Pepper Read Free Page A

his travels in Asia, published in 1510 to much acclaim.
    One of the European travelers to the East who was delighted to see a pepper garden, and who accurately described pepper, was Peter Mundy. An astute Englishman from Cornwall, Mundy was a factor, or merchant, for the East India Company during the early seventeenth century. He spoke Italian, French, and Spanish, in addition to English, and traveled widely in Europe, India, and China, filling his journals with charming drawings. Everything interested him: pepper gardens; the clothing of Chinese and Japanese women; fishes in the Indian Ocean; houses, boats, and royal processions in Sumatra; hairstyles in Madagascar. He was a curious and keen observer who drew what was novel to him at a time when relatively few European traders went to the East.
    In 1637 Mundy found a pepper garden in Surat, a city in northwestern India; most likely he had never seen a pepper plant before. The long vines planted at the foot of what he called small betel nut trees immediately caught his eye, perhaps because they reminded him of England. The vines, he wrote in his journal, resembled ivy. “Att the Foote of these trees they sett the pepper plant, which groweth uppe about the said tree to the height of 10 or 12 Foote, Clasping, twyning and fastning it selff theron round about as the Ivy Doth the oake or other trees with us,” he wrote. “They continue 10 to 12 yeare yielding good pepper; then they sett new plants, soe I was told. This yeares Croppe was newly gathered, some of it then lying a Drying in the sunne; yet were there a few clusters, both greene and ripe, left among the leaves on the plant. The berry when it is Ripe beecommeth ruby red and transparent cleare (I mean the substance about the kernel, otherwise greene), as bigge as small pease, sweet and hott in tast. The kernel of the said berry is the pepper indeed. The berry they putt to dry in the sunne and then that outward reddish substance drieth, rivelleth [shrivels] and becommeth black, in few daies, as wee now see it.”
    Mundy spent most of his life traveling, and was for a while a merchant for the English East India Company before he switched sides and worked for William Courteen, a rich merchant who established an association that for several decades challenged the monopoly of the Company. Before sailing to India in 1635 for Courteen, Mundy related with a certain wistfulness that he needed to find a ship in order to earn some money: “I had not bin longe att home, but through want of my accustomed Imployment, waistinge of meanes and some other occasions, I resolved once againe for London, to seeke some Voyage or Course to passe away tyme and provide somewhat for the future, which accordingly I performed…”
    Aside from his extensive travels, there isn’t that much that is known about Mundy. He was born around 1596 into a merchant family that sold pilchards, or sardines, and he may have married. He probably died in the late 1670s in England. Mundy’s remarkable diaries were never published in his lifetime; they appeared in print for the first time in 1914.
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    Wild pepper can be easily overlooked amid the unruly posturing of other tropical plants. The spice doesn’t advertise itself with large, vividly colored flowers, or tease the nose with delicate scents. It doesn’t generate an addictive or hallucinogenic substance, a distinctive aroma, or dazzling color. Its leaves are a modest dark green, shiny on the outside and paler below. Its only small extravagance is the berries it produces. They dangle in clusters from its vines like long pendulous earrings. After drying, the green berries become black, wrinkly little balls, each harboring a single seed—the peppercorn—the jewel delivering the mouthwatering kick that is its sine qua non.
    Pepper is a woody climbing vine, and it still grows wild in its original home in the monsoon forests of the Western