#sarsaparilla and plantations

[fatehbaz]

Everyone who grew up with Saturday-morning cartoon television in the 1980s or 1990s is surely familiar with the universe of the Smurfs. During many years of adventures, however, the diet of the little blue creatures remained somewhat of a mystery. 

The principal ingredient of many of their dishes was “Smurf berries,” which grew on bushes, but the indistinct appearance of the bushes gave few clues about their botanical nature. This was a deliberate move of the Smurfs’ creator, Belgian cartoonist Peyo (Pierre Culliford, 1928–1992). When the Smurfs were still only a European phenomenon, the Smurf berries were referred to by the French name salsepareille. Peyo chose this name for its exotic sound, initially being unaware that the name referred to very real plants. The name sarsaparilla or salsaparilla, as the plant is known in English, had been used for various species of the genus Smilax for centuries.

When the Smurfs became a phenomenon in the United States, the sarsaparilla shrub lost its berries, because many American viewers were thought to be familiar with sarsaparilla as a real plant. Smilax species are typically climbing vines (not Smurf shrubs) that can be woody, prickly, or both. They appear in tropical and subtropical areas around the world. The fact that an American audience might sooner recognize sarsaparilla than a European audience has everything to do with the plant’s history, which mainly revolves around Smilax species like S. aristolochiifolia and S. ornata, from Mexico and Central America. The best-known episodes from sarsaparilla’s history -- first as a medicine and later as a tonic drink -- are indeed about species from the New World.

The introduction of the Smurfs in the United States signified, in fact, sarsaparilla’s second Atlantic crossing. The oldest references to sarsaparilla are from Old World antiquity, where Smilax aspera was used as an antidote for poisons. The Roman medical writer Dioscorides (first century CE) devoted a chapter to this plant [...]. This description survived many centuries and became firmly embedded in the European medical tradition. [...] When European naturalists explored the plants of the New World in the sixteenth century, they tended to relate new species to better-known plants whenever they could. [...] Nicolás Monardes (1493–1588) described different kinds of American sarsaparilla in his work Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (1565). His descriptions carried a commercial touch. For instance, he tried to convince his readers that the whitish sarsaparilla from Honduras was better than the black variety from Mexico. Similarly, he aimed to embed the new American kinds of sarsaparilla in the traditional framework of European medicine. [...]

The old name sarsaparilla began to be associated not only with new Smilax species from different geographical regions, but also with new diseases. American sarsaparilla was not used as an antidote in cases of poisoning by venomous animals, but to cure syphilis. Syphilis had swept Europe [...], and the market for syphilis remedies was booming. Yet a range of botanical substances had to compete with preparations that contained mercury. The most famous botanical antisyphilitics were of exotic origin: guaiacum wood, China root, sarsaparilla root, and sassafras wood. All these plant parts became staple drugs in European pharmacies [...].

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Sarsaparilla [...] was also valued as a flavoring ingredient in medicinal tonic drinks, often along with sassafras. As such, sarsaparilla was to enjoy another wave of popularity in a later age. [...] As a medical commodity, sarsaparilla enjoyed great commercial success early on. Between 1568 and 1619 alone, 670 tons of sarsaparilla were imported in Seville, Spain, equivalent to some 7.5 million doses. [...]

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the borders between medicinal and other uses of sarsaparilla blurred. Proprietary remedies with sarsaparilla abounded, with the Ayer and Hood companies from Lowell, Massachusetts, turning the production of sarsaparilla into big business. In advertisements, it was usually promoted as a tonic, to purify the blood, and to create appetite. Because it was of American origin, it was supposedly especially suitable for American patients.

By this time, then, sarsaparilla had lost many of the Old World medical and cultural connotations [...]. The divide became so pronounced that European fans of the Smurfs in the twentieth century were no longer expected to recognize the name of a plant that had been a mainstay of pharmaceutical practice there for centuries, while the name sarsaparilla lived on as a soft drink in the United States.

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Image, caption, and all text above by: Wouter Klein. “Plant of the Month: Sarsaparilla.” JSTOR Daily. 16 June 2021. ”Plant of the Month” series is a partnership between Dumbarton Oaks and JSTOR Labs. [Image screenshotted and shown as it appears in Klein’s article, but illustration originally from U.S. National Library of Medicine and in the public domain. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[fatehbaz]

[I]n Latin America and the Caribbean, [a]lthough significant tracts of these forests have disappeared, their history goes well beyond the much discussed deforestation that gathered such momentum starting in the 1960s and 70s. [...] In [...] the lower Amazon River Basin, [...] [after European arrival] the extraction of natural resources for external markets got underway. These forest products, known as drogas do sertão, varied enormously: sarsaparilla, vanilla, cinnamon, manatee meat and oil, turtle shells, and feathers were among the most important. [...] [T]his trade [...] did have other environmental consequences, such as the sharp decline in turtle and manatee populations. [...]

[I]n 1750, the Caribbean coast of what is today Nicaragua also exported sarsaparilla and turtle shells in addition to mahogany. To the south, the alluvial mines of Colombia’s Pacific region became the principal source of New Granada’s gold exports during the eighteenth century, well anticipating the recent wave of mining prospecting and exploitation.

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The extractive economy, which began timidly during the colonial period, burgeoned during the second half of the nineteenth century [...]. The industrial revolution generated demand for raw materials, some of which could be derived from rainforest plants. The rubber boom, which took place primarily in the Amazon but also extended through the forests of Central America, is the quintessential example. There were other important booms, though they tended to affect very specific regions, such as that created by the demand for tagua, or vegetable ivory - the seed of various palm trees that grow in the forests of the Pacific coast between Panama and Ecuador [the “Choco” forest ecoregion] - which was used to make buttons before the invention of plastic.

In the case of the Petén Basin of Guatemala, the tapping of chicle, once the principal ingredient in chewing gum, also illustrates how natural resource extraction restructured regions during the boom period and, following the development of industrial substitutes, dramatically declined.

In the forests of Central America’s Caribbean coast, as exemplified by the case of Belize, logging precious woods and dyewoods was of great importance. But even more significant during the first half of the twentieth century was the expansion of banana plantations in old-growth rainforests. [...]

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Rubber tappers in the Amazon cleared trails through the forest to connect one or two hundred Hevea trees that produced white rubber, the finest on the market. Every day they collected the latex [...]. The case of black rubber, however, was quite different. This rubber was derived from the latex of the Castilla genus, which is found both in the Amazon and in the forests of the Pacific coast and Central America. But because this latex dries upon contact with the air, rubber gatherers cut down the trees to “bleed” them all at once. In short order, therefore, the population of black rubber trees declined dramatically [...]. [T]he price crash in 1913, caused by the development of rubber plantations in Asia, ended such initiatives [...]. In the wake of these colonos came the establishment of state institutions, such as municipal authorities, and national ones [...]. Starting roughly from the mid-twentieth century, the colonization of tropical forests has been associated with large-scale deforestation. [...] After the 1964 coup, the Brazilian military made the Amazon Basin strategic to their plans for national development [...]. The ideology of civilization’s triumph over an intractable nature and wild population has been instrumental in the conquest of rainforest frontiers.

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All text by: Claudia Leal. “Rainforest Frontiers.” In: “New Environmental Histories of Latin America and the Caribbean.” Edited by Claudia Leal, Jose Augusto Padua, and John Soluri. RRC Perspectives no. 7, 51-57. 2013. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]