Wicked Plants Read Free Page B

for the bean’s toxic effects. It works like nerve gas, disrupting the lines of communication between nerves and muscles. The result is copious saliva, seizures, and loss of control over bladder and bowels; eventually, as it becomes impossible to control the respiratory system, death by asphyxiation will occur.
    Its chemical composition, along with a little armchair psychology, may explain why the plant had such different effects on the poor souls facing a trial by ordeal. A person who knew they were innocent might chew the bean quickly and swallow it with pride, ingesting a quick dose that would cause them to vomit before the bean could do more damage. A guilty party, dreading death, might take tiny, slow bites. Ironically, this attempt to prolong their own life would only hasten their death by delivering a gradual, well-digested dose of poison.
    By the 1860s Calabar beans were the talk of London. Dr. James Livingstone returned from Africa with an account of a poison he called
muave
and noted that tribal chiefs would volunteer to drink the
muave
to prove their innocence, their strength of character, or to demonstrate that they had not been the victim of witchcraft. Mary Kingsley, a pioneering explorer who broke many taboos by traveling alone to previously unexplored parts of Africa, wrote in 1897 about an oath some tribal members would make before taking an ordeal poison they called Mbiam: “If I have been guilty of this crime . . . Then, Mbiam! THOU deal with me!”
    These frightening chants did not stop intrepid British scientists from testing the beans on themselves. In an 1866 London
Times
story titled “Scientific Martyrdom,” Sir Robert Christison is described as havingcome “very near killing himself in testing the effect of the recently introduced Calabar bean upon his own organism . . . and was as nearly face to face with death as a man well can be and yet escape its jaws.”

TANGHIN POISON-NUT
Cerbera tanghin
    Employed in Madagascar, this relative to the suicide tree
Cerbera odol-lam
is poisonous in all parts; even smoke from the burning wood can be toxic. However, the nuts deliver the poison in the most convenient form for trial by ordeal.

SASSY BARK OR CASCA BARK
Erythrophleum guineense
or
E. judiciale
    Observed in use along the banks of the Congo, the curvy, reddish-brown bark of this tree is toxic enough to stop the heart. Ranchers know to keep their cattle away from it, because it could even kill a steer. Other names for the tree include “ordeal bark” and “doom bark.”

STRYCHNINE TREE
Strychnos nux-vomica
    The seed of the strychnine tree is a potent enough poison to make it useful as an ordeal bean. Any prisoner offered
nux vomica
seeds to prove their innocence would be well advised to do some fast talking and suggest another ordeal poison, because the strychnine is far more likely to cause convulsions and death by asphyxiation than vomiting.

UPAS TREE
Antiaris toxicaria
    This Indonesian tree produces a toxic sap that’s also useful as an arrow poison. It was once (falsely) believed to produce narcotic fumes, and tales circulated that prisoners were being put to death simply by tying them to the upas tree and letting its sap and fumes slowly poison the condemned.

ILLEGAL

Coca
    ERYTHROXYLUM COCA
    In 1895 Sigmund Freud wrote to a colleague that “a cocainization of the left nostril had helped me to an amazing extent.” A modest, medium-sized shrub had transformed Freud’s entire outlook on life. “In the last few days I have felt quite unbelievably well,” he wrote, “as though everything had been erased . . . I have felt wonderful, as though there never had been anything wrong at all.”
    FAMILY :
Erythroxylaceae
    HABITAT :
Tropical rain forest
    NATIVE TO :
South American
    COMMON NAME :
Cocaine
    Archaeological evidence shows that coca leaves were placed between the cheek and gum as a mild stimulant as early as 3000 BC. When the Incas came into power in Peru, the ruling class seized