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The change is a pregnant commentary upon the good and homely old English saying, 'Cheap and nasty. The fall of cochineal throughout the Canaries brought many successors into the field, but none can boast of great success. The harvest was abundant, but not admired by manufacturers.
This will afford a beautiful purple. Use a teaspoonful of soda to an ounce of cochineal, and a quart of soft water. Boil 1 lb. of cloth an hour in alum water, pound 3/4 of an oz. of cochineal and mix 1 oz. of cream of tartar; put in a brass kettle, with water, enough to cover the cloth; when about blood hot, put in your cloth, stir constantly, and boil about fifteen minutes.
The Gobelins uses for its reds, cochineal or the roots of the madder; for blue, indigo and Prussian blue; for yellow, the vegetable colour extracted from gaude. In America there is a specialist in dyes: Miss Charlotte Pendleton, who gives her entire attention to rediscovering the dyes of the ancients, the dyes that made a city's fame.
And, wonderful to see, in front of the tower of Saint-Jean, was a ship bearing on her stern these words, printed in white letters, "The Pharaon, Morrel & Son, of Marseilles." She was the exact duplicate of the other Pharaon, and loaded, as that had been, with cochineal and indigo.
Favoured by a hint from Smithson, his particular friends followed his lead, and rushed into the markets to buy all the cochineal that could be had; to buy at any price, since the market was rising hourly. And then, all in a moment, as the sky clouds over on a summer day, there came a dulness in the cochineal market, and the female coccus was being sold at an enormous sacrifice.
The insects are shut up in boxes to lay their eggs on bits of linen, which are pinned to the cactus plants by one of their own thorns. In six months after planting the cactus, the harvest begins. The insect, which has secreted a purple fluid, is swept off the plant on to a board, and then baked to death in an oven. This constitutes the cochineal as imported.
This is one of the most useful of the genus, on account of its being the kind chiefly employed in the cultivation of cochineal. It is one of the easiest to manage, requiring only a rather dry atmosphere, plenty of light, and a temperature not lower than 50 degs. in winter. Syn. Nopalea cochinellifera.
Silk cannot be dyed a full scarlet; but a colour approaching to scarlet may be given to it, by first impregnating the stuff with murio-sulphate of tin, and afterwards dyeing it in equal parts of cochineal and quercitron bark.
And having mentioned the goods intended for Manila, I must observe that the principal return is always made in silver, and consequently the rest of the cargo is but of little account; the other articles, besides the silver, being some cochineal and a few sweetmeats, the produce of the American settlements, together with European millinery ware for the women at Manila, and some Spanish wines.
Samuel Kiechel, a merchant of Ulm, who was in London in 1585, records that, "news arrived of a Spanish ship captured by Drake, in which it was said there were two millions of uncoined gold and silver in ingots, fifty thousand crowns in coined reals, seven thousand hides, four chests of pearls, each containing two bushels, and some sacks of cochineal the whole valued at twenty-five barrels of gold; it was said to be one year and a half's tribute from Peru."
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