dutch Consul-General. The Consul himself did not know what to make of the seeds, and passed the matter on to Professor F.A.W. Miquel, a well-known Dutch botanist who had made a study of the cinchonas introduced to Java by Hasskarl, and who was then on leave in Europe. Miquel was intrigued by George’s story, and on his suggestion the Dutch government instructed the Consul to purchase one pound of his seeds. The Consul offered George a hundred Dutch guilders, with the promise of more if the seeds germinated once they reached Java.

  Despite this success, George still had fourteen pounds of seeds on his hands. Howard suggested he approach a Mr J.W.B. Money, an Anglo-Indian planter and owner of extensive cinchona plantations in India who was then on holiday in London. There followed a long exchange of letters, and George eventually secured an appointment. He told Money the story of the seeds, the best in all Bolivia, taken from an area in which no European plant hunter other than Ledger had ever ventured. After considerable persuasion by George, Money finally gave in and bought the remaining seeds for £50. Yet no sooner had he done so than he began to have cold feet. Cinchona succirubra was the best-known variety. No one had any experience of Cinchona calisaya, or knew how it would fare when planted out in Madras. Fifty pounds was a large sum of money, and the thought that he might have made an ill-conceived investment was too much for Money to bear.