author
Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville
1739–1780
A French botanist with a taste for risk, he is best remembered for a daring journey into colonial Mexico to study and smuggle the prized cochineal insect, source of a brilliant scarlet dye. His story blends science, travel, and espionage in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world.
1 Audiobook
Memoria sobre a cultura da Urumbeba e sobre criação da Cochonilha
by Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville, Claude-Louis Berthollet, José Mariano da Conceição Velloso
About the author
Born in Saint-Mihiel, France, on 18 June 1739, he first studied law and worked as an avocat before turning to botany. That shift led him from the courtroom into the world of plants, insects, and colonial agriculture.
He became known for an audacious mission in the 1770s: traveling to Oaxaca in New Spain to learn how cochineal was cultivated and to carry the insect and its host cactus back to the French Caribbean. Cochineal was enormously valuable because it produced a rich red dye, and Spanish authorities guarded knowledge of it closely, which gives his expedition the feel of scientific adventure mixed with industrial spying.
He died in Port-au-Prince, Saint-Domingue, in 1780. His reputation rests largely on the account of his journey and on Traité de la culture du nopal, et de l'éducation de la cochenille, published after his death in 1787, which helped preserve the story of his unusual botanical quest.