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The earliest recorded experiments on specimens of the arrow poison, ‘ourali’ or ‘wourari’, were carried out in Leiden, Holland.

The University of Leiden was formed in 1575, after William the Silent, Prince of Orange, raised the siege of the city. In return for the steadfastness of its citizens, he offered them a year free of taxes or a university. They chose a university. The university soon became an important centre for scientific learning and experimentation. The Low Countries were essentially a maritime kingdom at this time with a large proportion of the population engaged in seafaring trades. Indeed, so great was its fame as a centre of seamanship that Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, had Gulliver sent to Leiden to study navigation before embarking on his adventures.

It would have been surprising if a major maritime nation, with a history of successful voyages to the East Indies, had not participated in the exploration of South America. It is probable that the first samples of the crude arrow poison were brought to the Low Countries by a voyager from one of these expeditions. It is recorded that it was being used in experiments in the University of Leiden as early as 1740.

The first recorded experiments were those of De la Condamine (1701–74), who, in the early part of the eighteenth century, gave the poison to pullets in the hope of finding a remedy for their lethal effects. Stories brought back by voyagers, including Hakluyt, had led him to believe that sugar and salt were antidotes to the arrow poison. His experiments were hardly convincing, but he recommended salt in preference to sugar! We now know that both salt and sugar are useless against the effects of curare.

Another investigator, working with the same parcel of poison in Leiden at about the same time, was an Englishman, Dr Brockelsby (1722–97). He showed that, even after the poison had been injected into the leg of a cat and ‘its breathing had appeared to cease’, its heart continued to beat for almost two hours before it finally died. This experiment demonstrated for the first time that the poison did not kill by stopping the heart.

By 1745, when the Italian Abbot, Felix Abbada Fontana (also known as Felice Fontana, 1720–1805), performed his experiments, Leiden was the most famous centre of scientific enlightenment in Europe. Fontana was a distinguished anatomist who became the director of the Natural History Museum in Florence. He is remembered today for his description of the spaces of Fontana in the eye. He had been attracted to Leiden by its reputation for intellectual freedom and scientific experimentation.

His experiments, carried out on chickens, showed that the fumes of curare did not kill or injure the birds and that their flesh was not tainted or rendered unfit to eat. However, merely piercing the skin with a lance tipped with arrow poison rapidly killed them. These experiments clearly demonstrated that the fumes of curare were not lethal and that the stories spread by the early explorers of deaths from inhaling the fumes were wrong. They were, in all probability, a cover for the ritual killing of those involved in the preparation of the poison. There is little doubt that this was carried out in order to maintain the secrecy that surrounded the preparation of the poison.