Handbook of Vanilla Science and Technology

The commerce of Para direct with Lisbon ... enable those of the place whose circumstances are easy, to provide themselves with all the comforts of life. They receive European commodities in exchange for the produce of the country... all the various useful articles... from the rivers which fall into the Amazons, as from the river itself, such as clove-wood and the black nutmeg, sarsaparilla, vanilla, sugar, coffee, and in abundance cocoa, which is the currency of the country, ... (de la Condamine 1745; p. 249).

Vanilla was exported from many parts of tropical America to various countries in Europe. Comparisons were inevitably made between the quality of the varied products (Kouri 2004), and botanists were keen to identify if the multiple sources of vanilla represented multiple species. The namesake for the genus Vanilla, Charles Plumier (1646-1704), discussed three vanilla types he had observed in the Antilles in his Plantarum Americanarum (1758, originally published in 1693). Since Plumier’s description antedated the establishment of the binomial system of Linnaeus (1735), his “generic concept” had to be shared with Philip Miller (1754), the first to describe the genus using the Linnaean system. It is not clear which, if any, of the three vanilla types Plumier mentioned were V. planifolia. At the time, the vanilla market offered more diversity of commercialized species than at any time prior or since.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, vanilla, the “chocolate drug”, had established its popularity in Europe as a desirable plant, and its reputation spread through publications, especially as a medicinal. The tradition of listing vanilla as part of New World materia medica was passed on from F. Hernández to the English, largely through the effort of Sir Hans Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica (ca. 1725), which included significant portions of Hernández’s work. Such products as vanilla were recorded in standard trade data in England. In The present state of His Majesties isles and territories in America (London 1687), vanilla is enumerated among the island’s products: “cacao, indigo, cotton, sugar, and DRUGS, which this Island produces in great abundance, as, Guiacum, China-roots, Sarsaparilla, Cassia-fistula, Tamerinds, Vinello's (i.e. vanilla) and Achiots or Anetto (Chabran and Varey 2000).” The French also had a concept of vanilla influenced by Hernández. In 1743, Franpois Geoffroy compared a Vanilla species he found in Santo Domingo to Hernández’s description:

It is certain that... [it] is not different from that of Mexico, which was described by Hernández, save for the color of the flowers and the aroma of the pods since the Mexican flower is black and the pod has a pleasant aroma (Etienne 1743; cited by Lopez Pinero and Pardo Tomas 2000; p. 132).

In South America, Jesuit priests who served in the Orinoco River basin commented briefly on the natural abundance of vanilla in the region and the aromatic properties of its fruits (Rivero 1888; p. 4; Gumilla 1745, I: 366; 1993: 250; Caulin 1779: 18; Gilij 1780-1782, I: 176,1965:168; Romero-González 1998). Caulin even cited a common local name for vanilla: “Ekere-nuri”, meaning “lengua de Tigre” or “Jaguar’s tongue”, in reference to the leaf shape. While these commentators were aware of the economic value of vanilla, none made allusion to vanilla cultivation in the Orinoco.

8.1.2 II. Papantla Monopoly, 1760s-1840s

Growing demand for chocolate in Europe kept the cacao and vanilla markets surging in the early 1700s. Vanilla beans were arriving in Europe from throughout tropical America (Sauer 1993), all without the aid of cultivation. Instead, the commercialization of vanilla beans was based on fruit-gathering from wild populations of multiple species of Vanilla, which were subsequently cured in one fashion or another and then exported.