Spice: The History of a Temptation

But then Columbus always was a dreamer; it was the quality that simultaneously made him great and, as far as some of his contemporaries were concerned, absurd. Even now there were harder heads that were beginning to see America for what it was, but in his defence, Columbus’s assumptions and wild surmises seem a good deal stranger now than they did then. Given his premises and the mental universe of the medieval cosmographer, to seek the kingdom of Sheba beyond the mangroves and jungled fringes of what is now the Dominican Republic was not, at the time, so Quixotic. After all, the Bible said that Sheba’s kingdom lay somewhere to the east – or west, if you went far enough – and was it not the biblical truth that Sheba had brought spices to Jerusalem? ‘There came no more such abundance of spices, as these, which the Queene of Sheba gave to King Solomon.’ And there were many willing to push the notion of the unearthly origins of spice further still. Plenty of spices found their way into the medieval heaven: according to a deep-seated assumption of medieval theology, God, Christ, the Virgin and saints, the holy and royal dead, commonly smelled of spices. These were ideas and practices that were themselves inheritances from a much older, pagan past. Thousands of years before Columbus set off on his spice odyssey, it was not only heaven and paradise that smelled of spices, but the gods themselves.

And yet for the disappointed king this was of little interest – it was too recherché, too elevated by far. Short of cash, greedy for more, Ferdinand was not amused by his admiral’s flights of fancy. And who can blame him? Columbus had promised earthly gold and spice but instead delivered meandering reworkings of old myths and fairy tales. With every year he seemed to be losing an already shaky grip on reality; he was becoming a crank. More galling still, between letters from his dreamy admiral Ferdinand was receiving altogether more down-to-earth missives from his Portuguese son-in-law, from whose boasting pamphlets of spiced Indian triumphs the booksellers were turning a tidy profit.

But if the Admiral of the Ocean Sea ended up sailing down spice routes of the imagination, discovering a new continent by a happy accident, these were not the only leads he might have followed. For if his fancy eventually led him far from reality, far out of this world, others took more earthy associations of spice for inspiration. To many of Columbus’s contemporaries, spices were anything but paradisal, not so much on account of their origins as due to the uses to which they were put. Here the associations, above and beyond the pungent smell of Mammon, concerned very much more body than spirit. To those of less visionary inclinations than Columbus, it was not paradise that spices evoked so much as Babylon.

Half a millennium after Columbus laboured in vain, only vestiges of the former magnetism of spice remain: the twin poles of attraction and repulsion. But if the aura has long since faded, the continuing interest of the subject lies precisely in the complexity, the contradictory quality of the mixture: of sweetness and astringency; of hunger laced with misgivings; of recommendations and recipes hedged about with reservations. These were, moreover, tensions that even in Columbus’s day had co-existed for centuries. Long before he set off on his optimistic blunder, there were others who pursued not only the Indies and their spices, but also the paradises and Sirens that hovered about them; and others who decried them with equal vigour. This was an appetite of far greater antiquity than even Columbus could imagine, and pregnant with greater ambiguities than he would admit.

* Mastic is the resin of Pistacia lentiscus, an evergreen shrub native to the eastern Mediterranean, much sought after in medieval times for use in dyes, perfumes, varnishes and as a flavouring. The major producer of mastic was the Greek island of Chios, where Columbus’s Genoese countrymen acquired the spice.

* Not everyone was convinced. Some present at the Saló believed that the Indians were Moors, and that Columbus had sailed somewhere down the coast of Africa.

* Contacts may well have been still older. Excavations of Mesopotamian cities of the third millennium BC have turned up specimens of the Indian chank, a conch shell found only in the coastal waters of southern India and Sri Lanka.

* A quintal is a commercial hundredweight.

* There may have been earlier Spanish efforts to sail to the Spice Islands, but they were stymied either by the Spanish crown’s unwillingness to confront Lisbon or perhaps by Portuguese machinations. As early as 1512 the archbishop of Valencia had promoted a plan whereby the Spanish would sail east, contest Malacca, and take possession of the Moluccas.

* The third ship, the Concepción, had been abandoned and burned in the Philippines, ‘because there were too few men’.

* Incidentally, this was the first occasion when the English used lemon juice to ward off scurvy.

* The connection has long been a source of confusion for the unwary, and fodder for a good deal of sensationalist historicising, none of which should be taken too seriously. There was little more to the swap of the two islands than belated recognition of facts on the ground. At the time of the treaty’s signing the English had occupied Manhattan, and the Dutch had taken Run. The matter was not much more complicated than that.

* Galangal is the root of Alpinia officinarum, a native of eastern Asia related to ginger, with a similar though slightly more astringent taste. Still popular in Thai cuisine, it was widely used in Europe in the Middle Ages.

* Zedoary is an aromatic tuberous root of one of several species of Curcuma, related to ginger and turmeric. It was widely used in medieval medicines and cuisine.

* He took along a converted Jew who spoke Hebrew, Arabic and ‘Chaldee’ (Persian).

II Palate

2 Ancient Appetites

The beautiful vessels, the masterpieces of the Greeks, stir white foam on the Periyar river … arriving with gold and departing with pepper.

The Lay of the Anklet, a Tamil poem of c. AD 200

The Aromanauts

From 11 to 8 BC the Romans’ largest military camp in the land they knew as Germania stood on a well-defended site by the banks of the Lippe river, near the present-day town of Oberaden. Today the region lies in the middle of the huge industrial sprawl of the Ruhr valley, but when the Romans arrived this was a wasteland dividing the barbarian and the civilised worlds. Behind were fields and towns; ahead, bogs and forests. It was to push that division outward that the Romans were here, and this, after three years of fighting, they did. The fearsome tribesmen of the Sugambri were ground down, relocated or put to the sword. The legions moved on to new wars and new frontiers. The camp on the Lippe was abandoned and left to an all but total obscurity, uninterrupted but for a brief flurry of interest some two thousand years later with the visit of a team of German archaeologists. Picking through the kitchen scrapheap, they found olive pits, coriander seeds and black pepper.

That the centurions hankered for a little variation from the dreary German diet of roasted meat and porridge is no great surprise. In fact they were far from alone in enjoying their exotic seasonings, even in the outermost bogs and forests of the barbarian north. In England a century or so after Christ, soldiers stationed at the fort of Vindolanda regularly seasoned their meals with Indian pepper as they peered over the battlements of Hadrian’s Wall at the Caledonians; some of the inscribed wooden tablets recording their purchases still survive. Such concrete evidence confirms a fact that many Roman writers mention, but one that in the absence of physical evidence seemed barely credible: that before the time of Christ, a traffic in spices stretched across the Indian Ocean, from far beyond the easternmost reaches of imperial power, north and west across Europe to the outer reaches of the Roman world. And therein lay the roots of a culinary tradition that would endure long after the legions had crumbled and Rome itself lay in ruins.

The Romans were not the first Europeans to eat pepper, but they were the first to do so with any regularity. Locally-produced seasonings had been used in the Mediterranean world since at least the time of the ancient Syrian civilisation of Mari, late in the third millennium BC, where inscriptions on clay tablets record the use of cumin and coriander to flavour beer. When Rome was still a village, Greek cooks knew a host of different seasonings. Cumin, sesame, coriander, oregano and saffron are all mentioned in Greek comedies of the fourth and third centuries BC, but as yet no Eastern spices. It was not that the spices were unknown, nor that no one had yet thought to eat them, but rather that their exorbitant cost rendered them too precious for consumption by all but the very wealthy. There is a fragment by the Attic poet Antiphanes dating from the fourth century BC: ‘If a man should bring home some pepper he’s bought, they propose a motion that he be tortured as a spy’ – from which not much can be extracted other than a vague allusion to high cost. Another fragment contains a recipe for an appetiser of pepper, salad leaf, sedge (a grassy, flowering herb) and Egyptian perfume. The philosopher Theophrastus (c.372 – c.287 BC) knew pepper, but the context makes it clear that the spice is still the concern of the apothecary, not the cook.

Three centuries later pepper was still an elite taste among the Greeks. According to Plutarch, one admirer was the Athenian tyrant Aristion, who was happy to feast even as his subjects starved. When a Roman army besieged Athens in 86 BC the cost of wheat soared to 1,000 drachmas the bushel, whereupon the chief priestess of the city approached the tyrant to beg for one-twelfth of a bushel of wheat. Callously, he sent her a pound of pepper instead.

All that would change with the Romans. That a Roman soldier could share the taste even in the outer reaches of empire depended on one of Rome’s more stupefying technical achievements, and it marks the moment when the spice trade between Europe and Asia first emerges in clear view. Over 1,500 years before Vasco da Gama sailed his three small caravels to India, the Romans had done the same, but in bigger vessels and on a much grander scale. And as with da Gama after them, a strong aroma of spice hung over their exploits.

By the time of the geographer Strabo (c.63 BC – C.AD 24), writing a few decades before the legions decamped from the Lippe, an annual fleet numbering some 120 ships set off for the year-long round trip to India. The outlines of their journey are described in the document known as the Periplus, a pilot’s guide to sailing in the Indian Ocean. Written by an anonymous Greek-speaking sailor sometime in the first century AD, the Periplus describes each step of the journey, identifying which harbours to stop in and which goods to acquire. His readers were the long-distance traders and trampers who serviced the ports and markets in what he calls the Erythraean Sea, by which he meant the huge expanse of water encompassing both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean beyond.

There were two main trade routes within this vast expanse of water, each beginning at one of several ports along the Egyptian shore of the Red Sea. The first dropped down the African coast as far south as Mozambique, calling at the ports and trading stations that received products from the hinterland: ivory, incense, skins, slaves, ebony, exotic animals and gold. The second and longer voyage, and the conduit by which Rome obtained its spices, turned east across the ocean to India. The ships that sailed it were some of the behemoths of ancient navigation, immense ocean-worthy freighters displacing up to a thousand tons. One writer compared an Indian freighter to ‘a small universe in itself … equivalent to several ships of other nations’. On board were crews of marines to protect the valuable cargoes from the pirates who plagued these waters until modern times. Picking their way south through the reefs and rocks of the Red Sea, the fleet fanned out at the Bab el Mandeb, the bottleneck where Africa and the Arabian peninsula converge. Some made their last landfall on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, near present-day Aden – the same place where the India-bound steamers of the Raj would stop for coal, telegraphs and water some two thousand years later. Others sailed on south to Cape Guardafui, Africa’s easternmost point, where the Horn juts east into the Indian Ocean. In ancient times, the cape took its name from the traffic that paused here: the Cape of Spices. At this point the ships on the Africa route turned south, and the India-bound vessels turned their prows east.

According to the Periplus, the next stage of the journey was pioneered by a Greek sailor by the name of Hippalus. In the age of sail all navigation in the Indian Ocean was – to some extent, still is – overshadowed by the annual cycle of the monsoon. From May to August the summer monsoon blows hard and wet out of the south-west, unpredictably and occasionally furiously. By late August, the blustery squalls weaken into stiff breezes and the occasional storm. By September the summer winds splutter and falter, forgetting their outbursts and fading into indecisive squalls and calms.

Next comes a complete transformation. From November to March the winter monsoon wafts unfaltering dry, balmy zephyrs from the north-east, as reliable and as regular as any trade wind. With the right timing, outward or inward bound, ships were guaranteed a following wind in the starboard quarter. To Hippalus went the credit for recognising this annual pattern, thereby unlocking the secret of navigating in the Indian Ocean. Armed with his insight, the Romans sailed across the belly of the ocean to India, bustling over in anything from twenty to forty days. While still out to sea they were warned of the imminent approach of land by the swarms of red-eyed sea snakes that welled up around the hull, a mariner’s guide in these waters to this day. Soon after a blue-green blur lifted out of the sea, the cordillera of the Western Ghats.

The Romans called at any one of nineteen ports in which, in the words of the Periplus, ‘great ships sail … due to the vast quantities of pepper and malabathron’.* In return for manufactured goods such as glassware and works of art, tin and Mediterranean coral – much prized in India for its imputed magical properties – and above all bullion, Rome’s traders brought back ivory, pearls, tortoiseshell, diamonds, onyx, agate, crystal, amethyst, opal, beryl, sapphire, ruby, turquoise, garnet, bloodstone, emerald and carnelian. There were silks trans-shipped from China, parrots for a senator’s menagerie and tigers, rhinoceroses and elephants destined for public slaughter in the arena. There were spices from the north, costust† and nard from the Himalayan foothills, and still others arriving from further east (including, quite possibly, Moluccan cloves and nutmeg, although there are questions over their identification in Rome before the fourth century AD). But it was pepper that was Malabar’s chief attraction.

Rome’s spice traders were pointed in the right direction by less celebrated forerunners. Before the Romans arrived there were Greeks; and someone, presumably, had shown the Greeks the way. Tales of India had filtered west since the time of Herodotus (c.484–c.425 BC), and Greek travellers had known the land route to the north of India from at least the time of the conquests of Alexander the Great. In 325 BC Alexander’s admiral Nearchus sailed from the Indus back up the Persian Gulf and up the Euphrates to Babylon. Around 302 BC one of Alexander’s successors apparently sponsored two voyages from the Euphrates to India and its spices. However, the first hard evidence of any European involvement in regular seaborne trade with the spice-bearing south of the subcontinent dates from the time of the Greco-Egyptian dynasty of the Ptolemies (305–30 BC). Successors to the Egyptian fragment of Alexander’s empire, the Ptolemies had sporadic commercial exchanges with India, though these exchanges were probably in Arab (and Indian?) hands. They exchanged ambassadors with the Maurya emperors Chandragupta II (ruled C.321–C.297 BC) and Asoka (ruled c.274–c.232 BC). Back in Egypt Ptolemy II’s (ruled 285–246 BC) triumphal procession of 271–270 BC featured Indian women, oxen and marbles.

According to the geographer Strabo, the first European to attempt to establish serious commercial contacts with India was a certain Eudoxus of Cyzicus, an entrepreneurial Greek who made the acquaintance of an Indian shipwrecked somewhere on the shores of the Red Sea. Around 120 BC Eudoxus was in Alexandria when the regime’s coast guards brought a half-dead Indian sailor to the court of Ptolemy Euergetes II. Most likely the castaway came from the Dravidian south of the continent, or possibly even Ceylon, since by this stage an interpreter for one of the northern languages could have been found without too much difficulty. Before long the enigmatic arrival acquired a sufficient command of Greek to interest Eudoxus in the possibility of going to India himself.

Armed with first-hand knowledge of Indian waters, Eudoxus made two trips to India to buy spices and other Eastern luxuries, returning on each occasion with a rich haul of exotica, much to the delight of the king, who promptly requisitioned the lot. Frustrated, and anticipating an idea that would captivate the geographers of medieval Europe, Eudoxus attempted to circumvent the problem by circumnavigating Africa. On the first attempt he made it no further than modern Morocco, where his crew mutinied and he was forced to turn back. Undeterred, he set out a second time, taking with him seeds to sow crops and some dancing girls to keep his crew amenable. Having sailed west beyond the straits of Gibraltar neither Eudoxus nor the dancing girls were ever heard of again, but he deserves at least a mention in any history of navigation, for his is the first name in a tradition that culminates with Vasco da Gama.*

Whereas history records Eudoxus as a flamboyant failure, Rome’s approach to the problem of reaching India and its riches was, characteristically, a good deal more effective. Following the defeat and suicide of Cleopatra, the last of the Greco-Egyptian dynasty of the Ptolemies, the emperor Augustus annexed Egypt to the empire in 30 BC, thereby granting Roman merchants direct access to the Red Sea. Flushed with the spoils of empire, and with an emergent class of the Roman mega-rich demanding new and more exotic luxuries, Roman merchants now had the incentive, the opportunity and the means to establish themselves as a serious presence in Indian Ocean trade.

They wasted no time, and spared no means. Within a decade of Egypt’s conquest a bustling traffic was underway. New ports were constructed on the Red Sea shore, and wells were dug along the caravan routes crossing the desert from the Nile to the coast. Most likely the impulse for this expansion came from competition with Eastern powers already established in the trade, among them the commercial empire of the Nabataeans, an Arabian people that had grown rich on the ancient caravan traffic from Arabia and beyond – the splendid ruins of Petra are the most visible reminder of their wealth. Further south, the Romans faced competition from the trading powers of the Hadhramaut, successors to the trade and caravan routes once travelled, if the Bible is to be believed, by the Queen of Sheba. No sooner had Egypt been subjugated than an army under the command of the prefect of Egypt was dispatched to sack ports along the Arabian coasts. The likely incentive for the expedition was much the same as the one that had earlier spurred Eudoxus, and that would remain a perennial catalyst of the spice trade for the best part of another two millennia: the desire to circumvent – in this case, to rub out – the middleman. This obscure expedition was apparently the first war launched by a European power for the sake of the lucrative Eastern traffic, but it would not be the last.

With the way to India now wide open to Roman shipping, East and West began to develop a clearer image of one another than had ever been possible. Roman emperors regularly received Indian ambassadors. Augustus apparently exhibited a tiger in 13 or 11 BC For their part, the Indians were evidently reasonably familiar with Rome, and impressed by what they saw. At Ara, in north-eastern India, there is an inscription of King Kanishka in which he refers to himself as ‘Caesar’. Contacts were deepening, yet from the distance of Rome India still appeared as a hazy mix of fact and fantasy, as in Apuleius’ (c. AD 124–C.170) description:

The Indians are a people of great population and vast territories situated far to our east, by Ocean’s ebb, where the stars first rise at the ends of the earth, beyond the learned Egyptians and the superstitious Jews, Nabataean merchants and flowing-robed Parthians, past the Ituraeans* with their meagre crops and the Arabs rich in perfumes – wherefore I do not so much wonder at the Indians’ mountains of ivory, harvests of pepper, stockpiles of cinnamon, tempered iron, mines of silver and smelted streams of gold; nor at the Ganges, the greatest of all rivers and the king of the waters of the Dawn, running in a hundred streams …

The merchants who went there knew better, but it was not in their interest to be too forthcoming about what they saw – one reason, perhaps, why aside from the unadorned listing of ports and products in the Periplus no first-hand account is extant. Surviving Indian sources describe the foreigners’ trading stations and warehouses as ‘residences of limitless wealth’. There are references to Western converts to Buddhism and Greek mercenaries in the employ of Indian rulers. An Indian poet writes of his ruler’s taste for Greek wine. Greek carpenters built a palace for an Indian king. At Muziris, the principal entrepôt on the coast, the Romans erected a temple to the emperor Augustus: an act of pious patriotism, perhaps, or a reminder of the long arm of the metropole. Its ruins lie somewhere under the modern town of Cranganore, on the banks of a river sprung from a maze of backwaters, by which the pepper arrived, via porter, buffalo and barge, from harvest further inland. Ancient Tamil poets describe Muziris as a scene of heaving activity: a town that ‘offers toddy as if it were water to those who come to pour there the goods from the mountains and those from the sea, to those who bring ashore in the lagoon boats the “gifts” of gold brought by the ships, and to those who crowd the port in the turmoil created by the sacks of pepper piled up in the houses’. To visit Malabar today it is easy to imagine that the scene that greeted the Romans cannot have changed much since antiquity. In the spice quarters of Malabar the tourist still sees the same scenes of pulsating energy: haggling merchants and a harbour crowded with boats from the backwaters, unloading their cargo of spices. The occasional buffalo pushes its way through the crowd while porters scurry to and from the warehouses, bent double under sacks of cardamom and pepper.

With the right timing the return leg was a sleepier affair than the outward journey. Once the spices had been bought and loaded onto the ships nothing remained for the Romans but to wait for the monsoon winds to shift in their favour and, sailors being sailors, to knock back the toddy like water. With the gentle north-easterlies of the winter monsoon in their sails, Rome’s spice fleets retraced their route eastward across the ocean, then north up the Red Sea. The cargoes were unloaded on the Egyptian coast, then transferred onto caravans that angled back across the desert to the Nile. During the course of one such crossing a returnee from the Indian voyage carved graffiti that may still be read on the walls of the Wadi Menih: ‘C. Numidius Eros made this in the 38th year of Caesar’s [Augustus’s] rule, returning from India in the month of Pamenoth.’ In modern terms the year was 2 BC in the month of February or March, precisely the time when the fleets were expected back on the winds of the winter monsoon.