Nature, networks, and expert testimony in the colonial Atlantic: The case of cochineal

Abstract

This article examines the early modern debate over whether cochineal, the source of vermillion dye, was a plant or an animal, a seed or an insect. It explores how the debate played out differently in the contexts of the microscopic laboratory and the Royal Society of London and the Paris Academy of Sciences, the metropolitan pharmacy, French colonial botanical travel, the metropolitan merchant culture of Amsterdam, and finally Spanish colonial plantation society. It argues that these distinct epistemic spaces, or loci, each of which competed for authority in the debate, can only be understood in the context of the Atlantic world as a diverse but coherent epistemic theater. Tracing the contest between microscopic observations of anatomical features presented as universal knowledge and local experience of the harvesting process, it shows how successful claims to authority of leading microscopist Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723), apothecary Pierre Pomet (1658–1699), and naturalist Charles Plumier (1646–1704) depended as much on their relationship to the transatlantic production and trade of natural commodities as on their technical training or scientific status. The debate's resolution in Amsterdam and Oaxaca demonstrates how inseparable the intertwined legal, cultural and scientific apparatus for establishing matters of fact in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century were from the Atlantic world itself.

Keywords:

• cochineal
• Pierre Pomet
• Charles Plumier
• Antony van Leeuwenhoek
• spice trade
• microscopy
• indigenous knowledge

Notes

1. See Starfatti Larson, “Production of Expertise.” Anne Goldgar has emphasized overlapping domains of expertise that intersected in the early modern Dutch tulip trade. See Goldgar, Tulipmania, 184–7. Focusing on another colonial theater, Harold Cook's Matters of Exchange has changed our understanding of the way European science functioned and of the underpinnings of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution itself, suggesting that mercantile and scientific networks spanned the colonial world and held the same values of interested, precise, and transportable knowledge of natural objects.

2. See, for example, Chaplin, Subject Matter, 150–66, and Pyenson, Exact Sciences.

3. See Harris, “Confession-Building”; McLeod, “Introduction”; and Miller, “Joseph Banks.” On center and periphery in European colonial historiography generally, see Johnson and Socolow, “Colonial Centers.”

4. See McClellan and Regourd, “Colonial Machine.” A similar image of Spanish colonial scientific information gathering is made in Barrera, “Local Herbs,” and among the Jesuits in Harris, “Jesuit Scientific Activity.” On the limitations of this view, see Chambers and Gillespie, “Locality” and Osborne, “Science.”

5. See Shapin, Social History of Truth. Cañizares-Esguerra makes a similar critique of the historiography of colonial science in “Iberian Colonial Science.” Schiebinger, for example, has written: “Even in this era when many Europeans valued Amerindian and African knowledge useful to them, mythologies of drug discoveries suggested that knowledge traveled up a rather anthropo- and Eurocentric chain of being, from animals … to indigenous peoples, to the Spanish, and … ultimately to the French.” Schiebinger, “Prospecting for Drugs,” 124.

6. Neil Safier has fruitfully suggested that we look at itineracy itself and “connected histories” instead of at static epistemic models in “Global Knowledge,” 137. See also Beer, “Traveling the Other Way”; Ferreira Furtado, “Tropical Empiricism”; Palmié, Wizards and Scientists, 201–17; and Schaffer, “Asiatic Enlightenments.”

7. Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 14.

8. Armitage, “Three Concepts,” 16.

9. Barrera-Osorio has written of an “early scientific revolution” based on the carefully crafted observational information networks of sixteenth-century Spain, driven by the Casa de la Contratación, spurred by the development of new economically lucrative commodities, but with a vast influence on natural historical knowledge on both sides of the Atlantic. Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature, chap. 4.

10. A conflict explored by Lafuente and Valverde in “Linnaean Botany,” where it is argued that not only indigenous peoples but Spanish imperial botanists often quarreled with European systems of classification and the reduction of natural knowledge to systems. The historical importance of African knowledge of rice cultivation is explored in Carney, “Out of Africa.” Other recent treatments of Creole scientific knowledge include Bleichmar, “Atlantic Competitions” and Raj, Relocating Modern Science. On native informants, see Schiebinger, “Prospecting for Drugs,” 129.

11. On natural commodities, see Alves, “Of Peanuts and Bread”; De Vos, “Science of Spices”; and the bibliography in Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 28n22.

12. See Benedict, Curiosity; Campbell, Wonder and Science, 25–6; Spary, “Of Nutmegs and Botanists”; and Spary, Utopia's Garden, which stresses the power of French institutions in this gathering project.

13. Butler Greenfield's Perfect Red provides a thrilling and superbly researched overview of the history of cochineal.

14. Browne, “Chemical Industries,” 414; Lee, “Cochineal Production,” 450.

15. Lee, “American Cochineal,” 206. On the explosion of demand for luxury goods in early modern Europe, see Jardine, Worldly Goods, chap. 8.

16. Lee, “American Cochineal,” 208; Taylor, Original Writings, 2: 219.

17. Girard, Le Commerce français, 89–98; Lee, “American Cochineal,” 208, 215.

18. Browne, “Alexander von Humboldt”; Donkin, “Spanish Red,” 23–30; Humboldt, Essai politique.

19. Donkin, “Spanish Red,” 45; López de Gomara, Historia general, 2:144.

20. Cervantes de Salazar, Life, 61.

21. Tomson, “Voyage of Robert Tomson,” 9: 358.

22. Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, 7: 247.

23. Acosta, Historia natural, 183; Champlain, “Brief Discours,” 24.

24. The common Latin name for “kermes” was coccus baphica, and the Roman naturalist Pliny called it simply coccum, both derived from the Greek kòkkos, meaning “grain,” “seed,” or “berry.” The Spanish grana, perhaps from the same origin, became a popular colloquial name for cochineal and was adopted in other European countries as graine, grain, etc. Competing etymologies of the Spanish cochinilla, coined sometime between 1519 and 1525, proliferated along with the substance. Along with coccus, the Latin coccinus [“scarlet”] was suggested, and an alternative origin, which highlights the animal nature of the substance, that cochinilla derives from the Spanish cochino [“sow”], and thus cochinillo [“very small sow” or “sow-bug”]. Further linguistic confusion arose from the similarity between the French cochenille and coccinelle [“ladybug”].

25. Petty, “Apparatus to the History”; 796–7.

26. Lee, “American Cochineal,” 217; Menonville, “Travels to Guaxaca.”

27. See, for example, Roger, Les Sciences. This historiography within the life sciences parallels that described by Harold Cook for the scientific revolution in the physical sciences.

28. Harold Cook has pointed to the vast importance of the establishment of simple matters of fact to the scientific enterprise of the late seventeenth century and, in particular, to simple matters of fact in the realm of the natural history of the living. See Cook, “Cutting Edge of Revolution?” and Mukerji, “Dominion, Demonstration, and Domination.”

29. As, for example, in Swammerdam's famous presentation of “the Almighty Finger of God in the anatomy of a louse, in which you will find wonder piled upon wonder and God's Wisdom clearly exposed in one minute particle” (Lindeboom, Letters of Jan Swammerdam, 104–5). See Cook, “Cutting Edge of Revolution?”, 56–60.

30. See Wilson, “Microscope.”

31. See Fournier, Fabric of Life, 2–5; Ruestow, Microscope, 192; and Yoder, “Microscope in Focus.”

32. Wilson, Invisible World, 85. For an alternate view, see Stafford, “Images of Ambiguity,” which explores the ways in which microscopic observation in the early eighteenth century reveled in the world of intermediate objects that challenged categories such as animal and vegetable.

33. Swammerdam, Book of Nature, 182.

34. Dobell, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, 110; Wilson, Invisible World, 88.

35. Leeuwenhoek to Heinsieus, 10 August 1685, in Leeuwenhoek, Collected Letters, 273.

36. “[W]orms, or cocoons, which change into flies, and these settle and hold themselves on very tight to the tree; a fire is then lit under the tree, and the smoke causes them all to fall down, and after they are caught the head and the foremost part, together with the wings are removed and the rest is kept, so that the Cochineal is really the hindmost part or the tail of the fly.” Leeuwenhoek to the Royal Society, 28 November 1687, in Leeuwenhoek, Collected Letters, 143.

37. Ruestow, “Leeuwenhoek.”

38. Leeuwenhoek to Boyle, 21 September 1685, in Leeuwenhoek, Collected Letters, 275; Wilson, Invisible World, 92.

39. Leeuwenhoek to Heinsieus, 10 August 1685, in Leeuwenhoek, Collected Letters, 273.

40. “[N]ot only the head, and the foremost part, together with the wings, were removed, and the rest retained; but, what is more, that tall the legs, and the shell – or that part to which the legs were attached – had been cast off, so that nothing was left except the inside of the abdomen. And I imagined that the whitish substance which we may observe in the fissures of each grain, is a material that serves to guard the cochineal against being eaten up … These fissures of each grain of cochineal, I imagine, have been segments of the worm before it changed into a flying creature; and this latter (detail) I have noticed many times since a few days ago, in my investigations in which I am engaged at present; and if the year's season, in relation to the reproduction of insects, were not so far advanced, I have no doubt but I should be able to discover flying creatures that correspond (if not in colour, then in size and structure) to the little animals whose body is called cochineal.” Leeuwenhoek to Boyle, 21 September 1685, in Leeuwenhoek, Collected Letters, 275.

41. La Hire and Sédileau, “Description d'un insect.” Réaumur later classed the insect, together with cochineal, as a gallinsecte, a class of insects that share the property of resembling protuberances. Réaumur, Mémoires, 4: 4.

42. “[I]ls sont devenus de la figure d'une tortuë, et parfaitement semblables à un petit animal” [They took on the Figure of a tortoise, and perfectly resembled a small animal]. La Hire and Sedileau, “Description d'uninsect,” 206. All translations are the author's.

43. See Latour, “Powers of Association”; Latour, Science in Action; and Law, “On the Methods.”

44. Harold Cook has argued convincingly that the values of exactitude, universality, and repeatability arose simultaneously in early Dutch scientific, legal, and commercial spheres. See Cook, Matters of Exchange, 51–7. On apothecaries as knowledge bearers, see See Latour, “Powers of Association”; Latour, Science in Action; and Law, “On the Methods.”, 141–2, and Findlen, Possessing Nature.

45. See Sherman, “Exotic World.” On botanical collecting in the early modern French state, see Mukerji, “Dominion, Demonstration, and Domination.”

46. Pomet, Histoire générale, 30.

47. Menonville, Traite de la culture, xxx; Pomet, Histoire générale, 31.

48. Pomet, Histoire générale, 31–2; Plumier, “Réponse du P. Plumier,” 170.

49. See Parrish, American Curiosity, 140–1.

50. Pomet, Histoire générale, 30.

51. Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 206–9.

52. See Académie Royale des Sciences, Histoire de l'Académie, 280. Among the tracts that Plumier consulted were Acosta, “Historia natural” and Pison, De Indiae utriusque. Confronted by Plumier, Rousseau “avoüa sincerement à M. du Casse Chef d'Escadre des Vaisseaux du Roy et Gouverneur de l'Isle de St. Domingue, en presence de plusieurs des principaux habitans, qu'il s’étaoit fié là-dessus au rapport de quelques Flibustiers qui l'avoient entendu dire à d'autres, comme eux-mêmes me l'avoüerent” [sincerely admitted to M. du Casse, Commander of the King's Fleets and Governor of the Island of Saint-Domingue, in the presence of several of the island's principal inhabitants, that he had based his earlier claims on the stories of some freebooters, who had heard it said by others, as they themselves admitted]. Plumier, “Réponse,” 1672–3. The issue resurfaced when the German physician and naturalist Christian Frédéric Richter (1676–1711) sought clarification on cochineal from Plumier.

53. “Les Espagnols avoient assuré au Gouverneur de l'Isle, que c’était une éspèce d'insecte qui s'attachoit à l'Opuntia, et à quelqu'autres Plantes, et que M. Rousseau, qui avoit écrit le contraire, avoit avoué qu'il ne le sçavoit que par la relation d'autrui” Académie Royale des Sciences, Histoire de l'Académie, 280.

54. Plumier, “Réponse,” 1673.

55. Plumier, “Réponse,” 1682.

56. Leeuwenhoek, “Letter from Mr. Antony,” 1615.

57. Leeuwenhoek, “Letter from Mr. Antony,” 1616.

58. Leeuwenhoek, “Letter from Mr. Antony,” 1617.

59. Leeuwenhoek, “Letter from Mr. Antony,” 1618.

60. Leeuwenhoek, “Letter from Mr. Antony,” 1621.

61. Leeuwenhoek, “Letter from Mr. Antony,” 1620.

62. Indirect evidence suggests that native growers were at the time well aware of the fact that only the wingless female cochineal produced dye, and that the winged males flew from plant to plant to impregnate females. See Butler Greenfield, Perfect Red, 163.

63. Susan Parrish has argued that the colonial theater provided a kind of social inversion, in which botanical knowledge was often ascribed to “the laboring classes.” See Parrish, American Curiosity, 154. See also Lewis, “Gathering for the Republic” and Meredith, “Friendship and Knowledge.”

64. Leeuwenhoek, “Letter from Mr. Antony,” 1628.

65. On the Atlantic economy of trade information, see Goldgar, Tulipmania, 228.

66. Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie.

67. Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie., 51–3. For a similar analysis of another natural history, see Kriz, “Curiosities.”

68. Cook, Matters of Exchange, 16–17. On precision as a response to trust in the marketplace, see Goldgar, Tulipmania, 283–96.

69. Cook, Matters of Exchange, 267–303.

70. “[L]e tiers seroit plus que suffisant pour satisfaire devant tout Tribunal” [A third would be more than sufficient to satisfy any tribunal]. Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie, 15–16.

71. Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie, 16.

72. Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie, 57.

73. Harold Cook has argued that naturalists like Bontius performed a kind of co-option and erasure of the knowledge of many kinds of local observers, while keenly aware of his debt to such local knowledge, which “reinscribed information developed by other people in other cultures, past and contemporary, making it objective and exchangeable.” Cook, “Global Economies,” 118. On new hierarchies of expertise available in the seventeenthcentury Netherlands, see Goldgar, Tulipmania, 16; in late Renaissance natural history, see Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 13–14; and in the British Atlantic, see Parrish, American Curiosity, 94–115.

74. “[La cochenille] n'est pas un Frutilla ou Fruit, crû sur quelque Plante, comme on le presume en Europe, mais un animal qui a vie” [(Cochineal) is not a little fruit, grown on a plant, as it is presumed in Europe, but an animal that has life]. Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie, 55. Susan Scott Parish has stressed the power of first-hand witnessing as the keystone of the authority of transatlantic naturalists. See Parrish, American Curiosity, 118.

75. “[C]omme le Témoin l'a vû , avec ceux qui le servaoient dans ses plantations des Nopals.” Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie, 67.

76. “[V]û que les Indiens les mettent vivantes dans de petits Nids, faits de soin de paille trèsfine, en fac,on de nids d'oiseaux, lesquesls ils posent entre les troncs des Nopals, semez et cultivez à cette fin.” “[C]omme le Témoin l'a vû , avec ceux qui le servaoient dans ses plantations des Nopals.” Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie, 73.

77. “[V]û que les Indiens les mettent vivantes dans de petits Nids, faits de soin de paille trèsfine, en fac,on de nids d'oiseaux, lesquesls ils posent entre les troncs des Nopals, semez et cultivez à cette fin.” “[C]omme le Témoin l'a vû , avec ceux qui le servaoient dans ses plantations des Nopals.” Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie, 75.

78. “[P]etites Bestioles, comme des Punaises ou Ticques, qui sont animées, se meuvent, marchent d'un endroit à l'autre.” “[V]û que les Indiens les mettent vivantes dans de petits Nids, faits de soin de paille trèsfine, en fac,on de nids d'oiseaux, lesquesls ils posent entre les troncs des Nopals, semez et cultivez à cette fin.” “[C]omme le Témoin l'a vû , avec ceux qui le servaoient dans ses plantations des Nopals.” Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie, 128.

79. “Tout ce ci-dessus le Témoin a vû et experimenté, étant né dans les quartiers où la Cochenille se provigne et est cultivée” [All this the witness saw and experienced, being born in the areas where cochineal is grown and is cultivated]. “[P]etites Bestioles, comme des Punaises ou Ticques, qui sont animées, se meuvent, marchent d'un endroit à l'autre.” “[V]û que les Indiens les mettent vivantes dans de petits Nids, faits de soin de paille trèsfine, en fac,on de nids d'oiseaux, lesquesls ils posent entre les troncs des Nopals, semez et cultivez à cette fin.” “[C]omme le Témoin l'a vû , avec ceux qui le servaoient dans ses plantations des Nopals.” Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie, 133.

80. See, for example, Barrera, “Local Herbs,” 167–8, and Bleichmar, “Books, Bodies, and Fields.”

81. Indeed, Antonio Barrera has shown that even in the 1530s, while local indigenous informants were considered of inestimable value in establishing the features and properties of balsam, final authority to resolve disputes surrounding its properties rested, by order of the Spanish Crown, in the experimental laboratories of qualified physicians in Spain. See Barrera, “Local Herbs,” 172–3. On the different functions played by European and indigenous taxonomies, see Bulmer, “Why Is the Cassowary?”

82. On early Spanish colonial distinctions between European and indigenous authority, see Hulme, “Tales of Distinction.” On the related anxiety of social mixing in knowledgegenerating circles, see Goldgar, Tulipmania, 277.

83. On Linnaeus's natural theology and its impact on naturalist travelers, see Koerner, Linnaeus, 95–139. Susan Parrish has argued that providing authentic specimens and authentic knowledge of their surroundings was a key affirmation of status for traveling naturalists, and important for establishing a position in the European-based network of naturalists and virtuosi. Parrish, American Curiosity, 118–25.

84. “[L]es endroits ou avaient été les autres pattes.” Ruusscher, Naturelyke Historie, 45.

85. “[U]ne classe d'animaux bien étranges que la classe de ceux que nous allons examiner dans ce Mémoire; ils passent une partie considérable de leur vie, plusieurs mois de suite, et ceux où ils croissent le plus, appliqués contre des tiges ou des branches de plantes, d'arbrisseaux et d'arbres, sans se donner aucun mouvement sensible. Ils y sont aussi immobiles que la portion de la tige à laquelle ils sont attachés; ils semblent faire corps avec elle” [The class of animals that we are going to examine in the memoire is quite strange; they pass a considerable part of their lives, several months in a row, when they grow the most, stuck to the branches of plants and trees, without moving sensibly. They are as immobile as the part of the branch to which they are attached; they seem to be part of the same body]. Réaumur, Mémoires, 4: 1–2.

86. “[U]ne classe d'animaux bien étranges que la classe de ceux que nous allons examiner dans ce Mémoire; ils passent une partie considérable de leur vie, plusieurs mois de suite, et ceux où ils croissent le plus, appliqués contre des tiges ou des branches de plantes, d'arbrisseaux et d'arbres, sans se donner aucun mouvement sensible. Ils y sont aussi immobiles que la portion de la tige à laquelle ils sont attachés; ils semblent faire corps avec elle” [The class of animals that we are going to examine in the memoire is quite strange; they pass a considerable part of their lives, several months in a row, when they grow the most, stuck to the branches of plants and trees, without moving sensibly. They are as immobile as the part of the branch to which they are attached; they seem to be part of the same body]. Réaumur, Mémoires, 4: 3.

87. “[U]ne classe d'animaux bien étranges que la classe de ceux que nous allons examiner dans ce Mémoire; ils passent une partie considérable de leur vie, plusieurs mois de suite, et ceux où ils croissent le plus, appliqués contre des tiges ou des branches de plantes, d'arbrisseaux et d'arbres, sans se donner aucun mouvement sensible. Ils y sont aussi immobiles que la portion de la tige à laquelle ils sont attachés; ils semblent faire corps avec elle” [The class of animals that we are going to examine in the memoire is quite strange; they pass a considerable part of their lives, several months in a row, when they grow the most, stuck to the branches of plants and trees, without moving sensibly. They are as immobile as the part of the branch to which they are attached; they seem to be part of the same body]. Réaumur, Mémoires, 4: 89.

88. “[U]ne classe d'animaux bien étranges que la classe de ceux que nous allons examiner dans ce Mémoire; ils passent une partie considérable de leur vie, plusieurs mois de suite, et ceux où ils croissent le plus, appliqués contre des tiges ou des branches de plantes, d'arbrisseaux et d'arbres, sans se donner aucun mouvement sensible. Ils y sont aussi immobiles que la portion de la tige à laquelle ils sont attachés; ils semblent faire corps avec elle” [The class of animals that we are going to examine in the memoire is quite strange; they pass a considerable part of their lives, several months in a row, when they grow the most, stuck to the branches of plants and trees, without moving sensibly. They are as immobile as the part of the branch to which they are attached; they seem to be part of the same body]. Réaumur, Mémoires, 4: 89–91.

89. On this process, see Turnbull, “Traveling Knowledge.”

90. Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write. On indigenous and Creole agency among Oaxaca peasant farmers in particular, see Baskes, “Coerced or Voluntary?”