Spice: The History of a Temptation
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For a time, it looked as if God was indeed on their side. Da Gama had made the gratifying discovery that Arab traders had no answer to the fearsome naval artillery of the Portuguese. Now it fell to Cabral to flex his muscles. On his arrival in Calicut he demanded that the Zamorin expel all Muslim merchants, which naturally the Zamorin refused to do. Calicut’s prosperity, after all, was built on the twin pillars of free trade and respect for foreign shipping. Relations went from bad to worse. As the Zamorin stalled, Cabral seized a large and heavily laden Arab ship preparing to sail for the Red Sea, provoking a riot in which fifty-three Portuguese trapped onshore were killed. In response, Cabral turned his artillery on the city. The savage two-day bombardment forced the Zamorin to flee for his life. Having had the temerity to resist the Portuguese diktat, Calicut and all within were now fair game. The Portuguese seized or sank all Muslim shipping they could lay their hands on; Muslim merchants were hanged from the rigging and burned alive in view of their families ashore.
Calicut’s fate was just a taste of things to come. In the years that followed, similar treatment was revisited on the city and on other Malabar ports, often provoked by local squabbles but all to the strategic end of establishing a royal monopoly over trade in the Indian Ocean. Henceforth traders of all nations would require a permit to sail waters they had sailed freely for centuries. The goal was nothing less than to make the Indian Ocean a Portuguese lake. All competition would be taxed or blown out of the water.
And so, in their clumsy, bloody way, Portugal’s pioneers in the East set about building an Asian empire. It would last, in parts, for nearly five hundred years, the first of all European empires in Asia, and the longest-lived. Unlike its successors, however, this new empire was not based on the occupation of territory, the filling-in of the blank spaces on the map, so much as it was aimed at the acquisition of a network of trading stations and forts. The empire would rapidly diversify, but it is fair to say that spice provided the early impetus. What mattered was control over the centres of trade, above all the spice trade. In its formative years Portugal’s Estado da India was, as one historian has dubbed it, the pepper empire.
It was certainly spice that impressed Lisbon and its rivals. Looking back on the golden epoch of the conquests from an age of imperial retreat, the Jesuit historian Fernão de Queyroz (1617–1688) claimed that da Gama’s legacy and ownership of the spices in particular could not fail ‘to astound the world’. In Europe, it was the Italians who were most astounded, for it was they who stood to lose the most. By the time Asian spices arrived in Mediterranean waters the trade was effectively monopolised by a handful of big Venetian merchants, for whom da Gama’s démarche opened a terrifying prospect. Incredulity and caution on the first reception of the news of da Gama’s voyage turned to dismay when news came of a second and then a third expedition. In 1501 two Portuguese ships laden with spices arrived in Flanders and immediately set about undercutting the Italians who had long dominated the market. Venetian merchants in Alexandria and the Levantine ports and marketplaces soon found prices soaring, and for a few years the spice galleys returned empty. La Serenissima trembled. There was scant consolation in the sneering nickname conferred on Portugal’s King Manuel, the upstart ‘grocer king’.
This Manuel knew full well. In letters to various crowned heads of Europe, penned within days of da Gama’s return, King Manuel crowed his success, styling himself ‘Lord of Guinea, and of the Conquest, the Navigation and Commerce of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India’, and boasting of the vast profits that would now flow through his kingdom – and away from Venice. Among the recipients of these letters were the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, his parents-in-law; given the poor returns of their own investments in spices they must have found it particularly galling to learn of Manuel’s successes among the glittering riches of the glorious East, at a time when Spain’s explorers were still scraping around a scattering of heathenish Caribbean islands. This Manuel fully appreciated, so for good measure he had his letters printed into pamphlets for public consumption. One particularly gloating missive invited the Venetians to come and buy their spices at Lisbon, and indeed, in the desperate year of 1515, they had no alternative.
For a time it looked as though events in far-off Malabar had sparked a revolution in the old Mediterranean order. During the summer of da Gama’s return the Florentine Guido di Detti gloated that the Venetians, once deprived of the commerce of the Levant, ‘will have to go back to fishing’. The Venetians feared as much themselves. In July 1501 the Venetian diarist Girolami Priuli estimated that the Portuguese would make a hundred from every ducat they invested; and there was no doubt that Hungarians, Flemish and French, Germans and ‘those beyond the mountains’, formerly wont to come to Venice for spice, would now head for Lisbon. With this gloomy prognosis in mind he predicted that the loss of the spice trade would be as calamitous ‘as the loss of milk to a new-born babe … The worst news the Venetian Republic could ever have had, excepting only the loss of our freedom.’
For all those who envied Venice its riches it was an appealing prospect, but they were to be disappointed. As far as business was concerned, the Venetians were no babes in arms. In the longer run, Portugal’s grasp of the spice trade proved more shaky than it had at first appeared. Historians long accepted Manuel’s boasting at face value, taking it for granted that da Gama’s voyage succeeded in neatly redirecting the spice trade from the Indian into the Atlantic Ocean, but this was far from being the case. After a few disrupted decades, as the shock of early Portuguese conquests reverberated back down the spice routes, Alexandria and Venice staged a comeback. In the 1560s there were so many spices for sale at Alexandria that a Portuguese spy suggested Portugal should abandon the Cape route altogether and ship its spices via the Levant in order to cut costs. So great was the flow of illicit spices through the Portuguese blockade that there was speculation that the Portuguese viceroy was in tacit revolt against the king.
That Portugal failed to monopolise the spice trade is not, in retrospect, so remarkable. Even with their fearsome cannons, the Portuguese effort to lord it over the Indian Ocean, so far from home, was an extraordinary act of hubris, and Manuel’s vainglorious titles little more than a fantasy. With their religious bigotry and cavalier attitude to established networks the Portuguese rapidly accumulated enemies who would in due course cost them dear. Though they were unable to face the Portuguese ships in a shooting match, smaller, swifter Arab vessels enjoyed remarkable success in avoiding the blockade and generally raising costs. For the Portuguese crown every fort, every cannon and every man under arms represented a loss of profits. Violence was bad for business. Beset by enemies on the outside, the Portuguese empire proved remarkably porous from within. Subject to strict rules, compelled to buy and sell at prices set by the crown, and facing the likely prospect of an early death from some foul disease, shipwreck or scurvy, the Portuguese in India, most of whom had gone east to enrich themselves, had few legal means of doing so. Endemic smuggling, corruption and graft were the inevitable result. There were too many temptations to plunder, and little to stop it. The costs of the pepper empire raced ahead of returns. For all the sound and the fury (and the poetry), this was a creaking, leaking empire – ‘There is much here to envy,’ as one of da Gama’s descendants summarised matters.
In May 1498, however, all such future complications were far from the minds of da Gama’s crew. There were more pressing matters to attend to. As they walked dumbfounded through the streets of Calicut, ogling the rich houses of the great merchants, the huge warehouses bursting with spice, the mile-wide palace and the rich traders passing on their silken palanquins, they naturally thought they had hit the big time. Their first priorities were getting rich quick, or simply making it home. Da Gama contrived to make this already daunting task infinitely more difficult by sailing too early, before the monsoon winds had shifted. The crossing to Africa, three weeks’ sailing on the outward leg, now took three months. Thirty crewmembers died of scurvy, leaving a mere seven or eight able-bodied mariners for each vessel. The third caravel was abandoned, ‘for it was an impossible thing to navigate three ships with as few people as we were’. By the time they finally returned to Lisbon, only fifty-five of the 170 or so who had set forth remained. Da Gama himself survived due to the hardiness of his constitution and, in all likelihood, the superior quality of the officers’ rations (the nutrients in the wine and spices reserved for officers may have made the difference). Among the casualties was his brother Paulo, who died in the Azores, only a few days’ sailing from home.
Even in purely financial terms, the initial results were less spectacular than had been hoped. The two ships that returned to Portugal were compact, designed for discovery, not cargo. As a result the expedition came back with a substantial but scarcely earth-shattering haul of spices. The survivors brought little more than curios, in some cases paid for, quite literally, by the shirts off their backs. But in the heady days of da Gama’s return, when the king himself hugged this once obscure nobleman and called him his ‘Almirante amigo’, any future problems were far from anyone’s mind. For if da Gama’s experience foreshadowed the extreme hazards of the sea route to the Indies, it also gave a stunning demonstration of its promise. As they offered prayers of thanks in Bélem, where they had knelt two years earlier, all the survivors had reason to hope that the spices da Gama brought back were harbingers of greater things to come. The financiers rubbed their hands; from Antwerp and Augsburg the great banking houses of Europe looked on remote little Portugal with new interest.
What was clear was that the old order had been rattled, and there was good reason to believe that it would shortly be turned on its head. A decade after da Gama’s arrival in India an itinerant Italian by the name of Ludovico Varthema travelled through the Portuguese Indies and beyond, witnessing in person the prodigious infancy of Europe’s first Asian empire. He spoke for many in 1506: ‘As far as I can conjecture by my peregrinations of the world … I think that the king of Portugal, if he continues as he has begun, is likely to be the richest king in the world.’ At the time, it seemed a reasonable surmise. Measured by the spicy mandates of their missions and in the assessment of the day, Columbus looked the failure, and da Gama the success.
Debate and Stryfe Betwene the Spanyardes and Portugales
Behold the numberless islands,
scattered across the seas of the Orient.
Behold Tidore and Ternate,
from whose fiery summit shoot rippling waves of flame.
You will see the trees of the biting clove,
bought with Portuguese blood …
Camões, The Lusiads, 1572
As the competition between Spain and Portugal for the spices of the East escalated into an all-out race, not all the victories went Portugal’s way; nor was the competition, though always bitterly contested and often bloody, wholly without agreements and treaties. But like its modern counterpart the fifteenth-century treaty could have unpredictable effects – on occasion not so much preventing conflict as redirecting or even provoking it. This gloomy fact of international life has its prime late-medieval exemplar in the treaty of Tordesillas, signed by ambassadors of the two Iberian powers in the north-western Spanish town of the same name on 7 June 1494.
In its planetary terms the treaty of Tordesillas was perhaps the single most grandiose diplomatic agreement of all time. Following Columbus’s return in 1493, the Spanish crown moved quickly – by the standards of fifteenth-century diplomacy – to clarify the scope of any future voyages: who was entitled to discover what. The issue was referred to the Vatican, the ultimate arbiter of matters earthly and divine, and later the same year Alexander VI duly issued a papal bull on the matter. To Spain he granted sovereignty over all lands west of a line of longitude running one hundred leagues (about 320 miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain had title to the lands visited by Columbus, while the Portuguese retained the right to their discoveries along the West African coast.
For Portugal, however, this was not good enough. Sensing some national bias on the part of the Spanish-born pontiff, Portugal’s King João II demanded a revision, which was duly achieved after prolonged negotiations in Tordesillas. In effect, the pontiff’s planetary partition was shunted west. According to the new, revised terms, each Iberian power was assigned a zone either side of a line of longitude running 370 leagues (about 1,185 miles) to the west of the Cape Verde Islands. To the Portuguese went all lands to the east; to the Spanish everything to the west. They agreed, in effect, to divide the world between them, as neatly as an orange split in two.
Cut and dried as the arrangement seemed, the treaty muddled as much as it clarified, and its ambiguities and uncertainties meant it was pregnant with the seeds of future conflict. Critically, and fatally for any treaty, it was impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy when its signatories were in breach of its terms. With the invention of chronometers sufficiently precise to measure longitude still several hundred years in the future, there was no way of accurately measuring the division. The demarcation was for all intents and purposes a legal fiction. Navigators heading west into the Atlantic had to rely on dead reckoning to determine whether they were in the Spanish or the Portuguese zone.
More seriously, the framers of the treaty, like everyone else in 1494, laboured under serious delusions concerning the shape of the world they purported to parcel up. In the short term, this worked to Portugal’s advantage: ignorance of the shape and extent of the lands visited by Columbus, in particular the great eastward bulge of the South American continent, gifted Lisbon legal tide to Brazil. But Brazil was at this stage regarded as little more than a supply stop on the road to India. More pressing was the dispensation on the other side of the planet. The real prize in everyone’s minds was control of the fabulous, far eastern Indies. Who did they really belong to, Spain or Portugal? (The possibility that the Indies might belong to the Indians did not enter the equation.)
It was here that the unanswered and effectively unanswerable questions of Tordesillas were the stuff of Portuguese nightmares. The world being round, it was self-evident that the line of division ran in a great circle, all the way round the globe. When João succeeded in revising the treaty, in effect he gambled on giving Spain hundreds of leagues of Asian waters in return for more of the Atlantic and the right to Africa. But more in the west meant less in the east. The question was, where lay the slice? Where was the ‘anti-meridian’, and who owned the tide to the Spice Islands? Cosmographers could argue the point endlessly, debating the circumference of the earth with arcane and ingenious suppositions, but there was no way of knowing who was right.
With fleets setting off every year, and the pace of discoveries accelerating, the issue could not long remain academic. Indeed, as discoveries in the East proceeded apace, the debate became more complex and more fraught with geopolitical implications. After da Gama’s first voyage in 1497, successive Portuguese expeditions pressed deeper into the heart of maritime Asia. The first stop was the island of Sri Lanka and its cinnamon. In 1505 the first Portuguese expedition extracted ‘tribute’ of 150 quintals of cinnamon from the king of Gale – the first of a sorry string of similar, steadily escalating exactions.* Six years later the Portuguese crossed the Bay of Bengal and seized, after a brief and bloody siege, the entrepôt of Malacca. Dominating the straits of the same name between Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, Malacca was the richest port of the East, its prosperity dependent, like Singapore’s today, on a position astride a natural bottleneck. Here Gujarati, Arab, Chinese and Malay ships came to trade for spices and all the exotica of the East (the name is probably derived from the Arabic malakat, ‘market’). Malacca was the choke point through which all Eastern spices headed west. In the judgement of the first Portuguese arrivals it was the richest seaport in the world. A few years after its fall the adventurer and chronicler Tomé Pires (c.1468–c.1540) claimed, with the hyperbole typical of these years, that ‘whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice’.
Even now, however, the real prize lay still further east, somewhere in what the Malays called ‘the lands below the winds’. From somewhere in the scattered islands of the archipelago came the most elusive and costly spices of all: cloves, nutmeg and mace. In 1511 all that was known by the Portuguese was that they came from the mysterious ‘Spice Islands’, at this stage more a vague yet alluring notion than a place on the map; there were, in fact, no European maps of the Moluccas, or none worth navigating by. The obscurity shrouding the islands did not prevent, but rather engendered, speculation. For what limited intelligence they could garner the Portuguese had to rely on the second- or third-hand reports of Arab, Javanese and Chinese navigators, plus the extremely sparse accounts of one or two European travellers who claimed, with varying degrees of plausibility, to have been there. Most painted a picture of a place straight out of Sinbad’s voyages. The cosmography of Kaswini (c.1263) located the clove on an island near Borneo, whose residents had ‘faces like leather shields, and hair like tails of pack-horses’. They lived deep in the mountains ‘whence are heard by night the sounds of the drum and tambourine, and disturbing cries, and disagreeable laughter’. The eleventh-century traveller and geographer Alberouny of Khiva told tales of a fabulous island of Lanka:
When ships approach this island, some of the crew row to shore, where they deposit either money or such things as the natives lack, such as salt and waist cloths. On their return the next morning, they find cloves in equal value. Some believed that this barter was carried on with genii; one thing was, however, certain: no one who ventured into the interior of that island ever left it again.
Other Arab accounts of the islands were still vaguer and more vivid, as with Masudi’s (890–956) Meadows of Gold:
No kingdom has more natural resources, nor more articles for exportation than this. Among these are camphor, aloes, gillyflowers [cloves], sandal-wood, betel-nuts, mace, cardamoms, cubebs and the like … At no great distance is another island from which, constantly, the sound of drums, lutes, fifes and other musical instruments and the noise of dancing and various amusements are heard. Sailors who have passed this place believe that the Dajjal [the Antichrist of the Muslims] occupies this island.
Embroidered as these fictions were, the sixteenth-century reality lagged not far behind. For the spices of these fables grew only on two tiny archipelagos, each of which is barely larger than a speck on the best modern map. Needless to say, no such maps existed in 1500. To locate them among the 16,000 or so islands of the archipelago was to find a needle in a haystack.
The northernmost of those specks is the home of the clove, in what is today the province of Maluku, in the easternmost extremities of Indonesia. Each of the five islands of the Moluccas is little more than a volcanic cone jutting from the water, fringed by a thin strip of habitable land. From the air they resemble a row of emerald witches’ hats set down on the ocean. Ternate, one of the two principal islands, measures little more than six and a half miles across, tapering at the centre to a point over a mile high. In the phrase of the Elizabethan compiler Samuel Purchas, Ternate’s volcano of Gamalama is ‘angrie with Nature’, announcing its regular eruptions by spitting Cyclopean boulders into the atmosphere to an altitude of 10,000 metres, like the uncorking of a colossal champagne bottle. A mile across the water stands Tidore, Ternate’s twin and historic rival, like Ternate a near-perfect volcanic cone, barely ten miles long, its altitude a mere nine metres less: 1,721 metres to Ternate’s 1,730. From the summit it is possible to see the other three Moluccan islands, marching off in a line to the south: Motir, Makian and Bachan beyond. Together they represent a few dozen square miles in millions of miles of islands and ocean. At the start of the sixteenth century and for millennia beforehand they were the source of each and every clove consumed on earth.
The nutmeg was equally reclusive. Provided the winds are right, a week’s sailing southward from Ternate will bring the well-directed traveller to the tiny archipelago of the Bandas or South Moluccas, nine outcrops of rock and jungle comprising a total land area of seventeen square miles (forty-four square kilometres). Here, and here alone, grew the nutmeg tree.
Size and isolation conspired to keep the Moluccas’ obscurity inviolate. The first European with a plausible claim of having seen nutmegs in their natural state (though many have doubted his account) was the early-sixteenth-century Italian traveller Ludovico Varthema (c. 1465–1517). He found the islands savage and menacing, and the people ‘like beasts … so stupid that if they wished to do evil they would not know how to accomplish it’. Spices aside, there was practically nothing to eat. He made a similarly disparaging assessment of the northern Moluccas, where the people were ‘beastly, and more vile and worthless than those of Banda’. The Portuguese historian João de Barros (c.1496–1570) considered the land ‘ill-favoured and ungracious … the air is loaded with vapours … the coast unwholesome … a warren of every evil, and contain[ing] nothing good but the clove tree’. But regardless of their vapours and ‘rascal’ inhabitants, the Moluccas’ cloves, nutmeg and mace were sufficiently tempting to lure traders across the planet.
Portugal’s first expedition in search of the Moluccas left in 1511. In December of that year, shortly after the fall of Malacca, António de Abreu set off in charge of three small vessels. With the assistance of local guides, the Portuguese found their way to the Bandas, where they filled their hulls to overflowing with nutmeg and mace. With no room remaining for cloves, de Abreu resolved to return to Malacca with two of the expedition’s three ships, leaving behind a companion by the name of Francisco Serrão to carry on the search without him.
The northern Moluccas were a more elusive goal for the Portuguese, although in time they would prove a more valuable asset. After various tribulations, including shipwreck in the Banda Sea and getting hopelessly lost among the islands, Serrão eventually made it to Ternate in 1512, on a junk stolen from pirates on whom he turned the tables. Forming an alliance with the sultan of the island, he worked his way into local favour by assisting Ternate in its desultory conflict with neighbouring Tidore – a condition as constant as the annual visitation of the monsoon. The original Lord Jim, he married a local woman (who may have been a daughter of sultan Almanzor of Tidore; if so, an adroit act of marriage diplomacy) and built himself a small fort and trading post – it still stands – from which he sent back a steady stream of cloves to Portugal. He would remain in the Moluccas for the rest of his life.