First tonic water

Be honest, how often have you thought about the tonic in your gin recently?

Even in these enlightened times, it’s a liquid that still suffers a PR problem – a bitter tasting, quinine-infused mixer that almost always plays second fiddle to its more famous gin twin.

But tonic water has a rather fascinating and unexpected backstory. That doesn’t involve cocktails at all.

It was originally a medicine.

Which should come as no great surprise to language lovers. After all, the word “tonic” is defined as “a medicinal substance… that refreshes, restores, or makes you feel stronger and more energetic”.

So, the obvious question is: what was the original tonic water trying to make better?

In search of the answer, we must head to the cloud forests of the South American high Andes in the early 1600s.

It’s here that the cinchona tree grows, a largish and entirely ordinary evergreen with fragrant pink flowers. But this non-descript tree was to become one of the most sought-after plants in the world for the next 200 years. Why? Because its bark was absurdly rich in an alkaloid that was later named ‘quinine’.

Now, the bark of this tree had long been used to treat fevers and ‘agues’ by the local Amerindians , who called it ‘quina-quina’ (‘bark of barks’ in the native tongue) or ‘ganna perides’ (‘fever stick’). But it wasn’t until the Spanish conquistadores arrived from the 16^th century onwards, followed by the ever-present Jesuit missionaries, that it took on an almost god-like status as a cure for malaria.

Curiously, the countries where the cinchona tree abounded – mainly modern-day Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – were said to be almost entirely free from malaria before the Europeans arrived. It’s thought that the Spanish brought the parasite that causes the worst form of the disease (P. falciparum) to the continent on their slave ships!

From the late 1500s, stories of the miraculous tree started swirling in Spanish writings. It first popped up in a seminal work on medicinal plants by Nicolas Monardes, a 16^th century physician and botanist (who never actually travelled to South America) in 1574.

"From the new kingdom they bring a bark, which they say is from a tree, which is of great size… The Indians have the bark in abundance, and use it in all kinds of xamaras [an archaic word for diarrhoea or dysentery], whether with or without blood. The Spaniards, weary of this disease, on the advice of the Indians, have used this bark and have healed many of them with it. They take of it as much as a small bean made into powders,

they are taken in red wine, or in appropriate water, as they have the fever or bad..."

Segunda parte del libro de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, que sirven al uso de medicina

So, a cinchona powder mixed in “appropriate water” – certainly the first quinine-infused water – but maybe even the first tonic water, in its oldest and truest medicinal sense?

Of course, malaria wasn’t known by its modern name back in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, so the severe shivering symptoms it brought on were more commonly just referred to as an ague or fever.

Documents tell us that over 50 years later, in around 1630, the Spanish corregidor of Loja (the local colonial governor of the district of Loja, now in southern Ecuador), Don Juan López de Cañizares, fell gravely ill with a fever. After European remedies failed to cure him, a local Jesuit missionary remembered and recommended a remedy that had helped him 30 years earlier in a village called Malacatos, south of Loja. The local indigenous chief and healer Pedro Leiva had prescribed cinchona bark, which had cured the priest – and later the governor.  

A year or so later, in June 1631, came another story – this time from Peru and almost certainly apocryphal – of Lady Ana Osorio, the Countess of Chinchón (the wife of the Spanish Viceroy of Lima), who also became ill with a similar fever. The Loja governor sent some of the bark to the Count, and the Lady was miraculously cured. As the tale goes, the grateful Countess distributed her ‘powders’ to the sick people of Lima and brought the miracle cure back to Europe.

(Despite being historically inaccurate, this legend was so powerful and all-pervading that the famous biologist Carl Linnaeus officially categorized the tree in honour of the countess in 1742. Rather amusingly, when registering the genus, he used the Italianate spelling Cinchona, accidentally dropping the first ‘h’ from her title, Chinchón). 

In truth, it was the missionaries who spread the word of the powerful cinchona bark – they were the ones travelling the countries, talking to local healers, documenting their finds and asking Europeans to put their ‘faith’ in the cure.  

One of the first to showcase it was Augustinian friar Father Antonio de la Calancha, who wrote a detailed description of the natural wonders, native customs and religious history of Peru in his 1633 religious chronicles (published in Spain in 1639).

“A tree grows which they call ‘the fever tree’ in the country of Loxa, whose bark, of the colour of cinnamon, made into powder amounting to the weight of two small silver coins and given as a beverage, cures the fevers and tertians; it has produced miraculous results in Lima.”

Later, in 1653, Spanish Jesuit priest and naturalist Father Bernabé Cobo wrote about the bark in his massive encyclopaedic opus titled Historia del Nuevo Mundo (History of the New World), which wasn’t published until 1890.

“In the district of the city of Loja, diocese of Quito, grows a certain kind of large tree, which has a bark like cinnamon, a little more coarse and very bitter, which, ground to powder is given to those who have a fever, and with only this remedy, it leaves them.”

Through the writing of these missionaries, the cinchona bark took on many names, all of them intriguingly religious. Some of the best were: Jesuit’s bark (also Pulvis Jesuiticus in Latin), Cardinal’s powder, Popish powder, Countess’s powder, sacred bark and Peruvian bark.

It was certainly the Jesuits who controlled the new ‘trade’ in the bark, shipping it back to Europe in ever-increasing quantities. In Rome, it was being championed by Cardinal Juan de Lugo, a prominent Jesuit theologian who became famous for distributing the quinine-rich powder to “the fevered poor” who were suffering from malaria.

Interestingly, Rome was one of the worst places for malaria in the world at the time. The city was surrounded by the Pontine Marshes and the low-lying valleys of the Tiber River, massive breeding grounds for mosquitoes. So, during the hot summer months, the wealthy, including the Pope and his Cardinals, would flee the city for the surrounding hills to escape the deadly outbreaks. But rather than mosquitoes, people believed the disease was caused by breathing the "corrupt, foul air" (mal'aria in Italian) rising from the swamps.

Cardinal Juan de Lugo was so influential in religious circles, that by 1650 the bark was reportedly being used in Jesuit colleges in Genoa (Italy), Lyon (France), Leuven (Belgium) and Regensburg (Bavaria).

In 1655, cinchona bark started making a stir in the UK, where malaria was also endemic and widespread (known as “marsh fever”). The first written reference was in Northampton in 1656, where a Dr John Metford recorded curing a pregnant woman at Brampton, near Huntingdon, with small doses of the Jesuit’s powder (from The British Museum Sloane Manuscript 2812, “Observationes et Curationes”).

In 1658, an early and short-lived English newspaper, Mercurius politicus, even contained advertisements for cinchona bark.

“The Feaver Bark, commonly called the Jesuites Powder, which is so famous for the cure of all manner of Agues, brought over by James Thompson, Merchant of Antwerp, is to be had either at his own Lodging at the Black Spred- Eagle in the Old Bailey over against Black and White Court, or at Mr. John Crooks, Bookseller at the Ship in St. Paul’s Churchyard, with directions for its use. Which Bark or Powder is attested to be perfectly true by Doctor Prudjean and other eminent Doctors and Physi- tians who have made experience of it.”

But the man universally credited with solidifying cinchona bark’s medicinal reputation was Englishman Robert Talbor (also known as Tabor or Talbot). Born in Cambridgeshire in 1642, he was a somewhat mysterious figure in many ways – not an official physician and most likely an entirely unlicensed medical practitioner – but he was acknowledged to be a specialist in malaria, and had been apprenticed to an apothecary in Cambridge, called Dean, and later moved to Essex to practice where “marsh fever” was particularly rife. 

In 1672, he came to London and set up in Holborn, next to Gray’s Inn, and published his observations in Pyretologia, “a rational account of the cause and cure of agues, with their signes, diagnostick and prognostick”. The book made him famous, particularly in the royal courts of Europe.

His breakthrough was in curing Lady Mordaunt’s daughter, an important family in London’s society. That caught the eye of King Charles II, who appointed him (against his own doctors’ advice) to Physician-in-Ordinary in 1678, with a salary of £100 a year, even knighting him at Whitehall. In the following year, he did successfully treat the King at Windsor for an attack of malaria. Charles II then recommended him to King Louis XIV of France when the Dauphin became ill with ‘ague’ in 1680. The French physicians were of course sceptical of this unqualified English interloper and are said to have asked: “What is fever?” To which he somewhat arrogantly replied, “I do not know; you gentlemen may explain the nature of fever; but I can cure it which you cannot.”

The Dauphin of course recovered, and Louis XIV was overcome with generosity towards Talbor. He gave him the title of Chevalier and paid him 2,000 ‘Louis D’or’ gold coins. (This was a ridiculous amount of money – about £1,700 at the time – when the average annual salary of a skilled labourer was about £20). More than that though, the French King ‘bought’ the remedy from him for a 2,000 livres annual pension – granting him a 10-year monopoly on the prescription which came to be known as “the Englishman’s cure” or “le reméde anglais”. 

The cure, as it turned out when published later, was simply an infusion of a considerable quantity of cinchona bark in “good claret wine.” Talbor died rich but young, in November 1681, and was buried in Trinity Church, Cambridge, hailed as the ‘Febrium Malleus’ (fever smasher).

Inadvertently, Talbor’s success was also responsible for increasing the price of the bark around the world. Its efficacy was now incontestable. Even the Royal College of Physicians listed cinchona bark in its Pharmacopoeia Londinensis in 1677, the first standard list of medicines and their ingredients in England. And it entered popular culture with its first mention in a comedy play called ‘A True Widow’ by writer Thomas Shadwell in 1678.

“Theodosia: Is to love as the Jesuit’s powder is to an Aguem it stops the fit and in a little time wears it quite off.”

Later, in 1820, French scientists Pierre Pelletier, Professor of Toxicology, and Joseph Caventou, Professor of Chemistry at the École de Pharmacie in Paris successfully isolated and extracted quinine using alcohol and sulphuric acid. It meant it didn’t have to be taken simply as crushed up bark powder anymore, a scientific breakthrough that’s often cited as the beginning of the modern pharmaceutical industry. It certainly paved the way for quinine’s mass use around the world – by 1826, they were producing more than 3500kg of quinine annually, all from cinchona bark brought over in quantity from the Andes.   

Predictably, demand outstripped supply and the tree started to be overharvested. (It’s said that in 1805, 25,000 specimens were documented in the Ecuadorean Andes but by the 2020s there are just 29 trees!). The British quickly realised they needed their own supply to avoid buying quinine at inflated prices on the open market. This was especially important for their rapidly expanding Empire, and essential for their troops and subjects in India, where massive railway infrastructure projects were being undertaken, creating epic breeding grounds for mosquitos and thus spreading the disease quicker.

The British had a plan. They wanted to smuggle cinchona seeds out of South America and create their own plantations in the Nilgiri Hills in southern India at the foot of the Himalayas, which they thought would perfectly mimic the cloud forests of the Andes. Clements Markham, a geographer and explorer, was hired for the job in 1859, and he brought botanists Richard Spruce and Robert Cross on board too. Markham went to Peru, Spruce to Ecuador and Cross to Colombia, their combined adventures worthy of a Hollywood film. Spruce and Cross, especially, faced gruelling terrain in two countries on the brink of war, yet they successfully harvested over 100,000 seeds and 100s of plants, which they packed into Wardian cases (portable glass terrariums) to keep them alive on the voyage back to India.

The plan broadly worked and vast plantations of the ‘fever tree’ were established, satisfying even the hungriest of colonial powers with enough quinine. This coincided with British soldiers and officials in India being prescribed daily doses of quinine powder as a malarial preventative rather than treatment (up until then, cinchona bark had been given to people suffering with ‘ague’ rather than pre-contracting an ‘ague’).

But, as we know, quinine is extremely bitter, to the point of being almost unpalatable. So soldiers started mixing their medicinal bark powder with water, sugar and lime to make it appetising. Then the officers began adding their daily gin ration too, essentially creating an early gin and tonic. The Royal Navy even supported this ‘creative’ use of gin to administer quinine to their officers ashore, and a drinking culture grew up around it.

The first known written reference to gin and tonic came in 1868, extracted from the Anglo-Indian Oriental Sporting Magazine. It’s used to describe the drinks enjoyed by attendees of a horse race at Sealkote (Sialkot), northeast of the Punjab province in Pakistan today, at the end of the evening.  

With the British Empire expanding rapidly, and the scourge of malaria dominating the news around the world, foresighted companies back in the UK started sensing a commercial opportunity.

As early as June 1835, a Bristol-based pharmaceutical business called Hughes & Co. was actively advertising something rather intriguingly called ‘Quinine Soda Water’ in the Bristol Mercury newspaper. But Hughes wasn't a drinks company, it was a medicinal business with an impressive catalogue of quinine-based cures, such as ‘Hughes’s Quinine Pills’ and ‘Hughes’s Essence of Quinine’.

Ahead of the game, it had seemingly perfectly paired a trending medicinal ingredient and combined it with the relatively new technology of soda water. But the product didn’t catch on, and the ads swiftly disappeared.

It wasn’t until 23 years later, in 1858, that the term ‘tonic water’ was first used to define the drink we recognise today, courtesy of a businessman called Erasmus Bond.  

Erasmus was born in London in 1808, married Hannah Vale at the age of 26 and had two sons in quick succession, William and Erasmus Jr. Sadly, Hannah died in 1836 – during childbirth – and we lose sight of Erasmus until the 1841 Census documented him living with his widowed sister-in-law (with the delightful name of Peace Vale) and a Thomas Slee (a Southwark distillery agent). Erasmus later ended up marrying Peace – and they too had two children, called Thomas and Peace – and the 1851 Census has him listed as a ‘soda manufacturer’.  

We know that Erasmus had taken over a much older drinks company called Pitt & Co (established 1790, and with previous success with ginger beer and soda water) and was now operating out of a small factory at 28 Wharf Road. The site backed onto the Wenlock Basin, in the Regent’s Canal, enabling them to load and unload all their goods from barges.

He must have been a curious and inventive soul, because on 28^th May 1858, Erasmus Bond was granted UK Patent No. 1209 for what was termed “an improved aerated liquid”.

Despite the slightly technical description, what he was making was literally carbonated soda water infused with quinine. And to remove any lingering doubts, Erasmus began to market his new product under the name ‘Pitt’s Aerated Tonic Water’. Bingo.

For historic context, 1858 was slap-bang in the middle of the Indian Mutiny (1857-1859), a major and bloody uprising that saw the end of the British East India Company’s rule – and the start of the British Raj, when the Crown took ‘control’ of India. A quinine-based tonic to go with the officer’s gin had never been more needed.   

Yet making carbonated drinks in the Victoria period was still somewhat of a challenge. While we don’t know Erasmus’ exact factory technique, it would have been similar to others operating at the time, requiring precision to stop the bottles from exploding. There were usually two steps involved:  

Step one: crafting the ‘medicinal’ syrup base. Instead of using powdered cinchona bark, which would leave a brownish sediment in the bottle, Erasmus used purified quinine sulphate crystals (available thanks to the quinine isolation by the Parisian scientists in 1820). He then added either sulphuric acid or citric acid to help dissolve the crystals. And to make it more palatable, he added a load of sugar and probably some ‘aromatics’, which were an infusion of botanicals like orange peel and coriander seed.

Step two: adding the carbonation. Erasmus then had to force a large volume of carbon dioxide into this flavoured liquid. Unlike today, when you can just buy gas canisters, his team would have had to mix sodium carbonate (baking soda) with diluted sulphuric acid to produce pure carbon dioxide. The gas was stored in an inverted copper bell (a gasometer) floating in water to wash out any leftover toxic acid fumes. Then the carbon dioxide was forced under high pressure into chilled water using a steam-driven piston pump.

Because the dense sugar syrup would clog up his carbonation pumps, Erasmus couldn’t carbonate the entire mixture at once. Instead, a worker would place a precise “dose” (about 1 to 2 ounces) of the raw tonic syrup directly into the bottom of a heavy glass bottle. The bottle was then clamped into a filling machine, and high-pressure carbonated water was forced in, violently swirling and mixing with the syrup under pressure. The bottle was immediately sealed with a cork and wired shut to contain the carbonation.

(Interestingly, back in Erasmus’s day, tonic water would have been substantially more bitter, potentially containing about six times the quinine concentration of today’s versions).

Erasmus would then sell his Pitt’s Aerated Tonic Water by the case, usually wholesale to hotels and upscale grocers. Archival price lists and colonial shipping manifests show that premium aerated waters of this calibre typically cost between 3 shillings and 6 shillings per dozen bottles (which is roughly £48 in today’s prices). Which all goes to prove that Erasmus’s tonic waters were something of a luxury item – as proven by the drinkers, who were almost exclusively wealthy expats, high-ranking military officials (especially those just back from India) and middle-class Londoners seeking a digestive health aid.

None of his consumers would have thrown the glass bottles away – they usually paid a deposit of 1 to 2 shillings per dozen, refunded only when the empty bottles were sent back to the Pitt & Co. factory.

To spread the word of his new tonic water, Erasmus paid for a significant advertising campaign in the UK and abroad, even hiring some of the best-known physicians of the day to talk up the health properties of his drink – essentially early influencers.

We have the documentation from the International Exhibition of 1862, also known as the Great London Exposition, and in the official illustrated catalogue it states:

“This Aerated Water is the result of extensive chemical research, and has been submitted to several London physicians, from whom it has met with unqualified approval. It is considered by the proprietor to be of sufficient importance to patent, that being the only means by which the public can be protected against fraudulent imitations, and it is now offered under the most flattering testimonials. Its properties are antacid, cooling, and refreshing, combined with all the advantages of Soda Water; it gives strength to the stomach and tone to the whole nervous system, and is especially adapted to persons feeling depressed from mental or bodily excitement, imparting strength to those who suffer from nervous irritation, indigestion, or loss of appetite.”

One of the “flattering testimonials” is from a Dr Arthur Hill Hassall, a celebrated physician, chemist and microscopist known for his work in public health and food safety. At his Chemical and Microscopical Laboratory at 74 Wimpole Street, Hassall subjected commercial goods, foods, and household items to rigorous chemical and microscopical examination.

“I have carefully analysed Pitt’s Tonic Water. The idea of combining a tonic like quinine with an aerated water is a good one, and the practical difficulties in the way of carrying it out have been entirely overcome in this preparation.

It is a pleasant, refreshing tonic, and invigorating beverage, strengthening to the digestive organs, and calculated to promote appetite; it is also an excellent restorative to the stomach weakened by any excess or indulgence.

From its composition and properties, Pitt’s Tonic Water ought to a great extent to supersede the use of soda and other aerated waters.”

While Erasmus’s Tonic Water didn’t exactly fly off the shelf, it did establish a new market for quinine-infused tonic water – and was successful enough for him to employ “12 men and 4 boys” as stated in the 1861 Census, a not insignificant number for a maker of niche drinks.

There’s evidence of a concerted effort to sell in India, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore too (all colonial countries at the time). On 14^th July 1862, an ad appears in the Bombay Gazette that references an agent in India, which shows the beginnings of a tonic water supply chain.   

“SHORTLY will arrive from England per Ship … a small consignment of PITTS’ PATENT TONIC (Aerated Quinine) WATER, PITTS’ LONDON SODA WATER and LEMONADE, consigned to us, the undersigned.”

These exports were perfectly timed to target British officers, and the new trend of adding tonic to gin as a refreshing hot weather cocktail. Then, by the early 1870s, the gin and tonic had made its way from British India to Britain, with London newspapers reporting returning travellers asking for the drink by name.

That’s when tonic water started to go mainstream. Schweppes, already a behemoth in carbonated drinks, had largely ignored the niche ‘tonic’ craze, preferring to stick to the more popular market for soda water and lemonade. But the business now recognised the increased demand for the gin and tonic, so they introduced their Indian Tonic Water in 1870, mass-producing it in factories in London, Liverpool, Derby and Bristol.

The addition of the word ‘Indian’ gave the increasingly popular drink a name that immediately evoked the place where quinine had become part of everyday British life. It was a genius bit of branding: it suggested heat, travel and the very problem tonic had originally been designed to solve.

The rest, as they say is history. Erasmus Bond died in Isleworth, Middlesex, aged 57 in 1866, leaving an Estate worth £4,000, sizeable for the time. He couldn’t have known the tonic water he named would go as stratospheric as it did nor the impact it would have on the colonial Empire around the world.  

There’s a great and oft-repeated aphorism in popular drinks lore that’s been attributed to Churchill (although there’s no evidence he said it), that goes: “Gin and tonic has saved more Englishmen’s lives, and minds, than all the doctors in the Empire.” 

Of course he’s referring to the quinine not the cocktail – but after centuries of bitter bark, dubious medical theories, imperial expeditions, exploding bottles and a fair bit of gin, tonic water was getting its moment in the hot Indian sun.

Erasmus Bond was trying to make quinine palatable. Little did he know he was also creating one of the world’s great drinking rituals. Right, guess what cocktail I’m off to make?