A “reasoned proposal” against “vain science”: Creole negotiations of an Atlantic medicament in the Audiencia of Quito (1776–92)

Abstract

This essay discusses the 1779 report on quina by Miguel García de Cáceres, a customs official in Guayaquil, for the Visitador General to the Audiencia of Quito. Quina, a medicinal tree bark, was an important export commodity in the region which had been recognized since the mid seventeenth century by medical practitioners throughout the Atlantic world as an effective treatment for periodic fevers, one of the most prevalent ailments in the early modern world. In 1751, the Crown had established a royal monopoly of quina – a mechanism for asserting an exclusive claim to annual shipments of quina from Loja, the province reputed to produce the best bark. The remainder of quina was open to private harvesting and trading. In the late 1770s, the Crown wanted to know if it would be useful and profitable to expand its monopoly of quina. Cáceres was in favor of the proposed expansion, but his final report provided much more than a simple policy recommendation. In fact, the majority of his report was a critique of what he called the “vain science” employed primarily, but not solely, by European scientific and medical practitioners in the study of quina. He argued that this “science” produced “verisimilitude” rather than true knowledge, and that this false knowledge had a negative impact on the quina trade and threatened the very survival of the cinchona trees from which quina was harvested. More than a case of Creole patriotic epistemology, this essay argues that Cáceres’ report demonstrates how local debates among Creoles shaped the production of knowledge about quina – an object that moved within overlapping transatlantic networks of trade, empire, and science. Such entanglements of knowledge, politics, and economics at the local level characterized many of the knowledge-making enterprises in the early modern Atlantic world.

Keywords:

• Spanish Atlantic
• Quito
• quinine
• quina
• Creole partriotism
• colonial science
• monopoly
• Bourbon Reforms

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank members of the 2009 International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University for their feedback on an earlier version of this article, as well as Kevin Adams, Kelly Wisecup, Neil Safier, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Research for this article was supported by a fellowship from the J. William Fulbright Foundation (Spain) and research grants from the Institute for International and Comparative Area Studies at the University of California, San Diego and from the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego (NSF Grant SES-0349956: Proof, Persuasion, and Policy: A Research and Training Grant for the UCSD Science Studies Program).

Notes

1. On the history of quina in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Jarcho, Quinine's Predecessor.

2. Valdivieso, “Factura instructiva.” Documents relating to the Royal Pharmacy's evaluation of this shipment are now lost.

3. The royal pharmacists used some of this quina to treat the royal family, while the Crown gave it as gifts to Spanish and foreign dignitaries and distributed it to royal hospitals in Spain.

4. The bark remained an important medical commodity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as scientific and medical practitioners around the globe transformed quina into quinine, an anti-malarial drug that facilitated European and American imperial and commercial ventures and which remains an important tool in current efforts to eradicate malaria worldwide. See Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion; Cueto, Cold War, Deadly Fevers; Headrick, “Botany”; and Slater, War and Medicine.

5. Relative to the royal monopolies of other natural products like tobacco and cochineal, the quina monopoly was more limited in scope and left the majority of bark from New Granada and Peru to be harvested by Spanish and Creole landowners and traded by Spanish and Creole merchants in South America and throughout the Atlantic world. Moreover, since quina grew in the wild rather than it being cultivated, the Crown would have had difficulty even attempting to control all production and distribution of the bark. The Crown's only other efforts to regulate the quina trade were those policies and practices that attempted to restrict the contraband trade in the bark perpetrated by British, Dutch, and French merchants in the Caribbean and along the western coast of South America. On other royal monopolies in colonial Latin America, see Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets and Deans-Smith, Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers.

6. Cáceres, “Memoria.” This version of Cáceres’ report is a manuscript copy from the original made in Quito on 16 March 1779.

7. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 184v.

8. Here, I translate Cáceres’ term “maestros,” which literally means “masters,” as “experts” because this term seems a better match in English for Cáceres’ intended meaning. See Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 184v.

9. Cáceres’ characterization of Valdivieso's duplicity will be discussed in full later.

10. Conversely, Spanish pharmacists considered the evaluation of such characteristics as essential to their art. As late as 1814, Gregorio Bañares, Chamber Pharmacist to the King, maintained: “in choosing exotic materials [for medicaments], it is necessary to consider the color, odor, flavor, consistency and other physical characteristics directly.” See Bañares, Filosofía farmacéutica, 2.

11. Cáceres accepted that variation existed between different kinds and sources of quina, but did not accept that observable variations reflected variation in medical efficacy. He writes: “There is much variety observed between Quina trees such that they can be divided into distinct classes but not into distinct species.” See Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 183r.

12. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fols. 181v, 184v.

13. Which characteristics were tested and the value assigned to them differed from place to place.

14. See Brading, First America, 1–6, and Pagden, Spanish Imperialism, 91–116.

15. For a recent contribution to and overview of scholarship on the Bourbon Reforms, see Paquette, Enlightenment.

16. See Pauw, Recherches philosophiques; Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique; and Robertson, History of America.

17. See Gerbi, Dispute.

18. Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write.

19. See Cañizares-Esguerra, “Chivalric Epistemology” and “New Worlds, New Stars.”

20. See Achim, “Making Lizards into Drugs”; Aguila, “Estrategias”; De Vos, “From Herbs to Alchemy”; and Lafuente, “Enlightenment.”

21. See Moya Torres, El arbol and Contreras, El sector exportador.

22. For a recent overview of current scholarship on the Atlantic history of science, see Delbourgo and Dew, Science and Empire.

23. Andrien, Kingdom of Quito, 190. For more on the visita of García, see Andrien, “Politics of Reform.”

24. García Pizarro to Gálvez, fol. 175r.

25. García Pizarro to Gálvez, fols. 175v–176r.

26. Cáceres’ official title was Administrador Particular de Alcavalas y Aduana.

27. “Expediente seguido por Don Miguel”

28. García Pizarro to Gálvez, fols. 1775-v.

29. Cáceres, “Informe.”

30. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 181r.

31. There were two separate orders promulgated in January 1776. The first order informed the Viceroy of New Granada that all future shipments of quina (royal and private) must be sent to Spain via Lima and its port, Callao. This order effectively created a bottleneck at Callao through which all legal quina had to pass. Previously, merchants in New Granada had had the option of shipping the bark north to the Isthmus of Panama via the port of Guayaquil. See “‘Real Cedula’ to Manuel Antonio Flores” and “El Rey, ‘Real Cedula’ to Virrey Governador.”

32. “Junta General de Tribunales,” May 23, 1776. Transcriptions of all of the responses to the Junta's queries are all found in Cascarilla, box 1, expediente. 11, Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador, Quito. Of the various reports, I make use of the following: Carrión y Vaca, “Informe”; Checa, “Informe”; Sanchez Muñoz, “Informe”; and Villa Orellana, “Informe.”

33. The Junta had asked officials in the Audiencia of Quito to answer four specific questions: (1) Was quina collected from cultivated trees on private haciendas or from trees growing in the wild?; (2) How much bark did the respondent's region produce annually and how long after harvesting did it retain its potency?; (3) Was their quina available to “foreign colonies” and, if so, how?; and (4) Would a royal monopoly of quina be beneficial or harmful to the public and to commerce?

34. Villa Orellana, “Informe,” fol. 47v.

35. Carrión y Vaca, “Informe,” fols. 63v–64r.

36. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fols. 181v, 184r.

37. “In the past,” Cáceres observed, “there have been various epochs of 10, 15, or 20 years in which some kind of sudden shift has affected those Countries [i.e. Europe] in the solicitation of all kinds of species of [quina] including [what they considered to be] the best [species].” See Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 181v.

38. Cáceres and many of his contemporaries made no distinction between the price and value of an object. Cáceres, apparently, characterized the value of objects like quina as an objective quality that derived from their natural qualities or essence. From this perspective, letting traders and merchants determine the value of quina based on European demand created a disjunction between quina's natural value and its market value. Reformers like Cáceres supported the royal monopoly as a way to align the natural and market values of cinchona bark.

39. See Crawford, “‘Para desterrar las dudas.’”

40. Bark collectors responded in one of two ways: they either stopped collecting thick bark or started shaving down the thick bark that they collected.

41. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 184r–v.

42. Many experts in Europe not only considered acidity, bitterness, and the presence of resin to be characteristics of good-quality bark, but some experts suggested that these three qualities were also the locus of the bark's medicinal virtue. Yet, in Cáceres’ view, further testing of costrón would reveal that thick bark has “more acidity and more bitterness” as well as more “glutinous humor” than thin bark. See Càceres, “Memoria,” fol. 184v. Thus, based on their own criteria for assessing the bark, Europeans had no basis for their bias against costrón. See Maehle, Drugs on Trial.

43. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 184v. Valdivieso had previously tried to convince José Diguja, the President of Quito, of the utility of costrón. See Diguja to Valdivieso, fol. 194r–v.

44. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 184v.

45. Cáceres provides these details in his report. Yet, available shipping records for the monopoly from the period after 1769 do not indicate that Valdivieso continued to send powdered bark. However, other contemporary sources suggest that some private merchants brought small amounts of powdered bark and quina extract to Europe. See Ruiz, Compendio historico-medico comercial, 105–7.

46. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 184v.

47. Cáceres, “Memoria, fol. 186r–v.

48. In order to further understand this critique, let us imagine a hypothetical set of pharmacists at Cádiz charged with the task of inspecting quina shipments. Since all quina had medical virtue, according to Cáceres, the pharmacist-inspectors should only try to determine whether the bark was quina or not. Differences in the medical efficacy of different kinds of quina were either negligible or undetectable. So, the pharmacist-inspectors need not worry about evaluating the quality of the bark as long as it was, indeed, quina. However, “chemists” perpetuated the myths that differences in the medical virtue (quality) mattered and were detectable. As a result, the royal pharmacists continued to test for the quality of quina.

49. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 186r–v.

50. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fols. 182r–v, 186r.

51. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fols. 186v–187r.

52. On empiricism in the Atlantic, see Barrera-Osorio, “Empiricism”; Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature, 1–10; and Parrish, “Diasporic African Sources.”

53. Fondo Especial, vol. 67, no. 2858, Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador, Quito.

54. In reply to Valdivieso's letter, Diguja asked if Loja's forests could sustain yearly shipments of 100 quintales (10,000 pounds) for the Royal Pharmacy. The answer was no. Valdivieso explained to Diguja that his explorers of 1768 “spoke with little reflection” when they suggested “the plants [i.e. cinchona trees] would be replaced in four to five years.” They neglected, he continued, to account for “the many years needed for the bark to achieve any substantial thickness.” See Valdivies to Diguja, fol. 270r–v.

55. See Baskes, “Colonial Institutions.”

56. Moya Torres, El arbol, 78. Moya Torres argues that the repartimiento in the quina trade was the means by which local families involved in the trade reproduced and perpetuated their elite status.

57. See Andrien, “Noticias Secretas de America” and Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets, chap. 3.

58. See Fisher, Commercial Relations, and Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, 69–80, 143–85.

59. An early proponent of this view was José Celestino Mutis. See Mutis, “Representación hecha al Rey.”

60. Villa Orellana, “Informe,” fol. 47r.

61. Alternatively, Carrión suggested that prisoners and vagabonds could learn the value of work through forced labor on cinchona plantations. Carrión's suggestions for plantations were never implemented. See Carrión y Vaca, “Informe,” fols. 62r–63v. However, a system of government licensing of bark collectors did develop in the late 1780s and 1790s throughout the Audiencia of Quito.

62. Carrión y Vaca, “Informe,” fols. 54v, 57r, 58r.

63. Sanchez Muñoz, “Informe,” fol. 83v.

64. Checa, “Informe,” fol. 70v.

65. Sanchez Muñoz, “Informe,” fol. 83r.

66. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 188bisr.

67. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fol. 189r.

68. Cáceres, “Memoria,” fols. 188bisv, 189v, 190r–v.

69. Moreno y Escandón, “Vista del Fiscal,” fol. 144r.

70. “Junta General de Tribunales,” July 3, 1777.

71. See Freile Granizo, Eugenio Espejo.

72. Espejo, “Memoria,” 159.

73. Espejo, “Memoria,” 161.

74. Espejo, “Memoria,” 152.

75. Espejo, “Memoria,” 147.

76. Espejo, “Memoria,” 153–4.

77. Espejo, “Memoria,” 163.

78. See Bleichmar, Visible Empire; Engstrand, Spanish Scientists; Nieto Olarte, Remedios para el imperio; and Sota Ríus, “Spanish Science.”

79. See Latour, Science in Action, chap. 6.