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

by Michael Krondl

  When the gun smoke had cleared and the dikes had been repaired, what emerged after 1587 were two de facto states. In the south, the so-called Spanish Netherlands (essentially, today’s Belgium) retained an overwhelmingly Catholic population, while in the north, the United Provinces of the Netherlands (or more commonly, the “Dutch Republic”) were a mix of Catholic and Protestant—though in the economically dominant provinces of Holland and Utrecht, the Calvinists ruled the roost.

  The war was a stroke of supreme luck for Amsterdam, which, after 1575, had little personal experience of Philip’s shock troops. The city would certainly not have become involved in the East India spice trade as early if it hadn’t been for the Most Catholic Majesty’s jihad. After all, before the Spanish annexation of their neighbor’s empire in 1580, the Batavians had been free to sail down to Lisbon, where they would pick up all the spices they could carry. In those days, the spices were then distributed mostly through the southern Netherlands city of Antwerp. Why risk going all the way to India, even if the profits from dealing between Lisbon and Antwerp weren’t quite as plump? But all this changed with the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition. The Dutch were cut out of the Lisbon market, and with the arrival of Philip’s battalions, Antwerp’s economy crashed and the city burned. The result was a huge windfall for Amsterdam as the bankers, merchants, painters, and doctors who had once flocked to Antwerp now fled north. In the booming city on the Amstel, they joined the crowds of recently arrived Protestant refugees from France and Germany, as well as Jews escaping autos-da-fé in Lisbon and Seville.

  The ongoing war resulted in rivers of bad blood on both sides. Dutch captains felt completely justified in attacking any and all Spanish vessels, piling atrocity upon atrocity. In a typical move, when Dutch ships intercepted Spanish troop transports in the English Channel in 1605, the Dutch admiral, rather than take prisoners, had them all thrown overboard, tied back-to-back. All the same, while every one of Philip’s ships was considered a legitimate target, the Dutch privateers seemed especially diligent in carrying out their patriotic duty by hijacking galleons loaded down with American bullion. Not that they would turn up their noses at a lesser prize. Portuguese naus laden with pepper and cinnamon became almost as enticing after 1580, when Portugal came under Spanish rule. Now all of Portugal’s Indian spice empire was considered fair game—the entire Estado da Índia no more than one really big, fat prize for the privateer republic to seize from the iniquitous Papist tyrant. Amsterdam prospered as doubloons destined for Philip’s army were instead used to pay tavern bills on the Dam and cargoes of pilfered pepper scented warehouses once reeking with herring.

  Yet even before the first Dutch prow was moistened by an Indian Ocean wave, the ambitious city was prospering. As early as 1596, Amsterdam could boast that the volume of trade and shipping controlled by the United Provinces was far greater than that of England and France combined! Customs documents show that the number of Dutch ships entering the Zuiderzee in the last hundred years had gone up 400 percent, and a good number of those were docking where the Centraal Station’s steeples now rise. So the motivations for getting into the spice trade had to be different here than they once were for the Venetians or the Lisboetas. In 1600, Amsterdam’s prosperous merchants, who had mostly made their money on decidedly unglamorous commodities like timber and herring, certainly had no illusions that the spice trade could be the mother’s milk of prosperity as it had been in Venice. No doubt the way Lisbon’s treasury depended on the pepper naus would have struck these practical Hollanders as preposterous. The profit margins were certainly tempting. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the gross profit on grain was some 30 to 40 percent, while on spices, it would be more like 300 percent (admittedly, with higher expenses). Yet in the early days, at least, these hard-bitten venture capitalists were surely also drawn a little by the whiff of glamour that had long been associated with the Orient’s smelly little berries, buds, and bark. And with the war, there was now a window of opportunity to muscle in on the enormous profits that the Portuguese were supposedly making. The trouble was, the Dutch financiers didn’t really know much about the business.

  But then, in 1592, young Linschoten arrived home to Enkhuizen, still flushed from his tropical tan. Although Jan Huyghen van Linschoten was only in his late twenties when he returned from his long sojourn in Goa, he probably knew more about the Portuguese spice empire than any other Hollander alive. He had certainly collected enough material for a bestseller, something that the town surgeon, the self-promoting Berent ten Broecke, quickly recognized when he insinuated himself as a coauthor. The resulting Itinerario was just what the investors needed: a how-to book on getting into the exotic spice trade. Linschoten blew the lid off the decrepit state of Portugal’s far-off empire. The book was crammed with navigation charts, maps, sketches, and descriptions of the remote lands. It cataloged commodity prices in Cambay and spice prices in Malacca. Here were juicy descriptions not only of India but of Sumatra, Java, and the nutmeg isles to the east. When it came out in 1596, the Itinerario was snatched up not just in Amsterdam but also by would-be entrepreneurs all over Europe.

  There was still the matter of money. How do you go about raising the venture capital for such a risky enterprise? When Dom Manuel sent Vasco da Gama off to Calicut, he didn’t have to answer to any investors, but the merchants on the Dam would be risking their own shirts. At the time, their solution was revolutionary, though it would be familiar to anyone taking a new company public on today’s New York Stock Exchange. After an initially lackluster attempt to form several regional business entities, they created a joint-stock corporation—the first ever, according to most historians—naming it the United Dutch East India Company.

  Compared to the Portuguese—whose motives for getting into the spice trade intertwined dynastic, religious, and commercial ambition—and even compared to the Venetians, who saw fit to invoke God at every turn, the Dutch motivation was much more modern: it was about making as much money as possible. Though, even here, among capitalism’s nursemaids, a powerful dose of religious fervor nourished the expansion east. After all, the Dutch East India Company was born out of a battle of religions, even if the conflict with the Estado da Índia increasingly looked more like a trade war. But whatever the underlying motivations, the Dutch did not send their ships round the Cape of Good Hope in the pursuit of a crusade, the Company had no vice president in charge of proselytization, there was no expense line for churches and missionaries. Their spices were unsullied by any association with Eden. In other words, they were running a business, selling commodities not so different from lumber and beer. They were the kind of businessmen we’d recognize today, largely unencumbered by the ancient romance of their stock-in-trade.

  LUNCH AND THE SPICE TRADER

  “We don’t care what they do with them as long as we get a good price,” Lavooij responds to my question about how the spices he imports are used, no doubt echoing the opinions of his colleagues four hundred years back. Frank Lavooij is president of Rotterdam-based NedSpice and one of Europe’s largest spice dealers. “We don’t mind if they smoke it, eat it, or throw it away,” he continues, glancing at the commodity price numbers skidding across his computer screen. As an example, he mentions the tons of cloves that go up in smoke in the form of clove cigarettes. He is even more bemused with another important use for kruidnagel (literally, “spice nail” in Dutch). In South Asia, these little “nails” are used to fasten together the leaf used to wrap up pan, the mildly narcotic spice and betel nut packages chewed daily by hundreds of millions of Indians. Here, before popping the mixture into the mouth, the clove is just discarded. Indians have been importing cloves for this very purpose for hundreds of years. (It was the same type of narcotic mélange that the zamorin of Calicut chewed during his long interview with Vasco da Gama in 1498.)

  If you want to learn about the spice trade today, you won’t get far in Amsterdam, where you are more likely to come across the scent of cannabis in the
street than the sweet smell of nutmeg or mace. Rotterdam is where real business is done; the harbor here has long since replaced Amsterdam as Holland’s shipping powerhouse. And Frank Lavooij is the man to talk to.

  The train from Amsterdam’s Centraal Station meanders through the typical Dutch landscape of reclaimed land, neatly partitioned into radiant green quadrilaterals by ribbons of reflected sky. You know you’ve arrived in Rotterdam when windmills and steeples give way to high-rises and brand-new minarets. Once you’ve stepped out of the central station here, you might as well be in Minneapolis. Whether you look left or right, all you see are bland office towers. After being almost completely destroyed in the Second World War, Rotterdam was rapidly rebuilt, and that hurry to get on with business still permeates the air. Lavooij’s office is a short walk from the station in one of these anonymous new blocks.

  Yet here, at least, there is a whiff of why I’ve come: a faint but distinctive smell of pepper hovers over the polyester aroma of the newly installed carpeting in the NedSpice president’s office. The smell of pepper comes from a mill that sits on Lavooij’s desk. A nice touch, since the bulk of the company’s trade is in pepper. Cloves, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, and allspice make up most of the remainder. “If you’re big in spices, you have to be big in pepper,” he pronounces from behind the expanse of his desk.

  Frank Lavooij is not someone most people would notice in a crowded room. He is of moderate height and modest build, looking younger than his CV would suggest. Yet this fifty-eight-year-old spice merchant is about the closest you can come today to one of the directors of the Dutch East India Company who ran the city of Amsterdam in its golden age. As well as the co-owner of NedSpice, he is president of Rotterdam’s Chamber of Commerce. Later, when we are dropped off by his chauffeur at one of Rotterdam’s power broker restaurants, the other diners rise like a pack of wolves at the arrival of the alpha male. Not that Lavooij comes across as especially predatory; on the contrary, he exudes self-confidence in a quiet, almost painfully courteous way. His spot at the head of this pack means he must play the politician as well as the businessman. He is cool, calculated, cosmopolitan, and a little humorless—though a hint of a grin does break through when I get him on the subject of the raw herring he would eat growing up in a small town in the southern Netherlands.

  I was disappointed to learn that raw herring is not on the menu at the spice trader’s lunch spot. The restaurant is as generic as the rest of Rotterdam, located in an upscale strip mall and serving (admittedly well-executed) French cuisine that might have garnered its stars anywhere. As I nibbled on my roast venison with wild mushroom foam, Lavooij once again reminded me how little the spice business has changed since Linschoten’s time. Some of the details have been modified, of course. These days, the Malabar Coast no longer has a monopoly on the shriveled black berries that launched a thousand galleys, caravels, and naus, and even Java is no longer a player. Now the largest exporter of pepper in the world is Vietnam, followed at a distance by India, Indonesia, and Brazil. As a result, Lavooij’s partner is continually shuttling between the Netherlands and Southeast Asia to keep in touch with the company’s agents who are working to teach Vietnamese farmers how to grow this scruffy vine.

  Most of the spices are still grown by small farmers in upland areas as a sideline, much as Thomas Thumpassery does in the hills above Quilon. Middlemen collect the product and send it to brokers in towns like Cochin. Today, however, instead of selling it to Gujarati merchants, the Estado da Índia, or the Dutch East India Company, they forward it to international spice-trading companies like NedSpice. The spices are then shipped to Holland, repackaged, and redistributed across Europe and the Americas. Perhaps the biggest change is that the transportation time has been cut from the six or seven months it used to take in the seventeenth century to some two weeks today—not a big deal, Lavooij points out, since the shelf life of many spices is measured in years. And, of course, nowadays, the ships arrive in Rotterdam rather than in Amsterdam or Lisbon.

  Just like in the glory days of the Dutch East India Company, hardly any of the spices—no more than 5 percent, Lavooij estimates—stay in the Netherlands once they’ve landed there.*44 The rest are sent to Germany, Britain, and the United States, mostly to disappear into processed food. Despite his protestations to the contrary, the president of NedSpice isn’t entirely oblivious to the demand side of the business. The market for spices is steadily increasing year by year, which, in his opinion, can be directly attributed to people’s eating more processed food. Cooks at home are certainly not loading up their spice racks with mace and cardamom. “The spices in our kitchen,” the president of NedSpice says of Dutch cooking, “are black and white pepper, nutmeg, and cinnamon. But there aren’t a lot of people who say, ‘Oh, I must add some mace.’” Yet they’ll be eating mace, turmeric, and cloves all the same. The spices are there in prepared food, the convenience food bought in Wal-Mart and Carrefour hypermarkets on both sides of the Atlantic. “We continue to see a steady, steady, steady increase in consumption, and the price doesn’t seem to affect it,” he notes of this subversive new golden age of spice. Given the way more and more consumers across the world are becoming dependent on convenience food, it would be hard to imagine the demand for pepper, say, collapsing or even sagging. Lavooij tells me this on the way back to the train station as a confident smile flits briefly across his deadpan face.

  On the eve of the seventeenth century, Dutch businessmen couldn’t summon up the spot prices at the Cochin pepper exchange at the click of a mouse like today’s spice trader, nor could they present charts to demonstrate the growth in European fine-spice consumption at their stockholders’ meetings. But they did have Linschoten, who told them you could buy more than seven pounds of nutmeg for a guilder in Malacca while they knew they could sell it in Amsterdam for more than a guilder a pound. The competition—the underresourced, poorly managed Estado da Índia—was ripe for picking. In cities across the Netherlands, the venture capitalists gathered to plan a hostile takeover.

  FOLLOWING LINSCHOTEN

  If you’re anywhere near Nieuwemarkt square in central Amsterdam, the Oost-Indisch Huis is easy enough to find. Just follow the blond college students on their bicycles. They all seem to park their bikes—hundreds of them completely obstructing the sidewalk—in front of the imposing edifice. Like so many old buildings in Amsterdam, there is something of a gingerbread quality to the structure’s four-story, block-long façade, though here, you have to imagine sufficient gingerbread to feed a nation of Hollanders. As the bicycles make clear, this is now part of the university, but when the building was first erected around 1660, it was the nerve center of the East India Company in the days when Amsterdam was a company town.

  When the original offices were set up here in 1603, they were modest enough. The Company made do by renting part of an arms depot from the city. But with success came the need to expand. The headquarters eventually took up an entire block facing Hoogstraat. In later, less prosperous years, it was deemed essential to have a grand façade to camouflage the oceans of red ink.

  Back in 1600, the market for the more expensive spices seemed limitless. The demand for cloves, nutmeg, and mace, especially, had been growing by leaps and bounds. According to one widely accepted estimate, the consumption of these so-called fine spices may have gone up 400 percent in the course of the sixteenth century—admittedly, from a very low starting point. Pepper sales, on the other hand, at least on a per capita basis, remained sluggish. This makes sense in light of the economic situation of the times. Across most of Europe (Italy seems to be a bit of an exception here), the standard of living for the poor was slipping as wages stagnated, but the cost of staples like bread was going through the roof. Little wonder that the less advantaged would scrimp on life’s little luxuries and stop buying the pepper they could once afford. The rich, on the other hand, were barely affected by this inflationary spiral, since they never devoted more than a small percentage of their income to the st
aples. They spent most of their money on luxuries (books and servants come to mind), which, in contrast to the essentials, were getting cheaper by the day. No wonder more of them could afford to buy expensive Moluccan spices.

  But the economic explanation only goes part of the way in explaining the resurgent fashion for well-seasoned food. Better to look at the influence of (increasingly affordable) cookbooks that were rolling off the presses in Venice, London, and Antwerp. Admittedly, it was Italian cookbooks that set the standard, but there were lots of local publications in much the same vein. The earliest printed cookbook in the Dutch language, Een notabel boecxken van cokeryen (A Notable Little Book of Cookery), was already replete with recipes calling for not only inexpensive pepper and ginger but also for pricier spices such as cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and mace. Much like other cookbooks published in the Netherlands both before and during the war of independence, this one attests to the ongoing popularity of a well-spiced, sweet-and-sour cuisine.

  While the demand was certainly there, it took the Dutch investors several years to figure out the supply part of the equation. The earliest Dutch forays to South Asia were a mixed bag of abysmal failures and some modest successes. Among the former, perhaps the most misguided were several attempts to reach India via the Arctic Ocean! In the wake of Linschoten’s report, would-be spice traders organized some half dozen ad hoc companies all across the Netherlands. Not only Amsterdam but also Hoorn, Enkhuizen, Delft, and Rotterdam financed their own fleets and sent them east. In the resulting free-for-all, they had to devote at least as much energy to competing with one another as to fighting the Spanish monarch’s galleons. The government in The Hague may have been run by businessmen, but that did not mean they had any ideological investment in free enterprise. The cutthroat competition among the East India traders was bad not only for profits but also for the war effort, so the Republic’s leaders pressured the separate companies to join forces. The result was De Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (“the United East India Company”), or VOC, for short. Bringing these fierce competitors into a single organization wasn’t easy. After months of messy negotiation, a rather awkward board structure was established in 1602 in which each of the eight smaller towns got one member while Amsterdam itself got eight. One more rotating seat was added, for a grand total of seventeen, or the Heren XVII (the seventeen lords), as they would now be known.*45 The ornately penned company charter with its massive government seal was unusual in other respects, too. Interestingly, it gave a preferred status to smaller investors. (In this respect, it was a little like the ordinances in Venice, which required galley captains to take on cargoes of even small-time spice traders.) And the little guys rushed to invest their few stuivers in this sexy new start-up.