Gossypium barbadense

• 1. Introduction

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  Seven thousand eight hundred years ago, people along the coast of what is now Ecuador and Peru were already using Gossypium barbadense. Archaeologists have traced this back through seeds found on the floors of ancient houses. That same species is sold today under several more familiar names: Sea Island, Egyptian, Pima, and extra-long staple cotton. Each label points to a different place and era, but they all belong to a single plant. It accounts for only about 5% of world cotton production, yet it commands the highest prices the cotton market offers. What makes those fibers worth so much more than all the rest? And how did a plant from the coastal valleys of South America travel to South Carolina, Egypt, and the deserts of Arizona?

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• 2. Yellow Flowers, Black Seeds

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  The bolls of Gossypium barbadense split open when they mature, releasing what look like snowballs of fiber. Before those bolls form, the plant produces flowers with five petals, each up to 8 cm long and normally yellow. In Sea Island cultivars, the petals are creamy yellow with a red spot at the base, turning rose pink as they wither. When left unchecked, the plant can grow 1-3 m tall. Its leaves run 8-20 cm in length, with 3-7 lobes. Those lobes are more deeply cut than on the more commonly cultivated cotton, Gossypium hirsutum. In G. barbadense, the lobes reach about two-thirds of the leaf's length; in G. hirsutum, they reach only about one half.

  Thousands of years of cultivation have dramatically transformed the fiber of this species. Wild cottons produce so little fiber it might go unnoticed. Domesticated varieties produce far more. Some cultivars of G. barbadense produce so few short secondary fibers from the seed that they are called "lintless" or "smooth-seeded." The primary fibers, the long ones, are what cotton traders value most. The classification "extra-long staple," or ELS, entered use in 1907. Most cultivars of G. barbadense produce fibers long enough to meet that standard.

  Each boll is divided into three sections, and each section holds 5-8 seeds. Each seed measures 8-10 mm in length. The fiber from those seeds, shaped by centuries of selection, drew planters in South Carolina toward an unusual experiment in the late 18th century.

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• 3. From Dooryard to Export

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  At a site in the Ñachoc valley in northern Peru, investigators studying cotton from roughly 5,500 years ago reached a surprising conclusion. The plants there could not have been domesticated locally. G. barbadense must have been cultivated somewhere else first, then carried to the valley. A second body of evidence shows widespread use across Ecuador and Peru by about 5,000 years ago. Botanists tracking the species' genetic diversity point to the area around the Guayas Estuary in Ecuador and an island off the coast of Manta as the likely origin. That is where the forms most closely resembling wild plants survive today.

  By 1,000 BCE, cotton bolls grown in Peru were already indistinguishable from modern cultivars. Christopher Columbus found G. barbadense being grown in the West Indies as what was called a dooryard crop: single plants positioned near residences. The term captures the plant's role at that time. It was a domestic resource, not a commercial one.

  During the 17th century, English colonists in the West Indies began developing cotton as a cash crop. Plantations were established, worked by white indentured servants and enslaved Black people. By the 1650s, Barbados had become the first English colony in the West Indies to export cotton to Europe. By the late 1700s and early 1800s, G. barbadense was a major commercial crop across the West Indies. In the early 19th century, sugar cane proved more lucrative, and cotton production was largely set aside.

  The Columbian exchange moved cotton in all directions across the globe. New World cottons traveled to the Old World; Old World cottons arrived in the New World; and cotton reached places it had never grown before. In some of those regions, multiple species ended up growing side by side, before growers eventually settled on one for each location.

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• 4. Sea Island's Rise and Fall

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  The winter of 1785-1786 was unusually mild along the coast of Georgia, and that accident of weather changed the future of American cotton. Planters there had been trying for years to establish G. barbadense, but frost killed the plants before they could produce seed or fiber. That one mild winter allowed a few plants to survive and set seed. The next generation could produce both seed and fiber before winter arrived.

  Historical records credit Kinsey Burden with developing the particularly high-quality cotton that came to define the Sea Islands' reputation. He accomplished this in the first decade of the 1800s through seed selection on Burden's Island and Johns Island in South Carolina. The variety he developed commanded the highest price of any cotton on the market. Its staple length ran 1.5-2.5 inches and its texture was famously silky. It was used for the finest cotton counts and often blended with silk. By 1803, the Charleston market formally recognized Sea Island as a separate class, alongside South Carolina upland, West Indian, and Mississippi cotton.

  The cultivar "Seabrook" was named after plantation proprietor William Seabrook. "Bleak Hall" took its name from the plantation managed by John Townsend. Named cultivars like these gave individual growers a way to build a reputation in the market. An incident in the early 20th century shows how seriously seed selection was taken. The best selectors, to prevent West Indies planters from benefiting from their work, stopped selling seed even to their own neighbors. The result was a decline in quality across the entire Sea Island region.

  Sea Island cotton never fully recovered from the disruptions of the U.S. Civil War. In the early 20th century, the boll weevil caused tremendous damage in traditional cotton-growing regions of the United States. Sea Island cultivars were especially susceptible, and wet island conditions created a soil environment that further favored the insect. Commercial production of Sea Island cotton ended in 1920.

  From 2007-2019, "Bleak Hall" ranked as the third most requested seed from the National Cotton Germplasm Collection's G. barbadense sub-collection.

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• 5. Egypt to Arizona

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  In 1820, a French engineer named Jumel spotted an unusual plant growing as an ornamental in a garden in Cairo. He recognized it as a potentially valuable source of fiber. The plant had been growing in the region for some time already, but Jumel was the first to see its commercial potential. Based on its description, it appears to have been the long-fiber form of G. barbadense recently developed in the Americas. His observation launched what would become the Egyptian cotton market class.

  Egyptian growers, encouraged by the early success of Jumel's cotton, began testing other seeds, including Sea Island cultivars. The next major cultivar, "early Ashmouni," was likely a hybrid between Jumel's cotton and a Sea Island cultivar. The one that followed, "Mit Afifi," was likely a hybrid between early Ashmouni and another Sea Island cultivar. Many more cultivars followed over subsequent decades. In the second half of the 19th century, cotton production in Egypt expanded dramatically. The growth of irrigation systems played a role, as did the increased demand created by the U.S. Civil War.

  Around 1900, the United States led production in every major cotton market class except Egyptian. H. J. Webber and colleagues at the USDA believed Egyptian long-staple cotton would thrive in the irrigated deserts of the southwestern United States. On behalf of the USDA, David Fairchild traveled to Egypt in 1902 and returned with several Egyptian cultivars. A team led by Thomas H. Kearney spent roughly a decade selecting among those cultivars. The first commercially successful result was named "Yuma," after the Arizona town near the experiment station where Kearney's team worked. His second successful cultivar was named "Pima." It dominated irrigated lands in the southwestern United States from 1918 to at least 1941. The United States government formally adopted the name "American Pima" in 1970. As of 2005, American Pima accounts for less than 5% of U.S. cotton production. It is grown mainly in California, with smaller acreages in West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

  The Egyptian market class also covers Sudan, which was once part of Egypt. Growers there produce cottons across a range of fiber lengths, from extra-long staple to long-staple.

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• 6. Trademarks, Tires, and Tanguis

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  Caribbean growers received their first commercial quantities of long-fiber G. barbadense seed in 1902. For several years they planted with Sea Island cultivars, but then Sea Island producers stopped exporting seed. From that point, the genetics of cotton in the two regions began to diverge. In 1933, Caribbean producers formed the West Indian Sea Island Cotton Association. The WISICA mark is available to makers of yarn and finished goods from Sea Island of the Caribbean cotton that meet the organization's quality standards. The market class benefits from the reputation of 19th century Sea Island cotton, but Caribbean residents have been reluctant to produce it, partly because of its historical association with slavery.

  G. barbadense fiber has served as the cord material in automobile tires and as cloth for aircraft wings. It is also used for sewing machine thread and for fine textiles including lace and high thread-count cloth. Fine yarn requires long fiber, and G. barbadense provides some of the longest. A group of southwestern United States growers established the trademark Supima for products made from American Pima fiber.

  In Peru, a market class called Tanguis developed directly from local wild populations of G. barbadense. As of 2011, Tanguis accounts for roughly 80% of Peru's cotton production. Its fiber is shorter and rougher than that of other modern market classes, but it has unique properties suited to specific industrial applications.

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