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Updated: May 28, 2025
It is impenetrable to rain and very durable. The chief export from the place are chinchona, tobacco, orchilla weed, hides, cotton, coffee, and cacao. Our friends, we found, were anxious about the difficulties we might encounter on our journey, on account of the disturbed state of the country.
The inferior qualities of the weed, and also a variety of mosses that have the same properties as the orchilla, only in a minor degree, are dried and ground to a fine powder, which is denominated cudbear, and is applicable to the same purposes as the weed itself.
It has been suggested, that the orchilla was probably the Gertulian purple of the ancients; a conjecture which is strengthened by the fact, that the coast of Africa, where the orchilla abounds, was formerly called Gertulia. That the vivid dye which resides in this weed was known to the ancients, does not admit of any doubt.
Thus it happened that by 1428 my kingdom had become but a barren rock, dependent for its revenues upon the moss called the orchilla weed of which the darker and better kind could be gathered only by painful journeys inland. You may see, therefore, that I had little to comfort me as I paced before my house that morning.
The scenery on the banks was very beautiful, the trees not growing in dense masses, but scattered in groups, like those in a gentleman's park in England. Beautiful flowers covered the open spaces. Among some of the groups of trees we observed the orchilla weed hanging from the branches. This is one of the exports of Africa, and is used as a dye stuff.
It appears that the Florentines were not satisfied with keeping the preparation of orchilla a mystery from the rest of the world, but that they endeavoured to lead all inquiry into a false channel, by calling it tincture of turnsole, desiring it to be believed, that it was an extract from the heliotropium or turnsole: the Dutch also disguised it in the form of a paste, which they called lacmus or litmus.
Doubloons per ounce Dollars ditto Orchilla Weed per ton A bark called the Cape Packet, bound on a whaling voyage in the Pacific, arrived and sailed again to-day. Our consort the Diadem transport arrived this afternoon, and sailed the following evening, being Saturday 25th. Sunday, August 26th.
Had the little islands of Tortuga, Blanquilla, and Orchilla been situated in the group of the Antilles, they would not have remained without traces of cultivation. Vessels of heavy burthen pass between the main land and the most southern of the Piritu Islands. Being very low, their northern point is dreaded by pilots who near the coast in those latitudes.
The original mode of preparing orchilla, that which was practised by the ancients, is said to have been lost, and many chemical experiments exhausted in vain for its recovery. In 1300, however, it was rediscovered by a Florentine merchant, and from that period preserved as a profound secret, by the Florentines and the Dutch.
As the orchilla weed is a production, the practical application of which in various ways is diffused over a large surface of utility, and as its peculiar properties are not very generally known, a minute description of its nature and uses, which I have procured at some cost of time and research, may not prove uninteresting.
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