The small town of Sainte-Suzanne sits on the north-east coast of Réunion. I came here in search of slivers of the past, a glimpse of the world where Edmond lived. Here, the landscape rolls gently towards the sea against a distant backdrop of jagged peaks. They call it the ‘windy coast’, and between April and October it bears the brunt of the south-east trades. The winds come laden with moisture, and on this side of the island there are places where three hundred inches of rain may fall in a year, a tropical deluge that fills the mountain streams to bursting point and gives birth to cascades of fresh clean water through the gorges leading to the sea. It is humid here, the sticky enervating heat that saps the strength, but the soil is good, rich and fertile. This is where the planters settled in the early days, and where the great estates of sugar cane and coffee were most profitable. It is the part of the island where vanilla thrives.
At first, in spite of their fertile soil, and their skills in nurturing tropical plants from around the world, the planters of Ile Bourbon were no more successful with vanilla than anyone else outside Mexico. Like European botanists and collectors, the planters were confused as to which vanilla species would produce the correct fragrant seed pods. However, as coffee prices were threatened by cheaper imports from Brazil and Central America the planters of Bourbon were keen to experiment with new crops.
The idea that vanilla might be grown outside the Spanish dominions of Central America was tantalising, but not new. Sixty-five years before Charles Greville’s vanilla orchid flowered at Paddington, the commercial prospects for vanilla growing were already well known. In his ‘Gardener’s Dictionary’ of 1740, Philip Miller laments the lack of enterprise which prevented English colonists from exploiting the scented pods. Miller was a member of the Royal Society, and rejoiced in the title of ‘Gardener to the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries at their Botanic Garden at Chelsea’. He was also a great collector of plants and when he published his first edition of the dictionary in 1733, he had never seen vanilla. Seven years later, in a supplementary volume, he was able to accurately describe ‘an anomalous flower, consisting of six leaves, five of which are placed in a circular order, and the other, which occupies the Middle, is concave. The Empalement afterward becomes a horned soft fleshy Fruit, filled with very small seeds.’
Miller’s Dictionary lists only three distinct species: one with a greenish white flower with a dark fruit, one with a violet flower and a reddish fruit, and the third with a white flower and coral coloured fruit. Correctly, in spite of the confusion over species which would set in among later botanists, he identifies the first variety—with the greenish white flower—as the one from which the Spanish obtain their beans. Miller reports that the Spanish expect ‘thre’pence a fruit’ for the beans, a figure he clearly takes from William Dampier’s account more than forty years earlier. Similarly he repeats the buccaneer’s assertion that the fruits are cultivated by the Indians, and sold cheaply to the Spanish who go on to profit from trading them in Europe. He complains that the vanilla is rarely found in any of the English settlements in America: “though it may be easily transported, because they will continue fresh out of the ground for several months. I had some branches of the plant, gathered at Campechy and sent over between papers, by way of sample: they had been at least four months gathered, when I received them; and upon opening of the papers I found the leaves rotten, with the moisture contained in them, and the paper also perished with it; but the stems appeared fresh.”
Miller may have been the first European to import a living vanilla vine into Europe. Intriguingly, he was able to plant the vanilla vines, and keep them alive “with difficulty”. It seems likely therefore that the Marquis of Blandford was in fact re-introducing the plant to England when he grew it in his collection at White-Knights. Miller advises planting vanillas in a hothouse, watering them copiously and providing them with shade. He is also aware that the vines need to be at least six years old before they reliably fruit. What surprises him is that the English have not tried to take this profitable monopoly away from the Spanish: “it is a commodity which bears a good price, and is well worth cultivating in several of the English settlements, especially as the vanilla will grow in moist places, where the land is not cleared for timber.” Noting that in England vanilla is only used an ingredient in chocolate, he says that the Spanish in America have long used it medicinally, repeating the claims made by the earliest writers that it was helpful to the stomach and the brain, that it could expel wind and cure poisoning. In his estimation, vanilla is a horticultural treasure waiting to be exploited:
“As this Plant is so easily propagated by Cuttings; it is very strange, that the Inhabitants of America should neglect to cultivate it, especially as it is an Ingredient in Chocolate, which is so much drank all over America, but as the English have in a manner quite neglected the Culture of the Cocoa, it is no wonder they should neglect this; since the former was cultivated in great Plenty by the Spaniards in Jamaica, while that Island remained in their Possession; so that the English had an Example before them, if they would have followed it: whereas the Vanilla was not found growing there, and therefore it is not to be supposed, that the Persons who were so indolent, as to quit the Culture of many valuable Plants then growing on the Spot, should be at the Trouble of introducing any new plants.”
Miller’s success in keeping his vanilla plants alive was a short-lived achievement. When Charles Greville’s vanilla vine flowered in his greenhouse at Paddington it was a celebrated botanical curiosity. In the 1800’s the only commercially available vanilla beans were arriving from Mexico, with the total production no more than one or two tonnes. Vanilla was still a rare gourmet treat, something reserved for a select minority.
For a few years prior to the French Revolution the American statesman Thomas Jefferson served as minister to France, a period in which he acquired a reputation for good living and liberal politics. Among other tasks, his diplomatic mission was to establish a market for American tobacco and to negotiate an agreement for American whaling ships to deliver their catch to French ports. When he left Paris in 1789, Jefferson had travelled widely in Europe, and developed a taste for fine wines and new foods. Later, as President of the United States (1801–09), his guests in Washington were treated to recipes he had collected for French sauces, fruit tarts and French-fried potatoes. A succession of French chefs and butlers imported from Paris allowed Jefferson to continue dining in the style to which he had become accustomed.
In July 1791, Jefferson wrote from Philadelphia to William Short, the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Paris, concerning the shipping of various goods from France. Jefferson encloses a cheque, drawn on a London bank, to pay for wines from Champagne and Bordeaux. His expense accounts were complex, a mix of private and official transactions which Short was to help sort out. A postscript is added to the letter:
“Since writing the above, Petit [Jefferson’s French butler, Adrien Petit] informs me that he has been all over town in quest of Vanilla, & it is unknown here. I must pray you to send me a packet of 50 pods (batons) which may come very well in the middle of a packet of newspapers. It costs about 24 sous a baton when sold by the single baton. Petit says there is a great imposition in selling those which are bad; that Piebot generally sells good, but that still it will be safe to have them bought by some one used to them.”
It took Jefferson’s letter exactly two months to reach Paris, but William Short wrote his reply the next day, giving prominence to the supply of the vanilla, reassuring Jefferson that: “A person in whose skill I have confidence is to chuse the vanilla, and it shall be forwarded to you by way of Havre.”
A subsequent letter, in October, gives further details: “You will receive in the gazettes sent the 50 batons de Vanilla you desired. It cost 20 sous the baton. It was chosen by Madame de Flahaut who says it may be relied on as excellent. Besides Piebot seemed so well satisfied with your remembrance, that I am persuaded he has given only the best in hopes of a continuance of your practice.”
Among his papers stored at the Library of Congress, is Jefferson’s own handwritten recipe for vanilla ice-cream, thought to be the first in America. He records “a stick of vanilla” in the ingredients, and he recommends that the frozen dessert should be accompanied by Savoy biscuits, for which he also provides his own recipe.
As late as 1821, Jefferson was still struggling to obtain reliable supplies of vanilla, though by then he was sending money for their purchase from his home in Virginia to Browze Trist, a student in Philadelphia. By then, Jefferson was expecting to pay 10d for a hundred vanilla pods. The price was rising, a consequence of instability in Mexico where the Wars of Independence had been simmering for a decade, and which would cause a serious decline in the amount of vanilla reaching Europe. As Mexico freed itself from Spanish rule, its internal divisions and subsequent war with the United States over Texas would add further pressures to the already beleaguered peasantry. The time was ripe for vanilla to leave home.
* * *
After cuttings from Charles Greville’s plant were gradually circulated around the botanical gardens of Europe, vanilla became a mere curiosity, something to include in a respectable tropical collection. The long green creeping vine might on rare occasions flower, but frustratingly little. Just as Greville’s orchid had flowered and fruited in his greenhouse in London, transplanted vanilla vines in other locations would occasionally produce a few pods. Like many orchids, the vanilla sometimes produces a flower which is misshapen and capable of self-fertilisation. More often, though still rarely, a local insect will accidentally replicate the job of the bee normally associated with Vanilla planifolia, and spread pollen to the stigma. More than a quarter of a century after Greville’s death, the creeping green vines were still just a curiosity outside Mexico, withholding their luscious fruits from commerce. But things were about to change.
In 1836, there was a flurry of excitement among academic botanists. Professor Charles Morren, newly appointed to the chair of Botany at Liège University in Belgium, revealed the results of fertilisation experiments he had made upon vanilla plants which had been growing without producing fruit for more than fifteen years. In 1837 he published his findings in the Annals of the Paris Horticultural Society, and two years later repeated his claims with further details in the British Annals of Natural History:
“It was in 1836 that by a peculiar horticultural treatment we had at Liège upon one Vanilla plant fifty-four flowers, which having been fecundated by me, produced the same number of pods; and in 1837 a fresh crop of about a hundred pods was obtained upon another plant by the same methods: so that now there is not the least doubt of the complete success of this new method.”
The academic tone of Morren’s paper is prefaced with abundant hope that his research will yield commercial results.
“I believe I may assert that henceforth we may produce in Europe vanilla of as good a quality (if not better) as that which is exported from Mexico … in all the intertropical colonies vanilla might be cultivated and a great abundance of fruit obtained by the process of artificial fecundation… proof of the importance of science for improving every branch of industry.”
It is easy to forget that botany was, at the time, still a relatively young discipline anxious to prove it’s commercial worth. Morren himself was an advocate of the theories of the German botanist Christian Sprengel. It was Sprengel who first discovered that the nectar producing organs of a flower attracted insects with the use of colour. Drawn by the colours, the insects collected pollen and transferred it between flowers thereby allowing fertilisation to occur. Sprengel also revealed that some flowers avoided self-fertilisation by a process he called ‘dichogamy’, whereby the stamen (male) and pistil (female) parts of individual flowers mature at different times. Sprengel’s work went a long way to explaining why flowers developed different characteristics—their smell, colour, shape and size. In 1793, he published, “The Newly Revealed Mystery of Nature in the Structure and Fertilization of Flowers”, but received little acclaim.
The very notion that plants might have some kind of sex-life was controversial, and in some quarters, unpopular. Many botanists remained unconvinced by the study, and Sprengel’s theories about the relationships between insects and plant reproduction did not gain widespread acceptance until they were advanced and confirmed by the work of Charles Darwin.
Morren’s vanilla experiments confirmed that in order to produce healthy fruits, Vanilla planifolia vines needed to be at least five or six years old, and that to produce flowers they needed precise conditions of shade, heat and humidity. The problem with Morren’s method of fertilisation was that he used a pair of scissors to cut the rostellum, a relatively fiddly technique suited only to greenhouse conditions. His discovery, while academically important, remained a subject for discussion only within the narrow circle of academic botanists. The “great abundance of fruit from the inter-tropical colonies” simply did not appear.
Not far from Sainte Suzanne there is an old creole house set back from the sea on high ground. The narrow coastal road is edged with sugar cane that obscures the view towards the old estate until a break in the foliage reveals a long avenue of spindly old palm trees leading up towards the house. Known as Le Grand Hazier, it is one of the oldest wooden houses left on Réunion. The tropical climate is hard on buildings, and among other things the humidity is an excellent environment for termites. When I arrived there were men on the roof, replacing some of the old timber, under the supervision of the owner Joseph Chassagne. It was his ancestor, Albert, who travelled here from Bordeaux and bought six hundred hectares of land in 1801. The family estate is tiny now, little more than a large country garden, but the current generation have reached an agreement with the government, and amongst themselves, to maintain it as part of Réunion’s heritage.
Although I had never met him, I had seen Joseph Chassagne’s face before. The white skin, wrinkled and freckled with sun, his gentle French accent modulated with its creole sing-song, and his piercing blue eyes reminded me of men I had seen in Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar. The names may change but the gene pool they come from is unmistakable. I had met them on old plantations, in government offices and in bars. In Seychelles I had seen them barefoot and barechested in ragged shorts, and in Mauritius I had seen them dressed to the nines as they inspected their horses at the Turf Club. Something about the climate keeps them skinny.
Joseph had a crew cut, neat silver spikes of hair protruding from a tanned scalp. He welcomed me to the estate and apologised for the presence of the workmen on the roof. They would be hammering and sawing all day.
“We have no choice,” he explained. “When the weather is good we must do what we can, or soon there will be no roof left. And without the roof, you cannot have a house.”
As we climbed the short flight of steps at the front of the house I saw an old lady sitting in a wheelchair on the wide verandah. She was very pale and had snow-white hair neatly brushed away from her smiling face. Joseph explained that she was his aunt Marie, and she had been born in the house in 1919. She shook my hand without speaking, two bony hands emerging from the blanket that covered her lap. Her grip was as light as a child’s and she met my gaze with steady pale eyes. Joseph ushered me into the study at one end of the verandah and closed the door. “I must try to keep the humidity out,” he said, shaking his head as if he knew he was wasting his time.
The room was extraordinary. In places the plaster had almost completely fallen away, revealing the wattle strips behind. Portraits of the Chassagne family hung on the walls, cracked and rippling oils which seemed to be in danger of peeling from the canvas at any second. A large mahogany desk dominated the centre of the room, its surface strewn with family papers and mementoes that Joseph was in the process of cataloguing. As we talked he produced items from the collection, enthusiastically revealing details about the way his family had lived in the old days.
“Look, look. Here is a letter from my grandfather to Monsieur Berthelot, his shoemaker in Paris. You see, he is very concerned about the shoes he ordered in 1910 and which still hadn’t arrived when the First World War broke out. See here, he says they are ‘en forme Roosevelt’—he wanted the style made popular by the American president!”
There were deeds and maps showing the Ste. Suzanne district throughout the centuries, a patchwork of neat lines showing the extent of the various estates and the names of the plantations. Joseph chuckled as he showed me a letter from the Governor’s office in the eighteenth century confirming that the tax payable for the Grand Hazier estate was an annual contribution of twelve chickens and twelve turkeys. “My new zinc roof alone will cost 30,000 euros!”
Joseph led me back onto the verandah to see some of the other rooms, passing Tante Marie again, who was now being fed some mush from a bowl by a maid. In one of the front bedrooms I could see that a modern hospital-style bed with a metal frame had been pushed between two old wooden beds, and Joseph confirmed that this was the old lady’s room. “Those wooden beds are made of bois de fer—you call it iron-wood,” he said. “Try to move one—feel the weight! My great grandfather had them made here, but copied from a design he saw in a catalogue from Paris.”
There were holes in the ceiling and more old furniture as we passed towards the back of the house. Joseph’s fragmented image was caught in an ancient mirror, so old that most of the silver backing had peeled away. In the simple kitchen there was another maid, a large dark-skinned woman chopping up a palm heart on a wooden board. Two still life paintings of tropical fruit decorated the walls. They were drawn with skill, and the colours seemed fresh. “Tante Marie did those when she was in her twenties.”
More steps led down to the work area at the back of the house, and a collection of old sheds made of weathered coral cement. Weeds grew in profusion along the base of the walls and there were large pieces of rusting iron embedded in the undergrowth. Joseph said that they were cauldrons once used for evaporating sugar, which would be heated over an open fire and stirred with a giant wooden spoon. I wanted to see the garden, though Joseph was apologetic at its current state of neglect.
We walked through the grounds, and passed a vegetable garden where marrows and tomatoes poked from the beds. Off to one side of the property was an overgrown area stocked with every variety of fruit tree. The mosquitoes were bad, and I was soon scratching at my calves and ankles in the long grass. Even in it’s untended state the Chassagne’s land still boasted jackfruit, oranges, pineapples, cashew nuts, breadfruit, camphor, coffee and cacao.
We carried on through the trees, occasionally squelching over-ripe fruit unseen in the long grass beneath our feet. It was clear that Joseph loved the garden, and knew a lot about what grew there.
“Do you have any mangosteen?” I asked. I hadn’t thought about the fruit for years, but something about Grand Hazier gave me hope that it might be found there.
“Ah, how does an Englishman know this fruit?” Joseph’s eyes sparkled.
I had once tasted it in Seychelles, a pale succulent orb with an indescribably subtle sweetness which completely envelops the taste buds but is at the same time unbeatably refreshing. The only mangosteen tree (Garcinia mangostana) left in all of Seychelles grows in the President’s garden at State House, and I had once been given one by the head gardener. In the mid 1990’s the same tree was later badly damaged in a suspicious fire, having the misfortune to grow close to an office block where the government stored its accounts. An independent auditor was about to go through the balance sheets when the whole place burnt down, and the last I heard it may not still survive. Like nutmeg, this tree once came from the Moluccas and was gradually transplanted to the Philippines and beyond in the eighteenth century. It needs high humidity and heavy rainfall to survive, and produces circular purple fruit with firm white flesh on the inside. The French still call it the ‘King of tropical fruits’, and apart from having an exceptionally complex and gentle taste, it is reputed to reduce fat in the bloodstream. Joseph led me through the trees until we came to a noisome smelling tortoise enclosure close to a small house some way from the main building. The giant tortoises were a magnet for the mosquitoes and the only consolation for the smell and the discomfort was that the tree shading the reptiles was a mangosteen. Joseph plucked a darkening fruit about the size of a tangerine from a branch above his head and split the skin between his palms. Neat white segments in a ball glistened slightly in the sun. He gave me half of the fruit and once again I tasted their sweet juice.
Joseph winked at me. “Horrible, non?”
As we moved back towards the main house I spotted a familiar shape against the bark of an old tree. The dark green vine.
“Vanille,” Joseph muttered dismissively as I hurried towards it.
“Is it planifolia?” I asked.
“No, not this one,” he said shaking his head as I caressed the long green stem. “This is one of the varieties that they planted here by mistake, and we just leave it to grow in the forest. We did have planifolia, but there is a fungus in the soil here that kills it. I need to treat the ground but it costs money.”
Back at the main house, Joseph returned to supervising the workmen on the roof. As I said goodbye, Tante Marie was still there, watching the proceedings from the verandah with her watering artist’s eyes.
The planters of Bourbon long dreamed of being the first to break the Spanish monopoly on vanilla. Like the horticulturists in Europe who struggled to identify the plant which would deliver the sweet scented pods of commerce, the island’s colonists had already made their own mistakes with vanilla.
In 1819, the first vanilla plants arrived on Bourbon, carried aboard Le Rhône from the French colony at Cayenne in French Guiana. The Rhône’s Captain, Pierre-Henri Philibert, was a white creole, proud to bring this potential treasure back to his own island. He had personally collected the plants from Cayenne’s Governor, Carra Saint-Cyr, who said they were samples of ‘great vanilla’, probably Vanilla pompona— since they were described as banana shaped. At the time, Philibert apologised to Bourbon’s Governor, Pierre-Bernard de Milius, lamenting that he had only managed to bring back a handful of vanilla plants, because “at Cayenne they grow it little.”
The following year, Philibert made another voyage in search of vanilla, this time to the Philippines. After an expedition lasting four months, the expedition botanist, Perrotet, reached Cueva de SanMatheo, where he reported “to my utmost joy, in the middle of a virgin forest I saw vanilla vines, climbing among the branches of an enormous bamboo thicket.” Perrotet brought Philibert to the spot, and together they collected as many specimens as they could, describing the plants as “more slender and fragrant than the ‘great vanilla’ from Cayenne”.
Philibert was excited at the prospect of returning to Bourbon with the precious vanilla, hoping that this time he had found the right species to produce the precious fruit. Once again, he wrote to Governor Milius: “I believe that you will consider the introduction of vanilla to our colony a great benefit. It may become a source of prosperity, and in future years we may use it as an object of trade—especially with Asia. Our colonists can only profit from its cultivation.”
The Governor’s reply was equally hopeful, and congratulatory but with a sting in the tail: “We have long awaited the introduction of this precious plant. And, we will not forget that it was one of our own children that finally brought it to the island. It is a pity that you did not donate all of the plants from your last visit to Cayenne to the botanical gardens –thus delaying the cultivation of the crop by several years. The individuals to whom you gave these plants can hardly expect to take as good care of them as the experts at the Jardin du Roi.”
Philibert’s defence was that the vanilla plants from Cayenne were few in number, and that he had indeed brought back numerous other plants for the botanical gardens. He had entrusted his small stock to planters whose reputation and skill could not be in doubt, hoping they would succeed in keeping them alive.
It is just possible that the plants Philibert brought back from the Philippines were indeed Vanilla planifolia, even though they were found in “thick virgin forest”. According to Philibert the plants were only about thirty miles from Manila, and it is conceivable that they were specimens transplanted there from Mexico by the Spanish two hundred years earlier.
Records in Réunion’s Archives départementales reveal that the new arrivals were planted at several properties, including the gardens of Madame Fréon at Riviere de Pluies, and on the estate of Hubert de Montfleury at St. Benoit. Once again, Philibert did not want any single planter to have all of the plants in case something went wrong. However, none of the vines flourished, and a few months later they were all dead.
The third consignment of vanilla plants to arrive on the island was to be more successful. In 1822, specimens that were identifiably Vanilla planifolia arrived from Paris, this time donated from the collection in the hothouses at the Jardin des Plantes. These were plants grown from cuttings taken from the vanilla orchid which grew in Charles Greville’s garden at Paddington. Imported by another creole, David de Floris, these plants did finally survive. However, the planters of Bourbon, like the Spanish in the Philippines, the British in India or the Dutch in Java, became resigned to the idea that outside its native Mexico, vanilla would never bear fruit except by chance. There seemed no prospect of getting the vines to regularly and reliably produce the seed pods which were so valuable in Europe. At a plantation called Bellevue, close to the town of Sainte Suzanne, Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont succeeded in keeping a vine alive for twenty years. He complained: “Of one-hundred vanilla vines on our island, we would be lucky to see ten flowers, and even fewer fruits, in a whole year”.
Early one morning towards the end of 1841, and after almost twenty years of sterility, it was little wonder that Bellier-Beaumont was astounded to find two fruits growing on his own solitary vine. He made the discovery while walking through his gardens accompanied by one of his slaves, a young boy called Edmond. To the planter’s amazement, Edmond claimed that he had fertilised the vanilla flower.
Years later, Bellier-Beaumont would say that he at first dismissed Edmond’s claim as an idle boast. However, a few days later, another flower column showed the unmistakable signs of swelling ovaries. Once again, Edmond claimed the credit. This time Bellier-Beaumont demanded an explanation, and as there were other flowers on the vine, the boy proceeded to peel back the lip of the small orchid with his thumb, and with the aid of a small stick, lift the rostellum out of the way and press the anther and the stigmatic surfaces together.
The planter could not keep the boy’s discovery to himself, and within days he invited other estate owners to Belle-vue where Edmond was told to show them his trick. Representatives from the largest estates duly arrived: Sarrazin de Floris came from St André, Patu de Rosemond from St Benoît and Antonin de Sigoyer from the estate of Joseph Desbassyns at Sainte Suzanne (the same land where Le Grand Hazier sits today). Soon, the boy Edmond was in great demand, despatched in a carriage on a tour of other plantations so that he could demonstrate the art of ‘orchid marriage’ to other slaves. His sensational trick, le geste d’Edmond, was about to make many of their masters rich.