Trop Picks: Cinchona Tree

The story of the quest for cinchona (Cinchona officinalis) tells us everything we need to know about our modern age. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that without this tree, there would have been no British empire. That’s because its bark was the source of quinine, essential to the treatment of malaria, a chief cause of fatalities among the Empire’s footmen.

Unfortunately for the British, the cinchona’s native habitat was in the Caravaya forest bordering Peru and Bolivia, neither of which fell under the Imperial domain. Sensing that the South Americans were about to declare a monopoly on the trade of this most valuable of plants, the British decided to dispatch one of their own men to the Caravaya to thwart them.

That man was Clements Markham, a hero of the Imperial age, when the scientist-explorer would replace the soldier as the protagonist of the story. The scientist-explorer had to have scientific knowledge and be strong, fearless, cunning, and adventurous. James Bond is nothing.

But all these requirements were secondary to the main one: a facility for foreign languages. That’s because the new hero had to rely heavily on indigenous populations for his botanic discoveries.

All the scientific utterances on the cinchona had their origin in Quechua Indian knowledge, although the same utterances coming out of Quechua mouths would not have been recognized as such. Under the protective halo of science, working for the benefit of all of humanity unlike narrow native interests, the scientist-explorer justified the taking of that which didn’t quite belong to him.

Once in Peru, Markham had to face hostile local authorities who had got wind of his mission, growers who threatened to cut his feet off, a treacherous landscape and a mutinous crew. With the help of his Quechua guides, he managed to overcome all of these obstacles and smuggle cinchona cuttings out of the continent.

From South America, the cinchona was shipped to the Kew Botanic gardens and from there on to the cool Nilgiri mountains of Southern India, where the growing conditions mimicked the Caravaya. The supply of quinine for the British Empire was thus secured, and the rest as they say, is history.

(If this all sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because a few months ago we ran a similar story about Henry Wickham and his theft of rubber seeds from Brazil.)

Sources:

Kavita Philip in "Imperial Science Rescues a Tree: Global Botanic Networks, Local Knowledge and the Transcontinental Transplantation of Cinchona" in Environment and History, 1995.