Читать книгу Spice: The History of a Temptation - Jack Turner - Страница 12

It is an orchard of delights. With all the sweetness of spices. Paradise as described in the Cursor Mundi, a Northumbrian poem written c.1325.

Columbus, da Gama and Magellan, the three standard-bearers of the age of discovery, were spice-seekers before they became discoverers. Many lesser names followed where they had led. In the wake of their first groping feelers into the unknown, other navigators, traders, pirates and finally armies of various European powers hunted down the source of the spices and squabbled, bloodily and desperately, over their possession.

After the early successes of the Iberian powers, the spice trade took a Protestant turn. At the close of the sixteenth century English and Dutch traders made their first appearance in Asian waters, impelled by a desire for spice, as Conrad would phrase it, that burned in their breasts ‘like a flame of love’. Better organised and more ruthless than any traders yet seen in Atlantic or Asian waters, they fought off the Catholic powers, each other and all Asian rivals and smugglers for the advantage of bringing spices direct to Amsterdam’s Herengracht or London’s Pepper Lane.

At the hands of the northern newcomers Portugal’s Estado da India endured a protracted, undignified senescence, though it was barely a century old. Raiders preyed on the corpse and lopped off the choicest pieces. The first Dutch ships called at the North Moluccas in 1599, returning to Amsterdam low in the water from the weight of the cloves they carried: ‘So long as Holland has been Holland,’ one crewmember claimed, ‘such richly laden ships have never been seen.’ The English followed them east in 1601, James Lancaster leading a fleet under the auspices of the newly formed ‘Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ – better known as the East India Company.^* Sailing from the Javanese port of Bantam, an English pinnace reached the Bandas and their nutmeg groves in March 1603. Others followed, setting sail in vessels with such optimistic names as Clove or Peppercorn. With a toehold on the tiny islands of Ai and Run, James I was, for a time, proud to style himself ‘King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon’. For the sake of their nutmeg the latter two tiny islands shade Bermuda as England’s first overseas possessions.

Though these early voyages enjoyed mixed results, malaria, scurvy and inexperience taking a heavy toll, the northern intruders soon struck at the ‘Portingall’ with devastating swiftness. The first assets to go were the remotest, the distant Spice Islands. Here a handful of Portuguese, having long since incurred the loathing of the Muslim population, clung on in a state of permanent siege in a string of mouldering forts. Ternate fell in 1605. Shortly after the Dutch seized the Portuguese fort on Ambon, midway between the North and South Moluccas. Worse was to come, as the conquests of da Gama and his successor Albuquerque (1453–1515) were steadily rolled back. In the disastrous decade of the 1630s, Ceylon and its cinnamon forests fell to combined Ceylonese-Dutch forces – a marriage of convenience the Ceylonese would soon have cause to regret. The Portuguese Jesuit Fernão de Queyroz claimed the Dutch were ‘so disliked by the Natives, that the very stones will rise against them’, but his prediction of independence was some three hundred years premature. Malacca, the bottleneck and entrepôt of the East, surrendered to the Dutch in 1641; the pepper ports of Malabar followed in 1661–63. Spices were now, in effect, a Protestant concern.

The drama was played out on a global stage. The golden age of discovery was also the golden age of European piracy, when freebooters could plunder their way to royal favour and enrichment. The talismanic figure in this respect was Sir Francis Drake, whose Golden Hind was only the second ship to circumnavigate the globe. On the way he called at Ternate in 1579, sailing off with a cargo of cloves and agreement from Sultan Babu to reserve the trade in cloves to the English. For his part, Drake promised to build forts and factories, and ‘to decorate that sea with ships’. It was a bargain that would never be fulfilled, yet the treaty was more far-reaching in its ramifications even than the lordly haul of stolen Spanish silver and gold that had the Spanish ambassador in London demanding Drake’s head. With such dizzying profits in the air, Drake’s treaty with Babu sent shivers of excitement up the spines of the investors, and would-be imitators lined up to follow his lead. In view of the effect the treaty seems likely to have had on the merchants of London, culminating in the formation of the East India Company two decades later, Drake’s agreement with Babu was quite possibly the single most lasting achievement of his voyage.

Like Drake, these spice-seekers were seldom chary of robust methods. A spice ship represented a fortune afloat, and from a strictly commercial point of view it was considerably cheaper and easier to plunder the returning ships than to make the long and dangerous voyage for oneself. Galleons and caravels returning from the Indies ran a gauntlet of pirates and raiders, lurking in the Atlantic to deprive the exhausted and disease-depleted crews of their precious cargoes. One such haul was witnessed by Samuel Pepys in November 1665, when as Surveyor-Victualler to the Royal Navy he inspected two captured Dutch East Indiamen. On board he saw ‘the greatest wealth lie in confusion that a man can see in the world – pepper scatter[ed] through every chink, you trod upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs, I walked above the knees – whole rooms full … as noble a sight as ever I saw in my life’.

By now, however, this was a token victory for the English, since their own outposts in the Spice Islands had long since gone the way of the Portuguese before them. One English merchant in the Moluccas reported that the Dutch ‘grew starke madde’ at having to share the proceeds from the Moluccas’ cloves and nutmeg. Accordingly, in February 1623 the staff of the English factory on the central Moluccan island of Ambon were rounded up, tortured and killed. Their fate had been foreshadowed a few years earlier by the destruction of the English outpost on the nutmeg island of Run, which was then denuded of its trees for good measure. The ‘crying business of Amboyna’ prompted an outburst of pamphlets, anti-Dutch tirades and even a play by Dryden (Amboyna – admittedly, not one of his better works; Sir Walter Scott considered it ‘beneath criticism’), its jingoistic huff periodically recycled ever since. The affair was finally tidied up with the signature of the treaty of Breda at the conclusion of the second Anglo – Dutch war of 1665–67. The English renounced their claims in the Moluccas in return for acknowledgement of their sovereignty over an island they had seized from the Dutch, the (then) altogether less spicy New Amsterdam, better known by the victors’ name of New York.^*

In the longer term, however, such seizures and horse-trading, while spectacular, were unsustainable. There was more to be made from commerce than plunder – a distinction those at the sharp end of the spice trade would not perhaps have recognised – and by now the lion’s share of that trade was in Dutch hands. After several decades of mercurial, spasmodic English forays in the first half of the 1600s, but without any consistent investment from London, by the middle of the century the Dutch had emerged as the uncontested masters of the spice trade. They had achieved what the Portuguese had sought in vain: dominance in the trade in pepper and cinnamon, and a near total monopoly in cloves, nutmeg and mace.

Under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, the Vereenigde Oosrindische Compagnie (VOC), the problems that beset the trade were gradually ironed out. The bandit capitalism of the early days evolved into a more recognisably modern and permanent system. The market-disrupting cycle of gluts and shortages was succeeded by a ruthlessly efficient monopoly. The catastrophic losses of life and shipping along the African coasts were reduced to a sustainable level. Much of the risk was taken out of the business. Whereas the finances of Portugal’s Estado da India never made the leap out of medievalism, hamstrung by clumsy royal monopolies and endemic corruption, the annual fleets setting off from the Zuider Zee were backed by the full panoply of joint stock companies, shareholders and boards of directors. In time the East India companies of the Dutch and their English rivals grew into the armies and administrators of formal imperialism.

Such were, very briefly, the bloody, briny flavours of the spice age. But if the discoverers marked the beginning of a new era, so too they marked an end, for even their efforts formed part of a grand tradition. In his opening stanza Camões claimed that da Gama and his Christian spice-seekers ventured into ‘seas never sailed before’, but in fact the spice routes had been navigated for centuries, albeit not by Europeans, or at least not very many of them. As tends to be the way with pioneers, even the discoverers had precedents. Asia’s spices had been familiar in Europe long before Europeans were familiar in Asia – because someone, or rather various someones, had been to get them. Besides the disconcerting Moors who accosted his envoy on the beach, da Gama had the deflating experience of finding Italian merchants active along the Malabar Coast – some selling their services to Muslim rulers – and there had been others before. In this sense the discoverers’ achievements, however epic, were essentially achievements of scale. Neither the voyages nor the tremendous, transforming appetite that inspired them emerged from thin air. When da Gama and his contemporaries raised anchor spice was a taste that had already launched a thousand ships.

Had any of the protagonists in this vast and ancient quest been asked why this was so, some would have offered, if pressed, much the same functional answer as that given by modern historians: profit. The reputation of fabulous riches clung so closely to spices that some, as we shall see, considered them tarnished by the association. (Columbus himself was deeply embarrassed by the potential imputation of grubby, worldly motives to his quest, and was accordingly at pains to find some way of justifying the enterprise in terms of the spiritually worthy spin-offs: to retake the holy sepulchre, to finance a new crusade, to convert the heathen.) But if the medieval spice trader were asked why spices were so valuable and so sought after, he would have given answers that seem less intelligible to the modern historian than such reassuringly material arguments. In this regard the charms of spices admit no easy explanation, nor would our forebears have found the matter much less perplexing. Indeed part of their attraction, and the source of much of their value, was simply that they were inexplicable. Before Columbus and company remapped the world, spices carried a freight that we, in an age of satellites and global positioning systems, can barely imagine. Emerging from the fabulous obscurity of the East they were arrivals from another world. For the spices, so it was believed, grew in paradise.

That this was so was something more than a pious fiction. It was, in fact, something close to gospel truth, an article of faith since the early years of the Christian religion. One of many highly intelligent and educated believers was Peter Damian (1007–1072), the Italian Doctor of the Church, saint, hermit and ascetic in whose turbulent life the great issues of the eleventh century, somewhat in spite of himself, converged. In his hermitage at Fonte Avellana, in a bleak wilderness of rocks and crags in the central Apennines, he dreamed of that gentle place where, by the fount of eternal life,

Harsh winter and torrid summer never rage.

An eternal spring puts forth the purple flowers of roses.

Lilies shine white, and the crocus red, exuding balsam.

The meadows are verdant, the crops sprout,

Streams of honey flow, exhaling spice and aromatic wine.

Fruits bang suspended, never to fall from the flowering groves.

That paradise smelled of spices was, for Damian, something more than a passing fancy. His words and spiced imagery alike were lifted directly from the Apocalypse of Peter, an early Christian work, now discarded as apocryphal but widely read in the Middle Ages. Damian himself returned to the theme in a series of letters to his friend and fellow cleric St Hugh (1024–1109), abbot of the great Benedictine monastery of Cluny, at the time the intellectual and spiritual centre of Western Christendom. To Damian, the shelter of Cluny’s cloister was a ‘Paradise watered by the rivers of the four Evangelists … a garden of delights sprouting the manifold loveliness of roses and lilies, sweetly smelling of honeyed fragrances and spices’.

The belief in spices’ unearthly origins is crucial to understanding their charm – and their value. For if paradise and its spices were fair, so the world in which Damian lived was, so far as he was concerned, irredeemably foul. Among his other works is the Book of Gomorrah, one of the bleakest visions of humanity ever penned. In Damian’s eyes the entire race was mired in baseness, its sole, slender hope a Church that was itself sunk in moral squalor and loathsome homosexuality. The priesthood was addicted to every variant of rampant lust, racked by ‘the befouling cancer of sodomy’. Bishoprics were bought and sold, lecherous priests openly took wives and handed on their livings to their bastard offspring, and a corrupt and venal papacy was despised and disregarded by the secular powers. From his retreat in the wilderness Damian looked out on a world populated by a race of degenerate Yahoos. Paradise seemed a long way away.

Yet its aromas were there, as it were, right under his nose. Spices were a taste of paradise in a world submerged in filth; they were far more than mere foodstuffs. And this reputation endured even as knowledge of the wider world expanded and travellers penetrated, glacier-pace, some of the dark spaces on the map. Jean, sire de Joinville (c. 1224–1317) provided a fairly typical explanation of the spices’ arrival from the East. In his day, and long before and after, Egypt was the prime intermediary between the Near and the Far East, and as such Europe’s prime supplier of spice. After the capture of the crusader army in 1250 Joinville was held in an Egyptian dungeon as a prisoner of the sultan, awaiting the payment of a hefty ransom. Though he had seen the Nile carry off the bloated bodies of his companions, mown down by plague after the battle of al-Mansurah, he was prepared to believe in the river’s unearthly origins, and that it might carry more pleasant flotsam:

Before the river enters Egypt, the people who are so accustomed cast their nets in the river in the evening; and when morning comes, they find in their nets those goods sold by weight that they bring to this land, that is, ginger, rhubarb, aloes wood, and cinnamon. And it is said that these things come from the terrestrial Paradise; for the wind blows down the dead wood in this country, and the merchants here sell us the dead wood that falls in the river.

This from someone who, unlike the overwhelming majority of Europeans, had wet his feet in its waters.

And yet Joinville’s account was something more than a fabulous yarn spun by a returning traveller out to dazzle the folks back home. Judged by the standards of the day, his passed for relatively informed opinion; he had moreover a willing audience, many of whom would have seen it as impious to believe otherwise. For although no one had been there, few doubted the existence of the terrestrial paradise from where, according to an ancient tradition, some of the fruits of a lost Eden still trickled through to a fallen humanity: ‘Whatever fragrant or beautiful thing that comes to us is from that place,’ said St Avitus of Vienne (c.490–518). That spices grew in Eden’s garden of delights was no more than the literal truth, inasmuch as the vocabulary for delights and spices was one and the same. The connection was explained by St Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) in what was possibly early-medieval Christendom’s single most influential description of the East and the terrestrial paradise: ‘Paradise … is called in Hebrew “Eden”, which is translated into our own language as Deliciae, the place of luxury or delight [equally, the exotic delights and dainties themselves]. Joined together, this makes “Garden of Delights”; for it is planted with every type of wood and fruit-bearing tree, including the Tree of Life. There is neither cold nor heat but eternal spring.’ Unfortunately for humanity, however, this paradise was hedged in with ‘flames like swords, and a wall of fire reaching almost to the sky’.

As Joinville appreciated, with such barriers separating supply and demand, the exact means of that transfer were necessarily obscure, and the source of much speculation. According to the Book of Genesis, in Eden was the fountain that ‘went up from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground’. Translated to medieval cosmography, biblical exegesis held that this fountain was the source of the Nile, Euphrates, Tigris and Phison (or, to some, the Ganges). St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) concluded that the rivers circumvented the flames by passing underground before re-emerging. It was via these rivers that spices arrived.

Thus when Joinville looked on the waters of the Nile and came up with his colourful explanation of its harvest, he was merely reconciling the biblical truth to what he had seen with his own eyes. By unknown means and ferried by unknown hands, on streams flowing from another world, spices arrived from a place known only from Bible and fable, washing up in the souks of Cairo and Alexandria and thence to the markets of Europe like so much cosmic driftwood.

Or, perhaps more to the point, like gold dust. For mystery meant profitability. In a stroke of medieval marketing genius, there was even a spice that took its name from its purported origins, the grains of paradise that appear in spicers’ account books from the thirteenth century on. In medieval times grains of paradise, or simply ‘grains’, cost more than the black pepper of India. Sharp to the taste and now confined to speciality shops, the spice is in fact the fruit of Aframomum melegueta (also Aframomum granumparadisi), a native of West Africa, where it was purchased by Portuguese traders on their voyages down around the continent’s western bulge, or else freighted by caravan across the Sahara, along the gold and slave routes of Timbuktoo. By the time ‘grains’ arrived in Europe their credentials were burnished and their origins forgotten. Paradise made for as plausible an origin as any other.

That spices have all but lost their lustre in the twenty-first century is in large measure because much of the mystery has gone out of the trade and the places where they grow. Paradise survives not as a place, but as a symbol. Yet for centuries spices and paradise were inseparable, joined together in a relationship whose durability was guaranteed by the fact that it could not be disproved. The few known facts added up to a baffling puzzle that invited colourful explanations. Hardly anyone involved in the trade knew who or what lay beyond the last transaction, and much the same held true all along the spice routes. None but the first few handlers of these transactions had any idea where their goods originated; few had any idea where they were bound; and none could view the system in its entirety. Trade was a piecemeal business, passed on from one middleman to another. Perhaps the greatest wonder of the system is that it existed at all.

For between harvest and consumption Europe’s spices travelled a long and fragile thread. The spice routes mazed across the map like the wanderings of a black ant, criss-crossing seas and deserts, now appearing then abruptly vanishing and reappearing, forking and branching with the rise and fall of cities and empires, outbreaks of war and fluctuating demand. When the visiting King and Queen of Scotland celebrated the Feast of the Assumption at Woodstock in 1256 with no less than fifty pounds each of ginger, pepper and cinnamon, four pounds of cloves, two pounds each of nutmeg and mace and two pounds of galangal,^* their seasonings had travelled journeys the diners could barely guess at, acquiring an air of glamour and otherworldiness that we can only with difficulty imagine.

No spices were more travelled or more exotic than the cloves, nutmeg and mace of the Moluccas. Served to the visiting monarchs in a glass of spiced wine, all that can be known with any degree of certainty is their origin. After harvest in the nutmeg groves of the Bandas or in the shadow of the volcanic cones of Ternate and Tidore, next, most likely, they were stowed on one of the outriggers that still flit between the islands of the archipelago. Alternatively, they may have been acquired by Chinese traders known to have visited the Moluccas from the thirteenth century onwards. Moving west past Sulawesi, Borneo and Java, through the straits of Malacca, they were shipped to India and the spice-marts of Malabar. Next, Arab dhows conveyed them across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. At any one of a number of ancient ports – Basra, Jiddah, Muscat or Aqaba – the spices were transferred onto one of the huge caravans that fanned out across the deserts to the markets of Arabia and on to Alexandria and the Levant.

Only in Mediterranean waters did the spices come at last into European hands. By the turn of the millennium they crop up in the records of cities spread around its shores: Marseilles, Barcelona, Ragusa. Some spices arrived via Byzantium and the Black Sea, following the Danube to eastern and central Europe, but the greatest volume of traffic passed through Alexandria and the Levant to Italy. From Italy a number of routes led north over the Alpine passes towards France and Germany. Alternatively, which was both safer and faster, Venetian or Genoese galleys freighted spices out of the Mediterranean, through the straits of Gibraltar and up and around the Iberian peninsula before docking in view of the gothic spire of St Paul’s. From a Thameside wharf they were transferred into the store of a London merchant – as likely to have been Italian, Flemish or German as English – then in and out of a royal spicer’s cupboard before finally ending their long journey in the royal stomach.

If such was the system, however faintly we discern it, contemporaries saw it more faintly still – a fact that did not stifle, but rather stimulated, the imagination. It was a romance-writer’s stock-in-trade that spices perfume the air of the more beautiful dreamworlds that are such a feature of medieval literature. In a Castilian version of The Romance of Alexander written around the middle of the thirteenth century, galangal, cinnamon, ginger, cloves and zedoary^* waft through the air of the dreamscape. Much like Coleridge transported to the sunny ice-caves of Xanadu, the anonymous author of Mum and the Sothsegger left behind the greyness and grinding poverty of the fourteenth-century English countryside for a vision of a blissful, better land, where the Golden Age endured in all its spicy abundance and lushness. The fantasyland of the Romance of the Rose, among the most widely read and emulated poems of the age, is similarly rose-tinted and spice-scented. In evoking these fairer climes spices were as much a poetic convention as pearly teeth and snowy breasts, chivalrous knights and damsels in distress.

While poets and mystics were generally content to perfume the air of their paradise with spices, and to leave it at that, others made more concerted efforts to map the fabulous locales where the spices grew. This was, necessarily, a highly creative enterprise. Since all reports of paradise and spices alike arrived second-hand, the medieval imagination was free to run riot. Though nothing could be confirmed (or, more to the point, disproved), what was generally agreed was that spices came from a topsy-turvy world where the normal rules of European life did not apply. They were securely lodged in the same world as the marvels and misshapen prodigies that writhe across the portals of Europe’s Romanesque churches or scamper and cavort across its manuscripts. An illumination in a fourteenth-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale has a team of swarthy Indians in loincloths harvesting pepper in wicker baskets while a European merchant samples the crop; so far at least the botanical details are not far removed from the reality. Nearby, however, a gaggle of dog-headed Indians haggles over the harvest, men with faces set in their chests gambol among the bushes and others hop around on a single, stout foot.

In its mix of half-accurate detail and wild distortion this was a fairly representative example of European visions of the East. But how seriously were such depictions meant to be taken? There is a risk, in considering these and similar visions, that our own modern credulity outstrips the medieval. Evidently, some of the more fabulous tales of the Indies and their spices were never intended to be taken literally; they are a notoriously unreliable guide to informed opinion, and a trap for the unwary. In the fantastic Asia of such illuminations we are, manifestly, in a not-Europe. But while the tone of such depictions is often playful or didactic, what is clear is that they derived their force from their very invertedness. And spices were, for their creators, a means to that end. It is precisely through this fictive inversion that we, however dimly, can sense how extraordinary spices were in fact. Like the dog-headed men and man-devouring amazons with which they were paired, spices were as ordinary in the imagined Indies as they were exceptional in Europe; that they were commonplace in medieval fantasies was because they were extraordinary in reality.

Retrospectively, of course, it is a little easier to extract the fact from the fantasy, but in medieval times the lines were more blurred. It is precisely this sense of a world turned upside-down and inside-out that animates the genre of more-or-less fictional travellers’ tales that appears from roughly the thirteenth century on. Many such were parodies, such as that of Brother Cipolla of The Decameron, with his trip to Liarland (‘where I found a great many friars’) and Parsnip, India, with its amazing flying feathers. Of these the most celebrated, and in every sense the spiciest, was the Itinerarium conventionally attributed to one Sir John Mandeville, a suitably chivalric-sounding pseudonym of an anonymous, probably French, author. First circulated in various versions and translations between 1356 and 1366, along with the other by-now stock features of the marvellous Eastern landscape – Gog and Magog, Prester John, the Great Khan and his Asian Utopia – spices are one of the hallmarks of his fantastic tableaux. Ginger, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace grew in Java ‘more plentyfoulisch than in any other contree’, a land that had ‘many tymes overcomen the Grete Cane of Cathaye in bataylle’. Here, perhaps, is a grain of fact, a vague awareness of Javanese traders shuttling spices west from the Moluccas; so much the author might have learned from Marco Polo. But the force, and the point – for Mandeville (or whoever) wrote not to inform, but to amaze – is of the extraordinary become prosaic. Read on and there are ox-worshipping Cynocephales, corpse-eating savages and gems engendered from the tears of Adam and Eve. Such was the world where the spices grew. Along with the dragons and the mountains of gold, they were one of its distinguishing features.

Mandeville’s account must have raised a knowing chuckle among the merchants who, even then, knew better. And there were plenty who did know better. Odoric of Pordenone, a Franciscan friar who travelled through India, South-East Asia and China from roughly 1316 to 1330, reported meeting ‘people in plenty’ in Venice who had been in China. At much the same time, the Tunisian traveller Ibn Battuta saw Genoese merchants in India and China. But though the merchants did the legwork it was the Mandevilles who set the tone. (Perhaps this is to underestimate the savvy of the spice-dealers, who, after all, had an interest in making bankable publicity for their exotic wares: ‘Thus men feign, to make things deer and of great price,’ as a thirteenth-century Franciscan monk said of the wilder myths concerning the origins of cinnamon.) Such accurate information about the spices as did make it through was either kept a close secret or else recast in brighter colours.

Or, alternatively, it was discarded as nonsense. Tellingly, Mandeville’s account proved vastly more popular than a far more sober and factual authority on the Indies and their spices, the Travels of Marco Polo. Published a generation or so before Mandeville, Polo’s book met with widespread suspicion. Despite Rustichello’s best efforts (Rustichello being the professional romance-writer with whom Polo shared a prison cell in Genoa, thanks to whose ability to spot a bestseller the Travels exist), the Venetian’s unadorned account of Asia, with its straightforward, real-world qualities, was in some respects harder to credit than the fiction. In his uncomplicated, businessman’s manner Polo claimed to have sailed past lands where spices were commonplace, growing on real trees, harvested by real people, in quantities that Europeans could not fathom. He claimed the city of Kinsay (Hangchow), with its 12,000 stone bridges and hundred-mile circumference, received a hundred times as much pepper as the whole of Christendom, ‘and more too’. In his matter-of-fact tone, this was a little too much to swallow. It was somehow easier to place the Indies and their spices among the dog-heads and the floating islands. So extraordinary were spices that even the truth seemed fabulous.

And so it remained until the sixteenth century, when at last the discoverers chipped away at the great edifices of medieval ignorance and fantasy, dragging the realms of spice and gold into the prosaic light of day; into the unromantic focus of the profiteer and the venture capitalist. The great spice age, the apex of the appetite, was also the age that killed off their mystery.

Ironically, the individual who did more than any other to draw spices out of fantasy into cold fact was himself one of the most avid consumers of medieval legends of spice and gold. This is perhaps Columbus’s most remarkable achievement, for in respect of Eastern fables he bears, as has already been noted, more than a passing resemblance to Don Quixote, who so overcharged his fancy with the wooings, battles and enchantments of Palmerin of England and Amadis of Gaul that he quite lost his grip on reality. But whereas Quixote’s dreams sprouted from tales of chivalry and romance, Columbus’s schemes were founded – and sold – on sources that presented themselves, however capriciously, as impeccably factual. The surviving remnants of his library in the Biblioteca Colombiana in Seville include several of the books from which he drew his ideas, among them the early-fifteenth-century Imago Mundi of Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420) and the Historia Rerum of Pope Pius II (ruled 1458–1464), each alike laced with descriptions of the fabulous, spicy wonders of the East. There too is Columbus’s copy of Polo’s Travels, the margins crammed with the admiral’s comments on each and every mention of gold, silver, precious stones, silk, ginger, pepper, musk, cloves, camphor, aloes, brasilwood, sandalwood and cinnamon. Dipping in and out of these books, taking what he liked and disregarding what did not suit, spicing Polo’s figures and distances with the vivid hues of the others, Columbus constructed the fabulous mental geography that, quite contrary to his expectations, succeeded in revolutionising geography in an altogether different sense. When he sailed west he quite genuinely believed he was sailing to paradise. If he succeeded in reaching the place where the spices grew he had, ipso facto, arrived.

To his dying day he believed that he had been but a hair’s breadth from getting there. He went to his grave not in the poverty often imagined, but unenlightened. Writing on the troubled progress of his third voyage in the autumn of 1498, charged with chronic mismanagement of the infant colony of Hispaniola, whose disgruntled settlers were now in open rebellion against his command, Columbus assured his patrons that he had been no more than a day’s sailing from the earthly paradise. At the time this seemed reasonable enough, at least to Columbus. Not only his reading told him so, but also the evidence of his own eyes. As he sailed around the top of South America, standing on deck off Trinidad, the Pole Star arced in the sky above him, and the world seemed to spin off its usual axis. Columbus had the overwhelming, disconcerting impression that the ship was climbing, sailing up the incline to paradise. (By this time he had concluded that the world was pear-shaped, with the heights of paradise perched on a protuberance shaped like a woman’s nipple.) The Caribbean season was balmy and mild like an eternal spring: yet more evidence. Buckets were lowered over the side and it was found that the ship, though still out of sight of land, was sailing in fresh water – the outflow, surely, of one of the four rivers flowing from the heights of paradise. Columbus knew he had been, at most, only a short sail from the realms of spice and gold.

In the days of disgrace and humiliation that lay ahead, chained below deck, ignominiously sent back to Spain with his settlers in open revolt, it was a galling thought. But as Columbus’s jailers and the increasingly impatient King Ferdinand were beginning to realise, he was adrift in a sea of delusion. The sweet water through which he had sailed was in fact the enormous outflow of the Orinoco; the people he met were not prelapsarian residents of the terrestrial paradise but all-too earthly Caribs. Even the translators of biblical languages that Columbus had had the foresight to bring along were of no use in deciphering their unintelligible clicks and grunts.^*

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).