Color: A Natural History of the Palette (15 page)

For true Protestant symbolism you needed true Protestant black clothes—and that was an unbelievably complex issue for dyers. There had not been so much of a call for such colors before, and technology was not quite prepared for the rush. Many black clothes were dyed with oak galls fixed with alum (a vital substance for dyers which I will describe in my quest for red) but the color tended both to fade and to eat into the fabric. Other recipes included plants and nutshells—alder and blackberry, walnuts and meadowsweet and others—but again these tended toward gray.

The problem is that there are no true black dyes.
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There are black pigments—charcoal is one, soot is another—but pigments do not tend to be soluble in water, so it is hard to make them fix onto fabric. What many people did was dye clothes in several vats— blue, red and yellow—until the impression was one of blackness. However, that was expensive. Another option had to be found. And it is particularly ironic that the clothes of the most puritanical of Puritans were often made with a color collected by rough retired pirates, and paid for by exchange for rum and enough cash to keep several brothels busy on the Caribbean coast.

The Spaniards brought logwood, or “campeachy” wood, in some of the first ships arriving back from the New World. It was marketed as a good ingredient for both red and black dyes, although in England it was not used much until about 1575. And almost as soon as it was used, it was banned. Parliament claimed it was “because the colors produced from it were of a fugacious character,” and pretended they were looking after the interests of the users, although the fact that it represented a profit for the Spaniards cannot have helped. The law banning logwood dyeing was passed in 1581; the sea battle of the Armada occurred in 1588.

Then in 1673 the antilogwood laws were repealed. Parliament now claimed it was because “the ingenious industry of modern times hath taught the dyers of England the art of fixing the colours made of logwood.” But a cynic might wonder whether it was not something to do with the fact that the British suddenly had access to the natural logwood plantations of Central America, and needed a home market for their new resource. England and Spain had signed a peace treaty in 1667—with the Spanish granting trading rights in return for the British suppressing piracy. This made the Caribbean safer, but had the side effect of putting large numbers of pirates out of work. Without much in the way of savings or pension plans—not everyone had a treasure map with a cross marking the spot—these newly redundant buccaneers were doing what they could to make ends meet. One of the best get-rich-quick schemes of the day was collecting logwood—the newly trendy black dye, much in demand in Europe.

In 1675 a young man who was later to become one of England’s great admirals (and the man who dropped Alexander Selkirk off on his castaway island and picked him up five years later when he would become the inspiration for
Robinson Crusoe
) spent six months with the retired pirates. We can be grateful that he did, for his account of life in this particularly wild strand of the dye industry is both lively and horrifying.

William Dampier was twenty-two, and already a seasoned traveller, when he first had the idea of going to the Caribbean. In the late seventeenth century it was
the
place for adventurers, and by all accounts Dampier was an adventurous young man. As he recounted with boyish excitement in his journal (which he would later publish under the title of
Dampier’s Voyages
), in those days many of the islands were still inhabited by the “fierce Caribbees who would murder their own brothers if the return was good enough.” The logwood men he was to meet were not dissimilar. He left Port-Royal in August 1675 and a few weeks later he began his extraordinary education in the mangrove swamps—an education that would give him a rare insight into the dyeing industry, as well as less welcome knowledge of the inside of his knee.

There were about 260 Englishmen in the lagoon, on what is now the border between Mexico and Belize. Dampier joined five of them—three hardened Scots who liked the life, and two young middle-class merchants who couldn’t wait to get home. They had a hundred tons of tree already cut into chunks—but it was all still in the middle of the mangroves, and needed to be moved to the coast, which involved cutting a special path with cutlasses. The men were in a hurry, as a ship from New England was expected in a month or two, so they hired the young sailor to help them at the salary of a ton of wood for the first month—a payment he would be able to exchange for fifteen shillings with the New England ship’s captain.

The loggers lived by the creeks to get the benefit of the sea breezes and would commute into the swamp by canoe every morning. They lived on wooden frames set a meter above the ground, and would sleep under what they grandly called “pavilions.” Logwood trees thrive in mangrove lands, but men do not, and Dampier was there during the wet season, which was the worst. It was so flooded that the loggers “step from their beds into the water perhaps two foot deep, and continue standing in the wet all day, till they go to bed again.”

This muddy border between the land and the sea would later be called the “Mosquito Coast,” and it would be well named. “I lay down on the grass a good distance from the woods, for the benefit of the wind to keep the muskitoes from me,” recounted Dampier in a typical journal entry. “But in vain,” he continued, “for in less than an hour’s time I was so persecuted, that though I endeavored to keep them off by fanning myself with boughs and shifting my quarters three or four times; yet still they haunted me so I could get no sleep.” And when the worms came, they came with a vengeance. On one memorable day, Dampier found he had a boil on his right leg. Following the advice of the older men, he applied white lilies to it until two specks appeared. When he squeezed them, two huge white worms, each with three rows of black hair running round them, spurted out. “I never saw worms of this sort breed in any man’s flesh,” he observed, with impressive sangfroid.

The best trees were the old ones, because they had less sap, and were easier to cut. “The sap is white and the heart red. The heart is used much for dyeing; therefore we chip off all the white sap till we come to the heart . . . After it has been chip’d a little while, it turns black, and if it lyes in the water it dyes it like ink, and sometimes it has been used to write with.” Some trees, he said, were nearly two meters around. These couldn’t be cut into logs small enough for a man to carry, “and [we] therefore are forced to blow them up.”

The ship arrived a month later—and Dampier was astonished at how the logwood cutters “would extravagantly squander away their time and money in drinking and making a bluster.” They had not forgotten their old buccaneer drinking binges and would spend thirty or forty shillings at one sitting (remember that for his month’s labor Dampier had received just fifteen shillings) on drinking and carousing.

He was also amazed at the rules of honor between pirates. Generous captains would be well rewarded; mean ones would get the pirates’ revenge. “If the commanders of these ships are free and treat all that come the first day with punch they will be much respected, and every man will pay honestly for what he drinks afterwards. But if he be niggardly, they will pay him with their worst wood, and commonly they have a stock of such laid by for that purpose.” In fact the very meanest captains got a very bad deal indeed—the ex-pirates would punish them by giving them hollow logs specially filled with dirt and with both ends plugged up “and then sawed off so neatly that it’s hard to find out the deceit.” The “niggardly” captains would probably not find out until the end of the voyage, at a marketplace in Cadiz or Holland, that their dye-wood was doctored and worthless.

Logwood was actually very vulnerable to doctoring at all stages. Even if the loggers had sent a good stock of heartwood, there were still some fraudulent dyers in Europe who favored cutting—or literally painting—corners. To last more than a few days in the sunshine, the crushed logwood needed to be overdyed on woad- or indigo-colored fabric. The way to prove this was usually to leave a little triangle of blue on the black cloth, to show that indigo lay underneath. But sometimes lazy dyers would just dip the corners into indigo, and the poor Puritans, who had presumably bought in good faith, would see the black fade to orange within weeks. And they would know they had been cheated.

There is a curious postscript to the story. The British and Spanish fought over the mangroves until 1798, when the British won the battle of St. George’s Cay—and the rights to the area they later called British Honduras, and which is now called Belize. One of the main reasons for the British determination over 150 years to make this part of their empire was the logwood concessions. Many Belizeans today are descended from the slaves who were forced to cut down this heavy dye-wood. For no other reason than to help Europe be more black.

DEAD BODIES

Black paint can be made of soot and galls, peach stones and vine twigs or even ivory—which was Auguste Renoir’s favorite, when he used black at all. But one of the more notorious ingredients in the seventeenth century was bone black, which was said by some to be made from human corpses.
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I imagine the apprentices in artists’ studios would have told wonderful ghost stories about bone black, although there is little reason to think these rumors were based on anything more than ghoulishness. In truth, bone black—a rich deep blue-black pigment—was usually derived from the thighs of cattle or the limbs of lambs: uncontroversial powdered and burned scraps from the slaughterhouse’s remainder pit.
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And in fact it was not black—the apprentices would learn from their more knowledgeable colleagues—which was sometimes made from dead human beings. It was brown.

Brown has been such an abused color in terms of names: “drab” is now a definition of dullness but was once the technical term for a hue basking boringly on that middle line between olive and puce. “Puce”—meaning flea colored—was once a fairly nice thing to say about Marie Antoinette’s favorite color. Or how about “
caca du dauphin
,” a favorite in National Trust houses in the 1930s, and loosely translatable as “princely crap”? But even the color “isabella,” which sounds so pretty, has its origins in decay and bad smells. Rudyard Kipling loved this color term, and used it twice in his books. It refers to a curious decision by Queen Isabella (the queen who allegedly pawned her jewels to enable Columbus to make his voyage in 1492) to give moral support to the defenders of a siege near her hometown of Castile. Most ladies of her time would just have prayed supportively for the besieged soldiers. Not so Isabella, who apparently made the unusual (and as far as I know never repeated) pledge not to change her bodice until that particular town was liberated. She overestimated the skill of the opposite army. Perhaps if she—or her long-suffering husband Ferdinand— had known the town would be six months or more in the freeing, she would never have made the promise.

Brown is in a curious nonposition in terms of color hierarchy.
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It is certainly a color—more so than black is, or white—but like pink it has no place in the spectrum. It was, however, the need to distinguish specifically between different brown colors which led to the world’s first colorimeter. Joseph Lovibond was an Englishman who will be remembered for two things: his pioneering work with colors and the terrible moment when, as a teenager who had just made a fortune in the gold fields of South Australia, he waved too enthusiastically at the friends left behind on the wharf and all his money spun out of his hat and into Sydney Harbor.
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Poor once again, he returned home and joined his father and two brothers in the family brewing business. He began to realize that the variations in color of his different brews were a good guide to their quality, but found there was no established way of categorizing them—he needed some kind of graded scale. He tried different pigments, painting them on to a card and holding them up against the beer. But they were unreliable and tended to fade, and anyway, how do you compare a liquid against a paint? Inspiration for improving the world’s beer quality arrived one day in church. Lovibond was attending a service at Salisbury Cathedral, and suddenly realized the answer lay in finding the right shades of brown stained glass as a standard against which to compare the colors of his amber-colored brew. Five years later, in 1885, he produced the first colorimeter, with a scale of many different kinds of brown, and later adapted it, in the form of the Lovibond Color Scale, to measure the three primary hues, red, blue, and yellow, and so revolutionized color testing.

After the eighteenth century, brown ink was often made from sepia, the dark liquor secreted by cuttlefish when they are afraid,
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but most brown paints traditionally came from the earth. Umber (and burned umber, which is redder) is an ochre sometimes thought to be named after the Italian province of Umbria. But it is more likely to take its name from its effectiveness in making shadows, with the same Latin root as umbrella. Along with burnt sienna—which
is
named after the Tuscan town—umber was a key color for Italian Renaissance artists in creating a sense of depth, and a gentle transition from light to dark. The British forger Eric Hebborn said his first teacher used to promote the use of earth colors. Not because they were finer or stronger or better. But—and this was Hebborn’s theory—because he was Scottish, and they were cheaper.

In European art history the two most controversial browns are asphaltum and mommia. Asphaltum is an oily bitumen from the Dead Sea and was first used in the sixteenth century as a lustrous brown. But as the artist Holman Hunt told the Royal Society of Arts in his impassioned speech of 1880 about how painters could no longer remember how to use paint, by the time Joshua Reynolds decided to use asphaltum in the 1780s he “had not had experiments of generations to show him the course of safety . . . and it is owing to this, alas, that many of his pictures are now in ruins.”
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