An Edible History of Humanity

by Tom Standage

  The idea of finding spices in the Americas outlived Columbus. In 1518 Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish missionary to the New World, claimed that the new Spanish colonies were “very good” for ginger, cloves, and pepper. The conquistador Hernán Cortés found lots of gold, plundering it from the Aztecs in the course of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, but even he felt bad about his failure to deliver any nutmeg or cloves. He insisted in letters back to the king of Spain that he would, in time, find the route to the spice islands. In the 1540s another conquistador, Gonzalo Pizarro, scoured the Amazon jungle in a doomed search for the legendary city of El Dorado and the “país de la canela,” or cinnamon country. It was not until the seventeenth century that the search for Old World spices in the Americas was finally abandoned.

  Of course, the Americas offered the rest of the world all kinds of new foodstuffs, including maize, potatoes, squash, chocolate, tomatoes, pineapples, and new flavorings, including vanilla and allspice. And though Columbus failed to find the spices he sought in the New World, he found something that was, in some respects, even better. “There is plenty of aji,” he wrote in his log, “which is their pepper, which is more valuable than black pepper, and all the people eat nothing else, it being very wholesome. Fifty caravels might be annually loaded with it.” This was the chile, and although it was not pepper, it could be used in a similar way. An Italian observer at the Spanish court noted that five grains were hotter and had more flavor than twenty grains of ordinary pepper from Malabar. Better still, the chile could be grown easily outside its region of origin, unlike most spices, so it quickly spread around the world and had been assimilated into Asian cooking within a few decades.

  But despite the chile’s culinary virtues, it was not what Columbus wanted. The ease with which it could be transplanted from one region to another meant it did not have the financial value of traditional spices, which was due in large part to the geographical limitations of their supply and the need for long-distance transport. More importantly, however, Columbus wanted to find the Old World spices not simply for their taste or value, but because he wanted to prove that he really had arrived in Asia. That was why he sowed confusion for centuries to come by calling chiles “peppers” and the people he found in the Bahamas “Indians,” in each case naming them after what he had set out to find. For to find the source of spices was to have arrived in the Indies, the exotic and aromatic lands described by Marco Polo and others whose tales had bewitched Europeans for so many centuries.

  “CHRISTIANS AND SPICES”

  Spices were not one of the original goals of the Portuguese program to explore the west coast of Africa, which was launched in the 1420s by Infante Henrique of Portugal (known in English as Prince Henry the Navigator, yet another nineteenth-century coinage). Henry’s aims were to learn more of the geography of the coast and nearby islands, establish trade links, and perhaps make contact with Prester John, the legendary Christian ruler of a kingdom thought to be somewhere in Africa or the Indies, who would be a valuable ally against the Muslims. As Henry’s ships worked their way down the African coast, each going a little farther than the last, they disproved the ancient Greek notion that the earth eventually became too hot for human habitation. They brought back gold, slaves, and “grains of paradise,” an inferior pepper-like spice that was vaguely known in Europe since it was sometimes traded across the Sahara to the Mediterranean. They looked for an outlet of the Nile, in the hope of following it upstream to find Prester John. But as the fifteenth century progressed, the European need to find an alternative route to the Indies became steadily more urgent. The Portuguese ships pushed south and eventually, in 1488, Bartholomeu Dias rounded Africa’s southern cape by accident after being swept out into the Atlantic by a storm and then heading east. He returned to Lisbon with the news that contrary to the opinion of some of the ancients, the Indian Ocean was not landlocked and could be reached from the Atlantic—and so, by extension, could India.

  So why did it take nearly nine years for Portugal to send an expedition to India? Or ganizing a fleet would have taken time, but Columbus’s discoveries in the Atlantic may also have been responsible for the delay. If he really had found a westerly route to the east, then going all the way around Africa would be unnecessary. But when Columbus returned from his second voyage in 1496 with very little to show for it, the Portuguese regained their enthusiasm for an expedition to India around the southern tip of Africa. The ships sailed the following year. As a chronicler of the time succinctly put it: “In the year 1497, the King Manuel, the first of that name in Portugal, sent four ships out, which left on a quest for spices, captained by Vasco da Gama.”

  The voyage was characterized by religious confusion and rivalry. Having rounded the cape and worked their way up Africa’s east coast, da Gama and his men were mistaken for Muslims by the sultan of Mocobiquy (Mozambique). He promised to provide them with a pi lot who could guide them to India, but then realized his error. A fight ensued and da Gama’s ships bombarded the town, killing at least two people. Further run-ins with local Muslims followed as the Portuguese tried in vain to get hold of a pi lot. At Malindi, farther up the African coast, da Gama then mistook the Hindu residents for Christians of an unknown sect. After picking up an expert pi lot the Portuguese ships then headed across the Indian Ocean to India’s Malabar coast, where they anchored near Calicut (modern Kozhikode) on May 20, 1498. As was customary da Gama sent ashore a degredado, usually a criminal or an outcast who was deemed to be expendable, to make contact with the locals. The Indians could not understand him and took him to the house of some resident Muslim merchants from Tunisia. “What the devil brought you here?” they asked the man. “We came in search of Christians and spices,” he replied.

  Though the latter were clearly present in abundance in Calicut, the former were not. But da Gama and his men thought otherwise, assuming that the local Hindus were Christians, falling to their knees in Hindu temples, and mistaking depictions of Hindu goddesses for the Virgin Mary and images of Hindu gods for Christian saints. The king, or zamorin, of Calicut was assumed to be a Christian too, and therefore a natural ally against the resident Muslim traders. But he was deeply unimpressed by the trinkets the Portuguese offered (red hats and copper vessels, which were standard trade items on the west coast of Africa). He may have had a distant memory of the appearance in Calicut of Zheng He’s treasure fleets, just a few decades earlier, which had offered rich silks in return for spices; more was expected of mysterious foreigners than da Gama’s paltry offerings. Da Gama attributed the zamorin’s disappointment to the malign influence of the Muslims, and claimed that his ships were merely the vanguard of a much larger treasure fleet, which of course never materialized. So he headed home with only small amounts of pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger, arriving back in Lisbon in September 1499. Only two of his ships and fewer than half his men had survived the voyage—but da Gama’s expedition had shown that it was possible to circumvent the Muslim curtain and obtain spices directly from India.

  King Manuel was delighted, and was soon styling himself “Lord of Guinea and of the Conquest, the Navigation and the Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, and India.” This was of course an enormous exaggeration, but it left no doubt of his intent: to wrest control of the spice trade from the Muslims. Manuel spelled this out in a gloating letter to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, in which he explained that his explorers “did reach and discover India and other kingdoms bordering upon it . . . entered and navigated its sea, finding large cities . . . and great populations among whom is carried on all the trade in spices and precious stones.” He went on to express his hope that “with the help of God the great trade which now enriches the Moors of these parts . . . shall in consequence of our own regulations be diverted to the natives and ships of our own kingdom so that henceforth all Christendom in this part of the world shall be provided with these spices.” Manuel wanted to establish a Portuguese spice monopoly, in short, ostensibly for religious reasons—though
obviously there would be commercial benefits too.

  Yet how could tiny Portugal hope to displace the throng of Muslim ships in the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles away? Da Gama’s men had counted “about fifteen hundred Moorish vessels arriving in search of spices” during the three months they spent in Calicut. But they had also noticed something rather interesting about these ships: they were unarmed. This was standard practice in the Indian Ocean, where there was no dominant political or military power; even the Muslims were divided into several distinct communities. Instead what united the region was trade, based around a handful of major ports and a few dozen smaller ones. In each port traders from different communities could find ware houses to store their goods, banking services, access to local markets, and often a quarter of the city where their fellows resided and their own laws applied. Ports competed to offer the lowest tariffs and attract the highest volume of trade. There was a strong sense of reciprocity: If the police in a particular port mistreated foreign merchants, local merchants were just as likely to complain, since such behavior might lead to retaliation in other ports and undermine trade, which would be bad for everyone. Occasionally local rulers might try to control trade within a particular area using force; but all that did was divert business elsewhere. So unarmed trade was the norm.

  Portugal could have gone along with this system, paying Asian authorities for the use of port facilities and handing over tariffs in the usual way. But the Portuguese were used to the way things worked in the Mediterranean, where the use of force to protect sea lanes, shipping, and trading colonies had prevailed since Greco-Roman times. Besides, Portugal did not merely hope to participate in the Indian Ocean trade; it wanted to dominate it, and force the Muslims out. All this soon became apparent during the second Portuguese voyage to India, consisting of thirteen ships under the command of Pedro Alvarez Cabral, which set out in March 1500, less than six months after da Gama’s return. As the ships headed south and west into the Atlantic they made an unexpected landfall on the thitherto unknown South American mainland, thus claiming Brazil for Portugal—another unexpected consequence of the search for spices. One ship went back to Lisbon with the news, while the rest pressed on around the African coast, arriving in Calicut in September. Hostilities began almost at once: Cabral’s men captured some Muslim ships, and in response the Muslims seized and killed around forty Portuguese merchants in the town. Cabral responded by seizing more Muslim ships and setting them on fire with their crews still aboard. Next, his ships bombarded Calicut for two days, terrifying the inhabitants, before moving on to the ports of Cochin (modern Kochi) and Cannanore (modern Kannur) where the local rulers, keen to avoid a similar fate, allowed the Portuguese to establish trading posts on generous terms.

  Cabral’s ships then headed back to Portugal, laden with spices. His arrival in July 1501 was greeted with jubilation in Lisbon and dismay in Venice. “This was considered very bad news for Venice,” noted one chronicler. “Truly the Venetian merchants are in a bad way.” For as well as bringing the first big shipment of spices around the Muslim curtain to Europe, the Portuguese also seemed to have disrupted the Red Sea supply. In 1502 Venetian ships arriving in the Mamluk ports of Beirut and Alexandria found that there was very little pepper to be had, causing prices to rocket and prompting some observers to forecast the ruin of Venice. The number of galleys in its merchant fleet was reduced from thirteen to three, and rather than sending its fleet to Alexandria twice a year, as had previously been the custom, Venice started sending the fleet every other year instead.

  Portuguese belligerence reached new heights in the course of the third voyage to India, commanded by Vasco da Gama. His ships ransacked ports on Africa’s east coast, exacting booty and demanding tribute. On arrival in India, da Gama arbitrarily burned and bombarded towns on the coast in order to force key ports to buy a cartaz from him. This was a permit that granted protection to the port and its ships, and it was only issued on payment of a fee and with a promise not to trade with Muslims—a protection racket, in other words. Da Gama and his men also sank and looted Muslim and local vessels, on one occasion using prisoners for crossbow practice; the hands, noses, and ears of the remaining prisoners were cut off and sent ashore in a boat, and the mutilated people were tied up and burned to death in one of their own ships. Finally, Da Gama negotiated an agreement with the pepper suppliers in Cochin, loaded up with spices, and headed home, sinking a local fleet that had been sent to exact revenge and bombarding Calicut once again for good measure on the way.

  This set the tone for the Portuguese efforts to control Indian Ocean trade; any ship or port without a cartaz was deemed to be fair game, local rulers were intimidated into trading on terms generous to the Portuguese, and violence was used arbitrarily and unsparingly. Further expeditions were sent by King Manuel with orders to establish bases in key locations and harass Muslim ships traveling between India and the Red Sea, so that “they are not able to carry any spices to the territory of the [Mamluk] sultan and everyone in India would lose the illusion of being able to trade with anyone but us.” Portugal took Goa, on India’s west coast, in 1510, making it its main base in the Indian Ocean, and the following year took Malacca, the main distribution point for nutmeg and cloves from the mysterious spice islands, the Moluccas, which lay farther east. Soon afterward a Portuguese expedition finally reached those islands, which had been sought for so long, and informal trade relations were established. Nutmegs and mace were to be found on the nearby Banda islands.

  The Portuguese had found the very sources of the spice trade, but their plan to take control of Europe’s spice supply from the Muslims ultimately failed. The Indian Ocean was simply too big. At best, Portugal controlled some 10 percent of the Malabar pepper trade and perhaps 75 percent of the flow of spices to Eu rope, but its attempts to blockade Muslim shipping were never more than partially effective, and by 1560 the flow of spices taken by Muslim traders to Alexandria had recovered to their previous levels. But even though Portugal failed in its efforts to establish a spice monopoly, it did succeed in defining a new model for European trade in the East, based on monopolies and blockades enforced by armed ships from a network of trading posts, which was quickly adopted by its European rivals. Appropriately enough, the rivalries between these emerging colonial powers centered on the Moluccas themselves.

  THE SEEDS OF EMPIRE

  Spices helped to lure Columbus westward, where none were to be found, and da Gama eastward, where they could be found in abundance. And as if to crown their achievements in establishing new sea routes, spices also inspired the first circumnavigation of the earth. In 1494 Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, which included a simple way to divide up the new lands reached by their explorers. They ruled a line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between the Cape Verde islands off the African coast (which were claimed by Portugal) and Hispaniola (which Columbus had just claimed for Spain). Any new lands to the west of the line, it was agreed, would belong to Spain, and those to the east would belong to Portugal; the opinions of the inhabitants were considered to be irrelevant. It subsequently transpired that part of South America, unknown at the time of the treaty, lay to the east of the line, but the agreement clearly stated that it belonged to Portugal, so Portuguese it became. It all seemed very neat and tidy until the Portuguese reached the Moluccas, on the other side of the world. Which side of the line were they on? The 1494 treaty had not specified a dividing line in the Pacific, but the logical way to draw one was to extend the Atlantic meridian right around the earth—in which case, Spain suspected, the spice islands might fall into the hemisphere it considered its property. A Spanish expedition was duly dispatched to establish the precise location of the spice islands and claim them for the Spanish crown.

  Oddly enough the expedition was led by a Portuguese navigator, Ferdinand Magellan, who had fallen from favor in the Portuguese court, renounced his nationality, and offered his services to Spain instead. His ships headed west acro
ss the Atlantic in 1519 and were the first to cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the passage now known as the Strait of Magellan, at the southern tip of South America. Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines in 1521 when he intervened in a dispute between two local chieftains, but the expedition sailed on and reached the Moluccas.

  After loading up with cloves, one of Magellan’s ships, the Victoria, captained by Juan Sebastian Elcano, then continued westward to arrive back in Seville in 1522. The 26 tons of cloves on board covered the entire cost of the expedition, and Elcano was awarded a coat of arms embellished with cinnamon sticks, nutmegs, and cloves. The voyage had proved decisively that the world was round and that the oceans were connected. A crew member on the voyage, a wealthy Italian named Antonio Pigafetta, who kept a detailed diary, also noted something unusual when the ship stopped for supplies at the Cape Verde islands on the way back to Spain: It was the wrong day, “for we had always made our voyage westward and had returned to the same place of departure as the sun, wherefore the long voyage had brought the gain of twenty-four hours, as is clearly seen.” But the circumnavigation did not resolve the dispute over the ownership of the Moluccas. That was eventually decided by another treaty, in 1529, when the Spanish abandoned their geo graphically dubious claim in return for a payment of 350,000 gold ducats from Portugal. And ultimately the question of who was entitled to the Moluccas was rendered moot by the union of the crowns of Spain and Portugal in 1580.