The Incas had several reds. They could macerate the wood of the brazil tree to make a deep pink, they could make an orange dye with the dried seeds of the annatto plant, and of course there was logwood, which I found in my search for black, and was actually better black than red. But they used to treasure the ruby color from the cochineal insect as the best of them. Women used cochineal as a blusher, potters used it as decoration, home decorators used it on walls, and artists used it in their frescos. But most of all it was found in textiles, most of which have now been destroyed by time and sunlight.
The beetle blood alone would not pass any color fastness tests— without any additives the quipus and the clothes would have faded with the first wash. To make the color fix, the ancient Meso-Americans used to mix it either with tin or with alum. They did this much as the colormen of Winsor & Newton would have done in their early factory in Harrow, and much as modern carmine dye-makers like Antonio Bustamente do today in their great stainless steel vats.
Today alum is so cheap and such a specialist substance in industry that scarcely any attention is paid to it. Indeed, most people who are neither dyers nor chemists have never heard of it. But at one time this substance (actually several substances as it could be made up of aluminium sulphate and either potassium or ammonia) was one of the most important chemicals in the world. It was used in large quantities by tanners, papermakers and particularly dyers.5 Without alum you could hardly put any color onto clothes: you were condemned to a drab wardrobe, and few societies from the Egyptians onwards were satisfied with that.
Alum is what is called a “mordant,” relating to the fact that it is so astringent that it “bites” onto the color and makes it stick to the textile with its metallic teeth. In Book 35 of his Natural History, Pliny described how the Egyptians dyed clothes by a “very remarkable process” which first involved saturating the fabric with mordants after which “the fabrics, still unchanged in appearance, are plunged into a cauldron of boiling dye.”
In the Middle Ages the main European alum market was in Champagne: dyers from as far as Flanders and Germany would travel to France to buy this valuable raw material imported on donkey-back from Aleppo in the east and Castile in the west,6 with some of the best alum coming from Smyrna on the Turkish coast. With such a strong Muslim control of the world’s alum resources,7 it was a relief to the Catholic world when in 1458 a man called Giovanni di Castro found a large deposit within 100 kilometers of Rome at a town called Tolfa. For several decades the Vatican had a near-monopoly of this valuable commodity, although in the sixteenth century deposits were found in Flanders (there were rumors that Henry VIII of England only married Ann of Cleves to get his hands on her alum), and in around 1620 a Yorkshireman called Sir Thomas Chaloner risked his life to smuggle two of the papal alum workers to England to learn the secret of extracting it from shale. As geologist Roger Osborne describes in his book The Floating Egg, from that moment on the Lower Jurassic cliffs from Whitby to Redcar “were ripped open and thrown onto the beach.” And when in the mid-nineteenth century the scientific and religious worlds opened their minds to the possibilities of prehistory, it was in the rubble-strewn alum quarries of Yorkshire that some of the most exciting finds of marine fossils were discovered. Fossils, as Osborne writes, that enabled us “to think the unthinkable.”
THE OLD WORLD BUG
When Turner bought his carmine from his paint suppliers in London it was certainly made from cochineal, imported by the ton from the Americas and then turned into a lake pigment.8 But had he lived a few centuries earlier he would have used something also called “carmine,” which came from an Old World bug, as long as but thinner than a five-year-old child’s fingernail and almost as hard. It is the kermes insect—the Indo-European cousin of the cochineal, chemically related but with a much weaker concentration of color.9 From its Sanskrit name, krim-dja, came the words carmine and crimson. And today’s Persian speakers still use the word “kermes” if they want to describe red.
Among the Roman soldiers who travelled around Europe conquering land for Nero in the first century A.D. was a Greek doctor. No doubt Dioscorides did his duty in the camp hospitals, tending battle-wounded soldiers with the medicines and sharp-toothed saws provided by the military, but his heart wasn’t really in it. What he loved most was the days he could spend escaping on to the hillsides, heading away from the battle cries and collecting medicinal plants. He wrote a textbook about his discoveries, and the Materia Medica has been a useful source of information for botanists, physicians and historians ever since.
Dioscorides described how kermes was harvested with the fingernails—scraped carefully from the scarlet oak it lives on. But curiously he described it as “coccus,” meaning “berry,” and did not explain that it was an insect at all. Some people have said that meant he had never actually seen it. I think there is a different explanation. One of the beauties of language is its built-in metaphors. Kermes had probably been called the “oak berry” for so long that everyone knew it as that. Perhaps in two thousand years someone will unearth an ancient spy story and laugh at us for our own use of the word “bug.” “How innocent they were in those days, how animist in their beliefs,” this future reader might muse. “To think that an insect could listen in to conversations and report them back!” Pliny the Elder, who lived at the same time as Dioscorides, was also either incredibly confused by the dye’s origins or was also using the accepted metaphorical language of the day. In his Natural History he called the kermes both a berry and a grain, yet also described it as a small worm, or “scolecium.”
Whatever it was called, this little insect was big business. Since the Ancient Egyptians had started importing it by the camel-load from Persia and Mesopotamia, the kermes trade routes had increased to cover the known world, from Europe to China. The Romans liked it so much that they would sometimes demand that taxes should be paid in sacks of kermes. When it was ruled by Rome, half of Spain’s taxes to the capital were in the form of kermes—which they called “grana”—and the rest would mostly consist of more conventional grains like wheat. With such guaranteed demand the industry was always well paid and kermes-collecting was the kind of business that families could trace back through generations. Instead of being sun dried like cochineal, kermes insects suffered murder by slow subjection to vinegar fumes or death by immersion in a vinegar bath. It didn’t always work. Dr. Harald Boehmer, who has spent twenty-five years resuscitating the natural-dye carpet industry in Turkey, tells of how he went collecting wild kermes on the trees around the weavers’ villages, after which he popped them into a vinegar bath as his books suggested. “But they loved it and started swimming around and jumping out. That day the back of my car was full of lively insects,” he said.
A fashion statement in medieval Europe was to wear clothes made of a new cloth, imported from central Asia. The cloth was called “scarlet” and it was the pashmina of its time: vastly popular, frequently imitated but at its highest quality extremely expensive— at least four times the price of ordinary cloth. But the curious thing is, scarlet was not always red. Sometimes it was blue or green or occasionally black, and the reason that in English “scarlet” now means “red” and not “chic-textile-that-only-socialites-can-afford-but-which-we-all-aspire-to” is because of kermes.
By the Middle Ages, kermes was one of the most expensive dyes in Europe. Painters rarely used it: even then, more than five hundred years before Turner was making those rash pigment decisions about his wild skies, most people knew it wasn’t colorfast. But the dyers loved it. And what else would they use for their most valuable textile? There was madder, a plant root, which was relatively cheap and which I would find in my search for orange. It was fine for carpets and ordinary people’s clothes, and it was reasonably light fast. But it tended toward brown, and did not have that rich crimson hue that was so valued. Greens and blues had their fans, but ultimately the most valuable cloth deserved the most valuable dye, and kermes won out. So “a scarlet woman” a
ctually means “a woman of the cloth,” which would be particularly galling to some members of the Christian Church, accustomed as some of their scarlet-clad bishops are to denouncing the world’s oldest profession.
In 1949 the Russian archaeologist Sergei Rudenko was excavating burial mounds in Siberia’s Altai Mountains—and made an extraordinary discovery: the earliest known Persian carpet, now called the Pazyryk Rug and knotted 2,500 years ago. It proved to be one of history’s few grave-robber “success stories.” In the fourth century A.D. a band of robbers had discovered the tomb and stole its more portable treasures. They left the rug—probably it was a bit heavy for them. But they were in a hurry and they left the tomb door open after the bolts of silk had left. That winter, water flooded the cave and—Siberia being cold—the carpet froze for posterity. The rug shows deer and Persian horsemen prancing on a red field that scientists believe was dyed with what we now call “Polish cochineal,” which was a cousin to kermes. Incidentally, the archaeologists also unearthed a deposit of hemp seeds and pipes that had been used for smoking hashish10—a find that has excited hallucinogen historians ever since.
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.”