Читать книгу Spice: The History of a Temptation - Jack Turner - Страница 11

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.

On the surface, everything was going Lisbon’s way. The immediate and troubling question was whether the Portuguese had any legal claim to their conquests. To many experts the possibility of Spanish ownership under the terms of Tordesillas looked like a probability. At the time the earth’s circumference was still greatly underestimated, no one having the slightest inkling of the vast breadth of the Pacific. All authorities agreed that the Spice Islands lay only a few days’ sailing west of the Mexican coast, a misconception that would not be corrected for several years. According to the document regarded at the time as the single most authoritative description of the world, the Suma de Geografia of Martim Fernandez de Enciso, written in 1519, the eastern meridian as defined at Tordesillas fell at the mouth of the Ganges – which made the Moluccas Spanish.

While the cosmographers speculated, troubling reports and rumours filtered in. The sheer distance they had to travel from India east to the Moluccas had come as an unpleasant surprise to de Abreu and Serrão. Given the great distance they had covered, it seemed not at all unlikely that they had passed out of the Portuguese hemisphere, into Spain’s. The secrecy with which the Portuguese shrouded their voyages served only to encourage further speculation; one reason why so few contemporary maps survive is that they were treated with the secrecy of classified documents. The Spaniards smelled a rat. To many it looked as if the Portuguese were not conquerors, but trespassers.

One of those who shared this suspicion was a Portuguese nobleman from the remote province of Trás-os-Montes, Fernão de Magalhães, or, as he is known in the English-speaking world, Magellan. A veteran of Portugal’s early years in the Indies, he had waded ashore at the conquest of Malacca alongside Serrão, whose life he had saved. When his friend sailed east to the Moluccas Magellan headed west, to India and then back to Portugal. But he never renounced his ambition to revisit the Indies, and the Spice Islands in particular. Over the course of the next few years he and Serrão maintained a regular correspondence via the junks Serrão sent back laden with cloves from Ternate. It was clear from Serrão’s letters that the Moluccas lay a good deal further east than the Portuguese authorities would publicly admit. Largely on the basis of his communications with Serrão, Magellan’s suspicion that the Moluccas lay in the Spanish half of the globe grew to conviction.

Conviction soon ripened into action. Magellan wrote to Serrão that he would come and join him soon, ‘if not by the Portuguese way, then by Castile’s’: that is, he would sail west from Europe to the Spice Islands, avoiding the Portuguese zone entirely. The idea seemed eminently feasible. Provided his assumptions about the circumference of the earth were correct, the voyage would be shorter than the long trip around Africa and across the Indian Ocean. Technically, in strictly navigational terms, there was nothing stopping him; politically, on the other hand, the idea was dynamite.

In its essentials, of course, Magellan’s plan was nothing new: the idea of a westward voyage to the Spice Islands was the same as Columbus’s scheme a few decades earlier, the chief difference being that Magellan was aware of the chief obstacle in his way, in the form of America. Sailing west across the Atlantic, he aimed to drop down south around the bottom of South America or through a south-west passage, then cruise west to the Spice Islands. Only the outlines of what happened next are clear. As with Columbus before him, the first problem was securing the necessary capital. Back in Portugal, all Magellan’s efforts to finance his scheme ended in failure. Perhaps feeling personally slighted by the king’s refusal to grant him a pension, at some point disenchantment with Portugal and King Manuel set in. He may have been a casualty of court bickering and intrigue – a common fate for returnees from the Indies. Whether or not he divulged the full extent of his suspicions to the king is uncertain, but unlikely. If he did, the king would rather not have known: he had no interest in raising any more doubts over his claim to the Spiceries. Either way, having failed to generate any interest in his plan, Magellan went to Spain in search of richer pickings. Abandoning the land of his birth, he arrived in Seville on 20 October 1517.

Success across the frontier was not long in coming. Freed from the encumbrances of Portuguese court politics, Magellan joined forces with Cristóbal de Haro, the Portuguese agent of the Fuggers, the German banking dynasty that had provided the Portuguese crown with capital for the early spice fleets. Like Magellan, de Haro had also abandoned Portugal in search of a more cooperative royal client, his relationship with Manuel having soured, perhaps as a result of the king’s clumsy efforts at price fixing and insistence on a royal monopoly on all trade in spices. Between the two of them, the exiles from Portugal had the capital and the requisite expertise. By 1519, over increasingly shrill protests from the court in Lisbon, they secured the third element necessary for success, in the form of the backing of the Spanish crown.^*

Of all the great voyages of the age of discovery, Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe has good claim to be the greatest, whether in terms of the privations endured or the sheer audacity of the enterprise. Five black ships sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 20 September 1519, with a complement of about 270 men. Ambitious as it was in conception, the journey was hugely complicated by its commander’s innocence. There were volumes of speculation, but as yet no one knew where or for that matter whether the American continent ended, nor, if there was one, where the purported passage was to be found. Magellan may have imagined that the River Plate fitted the bill, but sailing upstream they soon found the water turning sweet and their way blocked. Exploring dozens of bays and inlets, each time they were forced to turn back in disappointment. The expedition was racked by fear, ennui and fatigue. Tensions between Magellan and his Spanish captains culminated in a mutiny at midnight on Easter day, suppressed by the execution of one of the mutineers; another was left to the tender mercies of the natives. Only as winter lifted, after yet more fruitless searches up every inlet, did Magellan finally lead the survivors through the maze of sea and islands at the southern tip of the continent, passing through a desolate fire-bearing country – Tierra del Fuego, as he dubbed it – then through 325 miles of icy squalls, mists and fogs in the straits that now bear his name. This was, already, an astonishing achievement, but it came at a price. When they entered the Pacific on 28 November 1520, only three of the original five ships remained.

The survivors found the new ocean calm, whence ‘Pacific’. Its tranquillity, however, was deceptive. Like Columbus before him, Magellan had premised his plan on a mistaken assumption of the earth’s circumference, but in this case almost catastrophically so, with the upshot that he had no inkling of the vast expanse of ocean still ahead of him. For fourteen weeks the survivors inched north and west, tormented by fickle winds and consumed by doubts, their food and water all but gone, forever imagining that the Moluccas were just over the horizon. (As it was, they were extremely lucky to have taken a course assisted by a westward current – an oceanic conveyer belt. Had they sailed a little further to the north or south they would almost certainly have perished.) When supplies ran out early in the crossing, the crew was reduced to a diet of ship’s biscuits softened in rancid water; when the biscuits were gone they mixed sawdust with rat droppings and chewed on the leather of the yard arms with teeth that rattled in their blackened, scurvy-ridden gums. When land was finally sighted on 6 March 1521, the crew had been still further reduced by malnutrition, sheer exhaustion and despair. They had survived no fewer than ninety-nine days without fresh food or water.

Next came the absurd and ignominious anti-climax. Soon after arriving in the territory of the modern Philippines, Magellan threw away his life in a pointless skirmish with what the chronicler of the expedition calls ‘an almost naked barbaric nation’. It was an utterly ludicrous death, the result of trying to impress a local chieftain with the power of Christian arms, the more ironic for coming at the end of such a hellish crossing. ‘Thus did this brave Portuguese, Magellan, satisfy his craving for spices.’

Even now, however, the survivors still had much sailing ahead of them. With no clear idea of where they were or where to look they visited ‘an infinity of islands, always searching for the Moluccas’. Finally, Magellan’s Malay slave (a relic of his time in the Indies) identified the unmistakable twin cones of Ternate and Tidore rising above the horizon. While the small Portuguese garrison on Ternate looked on in astonishment and dismay, the crew fired their cannons in joy and proceeded to neighbouring Tidore, where they bought cloves ‘like mad’. The narrator’s relief is palpable: ‘It is no wonder that we should be so joyful, for we had suffered travail and perils for the space of twenty-five months less two days in the search for Molucca.’

After a brief stop for rest and resupply, the shrinking band of survivors made plans for home. At this point Magellan’s flagship, the Trinidad, sprang a serious leak in its worm-eaten bottom. The crew repaired the hull as best they could and made an unsuccessful attempt to sail back across the Pacific to Mexico, but after a fruitless battle against adverse winds and currents they were compelled to return to the Moluccas, whereupon ship and crew were promptly captured by the Portuguese. Only four crewmembers would ever see Spain again.

Meanwhile the other surviving vessel, the Victoria, headed west.^* There were still another nine months of hard sailing before the ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope and turned north, passing along the entire western length of Africa and across the Straits of Gibraltar, to Spain. On 6 September 1522 the Victoria limped into its home harbour of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, fourteen days short of three years since leaving. Of the expedition’s original complement of over 270 only eighteen had survived. A harbourside observer commented that the ship was ‘more full of holes than the best sieve, and these eighteen men more fatigued than the most exhausted horses’.

By his premature death, Magellan had forfeited the fortune and glory for which he had abandoned his country; as a Portuguese in the service of Spain he won only the opprobrium of his motherland and the suspicions of his adopted country. (Had he lived to return to Spain he would, almost certainly, have fallen foul of court intrigue.) The honours went to the survivor who piloted the Victoria back into Sanlúcar, a native of Guetaria by the name of Juan Sebastián de Elcano, one of the participants in the mutiny against Magellan at Port St Julián. But to the survivor went the spoils. Elcano was rewarded with a coat of arms with the device of a globe set above two cinnamon sticks, twelve cloves and three nutmegs, flanked by two Malay kings grasping branches of a spice tree, blazoned with the motto ‘Primus circumdedisti me’ – ‘You were the first to encompass me’.

As the durable Spaniard had outlasted his Portuguese commander, so it seemed on the larger stage of diplomacy. When the Victoria limped back into harbour the tables appeared to have been turned. With a claim staked on Tidore, the Spanish crown now had a physical presence to back up its theoretical claim to sovereignty over the Moluccas. Yet even now there were more twists and turns in store. The border town of Badajoz was the scene of fierce debates between Spanish and Portuguese diplomats, the key issue the still unanswerable question of the Moluccas’ exact longitude. (As a matter of fact, they were indeed in the Portuguese zone, though that could not be confirmed for many years yet.) The Spanish pointed to their presence on Tidore; the Portuguese called them trespassers; the Spanish flung back the same insult. Talks ground on, one futile deposition succeeding another. In the end, a settlement came not from the diplomats but from the accountants of the royal treasury in Madrid. By the terms of the treaty of Zaragoza of 1529, the impecunious Spanish monarch, deaf to the pleading of his counsellors, traded his claim to the Spice Islands for the sum of 350,000 ducats, so as to pay for the ceremonies attending his forthcoming marriage. The Spanish claim to the Moluccas, purchased with so much ingenuity, sweat, cash and blood, was sold to fund a royal wedding.

It was an ignoble end to the enterprise. Many voices – among them de Haro’s – were raised in protest at the king’s short-termism. With the annual profit from the islands estimated at 40,000 ducats, the settlement represented less than a decade’s return. Compounding the investors’ disappointment was the fact that so far these profits had failed to materialise. Even the return of the Victoria had brought de Haro and the other investors little cheer. Among the quayside celebrations, one of the interested parties prepared a breakdown of the expedition’s costs and returns in a document unearthed three hundred years later by the scholar Martín Fernández Navarrete. Known as the ‘discharge document’, this unadorned summary of inputs and outputs makes for fascinating reading. Though at only eighty-five tons the second-smallest vessel of the expedition, the leaking hold of the Victoria yielded 381 bags of cloves, the legacy of the frantic buying that followed its arrival on Tidore. The net weight was calculated at 520 quintals, one arroba and eleven pounds: 60,060 pounds, or 27,300 kilograms. There were also samples of other spices: cinnamon, mace and nutmeg, plus, oddly, one feather (a bird of paradise?).

In the debit column alongside is a listing of expenses: weapons, victuals, hammers, lanterns, drums ‘para diversión’, pitch and tar, gloves, one piece of Valencian cochineal, twenty pounds of saffron, lead, crystal, mirrors, six metal astrolabes, combs, coloured velvets, darts, compasses, various trinkets and other sundry expenses. Taking into account the loss of four of the five ships, the advances paid to the crews, back pay for the survivors and pensions and rewards for the pilot, it emerges that once the Victoria’s 381 bags of cloves had been brought to market the expedition registered a modest net profit. For the investors it was a disappointment, paltry in comparison with the astronomical returns then being enjoyed by Portuguese in the East; but it was a profit nonetheless. The conclusion must rate as one of accountancy’s more dramatic moments: a small hold-full of cloves funded the first circumnavigation of the globe.