Pepper (10 page)

 

Four

Golden Elephants

DURING THE GOLDEN AGE OF BANDA ACEH IN THE EARLY 1600S, DAYLONG FEASTS WERE HELD IN SHALLOW RUNNING STREAMS AND CROWDS WATCHED FIERCE ANIMAL FIGHTS. HERE ON THE NORTHERN TIP OF SUMATRA THE TYRANT ISKANDAR MUDA RULED WITH AN IRON HAND. SOON EUROPEAN TRADERS LOOKED ELSEWHERE ON THE ISLAND TO BUY PEPPER.

“The Situation of the Port of Achen is admirable, the Anchorage excellent, and a healthful Air all along the Coast.”

—
J
ESUIT
F
ATHER DE
P
RÉMARE,
F
EBRUARY 17, 1699

In the early sixteenth century, the newly conquered city of Malacca offered the Portuguese a unique chance to tighten their grip on the Indian Ocean pepper trade. Strategically, Malacca controlled commerce between the Indian Ocean and the China Seas; just across the Strait of Malacca, tantalizingly close, the vast island of Sumatra, the westernmost part of the fabled East Indies, beckoned.

Sumatra spreads across the equator, its northern half reaching toward mainland Asia and its southern half stretching toward Java. Towering mountains carpeted with lush tropical forests hug its west coast, and from these mountains innumerable cascading rivers flow into the pepper-rich central highlands. Along these waterways, natives brought their precious cargo of pepper to foreign traders, who had long been drawn to the island's marshy eastern shores on the Strait of Malacca. As early as the tenth century, the Chinese had sailed to Palembang in southeast Sumatra seeking the tailed cubeb pepper, (not black pepper) to flavor their food and improve (as they believed) their sex lives. In the fourteenth century, they also sailed to the northeastern part of the island to purchase pepper in the newly established port city of Pasai. Like Malacca, this port city was Islamic, a result of Muslim traders, who had been plying the Indian Ocean for hundreds of years, establishing themselves in these and other ports in Southeast Asia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Soon after conquering Malacca in 1511, the Portuguese found themselves embroiled in the courtly intrigues of the Malaysian world, where rival rulers jockeyed for position and occasionally usurped one another. The Portuguese were generally reluctant to intervene unless their trade was threatened, and they usually did not understand the politics that led to these conflicts. One of their interventions, an attempt to mediate a conflict between Pasai and Pidië, another port city lying along Sumatra's northeastern shores, backfired badly. Instead of welcoming the Portuguese mediators, the people of northern Sumatra united under a new sultanate—Aceh, which would become the most-feared power in the Strait. And Banda Aceh, the site of the sultan's palace, would become one of the world's great pepper ports and a celebrated center of Islamic learning.

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Known mostly in the West today because of the catastrophic tsunami in 2004 that killed 118,000 people in northern Indonesia, Banda Aceh was at the height of its power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Called Achin by the English, the town was brimming with everyday pleasures, from the banks of its clean flowing rivers filled with bathers to its bustling marketplaces offering aromatic spices and diverse goods. The journals of foreign visitors provide glimpses of its wealth and beauty, and their delight seems genuine. After the filth and misery of ocean travel, Aceh must have appeared as a kind of paradise. Surrounded by water and trees, the town was wrapped in a green mist, a tropical verdure that extended far beyond the bounds of the town to the countryside. Residents enjoyed unusually good health, and pepper and gold abounded. The port “At first appeared to me like the landscapes framed by the Imagination of some painter or poet … whatever is most delightful in a County Prospect…,” observed a French Jesuit named De Prémare who visited Aceh in 1699. “The gold of Achin is thought to be the purest in the world,” he wrote.

In the sixteenth century, Aceh's might surpassed the strength of Pasai and Pidië combined, and even the Portuguese had to acknowledge its supremacy as a pepper port. Aceh attracted the Muslim traders who could no longer do business along the southwest coast of India or in Malacca because of the Portuguese. In Aceh these traders purchased pepper and other spices, camphor, as well as gold. In the early seventeenth century, the Dutch and English followed when the market for pepper exploded in Europe.

Acehnese marketplaces also offered large amounts of betel, the chewing gum of Southeast Asia that is mixed with lime and areca nuts; betel grew well in Sumatra. Precious nutmeg and cloves reached the port city via the narrow Sunda Strait separating Sumatra and Java. Using this route, the Acehnese had found a way to ship these spices to Sumatra, avoiding the Portuguese in Malacca altogether. The Sunda Strait was where Krakatau erupted in 1883, killing 36,000 people in Java and Sumatra.

Aceh's reach extended throughout the Indian Ocean, the East Indies, and the China Seas. It was the most accessible port in the East Indies, an entrepôt where cloves and nutmeg from the remote Moluccas and Banda Islands and pepper grown in Sumatra and Java could be purchased by foreign traders, and where the fine woven cloths of Gujarat, Bengal, and the Coromandel Coast of southeast India could be sold to the Acehnese. The textiles of India, much in demand in Indonesia, were widely traded for pepper. In the early seventeenth century, Aceh was described by an English merchant as a port that “lieth well to answere to the trade of all Bengala, Java, and the Moluccas, and all China … to the decrease and diminishing of all Portuguals trade, and their great forces in the Indies.”

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The first English sailor to record his impressions of Sumatra was the brilliant Arctic navigator John Davis, who also piloted ships to the East Indies for the Dutch at the end of the seventeenth century, an unusual job for an Englishman. The island of Sumatra, he wrote in his journal, appeared to be “a garden of pleasure.” The land was “pleasing and fertile.… Of pepper they have exceeding plentie, Gardens of a mile square.” Sumatra also had “plentie of Gold and Copper Mines, divers kinds of Gummes, Balmes, and many kinds of Drugges [spices], and Indico.” Like many of the European men who traveled to the East Indies in the seventeenth century, Davis's observations read like an advertisement for trade, an invitation to bring more ships to the far corners of the globe.

In Aceh, Davis encountered a thriving, prosperous port, packed with merchandise, in an unusually hospitable climate, where “the Ayre is temperate and wholsome, having everie morning a fruitfull dew, or small raine.” The spacious port city, he observed, was “built in a wood, so that wee could not see a house till we were upon it. Neither could wee goe into any place, but we found houses, and great concourse of people: so that I think the town spreads over the whole land.… I saw three great marketplaces, which are every day frequented as fairs with all kinds of merchandise to sell.” Dwellings were spread among forests of bamboo, banana, coconut, and pineapple trees.

In 1598 Davis served as the chief pilot for the second Dutch expedition to Indonesia. It was led by Cornelius Houteman, who was infamous; his pioneering voyage three years earlier was an orgy of destruction. Offering an early example of Dutch brutality that would be repeated often in the centuries ahead, Houteman's well-armed ships, financed by a group called the Compagnie van Verre (Company of Far Distant Lands, one of the companies that subsequently formed the VOC) bombarded Bantam, the rich pepper port in northeastern Java, and other ports, and he and his men executed prisoners in gruesome rampages. Although scurvy and other diseases killed more than two-thirds of his crew—only eighty-seven out of 240 men survived the twenty-eight-month voyage, an abysmal death toll even by the low standards of the late sixteenth century—Houteman was sent out on another expedition because he proved that Dutch ships could sail to Asia and return with pepper.

When the ships on the second voyage under Houteman's command reached Aceh after a grueling two-year voyage, the Englishman Davis noticed “foure Barks riding in the Bay, three of Arabia, and one of Pegu [Burma], that came to lade Pepper.” During their three-month stay, the aging Sultan Ala'ud-din Ri'ayat Syah took a measure of the strange men who had ventured so far from their homes to buy pepper. This wily, tyrannical sultan, who rose to power in 1588, did not know of the land where the Dutch came from, but to everyone's surprise he had heard of England. While wining and dining the visitors, the sultan made it known that he wanted to meet an Englishman, a request that surely was not welcomed by the Dutch. When the sultan persisted, the Dutch relented and allowed Davis to meet the sultan.

Davis described the ruler as “a lustie man, but exceeding grosse and fat,” aged one hundred year “as they say.” The sultan asked a lot of questions about England, and especially about “the Queene, of her Basha's, and how she could hold warres with so great a King as the Spaniard? (for he thinketh that Europe is all Spanish).” Apparently, news of England's victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 had reached Sumatra through the far-flung network of traders who visited Aceh. (The remark about all of Europe being Spanish is understandable, since Portugal had relinquished its crown to Spain in 1580, the Netherlands was under Spanish rule, and the Dutch and the English had yet to make a mark in maritime Asia. Portugal did not free itself from the Spanish yoke until 1640, and the Netherlands finally freed itself from Spain in 1648.) Davis's responses pleased the sultan. One month later, however, the sultan laid a trap for his unwary visitors, and Davis and a handful of men were lucky to escape with their lives and one of their ships. Cornelius Houteman wasn't so fortunate. He was killed by poison and his brother taken prisoner.

The sultanate of Aceh ruled over northern Sumatra with an iron hand, and in its prime controlled ports far down the east and west coasts of the island as well as villages in the central highlands of Minangkabau where gold was mined. Other sultanates, especially Johore in the southern Malay Peninsula, feared Aceh's territorial ambitions, and warfare broke out regularly among all of the rulers in the Strait of Malacca. Alliances shifted and sometimes Islamic sultanates allied themselves with the Portuguese to fight Aceh. Whenever the Portuguese in Malacca felt their trade threatened, they attacked neighboring Johore and the kingdom of Aceh across the Strait, although they did not try to capture the city of Banda Aceh itself after an attempt failed in 1521. The Portuguese launched more than fifteen invasions against these sultanates. Meanwhile, large Acehnese war fleets besieged Portuguese Malacca at least four times in the sixteenth century, and the Acehnese even called on the faraway Turks to help their cause. Aceh continued its campaign against Malacca in the early decades of the seventeenth century.

In the late seventeenth century, Banda Aceh was still a thriving port, but the power of the sultanate had diminished under a series of female sultanas. The wide-ranging adventurer William Dampier spent six months in Aceh in 1688 after becoming shipwrecked. He commented on the generally high standard of living and on the continual influx of foreign visitors. The houses, Dampier observed, were built on poles in the same fashion as those he had seen in Mindanao (in the Phillipines), but in Aceh, “by reason of their gold mines, and the frequent resort of strangers, they are richer, and live in greater plenty.” He described the city as seated on the banks of a river, near the northwest end of the island, and about two miles from the sea. “This town,” he wrote, “consists of 7 or 8000 houses and in it there are always a great many merchant-strangers, viz. English, Dutch, Danes, Portuguese, Chinese, Guzarats, etc. The houses of this city are generally larger than those I saw at Mindinao, and better furnished with household goods.”

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Foreign traders flocked to Aceh to buy pepper. The peppercorn was the first cash crop to be exported by Southeast Asia. Sometime during the fifteenth century, Muslim traders first brought black pepper from India to northern Sumatra. Historians aren't sure of the precise date, but there is no doubt that the black pepper vine flourished in Sumatra, as well as in Vietnam, the Malay Peninsula, and northern Java. The plant was easily cultivated in well-drained tropical soils cleared of forest, and by 1500 black pepper was traded in port cities along the northeastern coast of Sumatra, especially in Pidë and Pasai, and in parts of Malaysia. At first pepper gardens weren't common in Sumatra, but cultivation extended south and inland as consumption of black pepper rose in Europe. In the sixteenth century, pepper gardens proliferated along parts of the west coast of the island.

In 1598 Davis described an abundance of pepper in northern Sumatra growing “like hops from a planted root, and windeth about a stake set by it until it grow to a great bushie tree.” Soon after the market for pepper surged in the early seventeenth century, pepper gardens spread almost everywhere in Sumatra, which became the world's largest supplier of pepper. Even India imported pepper from Sumatra, where the spice was less costly to produce, when pepper was in especially high demand.

The Dutch and English entered the pepper trade at the beginning of the seventeenth century, causing pepper production to expand. Although the Portuguese still played a role in the trade, their impact diminished. In the sixteenth century, they had kept the price of pepper artificially high by keeping supplies deliberately low. As supplies of pepper increased, the price went down and it became even more popular.

The northern Europeans hastened the development of pepper gardens in Sumatra, which became a virtual pepper mill. Pepper was transported from all of its shores—Aceh in the north, Jambi and Palembang in the east, Priaman and a host of smaller ports in the west, and the Lampongs in the south. Most of the island's pepper was grown in the central highlands, which is penetrated by interconnecting, meandering waterways. Natives brought pepper by boat from upstream villages to downstream ports twice a year. No European could navigate these waterways. When the pepper harvests came in, hundreds of lightweight rafts carrying thousands of bags of pepper would emerge noiselessly in the early morning hours in the ports where Chinese junks, Portuguese carracks, and Dutch and English East Indiamen awaited.