The poison in this case is supposed to have been the Manchineel (Hippomane).
It is a handsome tree, but a very dangerous one, for the slightest cut on the surface produces a flow of a very fine white milk which is acrid and poisonous. This juice produces temporary or total blindness if the slightest speck enters the eyes, or even if one sits over a fire made of its wood. It is probably not true that people are killed if they merely sleep below it, and grass will probably grow quite well under its shade, although there are stories which deny this. Blowpipes and poisoned darts are used by many savages in Asia and South America. Perhaps the Curare or Woorali poison is the most wonderful of the South American kinds. The tree, Strychnos sp., grows along the Amazon and in the Guianas. The poison is obtained from the wood and bark, and several other vegetable substances are mixed with it. (This is a very common feature of native drugs and increases the chances of doing something.) It is a blood poison, and a very deadly one. Large animals like the tapir stagger about, collapse, and die after a very few steps, if they have been wounded by a dart. Humboldt declares that the earth-eating Otomaks were able to kill their antagonists by the mere pressure of their poisoned thumbnails.
In Africa it is more usual to find poisoned arrows shot from a bow. The exquisitely beautiful seed of Strophanthus Kombe is used as an arrow poison. The plant is a climber found in forests or bush, and has large woody pods about seven to twelve inches long. When these are open, the inside is seen to be full of the small yellowish seeds; each ends in a fine awn three to four inches long, which carries at the end a beautiful tuft of the finest silky hairs. The seed-coat is also covered with silk hairs. When viewed against a black surface, there is no more lovely object in nature. Yet from the seed-coat a very deadly poison is obtained; probably snake-venom and various gluey substances form part of the mixture, which is daubed on the arrows. Dr. Kolbe saw the Hottentots plastering their arrows with the poison of the hooded snake. Bushmen use a Lily bulb, Haemanthus toxicarius, but sometimes add part of the inside of a small caterpillar.
Another African poison which is not so well known is the Acokanthera, which was the ingredient in the arrows obtained by the writer in British East Africa.
North America is singularly free from these unsportsmanlike and horrible weapons, but they were not unknown in Europe in very ancient times. Pliny speaks of the Arabian pirates as poisoners, and allusions to their use of deadly arrows can be found in Horace, Ovid, and Homer. In the Odyssey, the hero goes to Ephyra (Epirus?) to purchase a deadly arrow poison, but he is refused for fear of the eternal gods. Poisoned arrows were employed by the Celts in Gaul, and also by the Saracens in the War of Granada in 1484.
Yet even in the time of Homer the sense of humanity seems to have decided against poisoned arrows as being both unnecessary and cruel, just as, in our own times, explosive bullets have been condemned, and are no longer used by civilized nations. But we should remember that until man became so expert with the bow and spear and so civilized by tribal fights as to be able to do without poisons, they were a very useful help in the struggle for civilization. Hundreds of thin pieces of bamboo about six inches long were regularly carried by certain African tribes. When dipped in poison and afterwards placed in paths in the ground, they formed a very efficient protection against barefooted enemies.
The Antiaris alluded to above is the famous Upas tree of Java. The tree was said to grow in a desert with not another living plant within ten miles of it. Such was the virulence of its poison that there were no fish in the waters. Neither rat, nor mouse, nor any other vermin had ever been seen there; and when any birds flew so near this tree that the effluvia reached them, they fell dead—a sacrifice to the effects of its poison. Out of a population of sixteen hundred persons who were compelled, on account of civil dissensions, to reside within twelve or fourteen miles of the tree, not more than three hundred remained alive in two months. Criminals condemned to die were offered the chance of life if they would go to the Upas tree and collect some of the poison. They were provided with masks (not unlike our modern motor-veils), and yet not two in twenty returned from the expedition.
All the foregoing statements were for years implicitly believed. They were vouched for by a Dutch surgeon resident in Java. Medicine is a profession, and Holland is a country which would in no way lead one to expect such magnificent mendacious audacity!
For the whole of the preceding statements about Antiaris is pure romance. The inner bark of young trees, when made into coarse garments, produces an extremely painful itching, whilst the dried juice is a virulent arrow poison.
Hellebore and Aconite were the favourite poisons of the Marquise de Brinvilliers and other specialists of the Middle Ages. The Christmas Roses or Hellebores were known to be poisonous fourteen hundred years before the Christian era, and are still used in medicine. Aconite, which has a tuberous root-stock, is dangerous, for it is occasionally eaten in mistake for the horse-radish, to which it has a faint resemblance. All kinds of aconite are poisonous. That of one of the Indian species is used to tip the arrows employed in shooting tigers.