by Bill Bryson
So began the great age of exploration. Christopher Columbus is the best remembered of the early explorers, but he was not the first. In 1487, five years ahead of him, Fernão Dulmo and João Estreito set off from Portugal into the uncharted Atlantic, vowing to turn back after forty days if they hadn’t found anything by then. That was the last anyone ever heard of them. It turned out that finding the right winds to bring one back to Europe wasn’t at all easy.
Columbus’s real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. He filled his holds with valueless iron pyrite (thinking it was gold) and with what he confidently believed to be cinnamon and pepper. The first was actually a worthless tree bark, and the second were not true peppers but chili peppers—excellent when you have grasped the general idea of them, but a little eye-wateringly astonishing on first hearty chomp.
Everyone but Columbus could see that this was not the solution to the spice problem, and in 1497 Vasco da Gama, sailing for Portugal, decided to go the other way to the Orient, around the bottom of Africa. This was a much trickier proposition than it sounds. Contrary prevailing winds and currents wouldn’t allow a southern-sailing vessel to simply follow the coastline, as logic would indicate. Instead it was necessary for Gama to sail far out into the Atlantic Ocean—almost to Brazil, in fact, though he didn’t know it—to catch easterly breezes that would shoot his fleet around the southern cape. This made it a truly epic voyage. Europeans had never sailed this far before. Gama’s ships were out of sight of land for as much as three months at a time. This was the voyage that effectively discovered scurvy. No earlier sea voyages had been long enough for the symptoms of scurvy to take hold.
It also brought two other unhappy traditions to the maritime world. One was the introduction of syphilis to Asia—just five years after Columbus’s men conveyed it to Europe from the Americas—helping make it a truly international disease. The other was the casual infliction of extreme violence on innocent people. Vasco da Gama was a breathtakingly vicious man. On one occasion he captured a Muslim ship carrying hundreds of men, women, and children, locked the passengers and crew in the hold, carried off everything of value, and then—gratuitously, appallingly—set the ship ablaze. Almost everywhere he went, Gama abused or slaughtered people he encountered, and so set a tone of distrust and brutish violence that would characterize and diminish the whole of the age of discovery.
Vasco da Gama never got to the Spice Islands. Like most others, he thought the East Indies were just a little east of India—hence their name, of course—but in fact they proved to be way beyond India, so far beyond that Europeans arriving there began to wonder if they had sailed most of the way around the world and were almost back to the Americas. If so, then a trip to the Indies for spices would be more simply carried out by sailing west, past the new lands lately discovered by Columbus, rather than going all the way around Africa and across the Indian Ocean.
In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set off in five leaky ships, in a brave but seriously underfunded operation, to find a western route. What he discovered was that between the Americas and Asia was a greater emptiness than anyone had ever imagined Earth had room for: the Pacific Ocean. No one has ever suffered more in the quest to get rich than Ferdinand Magellan and his crew as they sailed in growing disbelief across the Pacific in 1521. Their provisions all but exhausted, they devised perhaps the least appetizing dish ever served: rat droppings mixed with wood shavings. “We ate biscuit which was no longer biscuit but powder of biscuits swarming with worms,” recorded one crew member. “It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard … and often we ate sawdust from boards.” They went three months and twenty days without fresh food or water before finding relief and a shoreline in Guam—and all in a quest to fill the ships’ holds with dried flowerbuds, bits of tree bark, and other aromatic scrapings to sprinkle on food and make into pomanders.
In the end, only 18 of 260 men survived the voyage. Magellan himself was killed in a skirmish with natives in the Philippines. The survivors did very well out of the voyage, however. In the Spice Islands they loaded up with fifty-three thousand pounds of cloves, which they sold in Europe for a profit of 2,500 percent, and almost incidentally in the process became the first human beings to circle the globe. The real significance of Magellan’s voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.
• • •
Although Columbus had little idea of what he was doing, it was his voyages that ultimately proved the most important, and we can date the moment that that became so with precision. On November 5, 1492, on Cuba, two of his crewmen returned to the ship carrying something no one from their world had ever seen before: “a sort of grain [that the natives] call maiz which was well tasted, bak’d, dry’d and made into flour.” In the same week, they saw some Taino Indians sticking cylinders of smoldering weed in their mouths, drawing smoke into their chests, and pronouncing the exercise satisfying. Columbus took some of this odd product home with him, too.
And so began the process known to anthropologists as the Columbian Exchange—the transfer of foods and other materials from the New World to the Old World and vice versa. By the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, farmers there were harvesting more than a hundred kinds of edible plants—potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants, avocados, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cashews, pineapples, papaya, guava, yams, manioc (or cassava), pumpkins, vanilla, a whole slew of beans and squashes, four types of chili peppers, and chocolate, among rather a lot else—not a bad haul.
It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas. These foods weren’t just incorporated into foreign cuisines. They effectively became the foreign cuisines. Imagine Italian food without tomatoes, Greek food without eggplant, Thai and Indonesian foods without peanut sauce, curries without chilies, hamburgers without French fries or ketchup, African food without cassava. There was scarcely a dinner table in the world in any land east or west that wasn’t drastically improved by the foods of the Americas.
No one foresaw this at the time, however. For the Europeans the irony is that the foods they found they mostly didn’t want, while the ones they wanted they didn’t find. Spices were what they were after, and the New World was dismayingly deficient in those, apart from chilies, which were too fiery and startling to be appreciated at first. Many promising New World foods failed to attract any interest at all. The indigenous people of Peru had 150 varieties of potato, and valued them all. An Incan of five hundred years ago would have been able to identify varieties of potato in much the way that a modern wine snob identifies grapes. The Quechuan language of Peru still has a thousand words for different types or conditions of potatoes. Hantha, for instance, describes a potato that is distinctly on the old side but still has edible flesh. The conquistadores, however, brought home only a few varieties, and there are those who say they were by no means the most delicious. Farther north, the Aztecs had a great fondness for amaranth, a cereal that produces a nutritious and tasty grain. It was as popular a foodstuff in Mexico as maize, but the Spanish—offended by the way the Aztecs used it, mixed with blood, in rites involving human sacrifice—refused to touch it.
The Americas, it may be said, g
ained much from Europe in return. Before the Europeans stormed into their lives, people in Central America had only five domesticated creatures—the turkey, duck, dog, bee, and cochineal insect—and no dairy products. Without European meat and cheese, Mexican food as we know it could not exist. Wheat in Kansas, coffee in Brazil, beef in Argentina, and a great deal more would not be possible.
Less happily, the Columbian Exchange also involved disease. With no immunity to many European diseases, the natives sickened easily and “died in heapes.” One epidemic, probably viral hepatitis, killed an estimated 90 percent of the natives in coastal Massachusetts. A once-mighty tribal group in the region of modern Texas and Arkansas, the Caddo, saw its population fall from an estimated 200,000 to just 1,400—a drop of nearly 96 percent. An equivalent outbreak in modern New York would reduce the population to 56,000—“not enough to fill Yankee Stadium,” in the chilling phrase of Charles C. Mann. Altogether, disease and slaughter reduced the native population of Mesoamerica by an estimated 90 percent in the first century of European contact. In return, the natives gave Columbus’s men syphilis.*
Over time the Columbian Exchange also of course involved the wholesale movement of peoples, the setting up of colonies, and the transfer—sometimes enforced—of language, religion, and culture. Almost no single act in history has more profoundly changed the world than Columbus’s blundering search for eastern spices.
There is another irony in all this. By the time the age of exploration was fully under way, the heyday of spices was coming to an end anyway. In 1545, just twenty years or so after Magellan’s epic voyage, an English warship, the Mary Rose, sank in mysterious circumstances off the English coast near Portsmouth. More than four hundred men died. When the ship was recovered in the late twentieth century, marine archaeologists were surprised to find that almost every sailor owned a tiny bag of black pepper, which he kept attached to his waist. It would have been one of his most prized possessions. The fact that even a common sailor of 1545 could now afford a supply of pepper, however modest, meant that pepper’s days of hyper-rarity were at an end. It was on its way to taking its place alongside salt as a standard and comparatively humble condiment.
People continued to fight over the more exotic spices for another century or so, and sometimes even over the more common ones. In 1599, eighty British merchants, exasperated by the rising cost of pepper, formed the British East India Company with a view to getting a piece of the market for themselves. This was the initiative that brought King James the treasured isles of Puloway and Puloroon, but in fact the British never had much success in the East Indies, and in 1667, in the Treaty of Breda, they ceded all claims to the region to the Dutch in return for a small piece of land of no great significance in North America. The piece of land was called Manhattan.
By now, however, there were new commodities that people wanted even more, and the quest for these was, in the most unexpected ways, about to change the world still further.
II
Two years before his unhappy adventure with “many worms creeping,” Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary a rather more prosaic milestone in his life. On September 25, 1660, he tried a new hot beverage for the first time, recording in his diary: “And afterwards I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink), of which I never had drank before.” Whether he liked it or not Pepys didn’t say, which is a shame, as it is the first mention we have in English of anyone’s drinking a cup of tea.
A century and a half later, in 1812, a Scottish historian named David Macpherson, in a dry piece of work called The History of the European Commerce with India, quoted the tea-drinking passage from Pepys’s diary. That was a very surprising thing to do, because in 1812 Pepys’s diaries were supposedly still unknown. Although they resided in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and so were available for inspection, no one had ever looked into them—so it was thought—because they were written in a private code that had yet to be deciphered. How Macpherson managed to find and translate the relevant passage in six volumes of dense and secret scribblings, not to mention what gave him the inspiration to look there in the first place, are mysteries that are some distance beyond being answerable.
By chance, an Oxford scholar, the Reverend George Neville, master of Magdalen College, saw Macpherson’s passing reference to Pepys’s diaries and grew intrigued to know what else might be in them. Pepys after all had lived through momentous times—through the restoration of the monarchy, the last great plague epidemic, the Great Fire of London of 1666—so their content was bound to be of interest. He commissioned a clever but penurious student named John Smith to see if he could crack the code and transcribe the diaries. The work took Smith three years. The result of course was the most celebrated diary in the English language. Had Pepys not had that cup of tea, Macpherson not mentioned it in a dull history, Neville been less curious, and young Smith less intelligent and dogged, the name Samuel Pepys would mean nothing to anyone but naval historians, and a very considerable part of what we know about how people lived in the second half of the seventeenth century would in fact be unknown. So it was a good thing that he had that cup of tea.
Normally, like most other people of his class and period, Pepys drank coffee, though coffee itself was still pretty novel in 1660. Britons had been vaguely familiar with coffee for decades but principally as a queer, dark beverage encountered abroad. A traveler named George Sandys in 1610 grimly described coffee as being “blacke as soot, and tasting not much unlike it.” The word was spelled in any number of imaginative ways—coava, cahve, cauphe, coffa, and cafe, among others—before finally coming ashore as coffee in about 1650.
Credit for coffee’s popularity in England belongs to a man named Pasqua Rosee, Sicilian by birth and Greek by background, who worked as a servant for Daniel Edwards, a British trader in Smyrna, now Izmir, in Turkey. Moving to England with Edwards, Rosee served coffee to Edwards’s guests, and this proved so popular that he was emboldened to open a café—the first in London—in a shed in the churchyard of St. Michael Cornhill in the City of London in 1652. Rosee promoted coffee for its health benefits, claiming that it cured or prevented headaches, “defluxion of rheums,” wind, gout, scurvy, miscarriages, sore eyes, and much else.
Rosee did very well in his business, but his reign as premier coffee-maker didn’t last long. Sometime after 1656, he was compelled to leave the country “for some misdemeanour,” which the record unfortunately doesn’t specify. All that is known is that he departed suddenly and was heard of no more. Others swiftly moved in to take his place. By the time of the Great Fire, London’s eighty-plus coffeehouses had become a central part of the life of the city.
The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn’t necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving. So coffee’s appeal in Britain had less to do with being a quality beverage than with being a social lubricant. People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read the latest journals and newspapers—a brand-new word and concept in the 1660s—and exchange information of value to their lives and business. Some took to using coffeehouses as their offices—as, most famously, at Lloyd’s Coffee House on Lombard Street, which gradually evolved into Lloyd’s insurance market. William Hogarth’s father hit on the idea of opening a coffeehouse in which only Latin would be spoken. It failed spectacularly—toto bene, as Mr. Hogarth himself might have said—and he spent years in debtors’ prison in unhappy consequence.
Although pepper and spices were what brought the East India Company into being, the company’s destiny was tea. In 1696, the government introduced the first in a series of cuts in the tea tax. The effect on consumption was immediate. Between 1699 and 1721, tea imports increased almost a hundredfold, from 13,000 pounds to 1.2 million pounds, then quadrupled again in the thirty years to 1750. Tea was slurped by laborers and daintily sipped by ladies. It was taken at b
reakfast, dinner, and supper. It was the first beverage in history to belong to no class, and the first to have its own ritual slot in the day: teatime. It was easier to make at home than coffee, and it also went especially well with another great gustatory treat that was suddenly becoming affordable for the average wage earner: sugar. Britons came to adore sweet, milky tea as no other nation had (or even perhaps could). For something over a century and a half, tea was at the heart of the East India Company, and the East India Company was at the heart of the British Empire.
Not everyone got the hang of tea immediately. The poet Robert Southey related the story of a lady in the country who received a pound of tea as a gift from a city friend when it was still a novelty. Uncertain how to engage with it, she boiled it up in a pot, spread the leaves on toast with butter and salt, and served it to her friends, who nibbled it gamely and declared it interesting but not quite to their taste. Elsewhere, however, it raced ahead, in tandem with sugar.
The British had always loved sugar, so much so that when they first got easy access to it, about the time of Henry VIII, they put it on or in almost everything from eggs to meat to wine. They scooped it onto potatoes, sprinkled it over greens, and ate it straight off the spoon if they could afford to. Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were. But now, thanks to plantations in the West Indies, sugar was becoming increasingly affordable, and people were discovering that it went particularly well with tea.