One member of the expedition, the famous explorer Dr Richard Hakluyt, made a second voyage to Guinea, after which he described the preparation of the poison by a special priesthood who supervised the collection of the ingredients and officiated in the rites associated with its preparation. He also believed that the natives had an antidote for the poison, but neither he nor anyone else was able to determine the secret of their cure.
It is apparent from his account that the Spaniards frequently used torture to try to learn their remedy. His description of the suffering of those dying from the effects of the poison makes it clear that the victims remained conscious with staring eyes but were unable to cry out during the prolonged agony of their death. His horror at the terrible torment they suffered is all the more surprising when one considers that death by disembowelment, hardly a pleasant manner of dying, was practised as a punishment in England at that time.
Such was the fear created by these stories, it was evident that there was a pressing need to learn more about the nature of the poison and why it produced such a terrible death. The first step was to obtain samples of the poison that could be brought back to Europe, where it could be studied in a scientific atmosphere. Only in this way could its magical properties be assessed.
The earliest recorded experiments on specimens of the arrow poison, ‘ourali’ or ‘wourari’, were carried out in Leiden, Holland.
The University of Leiden was formed in 1575, after William the Silent, Prince of Orange, raised the siege of the city. In return for the steadfastness of its citizens, he offered them a year free of taxes or a university. They chose a university. The university soon became an important centre for scientific learning and experimentation. The Low Countries were essentially a maritime kingdom at this time with a large proportion of the population engaged in seafaring trades. Indeed, so great was its fame as a centre of seamanship that Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, had Gulliver sent to Leiden to study navigation before embarking on his adventures.
It would have been surprising if a major maritime nation, with a history of successful voyages to the East Indies, had not participated in the exploration of South America. It is probable that the first samples of the crude arrow poison were brought to the Low Countries by a voyager from one of these expeditions. It is recorded that it was being used in experiments in the University of Leiden as early as 1740.
The first recorded experiments were those of De la Condamine (1701–74), who, in the early part of the eighteenth century, gave the poison to pullets in the hope of finding a remedy for their lethal effects. Stories brought back by voyagers, including Hakluyt, had led him to believe that sugar and salt were antidotes to the arrow poison. His experiments were hardly convincing, but he recommended salt in preference to sugar! We now know that both salt and sugar are useless against the effects of curare.
Another investigator, working with the same parcel of poison in Leiden at about the same time, was an Englishman, Dr Brockelsby (1722–97). He showed that, even after the poison had been injected into the leg of a cat and ‘its breathing had appeared to cease’, its heart continued to beat for almost two hours before it finally died. This experiment demonstrated for the first time that the poison did not kill by stopping the heart.
By 1745, when the Italian Abbot, Felix Abbada Fontana (also known as Felice Fontana, 1720–1805), performed his experiments, Leiden was the most famous centre of scientific enlightenment in Europe. Fontana was a distinguished anatomist who became the director of the Natural History Museum in Florence. He is remembered today for his description of the spaces of Fontana in the eye. He had been attracted to Leiden by its reputation for intellectual freedom and scientific experimentation.
His experiments, carried out on chickens, showed that the fumes of curare did not kill or injure the birds and that their flesh was not tainted or rendered unfit to eat. However, merely piercing the skin with a lance tipped with arrow poison rapidly killed them. These experiments clearly demonstrated that the fumes of curare were not lethal and that the stories spread by the early explorers of deaths from inhaling the fumes were wrong. They were, in all probability, a cover for the ritual killing of those involved in the preparation of the poison. There is little doubt that this was carried out in order to maintain the secrecy that surrounded the preparation of the poison.
Charles Watertom (Fig 5)
It was the English naturalist and adventurer, Squire Charles Waterton (1782–1865) who first described the poison as ‘wourali’, the name given to it by the natives in the Esquibito river region of South America. In his book Wanderings in South America he described his adventures and observations during his journeys in the Amazon jungle in the company of his ‘Indian’ Machousi guides and a freed African slave called Dadi. Although he was principally interested in the great variety of bird life he found there he made a detailed study of many animals, including sloths, monkeys, caymans (which are like alligators) and snakes. It was during the first of his four trips to South America that he observed the Indians using arrows tipped in poison to catch their prey. It was as a result of this interest that he came to play an important role in the curare story.
If you were to visit the town of Wakefield in West Yorkshire in England you might come across Waterton Road and Waterton School, both named in honour of the remarkable, eccentric squire of nearby Walton Hall. Charles Waterton was born at Walton Hall, into an aristocratic, Roman Catholic dynasty with links to several European royal families who claimed they could trace their origins back to Edward the Confessor.
One of his ancestors, John de Waterton, served as Master of the King’s Horse at Agincourt. Unlike many aristocratic families, his forebears refused to convert to Protestantism during the reign of Henry VIII.
Charles Waterton was educated at the Catholic Stoneyhurst College and remained a devout, ascetic Catholic throughout his life. He lived an active life to a ripe old age in spite of repeated attacks of ‘ague’ (probably malaria). Even when he was over eighty, a neighbour saw him climbing a tree to return a bird that had fallen from its nest. He died following a fall on his estate, in which he fractured several ribs and damaged his liver.
In 1812, as a young man of thirty, he made his first voyage to Guyana, where his uncle had coffee plantations. He set about establishing one of the finest collections of preserved birds and animals in Europe, using his own preserving technique to maintain the colour and structure of the animals. He maintained that stuffing them distorted their shape. Many of the preserved specimens can be seen today in the museum at Wakefield. They are still colourful and lifelike.
It was the demonstration by the natives of the lethal effects of the dart and arrow poison that caused Charles Waterton to become interested in ‘wourali’. He described his travels, his discoveries and his vicissitudes in Guyana in his highly successful book Wanderings in South America, first published in 1879. It is written in the manner of a diary and, in spite of some exaggerations and embellishments, it very soon became a bestseller.
There is little doubt that Charles was an odd man. He was tall and thin and of a somewhat domineering manner. He was an astute observer and a resourceful inventor, but he was also very eccentric. He married Anne Edmonstone, who was descended from Arawak royalty. He tells how he fell in love with her when she was a baby and waited until she was seventeen before marrying her. When she died in childbirth he was so grief-stricken that he vowed never to sleep comfortably ever again. From that time on he slept with a wooden block as a pillow.
Waterton is credited with having introduced bird boxes into Britain. At first, this was to try to nurture little owls, but later they became widely adopted on the estate.
Reading his story leaves one with the impression that he was a