Handbook of Vanilla Science and Technology

The onset of severe indigenous population declines in the seventeenth century along the Pacific littoral of Mesoamerica (Chiapas, Guatemala, El Salvador) contributed to a restructuring of the cacao trade, with increasing exports of cultivated cacao being produced with imported African slave labor in northern South America, in areas such as Ecuador (Guayaquil), Colombia, Venezuela, and the Guianas (Hussey 1934; Price 1976; Ferry 1981; Pinero 1988; Presilla 2001; Salazar 2004; Coe and Coe 2007; MacLeod 2008). While this emergent industry had the potential to also stimulate cultivation of local Vanilla species alongside cacao in the region, such would not be the case. One of the strongest mitigating factors obviating the need for South American vanilla cultivation was the establishment of vainillales in Veracruz in the 1760s. Veracruz was the only legal port of entry into Spain for over 300 years (Knight and Liss 1991). Cacao exports from Spanish ports in South America, such as Cartagena and La Guaira, were obligatorily shipped to Spain via maritime trade with Veracruz. The geographic origin for vanilla cultivation, near the all-important port of Veracruz, could therefore have not been better positioned to take advantage of the European market. For the next 100 years, it would be primarily botanists and natural historians who would comment on vanilla. In Europe, biological taxonomy based on a system on binomial nomenclature was becoming standardized by Linnaeus. He named the first Vanilla specimen he described as Epidendrum vanilla (= V mexicana) in Species Plantarum (1753, II: 952). In his earlier Materia Medica (1749), Linnaeus listed vanilla’s supposed curative attributes as, “calefaciens, corroborans, cephalica, diuretica, aphrodisiaca”, used to treat: “melancholia, apoximeron”. He gave no indication of how vanilla should be prepared in such instances but, in passing, noted that vanilla was used to make chocolate (Shrebero 1787, p. 234, entry 551).

During his Peruvian expedition of 1777-1788, Spanish botanist HiptSlito Ruiz twice mentioned gathering of vanilla (of apparently different species) as secondary trade items. In the region of Cuchero, an area where quinoa (Cinchona nitida) bark collection predominated, Ruiz made mention of vanilla:

[Vanilla officinalis, vainilla (vanilla)]... The Indians gather some of the fruits, or pods, which they take to Huaanuco to sell, but the harvest in those forests is small because they have little value there (1998).

Ruiz observed a similar pattern in the village of Pozuzo:

Vanilla volubilis, vaynilla (vainilla, vanilla)]... Indians gather the fruits for sale to traveling merchants... who arrive at Pozuzo [to] buy coca leaves, paying for this product with cloth of various kinds, ribbons, glass beads, and other trinkets that the local people use as adornments, for holidays and their drunken parties when they drink maize chicha (1998, p. 259).

Plate 8.1 Map of vanilla uses in Meso, Central and Tropical South America, ca 1500-present.

Between 1762 and 1764, French botanist/agronomist Jean Baptiste Christophe Fusee Aublet provided relatively detailed coverage of vanilla botany and use in Cayenne (French Guiana). Like other commentators, Aublet noted that vanilla cultivation was, “... not estimated or searched by the inhabitants (p. 78),” but native Vanilla populations did occur in abundance, and local markets seemed to have existed. This is evidenced by one of the main topics Aublet discusses: curing. In a section titled, “To prepare the Vanilla, to turn its scent smooth, aromatic and marketable,” Aublet gives a description of nearly the entire curing process: