by Jack Turner
Though these early voyages enjoyed mixed results, malaria, scurvy and inexperience taking a heavy toll, the northern intruders soon struck at the ‘Portingall’ with devastating swiftness. The first assets to go were the remotest, the distant Spice Islands. Here a handful of Portuguese, having long since incurred the loathing of the Muslim population, clung on in a state of permanent siege in a string of mouldering forts. Ternate fell in 1605. Shortly after the Dutch seized the Portuguese fort on Ambon, midway between the North and South Moluccas. Worse was to come, as the conquests of da Gama and his successor Albuquerque (1453–1515) were steadily rolled back. In the disastrous decade of the 1630s, Ceylon and its cinnamon forests fell to combined Ceylonese-Dutch forces – a marriage of convenience the Ceylonese would soon have cause to regret. The Portuguese Jesuit Fernão de Queyroz claimed the Dutch were ‘so disliked by the Natives, that the very stones will rise against them’, but his prediction of independence was some three hundred years premature. Malacca, the bottleneck and entrepôt of the East, surrendered to the Dutch in 1641; the pepper ports of Malabar followed in 1661–63. Spices were now, in effect, a Protestant concern.
The drama was played out on a global stage. The golden age of discovery was also the golden age of European piracy, when freebooters could plunder their way to royal favour and enrichment. The talismanic figure in this respect was Sir Francis Drake, whose Golden Hind was only the second ship to circumnavigate the globe. On the way he called at Ternate in 1579, sailing off with a cargo of cloves and agreement from Sultan Babu to reserve the trade in cloves to the English. For his part, Drake promised to build forts and factories, and ‘to decorate that sea with ships’. It was a bargain that would never be fulfilled, yet the treaty was more far-reaching in its ramifications even than the lordly haul of stolen Spanish silver and gold that had the Spanish ambassador in London demanding Drake’s head. With such dizzying profits in the air, Drake’s treaty with Babu sent shivers of excitement up the spines of the investors, and would-be imitators lined up to follow his lead. In view of the effect the treaty seems likely to have had on the merchants of London, culminating in the formation of the East India Company two decades later, Drake’s agreement with Babu was quite possibly the single most lasting achievement of his voyage.
Like Drake, these spice-seekers were seldom chary of robust methods. A spice ship represented a fortune afloat, and from a strictly commercial point of view it was considerably cheaper and easier to plunder the returning ships than to make the long and dangerous voyage for oneself. Galleons and caravels returning from the Indies ran a gauntlet of pirates and raiders, lurking in the Atlantic to deprive the exhausted and disease-depleted crews of their precious cargoes. One such haul was witnessed by Samuel Pepys in November 1665, when as Surveyor-Victualler to the Royal Navy he inspected two captured Dutch East Indiamen. On board he saw ‘the greatest wealth lie in confusion that a man can see in the world – pepper scatter[ed] through every chink, you trod upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs, I walked above the knees – whole rooms full … as noble a sight as ever I saw in my life’.
By now, however, this was a token victory for the English, since their own outposts in the Spice Islands had long since gone the way of the Portuguese before them. One English merchant in the Moluccas reported that the Dutch ‘grew starke madde’ at having to share the proceeds from the Moluccas’ cloves and nutmeg. Accordingly, in February 1623 the staff of the English factory on the central Moluccan island of Ambon were rounded up, tortured and killed. Their fate had been foreshadowed a few years earlier by the destruction of the English outpost on the nutmeg island of Run, which was then denuded of its trees for good measure. The ‘crying business of Amboyna’ prompted an outburst of pamphlets, anti-Dutch tirades and even a play by Dryden (Amboyna – admittedly, not one of his better works; Sir Walter Scott considered it ‘beneath criticism’), its jingoistic huff periodically recycled ever since. The affair was finally tidied up with the signature of the treaty of Breda at the conclusion of the second Anglo – Dutch war of 1665–67. The English renounced their claims in the Moluccas in return for acknowledgement of their sovereignty over an island they had seized from the Dutch, the (then) altogether less spicy New Amsterdam, better known by the victors’ name of New York.*
In the longer term, however, such seizures and horse-trading, while spectacular, were unsustainable. There was more to be made from commerce than plunder – a distinction those at the sharp end of the spice trade would not perhaps have recognised – and by now the lion’s share of that trade was in Dutch hands. After several decades of mercurial, spasmodic English forays in the first half of the 1600s, but without any consistent investment from London, by the middle of the century the Dutch had emerged as the uncontested masters of the spice trade. They had achieved what the Portuguese had sought in vain: dominance in the trade in pepper and cinnamon, and a near total monopoly in cloves, nutmeg and mace.
Under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, the Vereenigde Oosrindische Compagnie (VOC), the problems that beset the trade were gradually ironed out. The bandit capitalism of the early days evolved into a more recognisably modern and permanent system. The market-disrupting cycle of gluts and shortages was succeeded by a ruthlessly efficient monopoly. The catastrophic losses of life and shipping along the African coasts were reduced to a sustainable level. Much of the risk was taken out of the business. Whereas the finances of Portugal’s Estado da India never made the leap out of medievalism, hamstrung by clumsy royal monopolies and endemic corruption, the annual fleets setting off from the Zuider Zee were backed by the full panoply of joint stock companies, shareholders and boards of directors. In time the East India companies of the Dutch and their English rivals grew into the armies and administrators of formal imperialism.
Such were, very briefly, the bloody, briny flavours of the spice age. But if the discoverers marked the beginning of a new era, so too they marked an end, for even their efforts formed part of a grand tradition. In his opening stanza Camões claimed that da Gama and his Christian spice-seekers ventured into ‘seas never sailed before’, but in fact the spice routes had been navigated for centuries, albeit not by Europeans, or at least not very many of them. As tends to be the way with pioneers, even the discoverers had precedents. Asia’s spices had been familiar in Europe long before Europeans were familiar in Asia – because someone, or rather various someones, had been to get them. Besides the disconcerting Moors who accosted his envoy on the beach, da Gama had the deflating experience of finding Italian merchants active along the Malabar Coast – some selling their services to Muslim rulers – and there had been others before. In this sense the discoverers’ achievements, however epic, were essentially achievements of scale. Neither the voyages nor the tremendous, transforming appetite that inspired them emerged from thin air. When da Gama and his contemporaries raised anchor spice was a taste that had already launched a thousand ships.
Had any of the protagonists in this vast and ancient quest been asked why this was so, some would have offered, if pressed, much the same functional answer as that given by modern historians: profit. The reputation of fabulous riches clung so closely to spices that some, as we shall see, considered them tarnished by the association. (Columbus himself was deeply embarrassed by the potential imputation of grubby, worldly motives to his quest, and was accordingly at pains to find some way of justifying the enterprise in terms of the spiritually worthy spin-offs: to retake the holy sepulchre, to finance a new crusade, to convert the heathen.) But if the medieval spice trader were asked why spices were so valuable and so sought after, he would have given answers that seem less intelligible to the modern historian than such reassuringly material arguments. In this regard the charms of spices admit no easy explanation, nor would our forebears have found the matter much less perplexing. Indeed part of their attraction, and the source of much of their value, was simply that they were inexplicable. Before Columbus and company remapped the world, spices carried a freight that we
, in an age of satellites and global positioning systems, can barely imagine. Emerging from the fabulous obscurity of the East they were arrivals from another world. For the spices, so it was believed, grew in paradise.
That this was so was something more than a pious fiction. It was, in fact, something close to gospel truth, an article of faith since the early years of the Christian religion. One of many highly intelligent and educated believers was Peter Damian (1007–1072), the Italian Doctor of the Church, saint, hermit and ascetic in whose turbulent life the great issues of the eleventh century, somewhat in spite of himself, converged. In his hermitage at Fonte Avellana, in a bleak wilderness of rocks and crags in the central Apennines, he dreamed of that gentle place where, by the fount of eternal life,
Harsh winter and torrid summer never rage.
An eternal spring puts forth the purple flowers of roses.
Lilies shine white, and the crocus red, exuding balsam.
The meadows are verdant, the crops sprout,
Streams of honey flow, exhaling spice and aromatic wine.
Fruits bang suspended, never to fall from the flowering groves.
That paradise smelled of spices was, for Damian, something more than a passing fancy. His words and spiced imagery alike were lifted directly from the Apocalypse of Peter, an early Christian work, now discarded as apocryphal but widely read in the Middle Ages. Damian himself returned to the theme in a series of letters to his friend and fellow cleric St Hugh (1024–1109), abbot of the great Benedictine monastery of Cluny, at the time the intellectual and spiritual centre of Western Christendom. To Damian, the shelter of Cluny’s cloister was a ‘Paradise watered by the rivers of the four Evangelists … a garden of delights sprouting the manifold loveliness of roses and lilies, sweetly smelling of honeyed fragrances and spices’.
The belief in spices’ unearthly origins is crucial to understanding their charm – and their value. For if paradise and its spices were fair, so the world in which Damian lived was, so far as he was concerned, irredeemably foul. Among his other works is the Book of Gomorrah, one of the bleakest visions of humanity ever penned. In Damian’s eyes the entire race was mired in baseness, its sole, slender hope a Church that was itself sunk in moral squalor and loathsome homosexuality. The priesthood was addicted to every variant of rampant lust, racked by ‘the befouling cancer of sodomy’. Bishoprics were bought and sold, lecherous priests openly took wives and handed on their livings to their bastard offspring, and a corrupt and venal papacy was despised and disregarded by the secular powers. From his retreat in the wilderness Damian looked out on a world populated by a race of degenerate Yahoos. Paradise seemed a long way away.
Yet its aromas were there, as it were, right under his nose. Spices were a taste of paradise in a world submerged in filth; they were far more than mere foodstuffs. And this reputation endured even as knowledge of the wider world expanded and travellers penetrated, glacier-pace, some of the dark spaces on the map. Jean, sire de Joinville (c. 1224–1317) provided a fairly typical explanation of the spices’ arrival from the East. In his day, and long before and after, Egypt was the prime intermediary between the Near and the Far East, and as such Europe’s prime supplier of spice. After the capture of the crusader army in 1250 Joinville was held in an Egyptian dungeon as a prisoner of the sultan, awaiting the payment of a hefty ransom. Though he had seen the Nile carry off the bloated bodies of his companions, mown down by plague after the battle of al-Mansurah, he was prepared to believe in the river’s unearthly origins, and that it might carry more pleasant flotsam:
Before the river enters Egypt, the people who are so accustomed cast their nets in the river in the evening; and when morning comes, they find in their nets those goods sold by weight that they bring to this land, that is, ginger, rhubarb, aloes wood, and cinnamon. And it is said that these things come from the terrestrial Paradise; for the wind blows down the dead wood in this country, and the merchants here sell us the dead wood that falls in the river.
This from someone who, unlike the overwhelming majority of Europeans, had wet his feet in its waters.
And yet Joinville’s account was something more than a fabulous yarn spun by a returning traveller out to dazzle the folks back home. Judged by the standards of the day, his passed for relatively informed opinion; he had moreover a willing audience, many of whom would have seen it as impious to believe otherwise. For although no one had been there, few doubted the existence of the terrestrial paradise from where, according to an ancient tradition, some of the fruits of a lost Eden still trickled through to a fallen humanity: ‘Whatever fragrant or beautiful thing that comes to us is from that place,’ said St Avitus of Vienne (c.490–518). That spices grew in Eden’s garden of delights was no more than the literal truth, inasmuch as the vocabulary for delights and spices was one and the same. The connection was explained by St Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) in what was possibly early-medieval Christendom’s single most influential description of the East and the terrestrial paradise: ‘Paradise … is called in Hebrew “Eden”, which is translated into our own language as Deliciae, the place of luxury or delight [equally, the exotic delights and dainties themselves]. Joined together, this makes “Garden of Delights”; for it is planted with every type of wood and fruit-bearing tree, including the Tree of Life. There is neither cold nor heat but eternal spring.’ Unfortunately for humanity, however, this paradise was hedged in with ‘flames like swords, and a wall of fire reaching almost to the sky’.
As Joinville appreciated, with such barriers separating supply and demand, the exact means of that transfer were necessarily obscure, and the source of much speculation. According to the Book of Genesis, in Eden was the fountain that ‘went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground’. Translated to medieval cosmography, biblical exegesis held that this fountain was the source of the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris and Phison (or, to some, the Ganges). St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) concluded that the rivers circumvented the flames by passing underground before re-emerging. It was via these rivers that spices arrived.
Thus when Joinville looked on the waters of the Nile and came up with his colourful explanation of its harvest, he was merely reconciling the biblical truth to what he had seen with his own eyes. By unknown means and ferried by unknown hands, on streams flowing from another world, spices arrived from a place known only from Bible and fable, washing up in the souks of Cairo and Alexandria and thence to the markets of Europe like so much cosmic driftwood.
Or, perhaps more to the point, like gold dust. For mystery meant profitability. In a stroke of medieval marketing genius, there was even a spice that took its name from its purported origins, the grains of paradise that appear in spicers’ account books from the thirteenth century on. In medieval times grains of paradise, or simply ‘grains’, cost more than the black pepper of India. Sharp to the taste and now confined to speciality shops, the spice is in fact the fruit of Aframomum melegueta (also Aframomum granumparadisi), a native of West Africa, where it was purchased by Portuguese traders on their voyages down around the continent’s western bulge, or else freighted by caravan across the Sahara, along the gold and slave routes of Timbuktoo. By the time ‘grains’ arrived in Europe their credentials were burnished and their origins forgotten. Paradise made for as plausible an origin as any other.
That spices have all but lost their lustre in the twenty-first century is in large measure because much of the mystery has gone out of the trade and the places where they grow. Paradise survives not as a place, but as a symbol. Yet for centuries spices and paradise were inseparable, joined together in a relationship whose durability was guaranteed by the fact that it could not be disproved. The few known facts added up to a baffling puzzle that invited colourful explanations. Hardly anyone involved in the trade knew who or what lay beyond the last transaction, and much the same held true all along the spice routes. None but the first few handlers of these transactions had any idea where their goods originated; few had any id
ea where they were bound; and none could view the system in its entirety. Trade was a piecemeal business, passed on from one middleman to another. Perhaps the greatest wonder of the system is that it existed at all.
For between harvest and consumption Europe’s spices travelled a long and fragile thread. The spice routes mazed across the map like the wanderings of a black ant, criss-crossing seas and deserts, now appearing then abruptly vanishing and reappearing, forking and branching with the rise and fall of cities and empires, outbreaks of war and fluctuating demand. When the visiting King and Queen of Scotland celebrated the Feast of the Assumption at Woodstock in 1256 with no less than fifty pounds each of ginger, pepper and cinnamon, four pounds of cloves, two pounds each of nutmeg and mace and two pounds of galangal,* their seasonings had travelled journeys the diners could barely guess at, acquiring an air of glamour and otherworldiness that we can only with difficulty imagine.
No spices were more travelled or more exotic than the cloves, nutmeg and mace of the Moluccas. Served to the visiting monarchs in a glass of spiced wine, all that can be known with any degree of certainty is their origin. After harvest in the nutmeg groves of the Bandas or in the shadow of the volcanic cones of Ternate and Tidore, next, most likely, they were stowed on one of the outriggers that still flit between the islands of the archipelago. Alternatively, they may have been acquired by Chinese traders known to have visited the Moluccas from the thirteenth century onwards. Moving west past Sulawesi, Borneo and Java, through the straits of Malacca, they were shipped to India and the spice-marts of Malabar. Next, Arab dhows conveyed them across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. At any one of a number of ancient ports – Basra, Jiddah, Muscat or Aqaba – the spices were transferred onto one of the huge caravans that fanned out across the deserts to the markets of Arabia and on to Alexandria and the Levant.