As this trade blossomed, Brother Salumbrino’s influence also soon extended beyond the walls of the college. Like the library at San Pablo, which ordered books from Europe and sent them out to colleges all over the viceroyalty, the pharmacy became an early distribution centre of medicines and medical information for other Jesuit institutions in the area. Salumbrino supplied medicines to the Jesuits who left San Pablo on long missions among the Indians in the Andes, and to other Jesuit outposts
The Libro de la Botíca neatly lists everything that San Pablo supplied to the other Jesuit colleges in the viceroyalty: agua fuerte and aguardiente, powdered mother of pearl, pine resins, black and white balsam, bezoar stone, nicotiana in powder, caña fistula, cinnamon, nutmeg, sal volatile – the original smelling salts – mercurio dulce or mercury sulphide for treating syphilis, black pepper, ambergris, senna, tamarind, sugar, camphor, sweet and bitter almonds, almond oil, tobacco from Seville, essence of roses and violets, rhubarb, chocolate and, of course, cinchona bark, that would eventually be despatched, dried in strips or in powder, in huge quantities all over the continent and also across the Atlantic.
From the earliest years the Jesuits of San Pablo were of the clear belief that conversion of the Indians would come about not by force, but by education and persuasion. For that reason they were quick to send young priests out into the field. Many of the young Jesuits who were posted to Peru made it a priority to learn Quechua and the other Indian languages, and to accustom themselves to the Indians’ way of life.
The Jesuits in the field, especially those who had been sent north-east of Lima, to Loxa in the Andes, began to persuade the local Indians to seek out the árbol de las calenturas, the ‘tree of barks’, as Bernabé Cobó, another Jesuit and a colleague of Salumbrino’s, would describe cinchona in his Historia del Nuevo Mundo in 1639. They taught them how to cut off the bark in vertical strips so as not to kill the tree, and to plant five new trees for every one they cut down. The Jesuits would place the saplings in the ground in the shape of a cross, in the belief that God would then help them grow better. More than two centuries later, an English plant-hunter and bark-trader would observe: ‘Always when passing [these plantations] my Indians would go down on their knees, hat in hand, cross themselves, [and] say a prayer for the souls of the Buenos padres.’
After they stripped off the bark, the cascarilleros or barkhunters would cut it into pieces and leave it to dry in the sun. Taking care not to break the fragile, powdery strips, they would wrap them carefully in pieces of cloth and then in watertight leather packs for transporting down the hills by mule to Lima.
San Pablo began to distribute cinchona bark – or cascarilla as it was known in Spanish – to the other Jesuit colleges in the viceroyalty, and even as far as Panama and Chile. Eventually Brother Salumbrino also began sending supplies of cinchona to Europe.
The first person listed in the Libro de Viáticos y Almacén as leaving San Pablo with a quantity of cinchona bound for Europe is a Father Alonso Messia Venegás, an elderly Jesuit priest who carried a small supply of it in his bags when he travelled to Rome in 1631. Father Alonso knew, as every Jesuit did, how malarious the Holy City was, and had heard accounts of the terrible conclave of 1623 when so many of the visiting cardinals died. Rome was in dire need of a cure for the fevers, and Brother Salumbrino was eager to see if the plant that stopped people from shivering could be put to use curing the chills that were a symptom of the marsh fever. Little did he know that not only did it stop the shivering, it could also be used to treat the disease.
The physicians in Rome found that the bark was indeed an effective treatment for the intermittent fever, and thereafter every Procurator who left San Pablo for the Holy City to represent the Peruvian Jesuits at the congress that elected the Jesuit Vicar-General every three years would take with him new supplies of the febrifuge bark. Shortly after Father Bartolomé Tafur, who served as the Peruvian representative at the congress of 1649, arrived in Rome he renewed his acquaintanceship with Cardinal Juan de Lugo, who was then in charge of the apothecary at the Santo Spirito hospital, and was becoming cinchona’s champion in the Holy City. In 1667 Felipe de Paz took with him a trunk filled with the corteza de la calenturas, and in 1669 Nicolás de Miravál arrived with 635 libras of cinchona for distribution in the curia, having left a similar amount in Spain.
By the second half of the seventeenth century, according to an early map of Lima in the state archive, the citizens of the capital had begun calling the street in front of the Jesuit infirmaries Calle de la cascarilla, Bark Street. Now part of the long, fume-laden Jirón Azangaro, which runs through downtown Lima from the Palacio de la Justicia as far as the Franciscan convent near the river, Calle de la cascarilla would remain up to the start of the republican period in 1825 as a public testimony to San Pablo’s role in distributing cinchona first in Peru and then around the world, and it appears in many of the maps of that time.
The final decade of the botíca at San Pablo saw Brother Salumbrino’s ambitions come to fruition. The pharmacy itself, where the cinchona bark was weighed out and packed, was beautifully furnished. On its wall hung a large portrait of Salumbrino which his fellow Jesuits had commissioned in 1764 at a cost of 140 pesos, and which bore the legend: ‘Agustino Salumbrino, first founder of this pharmacy of San Pablo’.
The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with solid oak shelves laden with bottles and flasks. Several tables and chairs were spread around the room, made of wood imported from Chile, and in the centre of the room was a long, wide mahogany counter of a beautiful reddish-brown colour. On top of the counter, in sharp contrast to the dark heavy wood, rested four delicate scales.
The three black employees who worked in the pharmacy spent their day in the laboratory, a forest of glazed earthenware and shiny instruments, some of lead or bronze, some of pure silver. The laboratory was filled with large jugs, scales, all kinds of stills used for distilling liquids, glass and metal funnels of all shapes and sizes, crystal flasks, retorts and matrasses, gridirons and hand mills, pumping engines and ovens, condensers and cauldrons, handsaws and sieves.
Brother Salumbrino’s Jesuit masters might have been uncomfortable in that room, with its heavy fumes and thick, unpleasant odours of medicines and chemicals, but they would have been happy to know that in San Pablo’s pharmacy he and his brother pharmacists had the means to preserve and restore the health of the hundreds of priests working in the field. The final inventory of the pharmacy includes more than five hundred medicines, in addition to the books in the library and the vast quantity of stills, bottles and other material that filled the laboratory’s shelves. Of the medicines in the pharmacy, by far the most valuable was una grande tinafa – a great jar – of cinchona bark, which is valued at one hundred pesos.
Despite the excellence of its pharmacy, the small world of San Pablo was about to be engulfed in political events that were fuelled, as so often happens, by fear and greed. Secret orders had arrived from Madrid: the Society of Jesus was to be expelled from the whole of the Spanish Empire on the orders of King Charles III, who feared its swelling power and longed to own its properties and who finally, after many decades, had chosen to believe the Jesuits’ enemies who had long tried to discredit them in the eyes of Charles and his court.
At four o’clock in the morning of 9 September 1767 the Viceroy, Don Manuel de Amat, had everything ready to carry out the King’s instructions in Peru. Four hundred soldiers were stationed within the viceregal palace. In the dead of night a number of the most important men in Lima also arrived at the back door of the palace, summoned by a handwritten note from Amat that read, ‘I need you for matters of great service to the King, and I warn you to come so secretly that not even those of your household would realise that you had gone out.’
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