thousand feet above the level of the sea, I drank always, before going
out to hunt, a strong infusion of coca leaves. I could then during the
whole day climb the heights and follow the swift-footed wild animals,
without experiencing any greater difficulty of breathing than I should
have felt in similar rapid movements on the coast. Moreover, I did not
suffer from the symptoms of cerebral excitement or uneasiness which
other travellers have experienced. The reason perhaps is, that I only
drank the decoction on the cold Puna, where the nervous system is far
less susceptible than in the climate of the forests beneath. However,
I always felt a sense of great satiety after taking the coca infusion,
and I did not feel a desire for my next meal until after the time at
which I usually took it.”
The reason of this action of the leaf is not less difficult to perceive
than that of its strength-sustaining capabilities.
When the Spanish conquerors took possession of Peru, the Indians, and
all their customs, were treated by them with equal contempt; but
everything connected with their religion was especially denounced by the
Spanish priests. Hence the use of coca was condemned and forbidden. It
was considered worthy the consideration of councils of the church, which
denounced it in 1567 as a “worthless substance, fitted for the misuse
and superstition of the Indians,” and of the thunders of a royal decree
which, in 1569, condemned the idea that coca gives strength as an
“illusion of the devil.” But these fulminations were of no avail. The
Peruvians still clung to their esteemed national leaf, and the owners of
mines and plantations, soon discovering its efficacy in enabling their
slaves to perform the heavy tasks they imposed upon them, became its
warm defenders. Even churchmen at last came to regard it with
indulgence, and, stranger still, to recommend its introduction into
Europe.
“One of the warmest advocates of the plant was the Jesuit Don Antonio
Julian, who, in a work entitled _Perla de America_, laments that coca
is not introduced into Europe instead of tea and coffee. ‘It is,’ he
observes, ‘melancholy to reflect that the poor of Europe cannot obtain
this preservative against hunger and thirst; that our working people
are not supported by this strengthening plant in their long-continued
labours.’ In the year 1793, Dr Don Pedro Nolasco Crespo pointed out in
a treatise the important advantages that would be derived from the use
of the coca plant, if introduced into the European navies; and he
expresses a wish that experiments of its utility in that way could be
tried. Though it is not probable that Dr Crespo’s wish will ever be
realised, yet there is little doubt that the use of coca as a beverage
on board ship would be attended with very beneficial results. It would
afford a nutritious refreshment to seamen in the exercise of their
laborious duties, and would greatly assist in counteracting the
unwholesome effects of salt provisions. As a stimulant, it would be
far less injurious than ardent spirits, for which it might be
substituted without fear of any of the evil consequences experienced
by the _coqueros_.”—VON TSCHUDI, p. 456.
It will strike the reader of the present article as somewhat remarkable,
that modern, perhaps more impartial and truth-loving inquiry, should
strip so many of these narcotic indulgences of the horrid and repulsive
aspect they have always hitherto worn. We find now that they have all a
fair side as well as a foul, and that it becomes a question for
reasonable discussion whether an educated population, trained to the
exercise of a reasonable self-control, might not be safely left to avail
themselves of the strangely fascinating enjoyments they are capable of
affording, without much risk of their becoming the source of any greatly
extended after-misery. But when, it may be pertinently asked, can we
hope to see the mass of our population so trained to self-denial and
self-restraint?
Of the chemical history of the coca leaf we are almost entirely
ignorant. The narcotic principle it contains appears to be volatile and
evanescent like that of the hemp plant. By keeping, the leaves gradually
lose their smell and virtue, and after twelve months are generally
considered worthless. We have found, that as they reach this country the
leaves are coated with a resinous or waxy substance which is only
sparingly soluble in water, but which ether readily dissolves. When
digested in ether, the leaves give a dark green solution, which, on
evaporation in the open air, leaves a brownish resin, possessed of a
powerful, peculiar, and penetrating odour. By prolonged exposure to the
air this resinous matter diminishes in quantity, and gradually loses the
whole of its smell, leaving a fusible, nearly inodorous, matter behind.
Ether, therefore, seems to extract at least two substances from the
leaf, one of which is volatile, and has a powerful odour. It is probably
in this volatile body that the narcotic qualities of the leaf reside.
According to the French chemist, M. Fremy, the leaf contains besides a
bitter principle, which dissolves in alcohol but not in ether, on which,
as on the _theine_ of tea, some of the virtues of the coca may depend.
But the chemical and physiological properties of this substance have not
yet been determined. A few pounds of fresh leaves, placed in the hands
of a capable chemist, might soon furnish us not only with more chemical
light, but probably also with some new and valuable remedial agents
capable of producing medicinal effects hitherto beyond our reach.
If we attempt to explain, by the aid of the above modicum of chemical
knowledge, the remarkable effects produced by the coca leaf, we utterly
fail. How the mere chewing of one or two ounces of the leaves in a day,
partly rejecting and partly swallowing the saliva,[53] but wholly
rejecting the chewed leaf—how this supports the strength, or can
materially nourish the body in the ordinary acceptation of the term, we
cannot understand. It cannot _give_ much to the body; it must therefore
act simply in preventing or greatly diminishing the ordinary and natural
waste of the tissues which usually accompanies bodily exertion. As wine
acts upon the nervous system of the aged so as to restrain the natural
waste to a quantity which the now weakened digestion can readily
replace, and thus maintains the weight of the body undiminished,—so it
is probably with coca. In the young and middle-aged it lessens the waste
of the tissues, and thus enables a smaller supply of food to sustain the
weight and strength of the body. All these substances probably operate
in a similar way to the partial absence of light, which, as is well
known, causes the same amount of fattening food to go farther in
increasing the weight of the body.
This explanation is only conjectural, and we hazard it only that some
chemical physiologist, into whose hands the drug may fall, may by actual
experiment test and amend it. Besides, we are aware that the explanation
itself requires explanation; for how either wine or any other substance
should have the effect described is by no means plain. At first sight it
seems wholly irreconcilable with the received chemico-physiological
doctrine, that the amount of muscular exertion is a measure of the waste
of the tissues. We believe, however, that the apparent difficulty is, to
a certain extent at least, capable of a purely chemical solution, but
the discussion is unfit for this place.
This leaf resembles hemp in the narcotic quality of dilating the pupil,
which opium does not possess. But in the proneness of the coca-eater to
stillness and solitude we recognise an influence of this herb similar to
that which opium exercises upon those who have experienced its highest
enjoyments. “Markets and theatres,” says De Quincey, “are not the
appropriate haunts of the opium-eater, when in the divinest state
incident to his enjoyment. In that state crowds become an oppression to
him, music even too sensual and gross. He naturally seeks solitude and
silence as indispensable conditions of those trances or profoundest
reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for
human nature. At that time I often fell into these reveries on taking
opium; and more than once it has happened to me on a summer night, when
I have been at an open window, in a room from which I could overlook the
sea at a mile below me, and could command a view of the great town of
L—— at about the same distance, that I have sat from sunset to sunrise,
motionless, and without wishing to move.”
This state resembles somewhat the abstracted condition in which the
coquero reclines beneath the sheltering tree;—whether his apathy and
phlegm ever approached to that of the coquero, the Opium-eater does not
inform us.
We have no accurate data from which to form an estimate of the actual
weight of coca leaf collected and consumed in Bolivia and Peru. Pöppig
estimates the money value of the yearly produce to be about four and a
half millions of Prussian dollars, which, at a shilling a pound, the
price it yields to the grower, would make the annual produce nearly
fifteen millions of pounds. This approximation is sufficient to show us
its importance to the higher regions of South America, in an
agricultural and commercial, as well as in a social point of view.
Dr Weddell, whose travels in Bolivia we noticed in a recent Number,
informs us that the province of Yongas, in Bolivia, in which the coca is
much cultivated, alone produces 9,600,000 Spanish pounds. The total
produce, therefore, is probably much beyond the fifteen millions of
pounds deduced from the statement of Pöppig. The importance of the plant
to Bolivia is shown by another fact stated by Dr Weddell, that the
revenue of the state of Bolivia in 1850 amounted to ten and a half
millions of francs, of which nine hundred thousand, or one-twelfth of
the whole, is derived from the tax on coca. Had he told us the amount of
the tax per pound, we should have been able to approximate more nearly
to the total produce of the state of Bolivia.
Here we close for the present our remarks upon this interesting class of
bodies. There are still others, the effects of which are not less
surprising, and which are indulged in by large masses of men, to the
consideration of which we may hereafter return.
Meanwhile, with such attractive descriptions before him as the history
of these narcotics presents, can we wonder that man, whose constant
search on earth is after happiness, and who, disappointed here, hopes
and longs and strives to fit himself for happiness hereafter—can we
wonder that he should at times be caught by the tinselly glare of this
corporeal felicity, and should yield himself to habits which, though
exquisitely delightful at first, lead him finally both to torture of
body and to misery of mind; that, debilitated by the excesses to which
it provokes, he should sink more and more under the influence of a mere
drug, and become at last a slave to its tempting seductions? We are
indeed feeble creatures, and of little bodily strength, when a grain of
haschisch can conquer, or a few drops of laudanum lay us prostrate; and
how much weaker in mind, when, knowing the evils they lead us to, we
cannot resist the fascinating temptation of these insidious drugs.
* * * * *
NOTE.—The writer of the above, and the previous article on _Narcotics_,
assures the critics who have done him the honour to notice his remarks
upon tobacco, that he is himself neither a smoker nor an opium-eater. To
the kind old lady, Mrs Mary Smith, who has taken the trouble to write
him from No. 195 Twelfth Street, New York, he begs to say, that he will
be happy to receive the little volume, containing “the results of
American experience on the use of tobacco,” and will endeavour to
consider them with an unprejudiced mind.
POEMS BY H. G. K.
FROM THE TENTS OF KEDAR.
When rolling wastes of barren sand
Torment the exile’s eye,
And, howling o’er the thirsty land,
The furnace blasts go by;
When Nature seems, with furious beams,
To glare in wrath on me,
My breast is fain to breathe again
The freshness of the sea.
When in the night awakes the breeze,
I turn, in feverish sleep,
And seem to hear, in rustling trees,
The murmur of the deep:
Thick falls the heat, the transient cheat
But feeds my misery;
Mine ears are fain to hear again
The language of the sea.
Unnumbered smilings of the calm
The billows give their GOD,
To HIM goes up the awful psalm
When tempests are abroad;
The ocean’s Lord my soul adored
On childhood’s bended knee;
O! I am fain to share again
The worship of the sea.
A CONFESSION.
When first I looked upon thy face,
O sister of the meek-eyed Dove!
I wondered at its gentle grace,
But never thought of love.
And when again, in later days,
Thy simple tale of grief I heard,
My heart outwent my lips’ weak praise,
But ne’er a pulse was stirred.
Slowly, at length, the feeling grew,
All common passions far above;
I found that when thyself I knew,
To know thee was to love.
But now, when years have passed, and these
Have brought us mutual joy and pain,
When children gathering round our knees
But closer draw the chain;
I find my days have been so free
From loneliness, despair, or strife,
If my late love grew dear to me,
How precious is the wife!
Nor thou with disappointment hear
A secret I had ne’er confessed,
Were that slow trust that made thee dear
Less rooted in my breast.
Not thine the vain and wanton look
On which the moths of passion feed,
Nor is thy soul such trivial book
As he who runs may read.
Nor envy I the vagrant race
Whose loves as soon as felt are gone,
Who wander on from face to face
Till age shall leave them lone.
The gourd that in a night appeared
Next noon had withered on the sand;
The oak a hundred years have reared,
For ages crowns the land.
MOVEMENT.
(INDIA, 1853.)
In the dismal polar world,
As the night of months wears on,
The ice-bound ship, her white wings furled,
Lies torpid, and alone.
At times the sailors hear
Strange voices of the night,
And see the streamers, far and near,
Of the transient northern light.
The months draw on, night wanes,
Slow creeps the spreading dawn,
A soft wind stirs the slumbering vanes,
The winter’s power is gone.
House awnings, hoist your sails,
Your vessel moves at last;
No matter, if Atlantic gales
Should snap each straining mast;
Nor if through crashing floes,
Or mountain waves she roam;
Through icebergs and through storm she goes
To the happier skies of HOME.
There is a land fast bound,
In chains of age-long night,
Encompassed by unfruitful sound,
And false precarious light.
The ages wear, night wanes,
She stirs in her helpless rest,
Loosens her old obdurate chains,
Sees day spring from the west!
Blow, low, or loud, each breath,
To regions light and warm;
Where calm is harbinger of death,
How welcome is the storm!
Brethren! if slanderous speech
Press heavy on your heart,
Remember truth is vast, and each
Beholds her but in part.
And if to alien view
We seem to slumber yet,
God sees the work begun by you,
And He will not forget.
THE POET AND THE PASSIONS.
The winds come forth from South and North,
Through the World they go,
And divers are the ends they work,
And places where they blow.
Some howl along the Polar snows,
Where the riving Icebergs roar;
And some sail o’er the weltering Sea,
And drive tall Ships before.
Some breathe on Mills by thymy downs,
And some, through Gardens fair,
Steal ’mid the flowers, and moist tree-leaves,
And in young lovers’ hair.
And others waste their strength and life,
On whirling spires of sand,
Till men the gathered poison take,
By Suez or the Caspian Lake,
From Fez to Samarcand.
Our passions thus in solitude
Are driven round and round;
Unrecognised by learned ears,
They howl in stony ground.
Time was the Poet’s music rose,
On every breeze that stirred;
In Nature’s free, unquestioned joy,
He sang as sings the bird.
Yon trifler of the curious pipe,
With all his high wrought art,
May for a moment please the ear,
But cannot touch the heart:
In a night of fabled innocence,
His simple fancies flow,
With cold fantastic images,
Like Moonlight on the snow;
While through the darkling ways of life,
The earnest crowds grope on,
And, though they may not tell their care,
The old delight is gone.
Speak in the darkness words of truth,
Upon the crowded ways,
Oh Poet, if such man there be,
In these material days!
Thou must ignore the heart no more,
In quaint reluctant rhymes,
If thou wouldst seek to cure indeed
The madness of the times:
Tell those, like fire whose souls aspire,
That God himself is love;
And that the Heaven they seek to reach
Is round them, not above:
Tell those whose self-deemed virtue brooks
No intercourse with sin,
God loves not whited sepulchres,
With rottenness within:
Tell those who sneer because their eyes
Embrace not all His plan,
The Steam-engine does many things,
But cannot make a man:
The accidents of time and space,
Their ripening lore may know;
The human soul as well was read,
Two thousand years ago:
The air that makes the furnace glow,
O’er flowery meads has blown,
Man lives by every breath of God,
And not by bread alone.
A FEW FACTS CONCERNING THE TURKISH QUESTION.
It is not at the point the Eastern Question has now reached that we feel
disposed to go into a minute retrospect of the circumstances that have
brought us to the brink of a war, whose consequences are incalculable.
Although, at the moment at which we write, everything seems tending to
strife, and we listen already for the echoes of cannon from the Danube’s
banks and the Euxine’s waters, the changes in the aspect of this
alarming question have hitherto been so numerous and so rapid in their
succession, that we still refuse to cast away all hope of its amicable
adjustment. True, that before these lines meet the public eye, armies
may have been set in motion, and collisions have occurred; but we prefer
to believe that the present warlike aspect of affairs may have been
exchanged for one more pacific, and that Russia, who would gladly
recede, could she do so with honour, may accept a retractation as a
reason for a concession.
What has brought Europe to its present painful state of suspense and
anxiety? The storm of democratic insurrection, which burst forth in
1848, and swept over the Continent, leaving few nations unscathed, had
scarcely lulled, when fresh alarm spread abroad, springing from very
different causes—from the aggression of a colossal power upon a feeble
one, utterly unable to cope with it. Upon what was this aggression
based? Its nominal origin is to be sought in the most futile matters of
dispute—in a wrangle between rival churches as to the possession of a
key, the repairs of a cupola, the right of entering a sanctuary by a
side door, or by the front gate. It was behind an affected interest in
this monkish squabble that Russia masked deep and dangerous designs.
The question of the Holy Shrines lay entirely between France and Russia,
as protectors of the Latin and Greek Churches in Turkey. England looked
on, and smiled with some little disdain at the sudden religious fervour
of the neighbour she had long held for a latitudinarian in such matters.
Russia was pleased to see her in this mood, and augured well from it for
the success of her plans. For Russia had a double point to gain. One of
her objects was the following up of the traditional policy that, for
more than a century, has impelled her southwards, in the direction of
those Dardanelles which the Emperor Alexander called _one of the doors
of his house_. Her second aim was the downfall of the present occupant
of the throne of France.
An ill-founded disbelief in the possibility of any sincere and durable
alliance between England on the one hand, and France, under her present
ruler, upon the other, has had much to do with the Czar’s attack upon
Turkey. It will be remembered that the _coup d’état_ of December 1851
was warmly approved by the Russian emperor. He looked upon it, as did
many in this and in other countries, who neither profess nor feel
attachment to despotism, as an immense service rendered to the cause of
order in Europe. France had reached a point at which absolutism, or
horrible and contagious anarchy, were the only alternatives left her.
She had overset or trampled upon every liberal, moderate, and
constitutional government she had ever had. She had proved herself unfit
for them; devoid of that invaluable species of patience which enables a
nation to endure small evils rather than rush upon great ones, and to
seek gradual reforms by peaceable means, instead of insisting upon them
suddenly and violently. She was so fortunate as to escape with the
lesser of the two evils, to one of which she was evidently and
inevitably speeding. The hour came, and the man. The last shred of
liberty’s flag was blown away, and turbulent France had found her
master. When this extraordinary event occurred, it was right, perhaps,
for the friends of constitutional government, and of the natural rights
of civilised nations, to protest, in the name of a great principle,
against the establishment of despotism. But such protests were too often
reiterated, and too virulently and offensively worded, by the only
really free press remaining in Europe, to produce practical good. On the
contrary, they did much harm. The persevering and rancorous manner in
which the majority of the English journals assailed the sovereign whom
they chose to stigmatise as a reckless adventurer, but who has proved
himself a man of commanding ability and rare energy—and who may possibly
yet show himself a truer friend to France than some who have made
patriotism their war-cry, whilst their own advantage was their
object—was well calculated to spread the belief that steadfast alliance
and cordial co-operation, for the attainment of _any_ end, were
impossible between Great Britain, and France under Napoleon III. There
is no doubt that this was the impression made upon the mind of the
Emperor Nicholas, who, in common with more than one great statesman in
other countries, looked favourably upon the new order of things, as that
best calculated to retrieve France from the slough into which she had
sunk, and, at the same time, to quell and daunt the revolutionary spirit
throughout Europe. But past dangers are quickly forgotten. In proportion
as the perils Europe had run from the democratic party grew faint and
fainter in the distance, and, as the probability rapidly increased of
the restoration of the Empire in France, the Czar became less and less
well-disposed towards the nephew of the man whose memory Russia has
certainly no reason to cherish. Perhaps recollections of his youth rose
up before him—the many reverses of the Russian arms, the flames of
Moscow, the blood and treasure his country had been compelled to lavish
to stem one man’s ambition. The terms in which he accredited his
ambassador to the new Emperor of the French sufficiently betrayed the
great diminution of the good-will with which he had for a time regarded
the government of Louis Napoleon.
The prevalent feeling in Europe, when Napoleon III. was proclaimed, was,
that the days of his empire were numbered, that his power was doomed to
speedy extinction. In war, many declared, lay his sole prospect and
probability of its retention. He rested upon bayonets; his name was
Napoleon, aggression and glory must constitute his sole tenure of the
place he had usurped. He must fight or fall. Two years have elapsed, and
as yet there is no prospect of these predictions being verified. War
there may be—we are perhaps on the eve of it—but certainly it will not
have been brought on or sought by the French emperor, who has shown a
wise and earnest desire to avoid it, and who, as far as he is to be
judged from his conduct hitherto, has a better right to the title of the
“Napoleon of Peace” than the citizen-king upon whom it was so fulsomely
bestowed. The war that is regretfully anticipated, but which we still
hope may be averted, will have been forced upon France, and instead of
being waged, as alarmists have predicted that the first war in which
France should engage would assuredly be, in the British Channel and on
English ground, it will present the novel spectacle of French and
English fleets combined under the orders of an English admiral, and of
British troops marshalled for action at the command of a French general.