Color: A Natural History of the Palette (22 page)

NEW WORLD INSECT

The first Europeans arrived on the American mainland in 1499, seven years after Christopher Columbus and his seasick crew first set their grateful eyes on the Bahamas. Fourteen years later, in 1513, the dreamer and failed farmer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa crossed the isthmus of Panama and became the first European to see the Pacific from that angle. On his return, he and his men built houses and sowed crops. The Age of the Conquistadors had officially begun, although it was to be remembered not for its architecture or agriculture, but for its guns and its greed.

The armed men found gold and silver in their New World, but they also found red. Within a few years they had taken over control of the cochineal industry from the locals. Like the Romans so many centuries before, the Spaniards took their red taxes seriously, and soon one of the biggest color export businesses that the world has seen started up. In Mexico they left its harvesting in the care of the indigenous Indians. They knew how to care for it—and what was more they wanted to do so, because it was so central to their culture. The Zapotec word for red, “tlapalli,” is the same as the word for “color,” so important is the crop to their traditional culture.

In 1575 alone about 80 metric tons of red arrived in Spain in the form of dried brown pellets, on what became known as the cochineal fleet. Over the next quarter-century the annual shipments fluctuated from 50 to 160 tons—several trillion insect bodies every year. The quantities depended not only on the weather and the market demand, but also on the state of health of the native workers. Whenever a flu bug hit the Americas, the harvest of red bugs was vastly reduced.

The fashion world reacts quickly to new materials, and suddenly wealthy Europeans were demanding that their cloth be made in this new deep red, often called either “grana” or “in grain.” Women were also going crazy for what was seen as the ultimate cosmetic. There is a moment in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
—written a few decades after cochineal first arrived in the Port of London—when the Countess Olivia describes the rouge on the cheeks of her portrait as “in grain sir! ’twill endure wind and weather.” By this word-play on the similarity between “in grain” and “ingrained”—or natural—the Elizabethan audience would have understood her to be at the cutting edge of cosmetic fashion. In the sixteenth century, Venice became the most important trading center for red. While Venetian businessmen sent it on to the Middle East, to be used for carpets and fabrics, Venetian women demanded a reserve to be kept for their own use. In around 1700, according to Jan Morris in her book
Venice
, there were just 2,508 nuns in that city and 11,654 prostitutes. No wonder there was a market for rouge.

When I started telling my stories about cochineal, many people were horrified, or at least surprised, to learn where it comes from. If they didn’t already know it was made from insects, they found the truth hard to believe. Sixteenth-century Europeans had the same problem. They were desperate to know what this wonderful new color was made of. But the Spanish weren’t telling. It was in the colonizers’ interest—a kind of financial alchemy—to guard the secret of red as carefully as they guarded their gold, which they managed to turn it into rather successfully.

They couldn’t hold out forever, and ultimately it was a Frenchman in his mid-twenties—a man called Nicolas Joseph Thierry de Menonville—who made the most daring raid of the eighteenth century on the cochineal fields of Central America, and broke the story of cochineal to the world. And he did it alone, against the advice of friends and family, and with just a meager subsidy from his own government, for whom he was later, as reward for his determination, to be appointed Royal Botanist.

A SPY IN MEXICO

When Thierry de Menonville’s 1787
Traité de la Culture du Nopal . . . précédé d’un Voyage à Guaxaca
arrived from the archieves of the British Library, the book was in a cardboard cover marked “fragile.” As I tenderly lifted the volume out of its crisp case, little scraps of leather binding fell onto the desk and the covers fell off—a legacy, I hope, of researchers who had been there before me. This book is a rarity now, available only in a few private collections and the national libraries, and if, in the early nineteenth century, it had not been discovered and translated by English armchair adventurer John Pinkerton, the story might have faded from the modern imagination—in Britain at least—as truly as Turner’s own carmine lake pigment. The translation—in Volume XIII of Pinkerton’s 1812
Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World
—is sandwiched between accounts of North American travels, from an era when Manhattan consisted of two thousand households and had porpoises frolicking in its waters.

De Menonville was a teenager in Lorraine when he first heard the details of Spanish Red. It had only been fairly recently that anybody had had any idea about what this “carmine” actually was. Many people in the sixteenth century thought it was a fruit or a nut, or anything but a bug. In 1555 a British traveller called Robert Tomson got permission to visit the new Spanish colonies in the Americas. On his return he declared that: “cochinilla is not a worme or a flye as some say it is, but a berrie that groweth upon certaine bushes.” Nearly fifty years later the French writer Samuel de Champlain explained confidently that cochineal “comes from a fruit the size of a walnut which is full of seed within.” These confusions find echoes in the ways that Roman scientists described kermes fifteen hundred years earlier. De Menonville knew it was an insect, although he didn’t quite know what it looked like. And he knew it lived on a cactus, although he wasn’t quite sure which.

His father and grandfather had been lawyers—the only other acceptable career choice in his family was, it seemed, to join the clergy. But de Menonville was interested in another kind of cloth—and most importantly, how to color it. Immediately after finishing his law degree he moved to Paris to study botany. In the pre-Revolution days of his childhood, he had been taught by liberal thinkers to believe that science should not be arcane or elitist but should benefit the people directly. So his youthful patriotic fervor was fully engaged when he read the political writings of the Abbé Raynal, who was an economist as well as a cleric. “Cochineal, whose price is always high, should excite the interest of those nations that are cultivating crops on American soil. It should also excite other people who live where the temperature is suitable for this insect and the plant on which it is nourished,” Raynal wrote. He noted with a sense of regret that “in the meantime New Spain remains in complete possession of this rich industry.” De Menonville took this as his mission statement—and started planning his great adventure: to steal the secret of cochineal.

In January 1777, when Spanish eyes were turning to the immediate aftermath of the Thirteen Colonies’ War of Independence against the British—and even more importantly to Peru and Colombia, where insurrections over the next four years were to challenge their dominance of South America—de Menonville landed in Havana, Cuba, on the brigantine
Dauphin
. As his ship came in from French Haiti, he looked in awe at the assembled batteries, citadels and forts, with their “innumerable mouths of thundering cannon,” and imagined them all pointed against him, intent on preventing his scheme of obtaining cochineal. He failed to realize, as they sailed into port without obeying—or indeed hearing—the commands issued through a Spanish “speaking trumpet” to cast anchor outside the harbor, that they were perilously close to receiving a “few ungrateful salutes from twenty-four pounders.”

He carried “a few clothes, some fruit and other refreshments, but especially a number of phials, flasks, cases and boxes of all sizes.” He also had a passport from Port au Prince, a letter describing him as botanist and physician (“to which I had a fair claim, possessing a diploma for the practice of physic,” he wrote defensively in his journal, probably having more certificates than years of practical experience in medicine) and the blessings of the French government. Cash had been less easily forthcoming than blessings: “I received, instead of the 6,000 livres promised to me by the minister of the navy, no more than 4,000: a circumstance occasioned by the deficiency of money in the treasury.”

His next task was to get to Mexico—but the Spaniards were already suspicious. “Are there not plants growing in your own country?” they asked. De Menonville answered that indeed there were, but Central America possessed superior examples. And then came the waiting time: six months during which “time flew with leaden wings” for the impatient botanist. He then decided on a new strategy—one that by all accounts suited his character perfectly. “Pretending to be actuated by that volatility and inconstancy of disposition, often with so little fairness ascribed to Frenchmen, I feigned to be overcome with ennui from my long stay in Havana.” Within six weeks the Spaniards, with a spot of ennui themselves no doubt from all that Gallic sighing and prancing, yet enjoying the way it confirmed their prejudices, had helped him get the precious visa to Mexico. Plenty more gesticulating and nationalistic stereotyping ensued down at the busy Havana harbor as he negotiated his ticket. “The master of the packet would take no less than 100 hard dollars: the demand was exorbitant but it was vain to reason: his avarice was inflexible. To all my arguments he opposed a truly Spanish phlegm and gravity and coolly pocketed my money without once taking his cigar from his mouth.”

In Vera Cruz, where he was incidentally thrilled to find pineapple ice cream, he found another method of getting his own way: by appealing directly to the Spaniards’ bowels. The laxative plant root jalap was so much in demand—despite the presence of hot peppers that could doubtless produce a similar effect—that the city of Jalapa, which supplied the Mexican world with the natural remedy, had been named after it in gratitude. Until de Menonville’s arrival the constipated citizens of Vera Cruz had transported their medicine at great cost from Jalapa, 100 kilometers away. To their evident relief the young botanist showed them how they could find it locally.

It was not the only local remedy the Spaniards used. From the first years after they conquered Central America they had been using cochineal not just as a dye, paint and cosmetic, but also as a medicine. When Philip II of Spain was sick he would get a mixture of ground beetles and vinegar served to him on his silver spoon. The physicians were flexible: they plastered it on wounds, recommended it for cleaning the teeth and, according to King Philip’s doctor, Francisco Hernández, they used it “to relieve ailments of the head, heart and stomach.” It is curious that today’s pharmaceutical and food industries treat cochineal as a harmless coloring agent, while for thousands of years it has been prized not only for its color, but for its ability to heal.
¹¹

The laxative discovery made de Menonville the hero of the moment, and he used that position to continue his undercover investigations—discovering that the mountain town of Guaxaca (now Oaxaca, pronounced Wa-har-ka) was the main center for cochineal production. But the governor quickly became suspicious of his questions, told de Menonville he had to leave on the next boat out, and this time the young adventurer’s dramatic posturing was for real. “I repaired to my lodging deadly sick at heart: I walked backward and forward, now threw myself on a seat and now into my cot, swinging it from one side to the other with such violence as to risk breaking my head against the ceiling.” With what he later called the “voice of anguish” he began to criticize himself: “Your plan of four years standing now falls to wreck: four years are lost of the profession you chose yourself, the bounties of your king have vainly and stupidly disappeared, you fail in an endeavor undertaken against the advice of your father, your friends, and everyone else.” But then another voice—of reason perhaps, or of foolhardiness—began to speak, reminding him that there were no ships leaving Vera Cruz for another three weeks. Perhaps, if he hurried, he could cover the 600 kilometers to Oaxaca on time. He wrote himself a firm directive in his journal: “You absolutely must, I said to myself, penetrate into the interior despite your lack of passport, and you must bear away the fleece, despite all the dragons on the way.”

And so the real adventure began: a day later, at three in the morning, he scaled the city walls and set off on his impossible journey. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and carried a rosary and a few “neat” clothes, in order “to assume the appearance of taking a walk rather than a journey.” He avoided the toll gates, stayed with Indians, pretended to be constantly lost to explain his strange location, and to be a Catalan from the French-Spanish border to explain his strange accent.

Bad roads, appalling weather, days without food and the dangers posed variously by the Spanish king’s soldiers and raging torrents were all par for the cochineal course—but de Menonville faltered only when he met a beautiful woman in an Indian home. “I looked for faultiness in her, but—almost naked as she was, having nothing on but a flounced muslin petticoat trimmed with a rose-colored cord, and a shift which left her shoulders bare—the nicest scrutiny discovered no defect.” Learning that she was married and had children “only rendered her more interesting, and her charms had a disorderly effect on my senses.” The Frenchman was close to pulling out a gold coin from his pocket with which to buy her favors, but then that useful inner voice became vocal once again— leave, it said, or your plans of four years will fall to nothing—“and I left the cottage without speaking a word, or daring to take another glance and dragged myself, sighing, along.”

A few days later, and having found a horse, a companion and excellent directions (the last from a “round and jolly” Carmelite), he arrived at a small hamlet called Galiatitlan, and finally saw, for the first time, and on the leaves of a cactus, what he thought could be the treasure he had come so far and risked so much to find. He leapt from his horse, pretending to alter his stirrups, and entered the grounds. Seeing the Indian owner walking toward him, he struck up what he tried to make seem like a casual conversation. Endeavoring to disguise his excitement, he asked the man what the plants were for. When he was told it was “to cultivate grana,” de Menonville pretended surprise and begged to see.