COCHINEAL OF HANS SLOANE

Given its tremendous commercial potential, it is unsurprising that other European powers, in particular the British and French monarchies and the Indies trade companies, sought to secure a stake in its production and distribution. In his Voyage to Jamaica, Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum, dedicates a few lines to ‘this good commodity’. Referencing two of the more popular theories about cochineal, e.g. that it was a worm or a berry (the name grana cochinilla, as the dye is still called in Mexico, is a vestige of this belief ), Sloane identified the plant on which it grew as ‘Opuntia maxima’. This ‘tree’ had spread across the island of Jamaica, brought there from the American mainland by a Spanish priest, but cochineal did not. As Sloane wrote, in Jamaica no one had ever observed ‘that Worm upon any of their Trees’. Privateering, not animal husbandry, was the surer way to acquire the dye in Jamaica.