Really Old Glory

The world is full of things that make you wonder “how the hell did they come up with that?” For example; who first came up with: “You know, I’ll bet that tarantula-looking thing we just pulled out of the water would taste good if we steamed it with Old Bay and figured out how to take it apart; and maybe dipped the edible bits in some melted butter, too.”

Dye stuffs fall into this category. Royal purple was produced in ancient times by gathering tons of Murex snails from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and letting them rot in huge vats. The resultant goo yielded a deep purple dye which turned indigo in the presence of sunlight (ultraviolet radiation). Ancient travel writers told of being able to smell the dye-producing city of Sidon from far at sea on shipboard while Sidon was still below the horizon.

I was recently rereading Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and was intrigued by the chapter on domesticated animals. Diamond says that domesticated species share several characteristics including social behavior (humans can take over the top spot in the pecking order) and docility.

These criteria apply to mammals (except maybe cats) and explains why the ancient Egyptians, who went on a domestication binge, failed to domesticate the hyena or the hippo (although the why in this equation seems to be lost in the dim mists of history). Of the three species of domesticated insects, only one, the honeybee fills Diamond’s condition of sociality. Of the other two, silkworms are docile but most assuredly non-social, and the other, the cochineal scale, seems social only because it is sedentary and almost entirely females. Cochineal is a small scale insect feeding exclusively on prickly pear and closely related cacti.

Cochineal, though now no longer produced industrially, was at one time, the major source of red/scarlet dye in the world. Somewhere way back when, an unremembered Mesoamerican hunter-gatherer found red stains on his or her clothes after harvesting cactus fruits and probably thought: “You know, if we could produce this stuff in industrial quantities, we could revolutionize the textile industry”. Originally raised throughout the drier parts of Central America, cochineal was the source of scarlet dye, the color of Aztec royalty. It was farmed like any other livestock. Scale rancheros tended the prickly pear cacti and the herds of bugs, to the point of building small straw “barns” to keep the rains from dislodging the insects. Cortez brought back cochineal scales as part of the spoils from the conquest of Mexico—gold, silver, corn, chili, bugs.

The Spanish made cochineal production a state monopoly and a state secret, much the same as China had tried to do with silkworms centuries earlier and Venetians did with glass. As with the Chinese experiment, it didn’t work for the Spanish. Prickly pear with its attendant cochineal scales was smuggled out of Mexico and introduced into Europe, to desert islands such as the Azores and the Canaries, and as far afield as the Galapagos and Australia. Fortunes were made on the dye, which some early chemist discovered could be made colorfast with the addition of tin salts.

The English and Dutch, in particular, went crazy over scarlet. Painters like Ruebens used it with abandon (close examination of pre-Columbian renaissance paintings reveals no bright reds) replacing the red-brown kermes dyes (made from European bugs) on their palettes as soon as they could lay hands on the stuff. The uniform tunics of British soldiers (redcoats) were dyed scarlet with cochineal dye as were eight of the fifteen broad stripes on the original Star-Spangled Banner.

Following the invention of coal tar aniline dyes in the late 18th century, the cochineal industry collapsed, leaving acres of untended prickly pear in its wake. The insects, which are as domesticated as chickens, mostly perished from their island homes, leaving the cactus to run riot without anything to eat it. Prickly pear cactus has become a noxious weed wherever it was planted outside its original range.

Today, cochineal has come full circle; it is produced in small amounts in Peru and Central America and is exported as safe, USDA-approved food coloring. Cochineal red is a replacement for coal tar dye Red 40 which comes from petroleum. You may fondly remember coal tar dye Red 40 as what gave bottled maraschino cherries their startling red color. Nowdays, the red comes from bugs; kind of puts you off that next banana split, doesn’t it?