Pine bark extract

Nine or ten branches

Stadacona, February 1536. Of Jacques Cartier's 110 men, fewer than ten were well.¹

His ships had been frozen in since mid-November, in ice over two fathoms thick. Even the drink froze in the casks.²

The sickness reached Stadacona first, the Iroquoian town where Quebec City stands now. In December Donnacona's people said more than fifty of them were dead, and Cartier banned them from the fort. It reached his men anyway. Their legs swelled, their sinews turned as black as coal, and their gums rotted until nearly all their teeth fell out.¹

Cartier had an image of the Virgin carried across the ice and set against a tree. Everyone who could walk went to mass before it, and he vowed a pilgrimage to Rocamadour if God let him see France again. That same day Philippe Rougemont of Amboise died, aged about twenty-two. Cartier had the body opened. The heart was white and shrivelled, sitting in more than a jugful of red water the colour of dates.³

The dead went under the snow, because the ground was frozen and the living were too weak to dig. The French also dreaded that Stadacona would learn how helpless they were.³ Whenever visitors came near, Cartier went out with two or three of his men and made a show of driving those men back aboard with shouts and thrown sticks. By signs he said the rest were busy below decks. Inside the ships the sick hammered with sticks and stones, as if they were caulking the hulls.³ Twenty-five of his best seamen died that winter.²

Then one day on the ice Cartier met Domagaya, one of the chief's sons, coming from Stadacona.^{4, 5} Ten or twelve days earlier one of his legs had been swollen at the knee to the size of a two-year-old child, and his gums had rotted. Now he was well.⁴

The juice and the dregs of the leaves of a tree, Domagaya said, had cured him. Cartier asked to see it, saying it was for a sick servant. He was hiding how many of his men were down.⁴

Domagaya sent two women with Cartier, and they came back with nine or ten branches. They showed the French how to grind the bark and the leaves and boil it all in water. The drink was taken every other day, and the dregs went on the swollen legs. According to them the tree cured every disease. Its name was annedda.⁴

At first nobody would touch it. Then one or two risked a taste, and felt better at once. Cartier wrote that two or three drinks cured them of every disease they had ever had. Even sailors with five or six years of the French pox were cured completely.⁴ Then the men almost killed each other to get it first. In less than eight days they used up a whole tree, as big and as tall as any Cartier had ever seen.⁴

"Had all the doctors of Louvain and Montpellier been there, with all the drugs of Alexandria, they could not have done so much in a year as did this tree in eight days."⁴

Four centuries later this winter became the founding story of a French pine bark extract.^{6, 7} Cartier only ever called it a tree.⁴

Two brothers in red caps

Domagaya had been taken from home once already.⁵

In July 1534 Donnacona's people had come to Gaspé to fish. Cartier put up a cross thirty feet high on the point, with a board that read LONG LIVE THE KING OF FRANCE.⁵ The chief paddled out in an old black bear-skin. He pointed at the cross, then at the land all around, as if to say the land was his and the cross had gone up without his leave.⁵

The French held up an axe, as if to trade it for his fur. When he came close, they grabbed his canoe and brought everyone in it aboard. Cartier fed them, then kept two of the chief's sons, Domagaya and Taignoagny, promising to bring them back. The two were dressed in shirts, ribbons and red caps, with a little brass chain round each one's neck.⁵ They spent eight months in France and came home as his interpreters.⁵

On 3 May 1536 Cartier raised another cross inside his fort, thirty-five feet high. The French were hoping to capture Donnacona. That afternoon he came with both his sons, friendly enough but with his eye fixed on the woods, "wonderfully uneasy".⁸

Domagaya had warned Cartier that his brother was telling their father not to go aboard. When Taignoagny rushed into the fort to pull Donnacona out again, Cartier called his men. They seized the chief, both his sons and two headmen, and the rest fled "like sheep before wolves".⁸ Domagaya, who had led the French to the cure, was taken with the rest.^{4, 8}

That night Donnacona's people stood across the river and howled like wolves, crying "Agouhanna, Agouhanna", their word for a chief.⁸ Ten Iroquoians sailed for France with Cartier. Only a girl of about ten was alive when he returned with settlers in 1541.⁹ When the new chief, Agona, asked after them, Cartier said that Donnacona had died and the rest "stayed there as great Lords, and were maried".⁹ That winter Stadacona went to war with his new colony, later boasting of killing more than thirty-five of his men.⁹

Champlain asks for Aneda

Samuel de Champlain sailed up the St Lawrence in 1603, sixty-eight years after Cartier.¹⁰ The fortified towns Cartier had seen were gone, and so were the people who built them.¹¹

The French went on paying for the lost cure. Champlain's company of seventy-nine wintered in 1604-05 on an island in the St Croix River, between Maine and New Brunswick. Thirty-five of them died. "We were unable to find any remedy," he wrote. He blamed the salt meat and vegetables.¹²

The next July, sailing past Casco Bay, he learned of a chief called Aneda. He felt sure from the name that one of the chief's people had found Cartier's annedda. The people there had never heard of it.¹³

The heath that became a forest

Across the Atlantic, one of Europe's largest maritime pine forests covers the Landes de Gascogne in south-west France.^{14, 15} On the eve of 1857, pine already covered a quarter of the land.¹⁶

In 1818 the traveller Saint-Amans saw "these landes, these immense landes, these landes as far as the eye can see". Nothing rested the eye but the heather, and nothing held it in the distance but a few scrawny flocks driven by half-wild shepherds.¹⁶ The sheep grazed the commons, and the heath was kept open by burning.¹⁶

In June 1857 a law of Napoleon III ordered the communes of the Landes and the Gironde to drain their grazing commons and plant them with trees. They had to pay for it themselves.¹⁶ In the 1870s great fires were set on purpose, but the pine won. In the Gironde's own words, the forest replaced the heath, the pine replaced the sheep, and the shepherd became a resin tapper.¹⁶

A pine forest burns easily. After three scorching summers, on 19 August 1949, a fire broke out near a sawmill at Cestas.¹⁷ In a week it went through nearly 50,000 hectares, and charred needles, burnt bark and ash rained on Bordeaux.¹⁷ Eighty-two rescuers died, some caught by the whirlwind the fire made. Twenty-six people from Canéjan were killed, more than the commune had lost in both world wars.¹⁷ A sign at Le Barp asks passers-by, in their memory, to "respect and protect the forest".¹⁷

Peanut skins and pine bark

The scientist who turned this bark into an extract started with peanuts.¹⁸

Albert Szent-Györgyi, who won a Nobel Prize in 1937 for his work on vitamin C, had also drawn a "vitamin P" from citrus fruit. It changed how leaky blood vessels were.^{18, 19} No disease was ever tied to a lack of it, so it was dropped as a vitamin.¹⁸ In 1947 Jack Masquelier, a young French scientist working on his doctorate, drew a colourless fraction from the red-brown skins of peanuts. In animals it had the vitamin P effect.¹⁸ In July 1948 he published his thesis and filed a patent with Francis Tayeau on "the leucoanthocyanin of the peanut".²⁰

By 1951 he was patenting a way to get the same kind of compound out of pine bark.²¹ By 1952 he and a colleague were tracing such compounds through the maritime pine, the tree whose burnt bark had rained on Bordeaux three years before.^{17, 21} By 1979 his team had given these compounds a family name of their own. It survives as the trademark of an extract of French maritime pine bark.^{6, 22}

His 1985 patent starts with a hundred kilograms of the bark, ground to a coarse powder and extracted with boiling water. It ends as a light beige powder with an astringent taste, measured like a tannin with the leather trade's hide powder.²² The patent calls maritime pine bark "a first class material", cheap and always to hand.²²

The inventor who signed it away

In 1970 Masquelier and three partners set up a company in Bordeaux. In April 1985 it signed a deal with Horphag, a Channel Islands company. Masquelier assigned his rights in his new patent to both companies.²³

In 1994 his company signed its share of the patent over to a Liechtenstein firm without telling Horphag. Horphag sued in Bordeaux and won.²³ In 1996 Masquelier signed over to the Liechtenstein firm any rights that might come back to him. In May 1998 the Bordeaux court of appeal ruled that he had "lost his rights as soon as he assigned them on April 1, 1985". He could make no use of the patent at all.²³ In 2001 an American appeals court let the French ruling stand.²³

He died in February 2009, aged 86.²⁰

The 450-year-old legend

A 2000 review in an American alternative medicine journal has Cartier trapped by ice in 1534 on the St Lawrence "in New York". There a Native American shows his men how to make "a tea from the bark and needles of pine trees". Masquelier reads Cartier's book and is intrigued.⁶ An encyclopedia of alternative medicine says the extract has "a 450-year-old legend surrounding it". It has Masquelier hear the story on research in Canada in the 1950s.⁷

Put it beside the record. The winter was 1535-36, at Stadacona, where Quebec City stands now.^{1, 5} And Cartier's account of the cure names no pine, only "a tree".⁴

Which tree, then? In 1600 Richard Hakluyt's English edition suggested sassafras.⁴ C.-H. Laverdière thought spruce in 1870, and H. P. Biggar hemlock in 1924.^{4, 13} Jacques Rousseau made the case in 1954 for white cedar, the commonest answer today, and Jacques Mathieu for balsam fir in 2009. Another reading even made it a pine, the eastern white pine.¹⁹ Edmund Slafter, editing Champlain in 1878, saw no way to tell.¹³

In 1541 the account of his third voyage found "Hanneda" again near the new colony, trees "above three fathoms about". It promised more "hereafter". If that was written, it is lost.⁴

What the brew carried was vitamin C. Indigenous peoples of the north-east used hemlock and black spruce against scurvy.¹⁹ Masquelier had been chasing something else, vitamin P.¹⁸

And Masquelier reading Cartier's book? Nothing found from Masquelier himself says when he first heard the story, or that it set him going. His own trail starts with peanut skins.^{6, 7, 18, 20}

Ground bark and boiling water

Today the bark for that trademarked extract comes from maritime pines in the Landes de Gascogne, the forest that replaced the sheep.²⁴ What trials in people have found is in the Research tab.

The two women showed the French how to grind bark and boil it in water, and Masquelier's recipe starts the same way.^{4, 22} Nobody knows which tree gave the French their nine or ten branches. It grew on the St Lawrence, an ocean away from the maritime pine.^{4, 13, 14, 19}