The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice

by Michael Krondl

  THE CAIXA

  Lisbon is full of sailors. Still, I had not expected that my official tour guide at the Museu de Marinha would greet me at the entry of the naval museum decked out in the glimmering white of a Portuguese navy uniform. Despite his outfit, it turns out that the navy does not pay Lieutenant Bruno Gonçalves Neves to serve upon the roiling seas but rather to dig through dusty archives. I soon realize that the young officer’s polite, military demeanor has done nothing to discipline his fascination with bizarre detail that is every historian’s stock-in-trade. As he leads me into the gallery devoted to “the age of discovery,” he makes sure to point out the location of the storerooms and kitchens on the elaborately detailed ships’ models—mostly, it seems, so that he can expound (with barely a flicker of amusement in his earnest brown eyes) on the rats and ship’s biscuit worms that must have made up a good share of common seamen’s protein ration after several months on board. Lieutenant Neves has made the Carreira da Índia his specialty, and he is more than happy to share its every grisly detail.

  He steers me past the display cases full of Lilliputian naus and caravels to a large, ornate wooden crate, about the size of an old-fashioned telephone booth set on its side. It was these caixas de liberdade—these “liberty chests,” he notes breezily—that really kept the East India fleet afloat. “You see, the Portuguese kings could never afford to pay their sailors a decent wage,” he explains, “so instead of an adequate salary, they got to fill these boxes with spice.” He searches for the right word. “It was like a tip or a bonus.” Crown employees could transport what they wished in the caixas, free of duty or freight charges, a little like the duty-free allowance that overseas tourists have today. The chests were a regulation size, and seamen were awarded one or more caixas depending on their rank—a nice little bonus if they came back filled with pepper but a princely gratuity if they returned packed with cinnamon. The finely carved crate at the museum must have belonged to an officer and could hold close to a ton of pepper, worth some six hundred ducats on the Lisbon market, or more than twice that value if it held cinnamon.*27 A captain was entitled to almost ten tons of spice, while a common sailor could bring home about three hundred pounds, an amount worth several years’ wages if his caixa was filled with one of the more expensive spices. A big wooden box full of cloves at least begins to explain why someone would endure the hardships involved in the passage to India.

  In the words of an Italian Jesuit who made the trip in 1574, the Carreira da Índia was “without doubt the greatest and most arduous [ journey] of any that are known in the world.” It was more difficult by several orders of magnitude than anything Italians engaged in the Mediterranean spice trade had to endure. An earlier Portuguese historian had boasted that the navigation of the ancients was as child’s play compared to what the Portuguese accomplished. As far as he was concerned, the legendary Argonauts were barely better than weekend sailors, traveling a mere three hundred to five hundred leagues, “dining in one port, supping in another, consuming many refreshments, and stopping frequently for water, with the result that their voyages were more of a pastime than toil.” Though the comparison is a little over-the-top, Lieutenant Neves assures me that you could hardly overstate the perils of the India route.*28

  There are plenty of firsthand accounts of the miseries of the carreira, but ask a Portuguese navy historian to suggest a good source on the cape spice route, and he will inevitably point you to a book written by a Dutchman. The little Iberian kingdom never produced enough sailors to man every spritsail and ratline in its navy, and as a result, it had long been common for other nationals to join up—though, in this case, if the higher-ups had known the consequences, they would never have let this particular foreigner on board.

  The book was written by Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, a Netherlander who had grown up in the little port town of Enkhuizen in the north of Holland. The sixteen-year-old Jan left home to seek his fortune in Seville, where his brothers had relocated earlier. He arrived in 1580, just in time to witness the Spanish annexation of Portugal. A couple of years later, with the help of one of the brothers, he managed to find a position in the entourage of the newly appointed archbishop of Goa and sailed for India. Then, after spending some nine years abroad, he returned home, where he wrote down his observations. The resulting exposé of the Estado da Índia turned out to be a bestseller, not only in Holland but in England and France, too. The book was full of information that Lisbon considered state secrets. Any Portuguese who wrote what Linschoten did would have been quickly relieved of his head. And with good reason. The Dutch later used Linschoten’s book as an instruction manual on how to beat the Portuguese at their own game.

  There is more to the book, though, than just the dry data of the secretive spice trade. The twenty-eight-year-old Dutchman managed to combine a shopkeeper’s attention to detail with a social scientist’s curiosity, so that even while he gave his readers a comprehensive catalog of hardheaded business information, he also included an almost anthropological survey of foreign lands and cultures. And, for good measure, a dose of sex seasoned the mix. He explained the commodities needed to buy pepper (gold), the best places to buy spices (Cochin and Malacca), but then he also revealed, in intimate detail, the libidinous escapades of Goa’s mestiza women.*29

  His description of his outward voyage to India is delightfully informative. Not only does he give the breakdown of the wages paid to just about every one of the five hundred men on board, he tells us what they got to eat and drink. (The translation dates from 1598.)

  All the officers and other persons which sayle in the ship…have for their portion every day in victuals, each man a like, as well the greatest as the least, a pound and three quarters of Biskit, halfe a Can of Wine [probably the Portuguese canada, equaling 1.4 liters], a Can of water, an Arroba which is 32 pound of salt flesh the moneth, some dryed fish, onyons and garlicke are eaten in the beginning of the voyage, as being of small valew, other provisions, as Suger, Honny, Reasons, Prunes, Ryse, and such like, are kept for those which are sicke: yet they get but little thereof, for that the officers keepe it for themselves…as for the dressing [cooking] of their meate, wood, pots, and pans, every man must make his owne provision.

  The ships of the Carreira da Índia were a far cry from the little caravels that had slipped in and out of African coves. They were vessels of five hundred, six hundred, even one thousand tons that were constructed like giant wooden warehouses with a modest-sized town perched on top. On the outgoing trip, they might hold anywhere between five hundred and a thousand people in a space about the size of a large American suburban house. The upper-class passengers, officers, and clergy could count on proportionately more room, leaving the rest packed even tighter. Yet on a ship swarming with six hundred people, no more than a quarter were likely to be involved in sailing the ship. The rest had a half year or more on their hands: months of boredom, seasickness, malnutrition, and stench (“stinking ayre, and filth,” as Linschoten puts it). There were usually lots of priests and friars aboard, on their way to save the unbelievers, and at least some of them tried to make sure the Devil did not find too much work for idle hands on the long voyage to India. The way Lieutenant Neves explains it, priests acted a little like the entertainment directors aboard cruise ships. They put on pageants and organized processions, to say nothing of keeping the passengers occupied attending frequent masses. Nevertheless, gambling seems to have filled much of the time between prayers—in spite of priests’ efforts to quench it. There were very few women on board—a dozen or less was typical—and given the Portuguese penchant for sequestering their wives and daughters, they must have been cooped up even more than normal. The sexual climate on board ship would have been much like what you’d find in a twenty-first-century American penitentiary. Cabin boys reportedly tied their trousers with a stout rope if they did not wish to wake up sodomized to the tropical dawn.

  As weeks turned into months, conditions worsened. In the first few weeks, the
food must have been plentiful and even rather elaborate for the upper classes. We have several accounts of food brought aboard by Jesuit priests. One clergyman brought with him some seventy-five liters of wine, a whole smoked pig, fifty (live) chickens, fifty sides of pork ribs, seventy pounds of beef, seventy hakes, a hundred dogfish (all presumably salted), sweets, dried fruits, olive oil, butter, and “one pound of each spice”—and this covers only part of the list. Cages filled with several hundred squawking birds and glum rabbits were tied down by the mainmast so they wouldn’t be blown away by the first gale. There were enormous stoves that were lit in the early morning by the ship’s boys and kept going the whole day as the boys, along with the personal servants and slaves of the gentry, prepared at least two meals daily. Naturally, mountains of wood had to be stocked aboard. They must have had quite the feasts in those first weeks, eating well-spiced fricassées and fish pies finished off with a sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar.

  By the time the ship had crossed the Atlantic, any fresh meat and live chickens would have been gone. The water began to stink in the barrels. At this point, both nobles and crew turned to the preserved meats and fish they had brought aboard. The Portuguese had not yet discovered salt cod, their beloved bacalhau (which today is supposedly prepared in more than 365 ways), but hake was prepared much the same way: split open, heavily salted, and air-dried. Sardines were packed in barrels between layers of salt. Hernâni Xavier tells me he has tasted these sardinhas de barrica in the North. “Blaagh,” he says when asked to describe the taste. “It smells too much.” The preserved fish were soaked in seawater before cooking (to decrease the salt content!), though when pitching waves made it impossible to use the stoves, or once the firewood had run out, the fish were often eaten raw. Another preparation of the time that is still current uses pork instead of sardines to make conserva. This is a little like the goose confit of southwestern France. To make it, small pieces of pork are fried, then layered with lard or oil. Today’s recipe is more lightly spiced than those sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries would have liked. Nevertheless, it uses plenty of black pepper, cloves, and chilies, especially if it is intended for long keeping. Today, conserva is typically eaten as a sandwich or occasionally grilled. Linschoten’s sailors would have had to use hard ship’s biscuit to make their sandwich—before it, too, began to spoil.

  By the time the ships reached the Cape of Good Hope, the hardtack was likely to be crawling with worms, and the water in the barrels was fetid. On at least one vessel, some of the sailors apparently turned to eating the dogs and cats aboard so that they wouldn’t have to eat the infested ship’s biscuit. Crew members began to suffer from scurvy, the disease caused by vitamin C deficiency. At first, the affected sailors became lackluster and pale. Then their limbs would swell, and their gums began to bleed. Finally, bloody sores covered the body. High fever was followed by convulsions and then death. The cure was perfectly well known at the time, but the fresh fruit that would have nipped the illness in the bud didn’t last long enough in the tropical heat. The smell emanating from the ship, where five hundred unwashed men had been eating, sleeping, and relieving themselves of every bodily fluid (seasickness was all too common) in extremely close quarters for at least four months must have been astonishingly putrid as it sailed up the African east coast and into Moçambique harbor to restock. If lucky, a ship would lose no more than 10 percent of its human load on the outbound voyage. The remainder of the trip across the Indian Ocean was usually uneventful, discounting storms, shipwrecks, and the like.

  The ships typically called first at Cochin, made their way up to the capital at Goa, and returned to load up with pepper at ports down the Malabar Coast, returning home about a year after they had left Lisbon.

  Whereas, on the way to India, the ships were relatively empty, laden mostly with ballast and provisions for those on board, on the return trip, they were so overloaded that they were dangerous to sail. Two entire decks of each nau were specially constructed with compartments to hold pepper. Once they were sealed, their lids were caulked and each one carefully numbered under the watchful eye of the king’s officials. All the other cargo—including the sailors’ and officers’ caixas; the bundles of cinnamon imported from Ceylon; the bales of cloves, nutmeg, and mace from the East Indies; all the provisions necessary for the return trip; and even the odd rhino or elephant—were placed anywhere there was room.*30 The survivor of one wrecked nau in 1554 recalled that there had been “about seventy-two boxes and so many bales and boxes stacked that they equaled the height of the castles.” Others report that there was so much cargo, it might be hung on the outside of the hull, supported by ropes. No wonder there were so many wrecks on the return trip! Between the trip there and back, the losses amounted to some 25 percent.

  If you think it completely irrational that an ordinary person would undergo such hardships and risk his life to fill that caixa with pepper, think back to the conditions in Lisbon’s slums. Here, the narrow lanes were open sewers, which, during the long, dry summer season, would remain unflushed for months. Dysentery was common, malaria endemic, accommodations not much more spacious than aboard ship, and the chances of social advancement almost nil. In the countryside, the peasants were starving. A single caixa could set you up for life (though given contemporary life spans, that didn’t necessarily amount to all that many years).

  Like rich people everywhere, the upper classes succumbed less often to deadly diseases than the people in the Alfama, yet they, too, had their reasons for the risky passage to and from India. The junior sons of nobility—the knights, squires, and fidalgos with little or no inheritance—saw the same kind of opportunity as the impoverished laborers. They, too, could come back with a fortune that would enable them to dine off Ming china and sip spiced wine from flagons of Venetian glass.

  The motivations weren’t always monetary, though, or at least, simple greed is only part of the explanation. If we can believe all the contemporary plays, poems, and songs that oozed with medieval chivalry, the spirit of the Crusades was still very much alive in the fifteen hundreds. “You, Portuguese, as few as you are valiant…Through martyrdom, in its manifold forms, you spread the message of eternal life…Heaven has made it your destiny to do many and mighty deeds for Christendom,” writes Camões in the middle years of the century, when, admittedly, the chivalric ideals were no longer what they used to be. Nonetheless, in the early fifteen hundreds, the greatest honors could still be earned only by swinging your sword on the battlefront, and in those days, the greatest field of glory was India (as it was loosely defined). When it came to the risks involved, it was a win-win situation. Like jihadists today, and like the Crusaders who had battered down Jerusalem’s gates, the early-sixteenth-century Portuguese conquistadores, I’m sure, genuinely believed that if they died in the pursuit of holy war (and the conquest of India was at first defined as such), they would garner all the rewards of heaven. And if they didn’t die, they’d return home filthy rich. This sincere belief in the spice trade as just one part of the great crusade against the infidel must at least in part explain the crazy risks the Portuguese were willing to take.

  Of course, the many priests sent annually to India were putting their lives on the line with no promise (at least theoretically) of worldly reward. Even if they were not all saints, most must have departed from Lisbon believing they were on their way to do God’s work in saving the heathens and stamping out the heretics. Later in the century, a Jesuit missionary would write, “If there were not merchants who go to seek for earthly treasures in the East and West Indies, who would transport thither the preachers who take heavenly treasures? The preachers take the Gospel and the merchants take the preachers.”

  THE MONASTERY

  Tram number 15 begins its route to the suburb of Belém just a few steps from Terreiro de Paço, the old front yard of the Portuguese kings. It makes a sharp turn at the waterfront and heads due west—past the ferry terminal of Cais de Sodré, where commuters pack the vessels that
ply the waters of the Tejo; then alongside the riverbank, past the clamorous docks of the Porto de Lisboa lined with engorged tankers and overgrown passenger liners; past schools of sailboats skipping across the green and gentle waves. Once you’ve reached Belém, the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos is unmistakable. The monastery stretches the length of three football fields. If you miss one tram stop, you can get off at the next one and still be in front of it.

  It may be huge, but at least from the outside, the Real Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Belém (Royal Monastery of Saint Mary of Bethlehem), as it is officially known, is disappointingly plain. Yet step inside and you enter another world. The cloister is like a fantastical garden where all the inhabitants have been turned to stone. A population of gloomy saints and grinning griffins is held up by twisting trunks of a hundred different species of column. Flowered vines wind and weave up treelike pillars where fishes and dragons hide, and up above, birds cavort amid limestone foliage. Inside the church, the forest of columns soars up some seven stories to the graceful arching branches of the Gothic vaults. Architectural historians have named this hyperornate style the Manueline, after the reign of the fortunate king when this late-Gothic exuberance flourished. At first glance, it would appear that the rational ideas of the Renaissance had made no inroads here whatsoever, that this petrified Eden is as medieval as the Lusitanians’ quest against the infidel. And yet, if you look carefully, you will notice the vaults turn into ropes, and hidden among the wondrous menagerie are carvings of navigational instruments, the so-called armillary spheres made up of interlocking ribbons of steel that were the GPS devices of their day. Looking up, you can see the same tension between the ancient and the modern, between religion and science, between God and Mammon, that led the Portuguese kings to try to run a spice-importing business as a way to pay for gilded churches half the world away. The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos itself was built to pay off God for helping the kingdom attain the peppery riches of the Orient. Manuel pledged to build the monastery in gratitude for Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage with money made in the spice trade, dedicating all the profits accrued from a crown investment of twenty thousand cruzados in a private trading company to the building project.