The Miraculous Fever-Tree Page 13

  No purveyor of medicines ever made such flamboyant claims for a tonic as did Ruiz in support of the miracle remedy quina. The bark could be ground up and infused or boiled, and administered as a liquid. Reduced to powdered form or as an extract, it could be given in pills, in preserves, in diluted wine or in water. Ruiz had seen it work, he said, against ‘simple or complex intermittent fevers, malignant putrefactions, nervous malignancies, exanthemas and [the] putrid effects of smallpox’. He would even prescribe it to help cure, among other things, toothache, gangrene, dysentery, measles, miscarriages, headaches and collapsed lungs. Indeed, the only ailments against which it didn’t seem to work, according to Ruiz, were gout and rheumatism. Given how much trouble he had gone to in order to obtain specimens of the tree, its leaves, flowers and seeds, it is hardly surprising that Ruiz wanted it to be a miraculous remedy that would cure almost any disease known to man. He, like everyone at that time, knew nothing about what malaria really was, how it was contracted, and how exactly quinine worked in treating it; nor would such things be known for at least another hundred years.

  However far-fetched his claims for the miracle tree from across the ocean, Ruiz was level-headed enough in describing the many varieties of quina that he had seen in exact detail. He wanted, more than anything, to lay down the foundation for better botanical knowledge by announcing that he had observed, collected, described and had drawings made of seven species of cinchona, including Cinchona officinalis, a magnificent forty-foot tree which he believed to be identical to those from Loxa, and Cinchona purpurea, which though it had purple leaves, looked very similar to the officinalis. Purpurea, which grew most happily on the lower slopes of the Andes, was more abundant than officinalis, but contained almost no active quinine. That did not prevent unscrupulous collectors from trying to deceive dealers by mixing it with the officinalis bark, which was much rarer and more difficult to harvest.

  Ruiz’s slim Quinología, and the supplement to it that he completed nine years later with his colleague Pavón, would ignite a controversy over the taxonomy of cinchona, how the different species should be named, and which were the most productive, that would rage on for a hundred years. His rival was another Spanish botanist, José Celestino Mutis, publication of whose work would prove if anything to be even more fraught and tragic than that of Ruiz.

  José Celestino Mutis studied medicine, but his only real ambition was to travel to the New World. Born in 1732 and raised in Cadiz, Spain’s busiest port, he spent much of his youth hanging around the docks. Like Cardinal Juan de Lugo, whose interest in the New World had also been aroused at an early age in Cadiz, Mutis loved to scan the horizon and wait for the arrival of galleons like the Conde, or the ill-fated San Pedro de Alcántara that ran aground off the coast of Portugal with Hipólito Ruiz’s precious cargo of specimens aboard. For hours on end he would watch the porters scurrying up and down the gangplank while others in the hold hoisted up cases of silver doubloons and gold castellanos, sacks of fine vicuna wool, planks of campeche and other rare tropical hardwoods, boxes of cocoa, vanilla, white sugar, rich chocolate paste, leather skins and, of course, the precious quina bark.

  In 1757, when he was twenty-five and freshly qualified after years of studying medicine, Mutis travelled to Madrid to try to persuade the authorities to send him abroad. While he waited he passed his time collecting plants and grasses around the capital, for he was a born naturalist; only occasionally did he see patients, and then only to ensure he did not starve. Three years later, the King appointed a new Viceroy, Marqués de la Vega de Armijo, to the New Kingdom of Granada, now part of Colombia. Mutis asked for a position as a botanist, telling de la Vega that he wanted to make a systematic study of the forests of Jesuit bark. After giving the matter some thought, the Viceroy agreed, though he told Mutis that in order not to disturb the King over such a trivial matter, he should be attached to de la Vega’s household as his personal physician.

  Realising that this was the only way he might advance his project, Mutis agreed, and in February 1761 the new Viceroy made his official entrance into Santa Fe de Bogotá, the capital of the New Kingdom of Granada. Full of excitement about what he thought would be the imminent start of his grand botanical project, Mutis wrote a letter to the most eminent botanist in the world, the Swede Karl von Linne, or Linnaeus, as he is commonly known. That Linnaeus had never heard of him was entirely irrelevant to Mutis. Writing as fast as he was able, in a flowery Latin hand that grew more and more illegible with every page, he wanted only to tell the great man of his plan to write nothing less than a new natural history of the entire continent of South America, and to apprise him that he planned to make regular shipments of the rarest plants in the very near future.

  Linnaeus answered Mutis immediately. He treated the young man as though he were already an illustrious colleague, gave him encouragement, requested his help and thanked him warmly for the forthcoming plants. He told him that he would work the tree, when the specimens arrived, into his great taxonomy under the name Cinchona, which he had given the genus after reading the description la Condamine gave the Académie des Sciences in 1738. (The misspelling of the word that should have been ‘Chinchona’ arose from the fact that Mutis and Linnaeus corresponded in Latin.)

  Lastly, Linnaeus sent Mutis’s heart soaring with the news that he had arranged to have the young Spaniard appointed a member of the Academy of Sciences of Uppsala. Thus began a correspondence that was to last until Linnaeus’s death seventeen years later.

  After such an encouraging start, however, Mutis would find that progress on the ground in Bogotá was harder to achieve. His friend the Viceroy, who had seemed so enthusiastic about the botanical project back in Spain, was taken up by other worries over his new job. Mutis worked hard as a physician, and soon found that he was one of the most popular doctors in the city. But the Viceroy, he realised, was ignoring him. ‘While in Spain,’ he admitted in anguish to his diary, ‘I believed that I should already be on my way to Loxa to study the cinchona tree … so assuredly the Viceroy promised me that shortly after our arrival here he would send me on this errand.’

  To distract himself, Mutis began teaching mathematics at the University of Bogotá. He took holy orders. He badgered the Viceroy’s officials about when he might start his botanical studies, until in desperation in 1763 he undertook to write to the King himself. Charles III had not yet bought Pedro Francisco Davila’s cabinet of curiosities, nor had he given the order to establish the botanical garden in Madrid. After a certain amount of flattery, Mutis pointed out to the King that Spain was neglecting the study of the natural sciences, in which other countries were making such extraordinary progress, and emphasised that Spain should have the best natural history museum in the world. He reminded Charles that his forebears had recognised the importance of the study of natural history, that Philip II and Ferdinand VI had sent scientists to America, but that the work they had started was far from done.

  Mutis courteously but firmly outlined Spain’s duty to the world in having been awarded by Providence such enormous possessions. ‘America,’ he wrote, ‘is not only rich in gold, silver, precious stones and other treasures but also in natural products of the greatest value … There is quinine, a priceless possession of which Your Majesty is the only owner and which divine Providence has bestowed upon you for the good of mankind. It is indispensable to study the cinchona tree so that only the best kind will be sold to the public at the lowest price.’ He warned that if the practice of chopping down trees to obtain the bark were to continue, the supply of the drug would be exhausted in a short time.

  So convinced was Mutis that he was right, and so desperate was he to start work, that he ended by threatening the King with punishment from above, describing the spectacle of Charles III seated on his throne surrounded by the ghosts of those who had died for lack of the remedy.

  The King did not reply.

  A year later, in 1764, Mutis sent the King another petition, and again no answer came. He also
sent Linnaeus some specimens from a cinchona tree that had been presented to him by the superintendent of the cinchona forest in Loxa. Linnaeus wrote back that he was most grateful for these samples, which allowed him to complete his classification of the tree whose name he had unwittingly misspelled. ‘I was delighted,’ he wrote, ‘with the beautiful drawing of the bark and the leaves and flowers that you sent me, which flowers … gave me a clear impression of a very rare species.’

  The man who gave Mutis the specimen from Loxa also told him that he had seen the tree growing in the New Kingdom of Granada. If this was true, it meant that the tree could survive north of the equator. Even more important, it might be as readily available on the Atlantic coast of South America as it was on the Pacific, which would greatly ease the problems of transportation.

  All of this set Mutis on fire. Again he went to the Viceroy, who, while he acknowledged the importance of the botanical study of the tree, threw up his hands and declared he could do nothing, as the King had repeatedly ignored Mutis’s petitions. De la Vega did however allow his desperate physician the occasional day exploring the outskirts of Bogotá. This was a limited concession indeed, for there was no cinchona to be had outside its natural habitat or close to the city.

  As a distraction, Mutis threw himself into silver mining. In 1766, five years after he arrived in South America, he went to live in a shack by a dilapidated silver mine, where he addressed himself to the problems of improving labour conditions and extracting ores. For four years he remained there, until in 1770 he returned to the capital, though he had not quite given up his interest in mining. Thus it was that one day when he was travelling between Bogotá and the silver mine during the rainy season, he noticed a grove of cinchonas, with their unmistakable corona of pink and yellow flowers. The first person to whom Mutis sent examples of this species, which he named Cinchona bogotensis, was Linnaeus.

  The discovery of cinchona trees growing so far north of the equator, and 150 miles east of their regular habitat, convinced Mutis that the tree would be found on the Atlantic side of the continent. Hearing that a new Viceroy was being appointed to the Kingdom, Mutis once again petitioned the authorities. De la Vega’s successor was sufficiently convinced by the botanist-physician to write to Madrid urging the Crown to consider establishing a monopoly of the quinine trade, in the hope of eliminating smuggling and ensuring that the trade in the drug was efficiently organised, so that quinine from Peru was exported westwards towards the Philippines and the Orient, while that of New Granada was shipped eastwards towards Europe.

  Yet again, the answer from Madrid was complete silence. In 1778 Mutis left Bogotá once again for a far-off silver mine. This was the same year that Ruiz and Pavón and their French colleague, Dombey, arrived in South America. If they had known of the difficulties Mutis had already suffered, they might never have made the journey.

  Mutis was still working at the same silver mine five years later when another Viceroy, an archbishop by the name of Antonio Caballero y Gongora, paid a pastoral visit to the remote spot where he lived. Gongora was a scholar and a patron of science, and he was astonished to find Mutis in the wilderness of the New World. When Mutis told him the sad story of his failures in South America, the Viceroy’s astonishment turned to fury. He took Mutis with him back to Bogotá, and immediately began to deluge the authorities in Madrid with petitions, reports and recommendations. Without waiting for a reply, he set about organising a provisional scientific commission entitled the Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada.

  Gongora’s dogged persistence paid off. In November 1783, more than three years after Ruiz and Pavón had visited the quinine forests of Huánuco, Mutis was made by royal decree the chief botanist and astronomer of the new botanical expedition. By order of the Crown, his debts were paid off and he was awarded a pension of two thousand pesos a year to continue his studies. Orders were given that all the books and instruments necessary for the expedition were to be sent from England, where the best of them were made.

  The first task that the expedition set itself was to send botanists to explore the forests of New Granada, in search of the cinchona tree. Headquarters were set up in a tiny town called Mariquita, and Mutis gave himself up to an orgy of botany. In no time the expedition began to accumulate manuscripts, specimens, and above all an endless number of hand-painted illustrations. The artists, who came from Quito, worked like medieval monks, for nine hours a day in complete silence. Their drawings were life-sized and elaborately detailed, showing all the phases of the plants’ growth, including the seeds and roots. In order to obtain the most accurate representations, Mutis devised different ways of preparing dyes from natural sources. He also put in order all the materials he had collected from his various pilgrimages over the years; thus the expedition founded a unique library.

  In 1791, at the same time that Ruiz after years of ill luck finally brought out his small treatise Quinología, the library and the collection of specimens of the Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada moved from Mariquita to larger premises in the capital, Bogotá, and the expedition was renamed the Botanical Institute of New Granada. The staff now consisted of ten scientists and fourteen artists. Mutis made provision for any of the children in the orphanage of Bogotá who showed an aptitude for botanical drawing to be given proper training and the chance to join the institute at the end of their schooling.

  Up to 1792, however, nothing had been published by the Botanical Institute. Material was constantly being accumulated, notes taken, specimens mounted and illustrations completed. Everyone was busy arranging the two major works that Mutis had planned: a monumental treatise on the flora of northern equatorial South America, which included thousands of illustrations; and a complete medical and botanical treatise on the cinchona tree, which was also to be profusely illustrated. Yet somehow neither work was ever quite ready for the printer.

  In 1793 the Spanish government gave orders for an investigation of the Botanical Institute to be carried out. Having seen the difficulties that Ruiz and Pavón had experienced, the government was particularly anxious that Mutis’s work should not be lost. The results of the investigation were far from encouraging: although the material gathered was clearly priceless, there was little prospect of publication, because not a single manuscript was anywhere near ready – there were only hundreds and hundreds of illustrations and thousands upon thousands of botanical descriptions, all scattered in confusion. If anyone should have been able to put some order into the work, it was Mutis, but the investigators were frankly unsure whether he was able or willing to complete the task.

  To fend them off, Mutis undertook, much as Ruiz and Pavón had done a few months before, to publish two short pamphlets on the cinchona tree.

  From the results, it is clear that Mutis had little interest in the pamphlets. Both deal largely with medical problems relating to the administration of cinchona, and he describes only four species of the tree, compared with Ruiz and Pavón’s seven. The attention he pays to the drug’s medical qualities is perfunctory to say the least, writing as he was decades after both Robert Talbor and Francesco Torti had published their clinical studies in exhaustive detail, and the pamphlets added little that was new.

  José Celestino Mutis died in 1808, at the age of seventy-six, without publishing a page of the colossal mass of manuscripts and illustrations that he had accumulated throughout his life. Francisco José de Caldas, one of the most gifted of the boys from the orphanage in Bogotá to whom Mutis had given the opportunity of training and a salaried job, and with whom Mutis had worked closely on the cinchona study, was appointed a director of the institute. On orders from Madrid, he immediately set about arranging Mutis’s work for publication.

  Not many months had passed, however, before there was an insurrection in the New Kingdom of Granada. The rebels, under Simón Bolívar, wanted to wrest New Granada from the Spanish Crown, and although a provisional government was put in place, the royalist forces were determined t
o fight back. Caldas continued his work preparing Mutis’s work for the printer. Before long, though, he was ordered to become a captain of the engineering corps, and to organise the building of cannon, gunpowder mills, ammunition factories and fortifications.

  The insurrectionists fought the Spanish soldiers for five years. For a while it looked as if the rebellion might succeed, but the Spanish reorganised their forces, and finally entered Bogotá. Caldas was arrested and condemned to death. When the sentence was passed, he said nothing in his defence. He did, however, turn to the court and remind them that there was something more precious than his or any man’s life: the work that had accumulated in the Botanical Institute, including the study of the cinchona tree on which the lives of so many people depended.

  Mutis’s work would be of no value to anyone, he emphasised, since he, Caldas, was the only person who could put it in order. Because of the years he had spent at Mutis’s side working on the botanical treatises, he was in a position to publish Mutis’s work. He asked the court that the time required to do this be granted to him before the death sentence was carried out. His request was denied. Refusing to give up, he sent a written petition to the authorities stating his case in further detail. Again the answer was no.

  On the eve of his execution, Caldas was asked to give more details about Mutis’s work, with a view to possible publication. Once again he asked for a postponement of the death sentence – only six months, and he would work with a chain tied to his ankle if necessary. A third time it was denied him.