Color: A Natural History of the Palette (23 page)

“But my surprise was real when he brought it to me, for instead of the red insect I expected there appeared one covered with a white powder,” de Menonville wrote. Was this a false ending to his quest? Could he have travelled so far for the wrong insect? “I was tormented with doubts,” he wrote. “And to resolve them thought of crushing one on white paper, and what was the result?” It yielded a royal purple hue. “Intoxicated with joy and admiration, I hastily left my Indian, throwing him two coins for his pain, and galloped at full speed after my companion.” Having discovered that red paint was made from white bugs, he “even trembled with ecstasy,” he wrote happily in his journal. Grand plans for a huge French national color industry, credited in future history books to none other than Thierry de Menonville, no doubt filled his dreams that night, although they shared their space in his head with more practical worries to the effect that “I should have to bring to a safe haven an animal so light, so pliable, so easy to crush: an animal which, once separated from the plant, could never settle on it again.”

It was not only France which was desperate for this dye, the young explorer knew. If de Menonville could get those insects home and if the venture was a success he knew he could export to Holland and Britain and a dozen other countries full of people who were tired of buying red from Spain’s overpriced monopoly. Britain was particularly vulnerable. By the time our young botanist was scaling the walls of Vera Cruz, British dyers were finding themselves in a quandary. Britain had a successful cotton industry but continental Europeans used to joke about English dyeing with the same amusement as they have joked, over the centuries, about English cooking. Of the 340 tons a year that New Spain was importing to Europe by the end of the eighteenth century, British dyers were claiming nearly one-fifth. It wasn’t all for fashion: much of that insect blood was intended to hide the stains of human blood, and was heading straight for the military dyeing vats, after an accidental discovery by a Dutchman living in London.

Cornelius Drebbel had not actually been working on dyes at all, that day in 1607, but had been sitting in his laboratory gazing out of the window, probably thinking about the world’s first “scuba” gear. He would eventually demonstrate his ideas in the world’s first submarine (or at least subriverine), which was rowed underwater from Westminster to Greenwich under his direction to the enthusiastic roar of crowds. But these moments of an eccentric’s glory were in the future. On the day in question, the glory was not at all obvious. Drebbel was absorbed in his thoughts, and he carelessly knocked over a glass thermometer containing a mixture of cochineal and aqua fortis.
¹²
It spilled all over the windowsill and onto the pewter frame of the window. To Drebbel’s surprise it made a bright red dye. He did some more experiments, using pewter and then just tin as a mordant, and ultimately set up a dye works in Bow in East London with his son-in-law Abraham Kuffler. By 1645 Oliver Cromwell had fitted out his New Model Army with Kuffler tunics and from then on the British army was to be famous for its red coats. The scarlet broadcloth for British officers’ uniforms would be dyed with cochineal until as late as 1952. So in the heady days of 1777 it was immensely valuable stuff, and for any young man who had the secret fortune and fame seemed assured.

Soon after that first sighting of cochineal, de Menonville arrived in the mountain city of Oaxaca. He begged the black owner of a plantation to sell him some nopal leaves with the bugs on them. He pretended it was for an urgent medical salve. “He permitted me to take as much as I pleased: I did not require twice bidding but immediately selected eight of the handsomest branches, each two feet long and consisting of seven or eight leaves in length but so perfectly covered with cochineals as to be quite white with them. I cut them off myself, placed them in the best possible manner in the boxes and covered them with the towels . . . I gave him a dollar . . . and while he overwhelmed me with gratitude I called in my Indians, loaded them with the two baskets and made off with the rapidity of lightning.”

At this point de Menonville could not help contemplating the terrible punishment he would meet if his cargo were discovered. Spanish justice was strict; smuggling carried strict penalties, and although he did not know exactly what they were, he did know that forgers were punished at the stake. If it was death by fire for making a few fake coins, what would the Spaniards conjure up for a man caught stealing the ingredients of their most lucrative trade? “My heart beat in a manner that beggars description: it seemed to me as if I was bearing away the golden fleece, but at the same time as if the furious dragon, placed over it as a guard, was following close at my heels: all the way I kept humming the famous lines of the song ‘At last I have it in my Power’ and should willingly have sung it aloud, but for fear of being heard.” He carefully packed up the boxes with plenty of other plants and started out on the return journey, itself full of adventures, with authorities almost guessing his trickery, and drivers attempting their own trickery.

“By accident a mirror happened to hang before me, and seeing myself in it, dirty and with my clothes torn, I could not but feel amazement and gratification at the little difficulty I had met with. In France, taken for a highwayman, I should have been stopped by the police: in Mexico I was not even asked for my passport.” He arrived back in Vera Cruz sixteen days after he had left, with his new friends believing he had been enjoying the baths at the nearby seaside town of Madeleine.

A week later he found himself at the port at dawn. “I was not without some dread,” he admitted, “and, in real truth, this appeared to me the decisive day. At day-break I caused all my cases of plants, as well as all my empty boxes, to be carried from my lodgings, and every thing had reached the gate of the quay before six o’clock. I computed that at this hour the idle would still be asleep, that the soldiers and officers, tied with the night-guard, would be at rest in their hammocks, and that all unoccupied and inquisitive would be at the market.” He was right about the streets, which were almost empty, but with thirty porters following him it was hard not to be noticed. The customs officers asked to see what the botanist had in his packs, and to his horror he was suddenly surrounded by a crowd of soldiers, sailors and tradespeople who could not contain their curiosity. De Menonville opened his boxes, as if he were proud to show off his findings—and to his huge relief, he got away with the bluff. “The officer of the guard complimented me on my researches and collection of herbs: the searchers admired them in stupid astonishment but at the same time were so civil as not to check any of the cases, though they might have done so without injuring my plants, and the head of the office, satisfied with my readiness to suffer examination, told me I might pass on.”

It was not an easy journey—it took an astonishing three months to reach Port au Prince in Haiti—but when he finally opened his cases, quivering with anxiety over the condition of his state secret, he was relieved to find that some of the bugs had survived. Moreover, the navy paid him the 2,000 livres they owed him, which he used to start his own nopalerie in Santo Domingo. It must have seemed ironic, if not cruel, that he went out one day for a walk near his house on Santo Domingo—and discovered indigenous cochineal.

De Menonville continued to publish research on whether it mattered if the cochineal lived on an opuntia with red flowers or white, yellow or violet ones (it didn’t), on how many different species of cactus the insect could successfully thrive on (about five or six), and on whether Mexican or Santo Domingan cochineal gave the better paint (he was undecided)—until his death three years later in 1780, when he was probably not even thirty years old. Doctors may have ascribed his fatal sickness to a “maligne” virus, but the word from those who knew him was that his death was caused by disappointment. The King—who was to die on the guillotine block in 1789—had made him Royal Botanist, but de Menonville had not become the hero he wanted to be. First there were rumors, which he strongly denied, that he had stolen the cochineal. Later the consignment he sent to the King’s garden in Paris was lost when the ship—the
Postillon de Rochelle
—was sunk. He had also not been popular among his colleagues: a subject delicately mentioned in an elegy given five years after his death by the president of the Société Royale de Médecine, Monsieur Arthaud. “People have reproached Monsieur Thiery [sic] for his violence, his posturing, and the hardness in his character . . . but it is an indifferent person who either will not or can not recognise the merit of a superior man, and who only looks at him from the outside,” Arthaud said, adding diplomatically that de Menonville was a French hero, albeit one with character flaws. The cactus garden that de Menonville tended in Santo Domingo—ironically only the wild cochineals survived—allowed the French cochineal industry to thrive for some years, until the arrival of new synthetic fabric dyes in the 1870s made this color a rarity in the world’s dyeing vats.

Today, in Oaxaca, the cochineal industry has almost vanished from the landscape,
¹³
although it is still there in the stones. The town’s colonial heritage is intact, and many of the grandest buildings, including the huge Santo Domingo church and its neighboring convent, now one of Mexico’s best provincial museums, could be said to be built on the bodies of beetles. But the city’s libraries do not easily yield the letters and records of Mexico’s red barons. With the help of librarians I found just one book—a school textbook with a mere one page of information about the industry that built the town, and even that information is based on the research of an English scholar—R. A. Donkin from Cambridge—not a Mexican.

INDIAN RED

De Menonville’s journey was, in his own mind, a failure. He may have found his fleece, but it had not brought him the gold he hoped for. But his work inspired others to try to introduce cochineal to the Old World. Having read his work, the decision-makers of the British East India Company became excited by the possibilities offered by insect harvests. There was, after all, a market: if they managed to make the red dye themselves, they calculated, they could sell it not only to Europeans but to the Chinese—who had been importing cochineal from the Americas for at least a hundred years on the fabled Manila Galleon. There was also a thriving market for red in Central Asia: the carpet dyers had long been experimenting with cochineal, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had begun displacing the more traditional red rug dyes.

Throughout the 1780s Dr. James Anderson in Madras made a bid to be the cochineal king of the British Empire. He imported several different kinds of opuntia from Kew Gardens, so that he was able to write home to England—with unmistakable delight—about a certain Captain Parker, who had called in to visit. “He was not a little surprised to find himself in a grove of upward of Two Thousand of the Kew Plants; many of them covered with the Fruit, of which he inadvertently eat [
sic
]; til his lips were deeply tinged and filled with small prickles.” Dr. Anderson—whose letters show a missionary zeal for introducing cochineal—also sent the plants on to remoter colonial stations, including the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic— more famously Napoleon’s last home—where the governor, Robert Brooke, pronounced them to be “growing luxuriantly . . . we have now a variety of the species here, and only want the insect.”

Indeed, everyone wanted the insect. Dr. Anderson kept writing letters trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade the British government to offer a cash prize to anyone who could bring live cochineals to India. In 1789 he was getting desperate and sent a letter to the Hon. John Holland back in England, telling him that “there are 500 copies of the
Directions for Taking care of the Insects at Sea
, returned from the Press,” and pushing him to get a budget for translating the document, “for it is evident that the French lost the Fruits of Mr. Tierry’s [
sic
] zeal by his want of time to establish rooted Plants for transporting the Insects.”

Everything seemed to have changed when, in 1795, a Captain Neilson sailed into the port of Calcutta. He had some cochineals—and a story to tell. The ship had stopped a few months earlier in Rio de Janeiro, and Captain Neilson had gone for a stroll outside town, attended by “the usual” Portuguese guard. He saw a plantation of cactus with the insect on it, and (having been stationed at Madras with the 52nd Regiment five years before) remembered Dr. Anderson’s appeals for help. He pretended to be an amateur naturalist and asked the locals for some samples. By the time he got to India they had all died, except for one leaf with a few dozen sickly little insects—on which rested the hope of Britain for a new and grand industrial venture.

Despite the paucity of their sample, the top men at the East India Company started imagining their fortunes were made. William Roxburgh, the superintendent of the botanical garden in Calcutta, was given the job of insect rearing, and the letters started flying around the sub-continent again. Imagine, wrote Dr. Anderson to the regional governor, Lord Nobart, “the opportunity of converting the most waste, barren and dry lands in your possession to great advantage, by encouraging the cultivation of the plant.” It took several decades of experimenting to realize that what they had got from Brazil was an inferior species to the prized “grana fina,” that it was expensive to tend, and that, in the words of an observer in 1813, it was “not very abundant in coloring matter and very inferior to any brought from New Spain.”
¹⁴

So the English experiment, which could have brought home-grown Indian carmine to Turner’s palette, was mostly abandoned—although by chance, on a walk through the Buddhist ruins of Taxila in Pakistan, I did spot a sickly bug on a wild prickly pear, so the infestation still occurs naturally. Cochineal was only ever successfully introduced to one place outside the Americas— the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa, where it has been harvested on a small scale since the nineteenth century. The islands are owned by Spain, which therefore effectively kept its red monopoly. And by then it was almost too late. Some artists still used the color—Raoul Dufy, Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque and others kept carmine for rare uses—but by the 1870s the colormen had mostly stopped selling it; most artists moved on to newer, stronger reds, and cochineal was destined to fill the market demands of today: to make faces more pink, and processed ham less anemic.