Within the foul-tasting, bitter red bark of the cinchona tree is an alkaloid that prevents and treats malaria. The Peruvian bark, which was first brought to Europe in 1631 or thereabouts, was looked upon as a miracle. But its discovery was also a riddle. Cinchona was a tree of the New World. It grew where the rain was plentiful in the foothills of the high Andes, where malaria had never existed. How did anyone guess that among all the trees in South America, it was the bark of the cinchona that would cure malaria? How was it that a seed so small it is almost invisible could grow into a tree, one eighteenth-century source wrote, that was as crucial to the art of medicine as gunpowder had been to the art of war?
This book is the story of the riddle of quinine, the miraculous fever-tree which transformed medicine – and history.
‘Malaria treatment. This is comprised in three words: quinine, quinine, quinine.’
SIR WILLIAM OSLER, Regius Professor of Medicine, Oxford, 1909–17
‘If you ever thought that one man was too small to make a difference, try being shut up in a room with a mosquito.’
THE DALAI LAMA, 1977
My grandparents had been married for many years when they left Europe for Africa in 1928, though not to each other.
My Parisian grandmother, Giselle Bunau-Varilla, had had at least two husbands, if not three. My Neapolitan grandfather, Mario Rocco, was being sought by Interpol for trying to kidnap his only child. His first wife, a tall, thin Norwegian with wide cheekbones and a finely arched brow, had been labouring for years to expunge him from her life. She wanted, above all, to change their daughter’s identity from Rosetta Rocco, a Catholic, to Susanna Ibsen, a Protestant – and to be rid of her husband forever.
The Neapolitan solution was to remove the child by force and go into hiding, a plan that ultimately failed, though not before it had annoyed the authorities and landed my grandfather in a great deal of trouble.
As an antidote, a year-long safari in the Congo seemed a welcome distraction to all concerned. Yet as the moment of departure drew near, both my grandparents were filled with the excitement of the unknown. Their journey turned from being an all-too welcome respite from their domestic travails to a grand, passionate tropical adventure.
A few hours before New Year 1929, they boarded the sleeper train in Paris that was bound for Marseilles. My grandmother, as always, could be counted on to remain calm even while eloping to Africa with someone else’s husband. My grandfather, who had jet-black hair with a deep white streak that swept back from his forehead, only felt his fine sense of the dramatic swell as he put Paris behind him. ‘Don’t even tell my in-laws what continent I shall be in,’ he wrote to his family from the train.
In Marseilles they boarded the SS Usambara, a passenger ship of the Deutsch Öst Afrika line that would bear them across the Mediterranean to Port Said, through the Suez Canal, and down the East African coast to Mombasa. From there, the plan was to travel by train and on foot across Africa’s thick equatorial waistline to the heart of the continent. They thought they would be away for at least a year. Longer, perhaps.
My grandparents were accompanied by a sizeable quantity of luggage. To equip themselves for a hunting trip that would take them as far west as the Ituri forest on the banks of the Congo river, they had paid a visit to Brussels, to the emporium of Monsieur Gaston Bennet, a specialist colonial outfitter who sold ready-prepared safari kits with everything a traveller might need for a journey of three, six or even nine months.
Monsieur Bennet’s inventory sounds much like the necessities that H. Rider Haggard’s hero Alan Quartermain packed when he set off in search of King Solomon’s Mines. For their extra-long hunting trip, he sold my grandparents four heavy-calibre rifles, including a double-barrelled Gibbs .500 which my grandfather Mario, with manly Neapolitan excitement, described in his diary as ‘una vera arma’ – a real weapon – and a .408 Winchester for my grandmother Giselle, who hoped to shoot an elephant. Eight months later she killed a lone male; its tusks soared high above her head when it lay dead on its side. She allowed herself to be photographed alongside the beast, leaning heavily on the barrel of her rifle as if it were a staff. But the truth is that she felt a little sick at what she had done. Killing the elephant unnerved her. She was five months pregnant at the time, which may have made her especially sensitive. She never shot an animal again.
As well as the rifles, my grandparents were outfitted with two pairs of shotguns, a twelve-bore and a lady’s twenty-bore; five hundred kilos of ammunition in watertight boxes; six trunks of tropical clothing; twelve cases of brandy; eight of books; a typewriter; a gramophone with my grandfather’s favourite record, ‘My Cutie’s Due at Two-to-Two Today’; coloured beads for gifts; and enough sketchpads, pastels and modelling clay to last them a whole year—my grandfather was a painter and my grandmother a sculptress. Their effects were packed into tin trunks weighing not more than twenty-five kilos each, the maximum that would be carried by an African porter. Giselle stood barely an inch over five feet and always wore a turban, which had the effect of both hiding her incipient baldness and making her seem taller than she really was. When my grandparents reached the Ituri forest she unpacked her clay and set about modelling a local Tutsi chief who towered nearly two feet above her. He watched her as she worked, his face impassive. He said nothing, but his children danced around and called her ‘Potipot’, she who works with clay.
In addition to the safety precautions of heavy Damascus-barrelled guns and several changes of boots, Monsieur Bennet packed my grandparents a sizeable medicine chest that was manufactured from black metal and lined with marbled endpapers to absorb any moisture and keep its contents safe from ants. In it he placed gauze bandages and sutures, several bottles of Dr Collis Brown’s Elixir, a concoction made of morphine, cannabis and treacle that had been invented in 1856 and was recommended for treating diarrhoea, boric acid for the eyes, carbolic acid against lion and leopard scratches, Epsom salts and castor oil for constipation, and a brown goo called Castellani’s Paint to fight skin fungi. There were also twenty-four sets of steel syringes and needles, each packed in a small metal box with a tight lid for easy boiling, the best method of sterilisation in the bush. No medicine chest bound for Africa was complete without a supply of purple crystals of permanganate of potash, for washing raw vegetables and cleaning out snakebite wounds. With it came a snakebite pencil which you used to cut a Y-shaped incision, so you could lift the skin immediately surrounding the bite and pack it with permanganate.
Snakes are highly sensitive to vibration, and most of them will slither away when they detect you approaching. Mosquitoes, on the other hand, do not. Among the most important items in Monsieur Bennet’s medicine chest was packet after packet of powdered sulphate of quinine, to guard against malaria. Alan Quartermain packed an ounce of quinine and one or two small surgical instruments into his bag for the final assault on King Solomon’s Mines. He would not have left home without it. ‘This was our total equipment, a small one indeed for such a venture,’ he wrote. ‘Try as we would we could not see our way to reducing it. There was nothing but what was absolutely necessary.’
From Mombasa Mario and Giselle headed west towards their first stop, Voi, a railway junction halfway between Mombasa and Nairobi. The land was flat and scrubby, with occasionally a mound of hills rising in a greeny-purple haze in the far distance. They saw Masai herders with thin, high-boned cattle that were oblivious to the sun’s heat. Dried-out umbrella thorns provided the only shade, and a patchy shade at that. Shortly after Voi they made a detour south across the border with Tanganyika to try to get a better view of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak. They passed the spot where General von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German soldier-adventurer, had routed a British regiment fourteen years previously. By 1917 the British had begun to fight back, and von Lettow was in trouble. Supplies were running short.