Cinchona lost their plants when a wave took them off their ship. The Dutch sent Justus Hasskarl who brought plants that were then cultivated in Java from 1854. The English explorer Clements Markham went to collect plants that were introduced in Sri Lanka and the Nilgiris of southern India in 1860. The main species introduced were "Cinchona succirubra" or red bark, as its sap turned red on contact with air, and "Cinchona calisaya". The alkaloids quinine and cinchonine were extracted by Pelletier and Caventou in 1820. Later two more key alkaloids, quinidine and cinchonidine were identified and it became a routine
Cinchona was finally described carefully by the astronomer Charles Marie de la Condamine who visited Quito in 1735 on a quest to measure an arc of the meridian. The species he described, "Cinchona officinalis," was however found to be of little therapeutic value. The first living plants seen in Europe were "C. calisaya" plants grown at the "Jardin des Plantes" from seeds collected by Hugh Algernon Weddell from Bolivia in 1846. José Celestino Mutis, physician to the Viceroy of Nueva Granada, Pedro Messia de la Cerda gathered information on cinchona in Colombia from 1760 and wrote a manuscript "El Arcano de