He reminds me that in India, outside of its native Malabar, black pepper was also an exotic import, which—while perhaps not so dear as in Antwerp—was affordable only for the well-to-do. The only part of India where black pepper was used as a seasoning by the common people would have been right here where they could go into the woods to pick it for free.
Coincidentally, just about the time chilies arrived in India, around 1500, the worldwide demand for black pepper (in China and North India as well as Europe) was going through the roof.*35 For the first time, black pepper began to be cultivated rather than just foraged in the woods. It became a cash crop. Put yourself in the place of a Keralan peasant. Would you sell your pepper crop for hard currency or crush it into your curry? The cheaply grown chilies must have made landfall at just the perfect time to replace the locally grown but now especially marketable pepper. There are other indications that chili was a poor people’s spice—pimento dos pobres, as it was once known in Goa. Thomas explains that when it comes to ritual foods made by upper-caste Brahman monks in the south, only black pepper will do, even in preparations that commonly use red peppers. Yet despite these sorts of ritual exceptions, most of the population would have found it easy enough to incorporate chili into their cuisine. In Indian cooking, spices are used to correct or adjust other foods much as they were in the Europe of Vasco da Gama’s time. Accordingly, capsicums not only made food spicy-hot in a way reminiscent of black pepper, they fit the same pharmacological slot.
From Malabar, chilies must have followed the same routes traveled by black pepper for hundreds of years: up the coast to Goa and then to North India, across the Himalayas to the interior provinces of China. (The Sichuanese were especially enthusiastic converts to the new spice.) Going west, Indian chilies certainly made it as far as Persia and even possibly Turkey, though it is much more plausible that the Ottomans got their hot peppers from Spain.*36 It was also Portuguese (and Gujarati) traders who most likely brought chilies to Southeast Asia as well, though it is also perfectly possible that Spanish seamen sailing the Manila galleon route from Acapulco to the Philippines can be assigned the credit. But even in places where merchants and mariners were inadequate to the task, birds swooped in, scattering capsicum seed–filled droppings in even the most remote locations.
West Africa is a different matter altogether and adds yet another layer of haze to an already cloudy picture. In the years when Christopher Columbus was hanging around the Lisbon court, Portuguese caravels were shipping two kinds of “pepper” from what was known as the Guinea or Melegueta coast of Africa: grains of paradise, aka melegueta pepper (Aframomum melegueta), and also an African peppercorn (Piper clusii ) related to cubeb pepper. Few people would mistake the spice called pimenta malagueta in Portuguese for black pepper (Piper nigrum). The seeds are much smaller, smoother, and lighter in color. They largely resemble the cardamom seeds to which melegueta is related, though, once it is ground, the spice has its own floral, juniperlike aroma with, admittedly, a distinctly peppery bite. The second pepper, which the Portuguese came across as they were nosing up the Niger in 1485, was dubbed pimenta de rabo, “pepper with a tail,” because it looked like a peppercorn with a little stem attached. The Italian pilot aboard described it as especially pungent. “It is very similar to cubeb pepper in appearance, but in flavor an ounce of this [African pepper] has the effect of a half-pound of ordinary pepper.” These little berries, occasionally called Ashanti pepper today, actually are related to the Indian spice; they have a similar kind of pungency. However, their somewhat bitter flavor may explain why this so-called false pepper had a relatively short run in the European market.
The caravels weren’t just shipping pepper, of course. One of the main “commodities” transported from the Guinea coast to Madeira and southern Spain to work the sugar plantations was human beings. Then, after Columbus’s famous trip, the Portuguese quickly got into the business of supplying slaves to the new Spanish colonies, and by the 1530s, they could count on customers in Brazil as well. Once again, the records are inadequate, but chilies must have arrived on the West African coast by way of the Cape Verde Islands, since this was the most common stopover for the slavers going in both directions. By the late sixteenth century, some Europeans are referring to chilies as “Guinea peppers,” while Brazilians are calling their native chilies malaguetas or pimenta de rabo. Is it any wonder that historians as knowledgeable as Aporvela’s Hernâni Xavier are convinced that chilies were native to West Africa and were being imported into Portugal long before Columbus set sail?
My guess is that chilies got to Portugal proper relatively late through several distinct if circuitous routes and were incorporated into the cuisine in a series of waves. Walk into any Portuguese deli and you’re likely to bump into red-tinted chouriços, linguiças, morcelas, and salpicões hanging from the ceiling and filling the display cases—all sausages tinted to a greater or lesser extent with pimentão. Cooks will add pimentão to foods cooked at home as well but with nowhere near the frequency found across the border in Spain. All the indicators suggest that these mild chilies reached Portugal by way of its next-door neighbor rather than directly from the New World and that here, too, they replaced expensive saffron as much as black pepper.
When a Lisboeta wants heat, she reaches for a malagueta or for piripiri. Both words are used rather loosely for any hot pepper, though the latter is usually dried. At some point, chilies called malaguetas must have been brought in from both Brazil and the Guinea coast, probably long after pimentões arrived from Spain. They’ve become widely popular only in the past few decades when the retornados, colonials (and natives) who fled Portugal’s newly independent former colonies in the 1970s, brought their African tastes back to the metropolis. The popularity of East African piripiri is of similarly recent vintage. Ask for piripiri in a restaurant (it is as common as ketchup in America) and you’ll get a little jar of ground hot pepper in olive oil. You can slather the condiment on whatever pleases you (though you might see a few eyebrows raised if you use it on some very traditional dishes). Even today, hot pepper has a working-class (and gender) association. I have found that piripiri is by no means ubiquitous in Portugal. Rui Lis, the nonconformist lawyer who has seen his fair share of heat in Africa, insists that’s because I’ve eaten at too many yuppie restaurants. When pressed, he admits that Portuguese women are also generally not fond of the condiment, but men, real men, need their piripiri.*37
Of course, most contemporary Lisboetas give as little thought to the origin of piripiri as they do to the globe-spanning empire the capital once ruled. No wonder: the hot pepper is much more pungent than some dimly remembered history lesson about a little country whose long-gone wealth was once coveted by grasping hands from Madrid to London to Amsterdam.
SHIPWRECKS AND CUSTARD TARTS
Across the railroad tracks and the highway that now separate the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos from the Tejo River stands Lisbon’s best-known monument, an ornate little tower that looks like nothing so much as a toy fortress put up so that children can play king of the castle in the radiant southern sun. Like the monastery, the Torre de Belém is constructed of shiny white limestone and decorated with graceful arches and proud shields bearing the Crusaders’ cross. The whole thing is girded with a faux stone rope tied in a sailor’s knot, as if the architect had decided to gift wrap his present to the king. Yet all this is disguise, an ornate blind with twelve-foot walls, a platform for the sixteen cannons pointed at anyone who would dare trespass into Lisbon’s estuary. From the tower’s highest platform, there’s an unlimited view of the entire river—all the way to where it opens up to greet the Atlantic near Cascais. Any enemy ship arriving from the ocean would have had to sail past these cannons, but perhaps even more important, the lace-covered gun battery reminded any would-be smuggler not to mess with the king. When the pepper-laden ships entered the estuary, they were met by customs officials who followed the ships all the way to Lisbon to make sure none of the crown’s spices
were surreptitiously brought to shore.
The sea could be treacherous between here and the mouth of the bay. There, the unseen sandbanks shifted with every storm. Hundreds of ships wrecked within sight of Belém. We know a great deal about one in particular thanks to recent joint American-Portuguese archaeological excavations led by Filipe Castro and Francisco Alves.
On September 15, 1606, the lookouts of the Torre de Belém saw the tall masts of the Nossa Senhora dos Mártires careening in the blowing wind, tilting and then crashing to the water as the massive hull struck an underwater obstacle and shattered, spilling cannons, caixas, sailors, and close to a million pounds of black pepper into the boiling waters. The next morning, Lisboetas awoke to beaches tinted black from the midnight tide of peppercorns. Witnesses report a mad rush to collect the costly cargo washed ashore before the king’s officials could fish out the remainder. Even recently, when the marine archaeologists went looking for the remains of the great nau, they discovered them embedded in a layer of muck mixed in with peppercorns. Many of the artifacts were long gone, pilfered by amateur divers and swept away by four centuries’ storms, but in the midst of the peppercorns, the fragments of the hull contained a sampling of the riches of the east—silver pieces of eight, gold jewelry, and Chinese porcelain—as well as the more common pewter plates and earthenware pots that are the bread and butter of the archaeology trade. You can go and see some of the finds at the Museu de Marinha. There’s even a generous pile of peppercorns. Pepper does keep well, but not this well. Some of the team’s members actually tasted the four hundred–year–old peppercorns. Not surprisingly, any trace of taste was gone. All the same, Professor Castro confesses that he detected a dim aroma when he dove down into the deepest of the muddy layers. Mostly, though, the peppercorns were just a flimsy outer layer with nothing inside. They had to be dehydrated in alcohol, then dried with a hair dryer in small batches, and impregnated with glue so that they would not turn to dust in the exhibit.
The breakup of the Mártires was just one more incident to add to a rising tally of shipwrecks that were a symptom of an empire that was increasingly as flimsy and hollow as the Mártires’ peppercorns. You can blame the loss of Lisbon’s spice trade on a long inventory of reasons, but the empire built on a shoestring—and held together with the spit and sealing wax of distant forts and factories—was just too wobbly to sustain the incompetence within and the assault from without.
Much of what went wrong, all my sailor historians are quick to point out, can be blamed on the Spanish. In 1578, King Sebastião I of Portugal (one of the more unhinged of the royal line) got himself killed on yet another crusade against the Moors. The result was that two years later, the Portuguese crown fell into the lap of the workaholic and fanatically religious Hapsburg monarch of Spain, Philip II, thereafter also Filipe I of Portugal. “We refer to those sixty years of Spanish rule as our ‘Babylonian captivity,’” Lieutenant Neves informs me, lest I have any illusions about the love lost between Portugal and her pushy neighbor. Theoretically, the two kingdoms were supposed to stay separate under Philip, but it didn’t work out that way for long. The Spanish ruler just couldn’t keep his fingers off the profits from the spice trade, especially when he needed the money to pay for his religious wars. At the same time, the annual Carreira da Índia, which was already depending on too many slaves and convicts to man the sails, lost even more of its experienced sailors to the comfier and more profitable Spanish galleons that used to make the relatively quick passage to the Americas. When Philip sent his disastrous armada to punish England’s Protestant queen in 1588, a good part of his fleet was actually Portuguese. “Those were our ships he wrecked!” Hernâni Xavier spits out. But the Spanish kings had their eyes fixed elsewhere—which meant that Lisbon’s fleet withered and her empire shriveled from neglect.
Holland’s entry into the spice trade—or at least, its timing—can also be laid at Philip’s door. Portugal had had a long, cordial history with the Low Countries from the days when her kings married into Burgundian nobility and her merchants unloaded salt and oil on Bruges’s medieval piers. Throughout most of the sixteenth century, Portuguese pepper was distributed through Antwerp, and Dutch middlemen regularly came down to Lisbon to fill their holds with melegueta, black pepper, and cinnamon. The Portuguese kings had encouraged this trade, granting the Dutchmen a package of privileges analogous to the Venetians’ fondachi in Muslim lands. The crown even allowed the northerners to practice their heretical rites within their own compound. In 1580, though, Holland was in the midst of an armed rebellion against Spain (the Netherlands had fallen under Hapsburg rule some years earlier). Philip II reacted by closing all his ports to Dutch shipping and sending his shock troops north to bring the heretics to heel. It didn’t work out quite the way he planned. The conquistadores experienced one humiliating defeat after another, and Holland’s navy sailed right up to Gibraltar and sank a Spanish armada a stone’s throw from Andalusia’s shore. With no pepper available to them in Lisbon, the Hollanders decided to go to the Asian source, looting and sinking as many of the enemy’s ships as they could along the way. The poorly manned Portuguese ships were especially tender targets, particularly when compared to the heavily armed Spanish galleons that made up the silver fleet from New Spain.
Goa was always too well defended for the Dutch to take it by force, but Portugal’s other redoubts in the Estado da Índia were picked off one by one. The spice islands of Tidore and Amboina fell in 1605, Malacca in 1641, Ceylon in 1656. Even Cochin, where the carreira had so long filled its ships to bursting with pepper, succumbed to Dutch assault in 1663. When, after the sixty years of Spanish captivity, a Portuguese king once again occupied the Paço da Ribeira in 1540, he could count on a mere eleven ships worthy of the name: eight galleons of Portuguese construction—of which, one was not fit to sail—and three other ships that had been seized from the French and the Dutch. In contrast, according to one contemporary estimate, the Hollanders could muster more than fourteen thousand vessels for war! Increasingly, the pepper fleet left India later and later in the season to avoid the Dutch (and later English) marauders, with the result that they missed the dependable winds of the monsoon and wrecked on the way home. The number of wrecks rose so precipitously in the early seventeenth century that in some years, Portugal had no pepper to sell at all.
Nonetheless, the Dutch could hardly be held responsible for every shipwreck. The Lisbon-bound ships were always chronically overloaded because of the crews’ own allotments of merchandise, whether in the form of the official caixas or in contraband. Given their rotten salaries, it was the only way to make the perilous trip worthwhile. Incompetence at every level could also take a share of the blame. In Portugal, the job of captaining a ship was assigned as a royal favor to members of the high nobility. Knowing prow from stern was not one of the prerequisites. As a result, the actual practice of sailing the ships was handed over to the pilot. You can imagine what happened when captain and pilot disagreed. Beaches from Moçambique to Madeira saw their share of pepper tides. As if this weren’t bad enough, experienced pilots were in short supply. In a meeting held at the viceroy’s Goan palace in 1643, the local authorities realized that, back home, there wasn’t a single pilot qualified to navigate a ship to India, since all those with adequate experience (all ten!) were stuck in Goa due to a Dutch blockade.
Sailors who had some idea of what they were doing were hard to find, too. Between the death toll on the carreira itself and the seamen who never returned from the Indies, the kingdom had been hemorrhaging sailors for years. Lieutenant Neves supplies a telling statistic, noting that in many years, there were more deaths on the return trip to India than there were mariners in the entire Spanish armada that sailed to America. Neves, like every historian of the spice route, repeats the story recounted by the royal chronicler Castanheda of the 1505 departure of the pepper fleet from Belém. The sailors were so green that the captain of one caravel nailed a braid of garlic to one side of the ship and an onio
n braid to the other so that they could tell right from left. Then, when he wanted to turn the ship to starboard, he shouted “Garlic,” and to port, he yelled “Onion.” The confusion wasn’t limited to the sailors, though, for Castanheda mixed the two up as well. Just imagine the first storm they encountered! And the sailors didn’t get better as the century progressed.
The Portuguese enthusiasm for promoting the faith, the very same fanaticism that had once led to the voyages of discovery, was now dragging the empire down. Not only was the king’s purse being drained to gild the magnificent altars of Goa Dourada, the realm’s policy of gunboat evangelism wasn’t making it too many friends in the East. Meanwhile, back home, the jackboot tactics of the Inquisition were sending many of the “New Christians” packing to less hostile climes. The exodus of these formerly Jewish artisans, merchants, and professionals was a disaster for the Portuguese middle class, even as it did wonders for Amsterdam, Antwerp, and London, which took them in. What’s more, the Counter-Reformation had insidious effects on the culture that were not as public as the autos-da-fé, where pork abstainers were burned alive. Compare the era of King João II, who authorized two French booksellers to import tax-free as many books as they chose because he believed “it is good for the common weal to have many books circulating in our kingdom,” to the stultifying climate of a hundred years hence. By then, the dread of foreign heresies had imposed a totalitarian form of censorship on any books printed in or imported into the kingdom. Even masterworks by Portuguese authors such as da Orta were much more widely circulated abroad than at home.
The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice Page 20