Palo wood has received over 60 names, thanks to its ability to produce many colours, from yellow to red to purple to black. The Mayans call it ek, the British ‘logwood’ or ‘campeachy’, and the Spanish palo de tinta, palo de Campeche or simply palo. In Linnaean taxonomy, it is Haematoxylum campechianum, the ‘bloodwood of Campeche’. The tree’s heartwood lives up to these labels. When split into small pieces and boiled in water, it bleeds the reddish haematoxylin. This substance, if exposed to the proper mineral agents or mordants, produces a rich blue-black. Other additives yield, in the 1704 words of German doctor Michael Bernhard Valentini, ‘an indescribable range of colours’ from brilliant yellow to purple.
Palo campeche wood chips
Figure 4. Chips of Haematoxylum campechianum wood before chemical treatment (courtesy of Alamy Stock Photo).
Adrian Masters
Further reading
- Colomer, J.L., and A. Descalso (eds.) (2014) Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe, vol. 2 (Madrid: CEEH).
- Contreras Sánchez, A. (1990) Historia de una tintórea olvidada: el proceso de explotación y circulación del palo de tinte, 1750–1807 (Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán).
- Cooper, M. (1974) Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China (New York, NY: Weatherhill).
- Elliott, J.H. (1990) Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Penguin Books).
- Harvey, J. (1995) Men in Black (New York, NY: Columbia University Press).
- Jarvis, M.J. (2010) In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).
- McDonald, K.P. (2018) ‘“Sailors from the woods:” Logwood cutting and the spectrum of piracy’, in The Golden Age of Piracy: The Rise, Fall, and Enduring Popularity of Pirates, edited b Head, 50–74 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press).
- Netherton, R., and G.R. Owen-Crocker (eds.) (2007) Medieval Clothing and Textiles, vol. 3 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press).
- Pastoureau, M. (2008) Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
- Record, S.J., and R.W. Hess (1943) Timbers of the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
- Richmond Ellis, R. (2012) They Need Nothing: Hispanic-Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
- Roquero, A. (2006) Tintes y tintoreros de América (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura).
- Tiesler, V., and M.C. Lozada (eds.) (2018) Social Skins of the Head: Body Beliefs and Ritual in Ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press).
- Valentini, M.B. (1704) Museum Museorum, oder Vollständige Schau-Bühne aller Materialen und Specereyen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlegung Johann David Zunners).
