Would your country ever steal a colour from another country?

Granted, from a twenty-first century perspective, the question doesn’t make perfect sense. One pictures a team of graphic designers pitted against another team, in some skyscraper in Shanghai or Mumbai or New York, concocting trademark colours for branding purposes. (Canada’s pretty much got the red-and-white scheme cornered, but did Mexico and Italy ever have a design conflict over the red-white-green of their flags?)

However, colour used to be more of a physical commodity than it is today. The raw materials used to produce colourants were costly: costly to produce, costly to transport, and costly to the environment. And, like any precious substance, they were subject to conflict, contention, and theft. Red was one of the most precious colours during colonial times, so an intense rivalry grew up between England and Spain over the mysterious red substance called cochineal.

Nobody knew where cochineal came from—except the Spanish, and they were striving hard to keep its origins a secret. Dried into brown grains, the brilliant red colourant was being shipped over from the New World in the sixteenth century. It brought a deep scarlet colour to Spanish textiles: if you automatically picture Spanish kings in royal red robes, or Spanish women in red dresses, that’s part of cochineal’s legacy.

After gold and silver, cochineal became the next most valuable commodity to cross the Atlantic. So, of course, there were pirates lusting over the substance.

Stealing Red
During the Elizabethan era, the English made great efforts to steal cochineal from the Spanish. One of the biggest prizes came when the notorious Earl of Essex captured twenty-seven tons of cochineal in 1597, enough to serve England for many years (according to a delighted Queen Elizabeth). Metaphysical poet John Donne served on this adventure, at the age of twenty-five, and later wrote about “weak ships fraught with Cutchannel”. However, this was the last major seizing of cochineal by the English. The French never managed to capture much cochineal (though they did send spies to Mexico to try to discover what it was), but the Dutch proved a threat: they were successful enough at it during the early 1600s that the Spanish had to shift their trading routes. Still, it was scarce enough that only the well-heeled masters, like Rembrandt, could afford to use cochineal lake pigments in their paintings, as Amy Butler Greenfield reports. The Spanish monopoly on red was leaving the rest of Europe colour-deprived by comparison.

But even when Europeans could get their hands on what was being called grana—”grain”—they still weren’t sure what the substance actually was. This enigma, of course, made it all the more impossible for the rest of Europe to get their hands on it. Gosta Sandberg tells the story of a Caribbean pirate ship in the mid-1700s that ends up with a longboat of the grain, during a botched piracy attempt. At first, they are perplexed: “The pirates’ disappointment over having captured only the longboat filled with worthless bags of dried brown grain quickly changed to happiness when they realized that the contents consisted of the ’scarlet grain’—the fabulous, expensive raw material for the red dyestuff carmine!”

Wormberries
Suppose cochineal was both plant and animal? What if it was made from a berry that could turn into a worm? This was the hypothesis of quite a few educated Europeans in the late 1600s. Pliny, the authoritative source of natural historians at that time, believed that red dyestuffs came from grains that were kind of like a berry and kind of like a snail (building on the observations that other dyestuffs came from berries and from mollusks); he came up with the concept of a berry that changed into a worm, or “wormberry.” As debate raged on as to whether cochineal was plant, animal, or both, the chemist Robert Boyle asked the Dutch father of microbiology, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, if he would examine cochineal under his microscope.

At first, Leeuwenhoek was convinced that cochineal was a tree fruit with hundreds of seeds, and compared it to a dried black currant… until a governor of Jamaica told him that it was a hindmost part of a fly, and upon looking again, he realiszd that cochineal was, in fact, the abdomen of an insect. (This anecdote and the following are related in Amy Butler Greenfield’s excellent book on cochineal, A Perfect Red.)

It was immensely difficult for the scientists of Europe to investigate cochineal without any live specimens. Efforts were made to bring back cochineal from the New World, but without luck. For example, the botanist Carl Linnaeus had a young associate, Daniel Rolander, bring back a variety of cochineal from Suriname in a glass container. But Linnaeus wasn’t home when the container finally arrived, and a dedicated gardener who saw a bug-infested plant decided to clean the plant off… killing all the cochineal on it. “This grieved [Linnaeus] so much he had the most dreadful fits of migraine he ever felt,” Linnaeus confessed in an autobiography.

Even more tragic, Rolander’s voyage to Suriname had, as Greenfield puts it, “broke his health and his sanity … He raved to all and sundry that he had discovered pearls containing the elixir of life on a Surinam shrub. He never recovered and died a beggar.”

So, what is cochineal, actually? The grains were made from a tiny insect that lives as a parasite on the pads of prickly-pear cacti, and they have been well-known in Central America for centuries. The Aztec word for the colour was nochezli, which became, in Spanish, cochinilla. It was commonly used by the Aztecs as a cosmetic, medicine, and food colourant. But the insects are very temperamental: they only like certain cacti at certain temperatures. It is not easy to harvest something that lives on a cactus, either. The cultivators could harvest the cochineal two or three times a year, but they had to be brushed off the spiny cacti with some kind of implement and then dried in the sun for days. It was a painstaking operation, and the Spanish left the actual cultivation of it in the skilled hands of the indigenous people.

Today, because we have such easy access to bright colour, we don’t fully understand what it meant to people of colonial times to dress in red or surround themselves in a bed of crimson (as Louis XIV did, covering is walls and chairs and hanging the curtains of 435 beds with cochineal-crimson damask). Red colour was more than a status symbol; it was a matter of national pride. English priest Thomas Gage boasted in the early 1600s that “no nation is more warlike and high spirited than the English, whose cloathes [sic] are very fiery; wearing more scarlet than any nation in the World; … they delighted to go in red and be like the Sun, so naturally they were brought to those Seas to single out such ships as withal from America carried the rich Commodity of Cochinel.”

Colour Rivalry Today
Colour in 2008 is more the province of corporations than of nations: as countries, we have much more valuable commodities to struggle over now than colourants. But merchants have always fought about colour. There were rivalries between merchants of dyes, rivalries between syndicates producing different plants for colourants, even rivalries between colours. When blue came into fashion, merchants of red in Thuringia (in present-day Germany) asked glass makers to insert blue devils into stained-glass windows, in order to give the new blue a bad reputation; in Magdeburg, “hell itself was painted in blue in frescoes in order to associate the rival colour with death and pain.” (Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color)

Today’s corporations don’t produce colour and fight for the market of it in the same way, of course, because they’re not caught up with the manufacturing of it. Rather, they own it– figuratively or literally– through branding. In Europe, you could construct a crayon-box of Vodafone Red, Orange mobile provider network Orange, Activia Green… Down under, purple is linked with Cadbury chocolates, even though an Aussie judge ruled that “Cadbury does not own the colour purple and does not have an exclusive reputation in purple in connection with chocolate.” In Bolivia, fortress-like walls encase most houses, bearing murals with Coca-Cola red, NIDO baby formula yellow, Pascual-brand milk blue: the outdoor environment has become a pastiche of primary colours, each linked to a product or company. In North America, we are somewhat sheltered from colour marketing schemes.

Still, global politics make play a role in today’s colours in ways you wouldn’t expect.

How are the hot colours of our furniture, accessories, and clothes determined? The Pantone company does colour forecasts; the Color Association in the US has been putting out colour forecasts since 1915: “No business or individual can afford to be colour unaware.” Issued twenty months in advance, the forecasts are not ignorant of geopolitics, as illustrated in the 2002 report:

Colour is invariably a good indication of a psychological climate. In the year 2002 this is more true than ever. In the aftermath of the September 11th tragedies and in the midst of a troubled global economy, the colours we seek will be warmer and cozier. Traditional colours, farmland greens, deep reds and reddened blues, will be treasured because they are reassuring. Generally, gentle and happy pastels and clean, patriotic red, white and blue colour patterning will be popular for the optimistic moods they evoke.

Colour stories based on fashions and fabrics that evoke nostalgic feelings will be important to a designer’s and marketer’s strategy. The emphasis of American designers today is on the tried and true rather than what is too high-tech or too futuristic. Americans are re-evaluating what is important — the safety of the planet, the home and family, and honoring humanity; this sober psychological climate will have a profound influence on colour.

Twenty-First Century Cochineal
And what of those humble little cochineal insects today? They may not be pirated on the high seas, but there’s still demand for them as a colourant. As synthetic colours like Red-40 gain ill reputations, natural colourants have seen higher demand. The red in Yoplait strawberry yogurt and Ruby Red grapefruit juice? Cochineal. It has been the bane of vegetarians for awhile. As heard on Knowledge for Thirst blog:

I still remember the first time I learned about this. In college, this girl I was hot for was in the Animal Rights group on campus. One time she came up to me and was like: “Don’t ever drink Ruby Red Grapefruit juice. It has cochineal extract in it.”

I was like: “What’s a cochineal?”

And she was all: “I don’t know, man, but it’s got a fused ganglia.”

That was as intimate as we ever ended up getting, but ever since then I’m on the lookout.

There’s a fair amount of controversy about whether it’s better to have bugs in your juice or to have synthetic chemicals made from petroleum in your juice (personally, I think neither is a viable option). But in a bizarre way, it’s reassuring to know that the little insect with a fascinating past still has a viable place in the world. And in Ecudaor, there was a pilot project helping indigenous peoples continue to harvest cochineal, as part of a way to make a living from their lands; similar projects have been undertaken in Botswana and Mexico. Currently, it costs fifteen to twenty times more to use cochineal as a colourant than a petrochemical like Red 40, but with petrol prices on the rise, who knows? Perhaps the little insect can make a comeback.

Tags: cochineal, pirates, red

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Posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 10:55 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.