Pepper Read Free

meant conquering the port city suppliers, setting in motion a new chapter in the history of pepper and empire.
    At the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese became the first Europeans to sail to India when Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and crossed the Indian Ocean, an incredible feat. The Portuguese then spent the next one hundred years trying to gain control of the pepper trade in India and Asia. When they failed, the Dutch and the English attempted to take it over in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The history of black pepper is bound to the two companies that are synonymous with the evils of colonialism, the English East India Company and the Dutch East India Company or VOC ( Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie ), and the spice gave birth to the insidious opium trade when the Dutch first offered the narcotic as payment for pepper grown along the Malabar Coast of India. There was a reason why Voltaire wrote that after the year 1500 there was no pepper obtained in India that was “not dyed red with blood.” The rivalry between the northern European mercantile companies penetrated almost all of the pepper ports in Asia, but most notably those in Java and Sumatra in Indonesia, and deepened the trading links that had already existed in Asia. The so-called “country trade,” or intra-Asia trade, was especially important to the VOC.
    By the time the Americans entered the scene in the nineteenth century, they realized that the pepper trade couldn’t be conquered. These sensible businessmen went about making their own fortunes from pepper, and the import duties on the spice helped shore up the economy of a young nation. When piracy imperiled the pepper trade, President Andrew Jackson sent a U.S. warship to Sumatra, resulting in the first official armed U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia.
    Many people in the West today associate Sumatra with coffee, but long before coffee there was pepper. This large island that straddles the equator and nearly touches mainland Asia was the world’s largest producer of pepper for more than two hundred years; hundreds of millions of pounds of pepper poured out of the numerous ports that lined Sumatra’s shores. This island played the lead role in the pepper trade, and its fate influenced the history of India and Southeast Asia.
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    Medieval Europeans who had never seen pepper growing in the wild entertained some fanciful notions of its origins. According to Bartholomew the Englishman, who lived in the thirteenth century and wrote encyclopedias, the spice grew on trees in forests guarded by serpents. Its black color was the byproduct of fire. “Pepper is the seed of the fruit of a tree that groweth in the south side of the hill Caucasus in the strong heat of the sun,” he wrote. “And serpents keep the woods that pepper groweth in. And when the woods of pepper are ripe, men of that country set them on fire, and chase away the serpents by violence of fire. And by such burning the grain of pepper that was white by nature is made black.”
    This persistent myth wasn’t dispelled until more Europeans began traveling to India during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and could see for themselves how pepper grew. An early account was given by the brilliant Portuguese physician and naturalist Garcia da Orta, who lived in Goa and published a profoundly influential treatise on the medicinal plants of India in 1563. But even da Orta believed that black and white pepper came from different climbing plants. Many scholars have published Orta’s drawing of a pepper plant, which has a strangely modern sensibility, resembling the paintings of early twentieth-century cubists. Some fifty years before Orta’s treatise was published, an Italian named Ludovico di Varthema is said to have vividly portrayed the pepper plantations in Calicut, a port city on the southwest coast of India, in his own account about