Spice: The History of a Temptation

However not all these spice-seekers were quite so naïve or gullible as their cavalier tree-spotting might suggest. In order to assist in the search, each of Columbus’s expeditions took along samples of all the major spices to show the Indians, who would then, so it was hoped, direct them to the real thing. Yet such was the strength of the Europeans’ conviction that even their samples failed to clear up their misunderstanding – rather, the reverse was the case. During the first voyage, two crewmembers were sent on an expedition into the Cuban hinterland with samples of spices, reporting back on 2 November 1493: ‘The Spaniards showed them the cinnamon and pepper and other spices that the Admiral had given them; and the Indians told them by signs that there was a lot of it near there to the south-east, but that right there they did not know if there was any.’ It was the same story everywhere they went. ‘The Admiral showed to some of the Indians of that place cinnamon and pepper … and they recognised it … and indicated by signs that near there there was much of it, towards the south-east.’

The Spaniards’ error was, then, of the sort that has always bemused strangers in a strange land: shortcomings of intelligence; problems of communication; they were finding what they wanted to find, regardless of the reality. The script was repeated with every new landfall. The Indians, already sufficiently puzzled by the pale, bearded strangers, were accosted with samples of dried plants they had no way of recognising. Anxious to get rid of their visitors, or perhaps keen to help but reluctant to admit ignorance of the directions – a still-flourishing Caribbean tradition – the Indians fobbed them off with a wave of the hand and a vague report of gold and spices ‘further on’. And the Spaniards, incapable of rejecting their convictions, refusing to believe the awful possibility, willingly accepted the version of events that suited them best. Exceptions to their expectations were discarded as anomalies, not the smoking gun of falsification. No one could see that the empire had no spice.

Everywhere they went, on this and on subsequent voyages, it was the same story. Yet before long the excuses started to wear a little thin, and in due course Columbus’s inability to make good his promises of gold and spices would contribute to the loss of his credibility. On each of his four voyages to the Caribbean he was compelled to turn for home with little more than paltry samples of gold and his indifferent ‘spices’, just enough to save him from ridicule, leaving others behind to carry on the search, each time with his excuses at the ready. Ferdinand’s patience with his dreamy admiral wore thin, as did the patience of those who served under him. An anonymous memo of 1496 stated what was becoming increasingly clear to all but Columbus: that the islands’ so-called spices were worthless. One who had his feet more firmly planted on the ground, and perhaps the first to appreciate the realities of the situation, was a crewmember of the second voyage, Michele de Cuneo. Writing from the island of Isabella during the second voyage, on 20 January 1494, he was quick to accommodate himself to a spice-free America. When an expedition was dispatched into the hinterland, returning with two Indians, their failure to find any spices was compensated for by their samples of gold: ‘All of us made merry, not caring any longer about any sort of spicery but only of this blessed gold.’ And indeed gold was where the future lay.

Even now, however, and for decades after, the hope of American spices lingered on. As late as 1518, Bartolomé de las Casas was still prepared to believe that New Spain was ‘very good’ for ginger, cloves and pepper. Remarkably, Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztecs, was perturbed by America’s elusive spices – this in spite of his having delivered a quite colossal fortune into the royal treasury from the conquered empire of Montezuma. In a string of letters to the king he repeatedly promised to find a new route to the Spice Islands, and offered a string of shamefaced apologies for his failure to deliver any cloves or nutmeg in the treasure ships now regularly sailing back to Castile. His men, he pleaded, were still looking. In his fifth letter of 1526, like Columbus before him, he asked for a little forbearance. Given time, he promises, ‘I will undertake to discover a route to the Spice Islands and many others … if this should not prove to be so, Your Majesty may punish me as one who does not tell his king the truth.’

Fortunately for Cortés his bluff was not called. He found no spices, but neither was he punished. For several decades more the conquistadors kept looking, yet all, like Columbus, found themselves chasing a will-of-the-wisp. In the south of the continent, Gonzalo Pizarro set off on a deluded, disastrous quest for cinnamon, plunging from the icy heights of the Peruvian altiplano into the Amazonian jungle, half a planet away from the real thing. Others sailed north, searching for nutmeg and a north-west passage deep in the icy wastes of the Canadian backlands. In due course the New World garnered new dreams and new fortunes from gold and silver; after, there was sugar, fur, cotton, cod and slaves. It was not for well over a hundred years after Columbus first looked that the myth of America’s spices was finally dispelled.

And yet the search was not quite the failure it seemed at the time. The Central American jungle yielded vanilla, and Jamaica allspice – its hybrid taste and pepper-like appearance the source of much confusion. There were, besides, other vegetal riches ripe for the plucking: tobacco, maize, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate. Columbus himself brought back pineapple and cassava. Centuries later, Asian spices were eventually introduced to the Americas, with such success that Grenada is now a major producer of nutmeg; the island republic features a nutmeg on its flag. And even Columbus, his delusions and false dawns notwithstanding, found one reasonable approximation to a spice. In his log for 15 January 1492 he writes of Hispaniola that ‘there is also plenty of aji, which is their pepper, which is more valuable than [black] pepper, and all the people eat nothing else, it being very wholesome. Fifty caravels might be annually loaded with it [from Hispaniola].’ Peter Martyr, the Italian humanist at the Spanish court, noted that five grains of the new plant brought back by Columbus were hotter and more flavourful than twenty grains of Malabar pepper. Columbus himself was taken aback by its heat, reporting to the king and queen (like many an unwary newcomer since) that he found Caribbean food ‘extremely hot’. The natives seemed to put their incendiary pepper in everything.

Not even such a dreamer as Columbus could have foreseen the future success of his ‘aji’: it was, of course, the chili, and it was growing wild all over Spain’s new possessions. Within decades the plant had spread so rapidly around the world that Europeans travelling in Asia expressed confusion as to its origin, just as we too might wonder at the possibility of Thai or Indian food without its bite. But in 1493 the future popularity of the chili was unknowable, and would in any case have come as scant consolation to those who had their hopes or money invested in the chimerical spices of America. Given its ease of harvest and transplantation, the chili was never the major money-spinner that the true Eastern spices had been for thousands of years. In respect of spices, which is to say in respect of one of the primary reasons why it was discovered, the New World was something of a disappointment.

Christians and Spices

After the year 1500 there was no pepper to be had at Calicut that was not dyed red with blood.

Voltaire, Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les moeurs et l’ésprit des nations, 1756

Outside his native Portugal, where past glories live long in the memory, Vasco da Gama has generally been remembered as Columbus’s less eminent contemporary. It is a somewhat unfair assessment, for in a number of senses da Gama brought about what Columbus left undone. In sailing to India five years after Columbus sailed to America, da Gama found what Columbus had sought in vain: a new route to an old world. The one might be thought of as the complement to the other, as much in terms of the objectives as the achievements of their missions. Between the two of them, however dimly sensed it may have been at the time, they united the continents.

The greatest difficulty of Columbus’s voyage was that it was unprecedented. In navigational terms, the outward crossing was uncomplicated. Barely out of sight of Spanish territory in the Canary Islands, his small flotilla picked up the north-easterly trades that carried it across the Atlantic in little over a month. In comparison, da Gama’s voyage lasted over two years, covering some 24,000 miles of ocean, a distance four times greater than Columbus had travelled. When Columbus sailed to America he had to chivvy his men through thirty-three days without sight of land; da Gama’s crew endured ninety. Their voyage was, in every sense, an epic – literally so, inasmuch as it provided the inspiration and subject matter for Portugal’s national poem, the magnificent, sprawling Lusiads of Luís Vaz de Camões, its 1,102 stanzas an appropriately monumental and meandering tribute.

As tends to be the way with epics, the drama was supplied by a combination of heroism, foolishness and cruelty. After saying their last prayers in the chapel of Lisbon’s Torre do Bélem, the crew bade farewell to wives and families before setting out on their ‘doubtful way’ (caminho duvidoso), directing their three small caravels and one supply vessel down the Tagus on 8 July 1497. Passing the Canaries, they headed south down the African coast, skirting the western bulge of the continent towards the Cape Verde islands. Next they turned their prows south and west into the open ocean, hoping thereby to avoid the calms of the Gulf of Guinea – so much they already knew from the many earlier Portuguese expeditions that had sought African gold and slaves for decades. Dropping below the equator they passed from a northern summer into a southern winter whose gales, now deep in the southern latitudes, slung them back east to Africa. Even now they were still far to the north of the Cape of Good Hope, and they had to fight a tortuous battle against adverse currents and winds before they could finally round the bottom of the continent. When they finally left the Atlantic for the Indian Ocean they were already six months from home.

Thus far their course had been scouted by the exploratory voyage of Bartolomeu Diaz a decade earlier; now they were entering uncharted waters. With scurvy starting to get a grip on his exhausted crew, da Gama cautiously worked his way north along Africa’s east coast in an atmosphere of steadily mounting tension. Stopping for supplies and intelligence at various ports along the way, the Portuguese met with mixed receptions, ranging from wary cooperation to bewilderment and outright hostility. A lucky break came at the port of Malindi, in present-day Kenya, where they had the immense good fortune to pick up an Arab pilot familiar with the crossing of the Indian Ocean. By now it was April, and the first gatherings of the summer monsoon, blowing wet and blustery out of the south-west, propelled them across the ocean in a mere twenty-three days. On 17 May, ten months after leaving Portugal, a lookout smelled vegetation on the sea air. The following day, through steam and sheets of scudding monsoon rain, the mountains of the Indian hinterland at last rose into view. They had reached Malabar, India’s Spice Coast.

Thanks to good fortune and the skill of their pilot they were no more than a day’s sailing from Calicut, the principal port of the coast. Though they naturally had little idea of what to expect, the newcomers were not wholly unprepared. With their long experience of voyages down the west coast of Africa, the Portuguese were accustomed to dealing with unfamiliar places and peoples. On this as on earlier voyages, they followed the unsavoury but prudent custom of bringing along an individual known as a degredado, generally a felon or outcast such as a converted Jew, whose role it was to be sent ashore to handle the first contacts with the local population. In the not unlikely event of a hostile reception the degredado was considered expendable. And so, while the rest of the crew remained safely on board, on 21 May an anonymous criminal from the Algarve was put ashore to take his chances.

A crowd rapidly formed around the exotic, pale-faced stranger. To the bemused Indians little was clear, other than that he was not Chinese or Malay, regular visitors in Calicut’s cosmopolitan marketplace. The most reasonable assumption was that he came from somewhere in the Islamic world, though he showed no signs of comprehending the few words of Arabic addressed to him. For want of a better option he was escorted to the house of two resident Tunisian merchants who were, naturally enough, stunned to see a European march through the door. Fortunately, the Tunisians spoke basic Genoese and Castilian, so some rudimentary communication was possible. A famous dialogue ensued:

Tunisian: ‘What the devil brought you here?’

Degredado: ‘We came in search of Christians and spices.’

The answer would not have pleased the Tunisians, but as summaries go this was an admirably succinct account of the expedition’s aims.

Spices figured no less prominently in da Gama’s motivation than they had in Columbus’s voyage five years earlier. The Christians too were more than a matter of lip service; to some extent commercial and religious interests went together. Yet of the two the spices offered richer pickings, and there could be little doubt which mattered more in the minds of the crew and those who came after them. The anonymous narrator who has left the sole surviving account of the voyage goes straight to the heart of the matter:

In the year 1497, King Manuel, the first of that name in Portugal, sent four ships out, which left on a quest for spices, captained by Vasco da Gama, his brother Paulo da Gama and Nicolau Coelho. We left Restelo on Saturday, 8 July 1497, for a voyage which we hope God allows to end in his service. Amen.

Their prayers were not in vain. Whereas Columbus was an entire hemisphere off track, the Portuguese had hit the motherlode.

When da Gama’s degredado splashed dazedly ashore in May 1498, the Malabar coast was the epicentre of the global spice trade; to some extent, it still is. Located in the extreme south-west of the subcontinent, Malabar takes its name from the mountains that sailors see long before the shore comes into view, a suitably international hybrid of a Dravidian head (mala, ‘hill’) grafted onto an Arabic suffix (barr, ‘continent’), the latter supplied by the Arab traders who dominated the westward trade from ancient times through to the end of the Middle Ages. The mountains are the Western Ghats, whose bluffs and escarpments form the western limit of the Deccan plateau. The coast, a low-lying, fish-shaped band of land squeezed between sea and mountains, was, and is, a centre of both spice production and distribution. Calicut was the largest but not the only entrepôt of the coast. A string of lesser ports received fine spices from further east for resale and reshipment west, onward across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and Europe. From the jungles of the Ghats merchants brought ginger, cardamom and a local variety of cinnamon down from the hills, punting their goods through the rivers and backwaters that maze across the plain to the sea. Above all, they brought pepper.

Pepper was the cornerstone of Malabar’s prosperity: what the Persian Gulf today is to oil, Malabar was to pepper, with similarly mixed blessings for the region and its residents. The plant that bears the spice, Piper nigrum, is native to the jungles that cloak the lower slopes of the Ghats, a climbing vine that thrives in the dappled light, shade, heat and wet of the tropical undergrowth. Though it has long since been transplanted around much of the tropical world, connoisseurs of the spice claim that Malabar still produces the finest. Like practically every other aspect of life in Malabar, pepper’s cycle of harvest and trade moves to the seasonal rhythms of the monsoon (the word derives from the Arabic mawsim, ‘season’). In late May or early June the rains sweep in on a front of gusty south-westerlies from the Arabian Sea: the ‘burst’. Over the next few months the first blooms appear on the pepper vines as the upper slopes of the Ghats are drenched in a daily Wagnerian deluge of inky clouds and crashing thunderstorms. By September, the rain falls less heavily, and the clouds and mists boil away up the valleys and gorges. A long, sultry heat descends on the hills. In November, the winds flip 180 degrees, blowing mild and dry out of the north-east as the hot air of the central Asian summer is sucked southward, down the subcontinent from the Himalayas, across the Indian plain to the ocean. In this hot, dry atmosphere the pepper berries cluster and swell; their pungent, biting flavour ripens and deepens. By December they are ready for harvest. Walk any distance in rural Malabar before the return of the monsoon and you are likely to have to make a detour to avoid a patch of peppercorns left out to dry in any space available.

Thanks to the combination of spice and monsoon, when Malabar first emerges into history the coast was already a crossroads frequented by traders and travellers from around the Indian Ocean world. The spices were the end, the monsoon winds the means. There were communities of Chinese and Jews here from the early centuries AD, the latter constituting one of the oldest Jewish communities outside the Middle East. Long before then there had been visitors from Mesopotamia: pieces of teak – another attraction of the coast – were found by the archaeologist Leonard Wooley at Ur of the Chaldees, dating from around 600 BC.* By the time of Christ, when da Gama’s native Portugal was a bleak and barren wilderness of Lusitanian tribesmen peering out on the sailless waters of the Atlantic, Greek mariners were arriving in Malabar in such numbers that one recherché Sanskrit name for pepper was yavanesta, ‘the passion of the Greeks’. Thanks largely to its vegetable wealth Islam was established here from the seventh century onward; Indian Muslims thriving, settling and converting over half a millennium before their Moghul co-religionists stormed down from central Asia. Even in da Gama’s day there were a handful of intrepid Italian merchants who had arrived by the long and dangerous overland route from the Levant. When da Gama dropped anchor Malabar was the most important link in a vast and vastly profitable network, and had been so for centuries.

For those who profited thereby da Gama’s arrival represented an almighty spanner in the works; for the Portuguese, a coup de théâtre. Now for the encore. Surviving the voyage out was one thing, but the Portuguese had still to find their way through the perilous shoals of Malabar politics, in which respect they were utterly in the dark. It seems that da Gama had expected to find in India a situation similar to that the Portuguese knew from their trading voyages to West Africa, where they could barter trinkets of low value for stellar returns, and so was taken aback to find the rich and sophisticated Indians demanding payment in gold and silver. As with Columbus’s experience in the Americas, his misconceptions had tragicomic results. On his march into Calicut to meet its ruler, the Zamorin, da Gama was so overwhelmed by the proliferation of peoples and religions, and so confident of finding the eastern Christian lands of Prester John, that he mistook a Hindu image of Devaki nursing Krishna for a more familiar mother-and-son pairing. Though puzzled by the teeth and horns on some of the statues of the ‘saints’, he promptly fell to his knees and thanked the Hindu gods for his safe arrival.

This was, however, an isolated and definitely unwitting display of religious tolerance. With da Gama regarding himself as every inch the righteous crusader, and out to garner profits no matter the means, Indo-Portuguese relations were practically bound to get off to a rocky start. In his first meeting with the Zamorin, da Gama promptly set about aggravating an already fraught situation with a mixture of religious bigotry and peevish ignorance. The truculent tone of the new arrival might have been calculated to cause offence. The Zamorin was a civilised and sophisticated ruler used to receiving traders from around the Indian Ocean world and one, moreover, most definitely unused to the tepid tribute and paltry gifts – honey, hats, scarlet hoods and washbasins – offered by the Portuguese. Who were these uncouth newcomers that they should treat him, the Lord of Hills and Waves, like some naked barbarian chieftain?

On all sides there was confusion, misunderstanding and suspicion. Da Gama was briefly detained ashore, further fuelling his already ripe paranoia over the ‘dog-like’ behaviour (perraria) of the Indians. On board the Portuguese vessels there was a steadily mounting nervousness that the Moors had poisoned the Zamorin’s mind. These fears were justified, if self-fulfilling: it was after all only rational for the Moors, sensing an opportunity to nip this new threat in the bud, to have encouraged the Zamorin to imprison or indeed execute the ungracious newcomer.

The Zamorin, however, hedged his bets. He granted da Gama’s men freedom to trade, and through the months of July and August they carried on a desultory exchange in an atmosphere of mutual recrimination and distrust. After a summer of escalating tension, da Gama sailed for Portugal in bad odour, leaving a mood of foreboding behind. As he raised anchor, he angrily threatened a group of Moorish merchants, warning them that he would soon be back. He had every reason to be as good as his word, for he left with the fruit of the summer’s efforts, a respectable cargo of spice.

Unlike Columbus’s altogether less convincing souvenirs from the Indies, there was no doubting da Gama’s evidence. But spices aside, exactly what else he had found would not be perceived for several years. In his report to the king, da Gama painted a somewhat distorted picture. Even now he was convinced that Hinduism was a heretical form of Christianity. After two months in the country, he seems to have concluded that the unmistakable polytheism he had seen was some sort of misconceived Trinity. But what was clear to all was the prospect of great things to come, and King Manuel was not one to shirk such a golden opportunity. The doubters’ faction at court and the voices of caution had been silenced. The way to India and its riches lay open. Preparations were immediately put in place for a second, larger fleet.

It sailed on 8 March 1500 under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral, his thirteen ships and more than a thousand-strong crew dwarfing da Gama’s scouting trip of three years earlier. If da Gama’s mandate was reconnaissance, Cabral’s was empire-building. Once in India some of the uncertainties and anxieties of the first voyage soon crystallised into ruthless imperial intentions. (En route to India Cabral discovered Brazil – another unforeseen consequence of the search for the Indies.) Arab and Gujarati traders, Jews and Armenians already established in the trade – all were infidels, ergo enemies. Contrary to a long-cherished notion of liberal and nationalist Indian historians, the Portuguese were not the first to bring violence to the ocean, but they certainly did so with unprecedented expertise. They were moreover the first to claim ownership over more than a localised corner of its waters, and to do so in the name of God. When Camões versified his countrymen’s feats he had Jupiter, in a Virgilian touch, dispense imperium to the conquering Portuguese: ‘From the conquered riches of the Golden Chersonese, to distant China and the farthest islands of the East, the whole expanse of the ocean shall be subject to them.’ And this, substituting ‘God’ for ‘Jupiter’, was exactly how King Manuel saw matters. On the king’s orders, Cabral was to seize control of the spice trade by any means necessary. Portugal’s work was God’s work.