cochineal--and you thought lizard fuel was safe

Excerpt from Color: The Story of Dyes and Pigments, more specifically, The Red Dyes: Cochineal, Madder, and Murex Purple, A World Tour of Textile Techniques, 1994

A red dye worth rubies:
Until the invention of synthetic dyes, all the red colorants—archil madder, brazilwood, murex, and cochineal—were expensive and greatly prized. Cochineal dye has been in use since the empire of ancient Egypt. In the 1500s, discovery of sources in Mesoamerica brought untold wealth to the Spanish, who guarded the secret of its manufacture well.

Cochineal: the gold that did not glitter

A color plant, a mollusk, or a scale insect does not announce, through its leaves, fruits, or glands, the presence of any dyestuff. Only the dyer knows that through his chemical manipulations, brilliant and hardy colors can be derived from the often unattractive natural materials. One day in the middle of the 1700s, the crew of one of the Caribbean’s most feared pirate ships learned that both colorful and pecuniary riches could be hidden in very humble dress. They sighted a large Spanish ship outside the coast of Honduras with a presumed load of gold and silver intended to enrich the Spanish crown, a circumstance of ownership that they decided to change rapidly by catching up with and boarding the ship. The Spaniards were quick and managed to avoid their pursuers. In their haste to escape, the longboat was left behind and was captured by the pursuers. 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!
At the time of this event the origin of the “scarlet grain” was still unknown in Europe. However, rumor had it that the Spaniards got it, along with other precious goods, far away in the mysterious countries on the other side of the Atlantic.
The areas of origin and the early use of cochineal
The valuable but outwardly insignificant small grain was nothing other than dried females of the insect family Dactylopius, long called cochineal. Despite the fact that cochineal had been introduced to Europe before the end of the 1500s, uncertainty about the true nature of the dyestuff reigned long into the 1700s. The cause was simple enough. For the Spaniards, the sought after good was of the greatest economic importance and they did everything they could to keep its existence and production a secret. Various written Spanish sources from the 1500s give evidence of the sensitive nature of the substance. Early works kept silent or were directly misleading about actual conditions. Later, what were for the most part correct descriptions, remained unnoticed or not believed. In fact, the Spanish authorities encouraged this lack of knowledge, making it more difficult for foreigners to gain a collective picture of the manner of production and work methods used in cochineal factories.
The cochineal scale insect originates in South and Central America, where the Indians already used the carmine color for dyeing textiles in 1000BC. When the Spaniards went to Mexico in the early 1500s, the dyestuff became frequently used. From Mexico its use spread to other countries, including Peru. The old Aztec term for the color was “nochezli”, which the Spaniards changed to “cochinilla”. Eventually the French form of the word, “cochenille”, became the most used.
Red from the other side of the ocean.
The Latin American countries’ original production of cochineal should have been limited in scope and only intended to meet the needs of domestic textile production. After the Spaniards arrived, large-scale production of the valuable dyestuff was introduced and it eventually became one of the most important sources of income for the colonial power, aside from the export of silver. It has been calculated between the years of 1758 and 1858, no less than 27,000 tons of cochineal were shipped out of Mexico. The picture of the extent of cochineal production becomes even clearer if data about the size of the plantations is considered. Each plantation consisted of no less than 50,000 cactus plants. The increasing demand was partly because the European and the Asian dye works discovered that Mexican cochineal had a higher content of actual dyestuff than the Polish and Armenian color scale kermes insects which had been used up to that time.
Thus, export was to Europe alone. In the 1580s, cochineal was transferred with loads of silver from Acapulco on the Tehuantepec isthmus to Manila on the Philippines. The dyestuff was also found in China from the time of the emperor Kang-Hsis (1662-1722). This far-sighted ruler was not only the promoter of the first great Chinese map and a great literary encyclopedia of over 5,000 volumes, but he was also the one who gave the French and British the right to conduct trade between China and the Occident. He was aware that “Ko-tcha-ni-la” was a product of a Latin American insect and that it was introduced by the Europeans. The carmine color went (and still goes) under the name of “foreign root”, Yang Hung. Yang actually means ocean, so the expression could also be translated as “red from the other side of the ocean”. Compare this to our word ultramarine (the blue gemstone lapis lazuli, from the other side of the ocean).
The spread of the cochineal scale insect to new areas
The Spaniards brought the dried cochineal insect to Europe where the carmine dyestuff was then extracted, packed and sold to waiting consumers. To ensure sole right to the product, the Spanish government prohibited all forms of import of living scale insects to the European continent. Despite constant prohibitions that included a ban on exporting the mother strain of cochineal from Mexico to bordering Latin American areas, by the end of the 1700s, breeding had spread across the borders of the country to Guatemala, Brazil, and to the Indonesian island of Java. Later, plantations were also started on several of the West Indian islands, in Algeria, and on the Canary Islands. The monopoly that the Spaniards had ever since Cortez conquered Mexico in 1519 was thereby broken, and the consumers could be supplied with the cochineal dyestuff from a number of different markets: the French from Veracruz, the Dutch, from Java, and the English from India.