Cinchona ledgeriana" had a yield of 8 to 13 percent quinine in bark grown in Dutch Indonesia which effectively out-competed the British Indian production. It was only later that the English saw the value and sought to obtain the seeds of "C. ledgeriana" from the Dutch. During World War II, the Japanese conquered Java and the United States lost access to the cinchona plantations that supplied war-critical quinine medication. Botanical expeditions – called Cinchona Missions – were launched in 1942-1944 to explore promising areas of South America in an effort to locate cinchona species that contained quinine and could be harvested
Hugh Algernon Weddell des environs de Paris (1845). In 1843, he was invited to join the expedition of François Louis de la Porte, comte de Castelnau to South America, and he explored and collected botanical specimens on that continent for five years. In May 1845, Weddell left the expedition which was then in Paraguay, and proceeded on a solitary journey which would take him into Peru and Bolivia. Before leaving Paris, he had been particularly instructed by the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle to undertake a thorough investigation of the "Cinchona" plant, or "fever bark" tree in its native habitat. "Cinchona", the source of