Handbook of Vanilla Science and Technology

During the colonial period in the New World (ca. 1500-1800), Europe’s sea-borne empires (Portugal, Spain, England, the Netherlands, and France) sought out, and competed for, New World wealth by means of trade, settlement, and conquest. In addition to the extraction of precious metals, the commercialization of tropical plants provided one of the most profitable and enduring enterprises for Europe’s colonial interests. The motivation to locate, identify, and capitalize on new and rare plants in all of Europe’s tropical colonies (“colonial botany”) was thus “big science” and integral to colonial endeavors as a whole, spawning the world’s first multi-national trading companies such as the English East India Company, the French East and West India Companies (Compagnie des Indes Orientales/Occidentales), the Dutch West India Company, and the Dutch East India Company, or Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) (Rich and Wilson 1967; Boxer 1969; MacLeod 2000; Brockway 2002; Schiebinger 2004; Schiebinger and Swan 2005). The scale by which Europe was able to marshal resources to these ends during the period was unprecedented, perhaps no better epitomized than by the production of sugar cane (an Old World plant) by African slave labor in tropical America for sale to Europe (Mintz 1984; Dunn 2000). Among other far-reaching consequences, the consumption in Europe of sugar and other stimulating plants of colonial derivation such as cacao, tobacco, coffee, and tea, would over time play an essential role in the “energizing” and enabling of an industrial workforce in the nineteenth century, along with staples such as maize and potato (Goody 1982).

Vanilla gained some notice in Europe, beginning in the sixteenth century. Columbus was credited for being the first to introduce vanilla beans into Europe while returning from his fourth voyage (Morren 1839; Smith et al. 1992; Weiss 2002); the apothecary Hugh Morgan recommended vanilla beans as a flavoring to his Queen, Elizabeth I, (Kouri 2004); Morgan sent beans to Flemish botanist C. Clusius in 1602; Clusius in Exoticorum Libri Decem (1605) would call them “lobus oblongus, aromaticus” (apparently on Morgan’s suggestion) (Purseglove et al. 1981); W. Piso used “vanilla” for the first time in print while working in Brazil in 1658; shipments of vanilla were received in Cadiz, etc. (for full details, see Correll, 1953; Lubinsky 2007; but esp. Kouri 2004).

The development of European interest in vanilla was to a large extent the by-product of a greater interest in cacao (Kouri 2004; Coe and Coe 2007). Spanish priests-ethnographers, such as F. Bernardino de Sahagiin, and royal physicians, such as Diego Duran, described the indigenous use of vanilla as a condiment/medicine in cacao beverages (de la Cruz 1940;

Sahagtin 1963; Duran 1994). An especially insightful example into Contact-era vanilla use is the work of Dr Francisco Hernández, royal physician to the King of Spain, whose monumental treatise on the medicinal flora of New Spain was disseminated in print in 1651. His entry on “Tlilxochitl” (Nahuatl, “Black Flower”) is the most detailed description of the native use of vanilla in Mesoamerica:

... the vanilla beans, smell like musk or balsam of the Indies, and they are black - hence the name. It grows in hot, moist places. They are hot in the third degree and are usually mixed with cacao as well as with mecaxtichitl... Two vanilla beans dissolved in water and taken will provoke urine and menstruation, if mixed with mecaxochitl. It hastens birth, expels afterbirth and a dead fetus. It strengthens the stomach, and expels flatulence. It heats and thins the humors. It invigorates the brain and heals fits of the mother. It is said that these vanilla beans are a similar remedy against cold poisons and against cold poisonous animal stings. It is also said to be one of the most aromatic plants in this region (Varey 2000; p. 167).

By the time Hernández’s work was published, England was actively accumulating direct knowledge about the whereabouts and uses of vanilla in tropical America. In the 1630s, Thomas Gage reported on the presence of vanilla along the Pacific coast of Guatemala:

The chief commodities which from along that coast are brought to Guatemala, are from the provinces of Soconusco and Suchitepequez, which are extreme hot, and subject to thunder and lightning, where groweth scarce any remarkable commodity, save only cacao, achiote, “mecasuchil”, vanilla and other drugs for chocolate (Thompson 1958).

Around the same time, in the 1640s, the English began to exploit wild vanilla populations in northeastern Nicaragua and Honduras (i.e. the Cayos Miskitus), specifically in the region around the Caratasca Lagoon, along with populations of silk grass and annatto (Offen 2000).