A Brighter Shade of Red

Amy Butler Greenfield. A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. viii + 338 pp. Cloth, $26.96; Paper, $15.95.

Reviewed by Anthony S. Travis

The irresistible lure of one red dyestuff during the 16th through the 19th centuries has provided Amy Butler Greenfield with wonderful material for a delightful and highly recommended book. The red dye was cochineal, prized by the ancient Mexicans, and after 1519 admired by the newly arrived Spanish conquistadors. In an age when the European textile industry was preeminent, the magnificent red of the New World was in high demand for dyeing silk and wool. Cochineal supported the Spanish economy, much to the chagrin of other European nations, who were anxious to break the monopoly and use the dye to pay off their own national debts.

Side stories of empires, kings, queens, soldiers turned colonial governors, sea captains, adventurers, and scientists provide essential context to the unfolding drama. The economic importance of cochineal stimulated technical studies, particularly among Spain’s rivals. In London the investigators included the Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel, famous for sailing underwater in a wooden submarine down the River Thames in 1621. Drebbel never revealed how he generated the oxygen that sustained his dozen oarsmen, but he did show that tin was the perfect mordant for obtaining an unprecedented bright red with cochineal, and set up in business as a dyer to exploit the discovery, only to fail miserably.

While piracy on the high seas and intrigue, officially sanctioned or otherwise, diverted some of the Spanish supply and helped fill the coffers of England and France, there remained a fascinating scientific question. What was the exact nature of cochineal: worm, berry, or seed? All that was known was that the dye was associated with a cactus native to Mexico. It was the availability of the microscope that supplied the answer. Cochineal was shown to be an insect in 1694 by Nicholas Hartoeker and in 1704, in remarkable detail, by Anton van Leeuwenhoek. This set off the hunt for living samples, with defeat often snatched from apparent victory. In the mid-1700s the botanist Carl Linnaeus was distraught to learn that his gardener, thinking that the plant was infested, had carefully removed and destroyed the insects from a newly arrived cactus before Linnaeus had seen them.

Success was elusive. In the 1770s the Frenchman Nicolas-Joseph Thiery de Menonville, using a mixture of deception, disguise, and pure guile, and narrowly escaping the seductive delights of a beautiful Mexican landlady, embarked on a risky adventure to the interior of Mexico, where at Oaxaca he procured samples of the precious nopal cactus and cochineal. He spirited them away to Port-au-Prince, but was unable to create a French colonial cochineal industry. At the end of the 18th century Joseph Banks, who had read Thiery de Menonville’s account, sought to cultivate cochineal at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, hoping to transplant it to some suitable British colony. This enterprise also met with failure.

Meanwhile the cochineal industry of Mexico grew massively to satisfy the increasing demand for textiles—until successful cultivation in Java threatened the Mexican industry. By the late 19th century cochineal had succumbed to synthetic dyes, though the industry has revived on a small scale in Mexico in recent years.

Greenfield explores nearly every relevant aspect of cochineal, but readers of Chemical Heritage will find some omissions. She correctly points out that the cochineal colorant, carminic acid, is an anthraquinone, but fails to link this piece of information with the synthesis of alizarin. Since she brings the rest of the story up to the present, Greenfield could have examined the investigations of Carl Liebermann, codiscoverer of the alizarin process, and Otto Dimroth’s brilliant work on degradation products, which in the 1920s enabled the almost complete structural elucidation of the colorant from cochineal. (The stereochemistry of the C- glycosyl bond in carminic acid was not established until the early 1980s.) She also founders on the slippery slope of chemistry: had William Perkin “started with toluidine” (p. 224) in 1856, he would almost certainly have come across a colorant, maybe a bright red (fuchsine or magenta) if not his famous mauve, instead of having to repeat the experiment with aniline.