A Brief History of Pernambuco and Bowmaking
- Mackenzie Miller
- Aug 22
- 6 min read
-Nadya Hill, August 2025
As a string player for the vast majority of my life, I will admit to at times lacking a little curiosity about what goes into the tools in my case. It’s easy to take for granted your violin and bow when you’re mostly worried about putting food on the table and making sure your Don Juan excerpts are ready to go at a moment’s notice.
But sometimes the most interesting stories are the ones that lie just below the surface of the things we see every day. When I started to think about it, a puzzle appeared: the materials typically used in violins, violas and cellos are materials that most craftsmen in Europe would have had fairly local access to. Maple, willow, poplar, spruce? All of these trees grow in the areas of Europe where violin making thrived. Of course there were deviations to these standards: occasionally you’ll see something wild like the walnut back on this Willems viola from 1699…
In some regions you'll see whalebone purfling...
But still, all of these materials would have been commonplace in the luthier centers of Europe. How then, did a new world tropical hardwood become the preferred material for our bows?
As we collectively mediate on the ethics and future of using pernambuco in bowmaking, it’s worth looking at the history of bowmaking, and how we started using this material in the first place.
The use of a horsehair bow “…can be traced as far back as the… 10th century….it seems likely that the principle of bowing originated among the nomadic horse riding cultures of Central Asia, whence it spread quickly through the East, so that by 1000 it had almost simultaneously reached China, Java, North Africa, the Near East and Balkans and Europe.”
- Eric Halpenny from the 1988 Encyclopædia Britannica
These bows were typically made of materials local to the maker, and existing examples range widely in material from metal to mulberry wood to bamboo.
Even by the mid-1700s, 200 years after Andrea Amati invented the violin, the materials used for bows were not standardized, and the craft of bowmaking was not yet considered particularly illustrious. As the 1785 Encyclopédia des Arts et Métiers Mécaniques states, “In Paris, there are some artisans who make bridges, others who make bows, and similar minor accessories”.
Early bow specialist David Hawthorne states, “[in the Baroque era] bows would have been made from local European woods, but eventually South American snakewood became the wood of choice for those who could afford it [for clip-in bows] because of its strength and great sound.”
- Freiberg, Sarah. Strings Magazine “How to find the Right Historical Bow” July-August 2021
Back to the original query: how was it that these tropical hardwoods found their way into the the hands of artisans in the gloom of Europe’s back streets?
In the year 1500, Portugual was heavy into seafaring exploration in hopes of finding a Western route to India, and Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the Northeastern shore of Brazil, a region named Pernambuco, for Portugual. The Portuguese quickly found a land filled with extremely profitable natural resources and an indiginous population intitially willing to trade. But perhaps most incredibly, they became aware of a beautiful red-hued tree with pigmentation so rich that even a small amount of its sawdust could be used as a vibrant textile dye.
The Portuguese aptly named the tree “pau-brasil” (ember wood), and this dye wood became such an important European import that the whole of its country of origin became known as “Brazil”, and control over the trade of this wood led to decades of battles between the colonial seafaring powers of Europe including the Portuguese, Dutch, and British (not to mention the Caribbean pirates of the 18th century, but THAT is a story for another day!). From the 1500s on, exports of snakewood (amourette) for extravagant furnature, pernambuco (pau-brasil) for textile dyes, and sugar for all things sweet and preserved started pouring into the main ports of Europe.
(Just to make a quick point: when I’m referring to “pau-brasil” or “brazilwood” in this article, I am referencing paubrasilia echinata, not the brownish wood used in cheaper trade bows which is a different species altogether.)
I would be remiss if I failed to address the dark side of this contact between Europeans and the indiginous Tupi-speaking population of Pernambuco. While the Tupi were, by all accounts, initally open to trade with the Portuguese, the Portuguese quickly began enslaving local populations in order to fulfill the immense commercial undertaking of colonializing the region. The labor required for the processing and export of sugar, pernambuco, and other tropical hardwoods was so extreme that the enslaved local population was not able to meet the demands, and Pernambuco’s capital city Recife holds the grim distinction of being the first transatlantic slave port in the Americas.
So now we come back to the streets of France and Britain, the bowmaking centers of Europe from the mid-1700s on. As musical demands at the end of the Baroque period pushed bows in a new direction, the mid 1700s saw an explosion of creativity in bowmaking. We now typically refer to the various bows from this time period as “transitional”, as they have features reminiscent of both baroque and modern bows.
One of the most drastic changes of bows from this period is a taller, more square head, and an increase of camber (curve) towards the hair, which produces a more versatile range of bow strokes and sustain.
Pernambuco in bows starts showing up in this transitional period in the 1740s in the main port cities of both England and France. By this point, due to its hardy nature and antimicrobial properties, pernambuco was being used for shipping crates and barrels for sugar, tobacco, and dye materials coming from the Americas. There are a number of apocryphal stories of either Nicolas Pierre Tourte or FX Tourte bandying about the docks of Paris looking for scraps of wood to make bows with, and ending up with some pieces of pernambuco. It’s likely that scrapped crates of pernambuco wood would have also been available in the ports of England for the Dodd and Tubbs families to repurpose in their “minor accessory making”. Additionally, there is evidence that the Tubbs family were silk weavers before engaging in “fiddlestick making”, so they would have been familiar with pernambuco’s uses in textile dyes. All of this is to say, we don’t know exactly how pernambuco started being experimented with for bowmaking, but it definitely occurred around this period of time.
During this creative transitional period, a variety of woods were used in bowmaking. Snakewood was a popular choice in the baroque era due to its beauty and density. However, according to David Hawthorne, “It turns out snakewood tends not to hold its camber very well, but pernambuco does. It is likely that while many bows throughout the 18th century would have been made from European hardwoods, most of the original transitional bows that survive today are of pernambuco”.
By the time F.X. Tourte, the great synthesizer of the modern bow, started making bows sometime around 1774 or 1775, the virtues of pernambuco as a bow wood were clearly established. Though even Tourte himself made bows of a variety of materials as is evidenced from this reciept from the Baron de Tremont acknowledging the purchase of bows by F.X. Tourte made of pernambuco “bois de bresil”, coral “Corail”, and amourette “bois de la Chine”.
Pernambuco's ability to bend with dry heat and retain shape when cooled certainly made it absolutely ideal in this new modern shape, and there has not been another wood found in the 200 years since F.X. Tourte that has the same unique combination of "sonic qualities, density, strength, and suppleness".
Anderson, Morgan. “Pernambuco and the Art of Bowmaking” October 21, 2013.
There have been a few times through the history of bowmaking that for one reason or another pernambuco was not available, and as always, necessity if the mother of invention. One particularly amusing innovation came about in the 1830s.
By the time Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume was running his Parisian workshop, pernambuco had become the predominant wood of choice for bowmakers. However, bowmakers experienced a severe shortage of the wood in the 1830s due to the War of Cabanos in Brazil. Vuillaume, ever the innovator, decided to experiment with hollow steel bows, which originally carried the same price tag as all the other incredible bows that came out of the Vuillaume shop! Both Paganini and DeBeriot used these steel bows, but they never truly caught on to a wider audience as the vast majority of players strongly preferred the playing aspects of wood, and particularly pernambuco wood bows.
Through the years, many alternatives to pernambuco in modern bowmaking have been tested— from steel to snakewood to ipe to different types of densified hardwoods… but the fact of the matter is that nothing comes close to pernambuco’s unusual combination of density, flexibility, strength, and resilience.
The legal and sustainable use of pernambuco is therefore incredibly important for both the future of string instrument music and the future of this stunning tree!