Pepper (27 page)

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Not surprisingly, animals living on islands in the Indian Ocean where pepper traders stopped on their way to Asia were especially vulnerable to the depredations caused by hungry men seeking fresh food. The dodo, the quintessential symbol of extinction, lived on one of these islands. By 1690 these odd-looking flightless birds with their huge heads and beaks were no longer seen on Mauritius, succumbing to men and the pigs, monkeys, dogs, cats, rats, and other animals introduced deliberately or accidentally on the island.

In the 1630s, the Cornish traveler Peter Mundy described two dodos in Surat, India, where a mogul emperor kept a zoo, providing one of the few eyewitness accounts of the living bird. He wrote: “Dodoes, a strange kinde of fowle, twice as bigg as a Goose, that can neither flye nor swymm, being Gloven footed; a wonder how it should come thither [Mauritius], there being none such in any part of the world yet to be found. I saw two of them in Surat house that were from thence [Mauritius].”

Based on recollection of the birds in Surat, Mundy also described dodos as being “covered with Downe, having little hanguing wings like short sleeves, altogether unuseffull to Fly withal, or any way with them to helpe themselves. Neither Can they swymme butt as other land Fowle Doe [when] on Necessity Forced into the water, being Cloven Footed as they are.”

Mauritius, along with Réunion and remote Rodrigues, are three volcanic islands known as the Mascarenes, named after the Portuguese explorer Pedro Mascaregnas who is said to have discovered Réunion in the early sixteenth century, although Arab sailors probably preceded him. Lying some five hundred to nine hundred miles east of Madagascar, these islands were in the path of European ships going to and coming from Asia. Mauritius, the only one of the islands to offer good, deep harbors, was the first to be settled, in 1638 by the Dutch. The French subsequently annexed Réunion and gradually built a settlement, while tiny Rodrigues was uninhabited until the eighteenth century because it was surrounded by reefs and could not be approached easily.

All three islands once hosted abundant wildlife. In the words of Alfred North-Coombes, the eminent historian of Mauritius, when “ships began to call and man came to stay, hogs and dogs, cats and rats, sailors and settlers began a frenzy of destruction that wiped out these harmless animals within a few decades.”

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Today, we can appreciate the extraordinary wildlife that once existed on Rodrigues thanks largely to a French traveler named François Leguat, who spent two years on the island near the end of the seventeenth century. Amazingly, his daring journey didn't begin until he was a middle-aged man and nearly bankrupt.

In 1685 Louis XIV reneged on his promise to tolerate French Protestants and revoked the Edict of Nantes. Facing persecution, thousands of non-Catholics were forced to leave France, and among them was Leguat, who went to Holland in 1689. By that time he was fifty-two years old and newly impoverished, because Protestants leaving France had to forfeit all of their property. Dejected and rootless, he heard about a scheme to establish an ideal French Huguenot republic on the island of Réunion, which was then believed to have been abandoned by the French. The chance to start a new life with his fellow Huguenots appealed to Leguat, and he enlisted, despite the fact that he was considered well past his prime. He felt as if he had nothing to lose. “After having been forc'd to leave my Native Country,” he wrote, “with so many thousands of my Brethren, to abandon my small Inheritance, and to forsake for ever, according to all outward appearance, those Persons that were dear to me, without finding in the New Country … that sufficient Relief which my present necessity demanded, I gave my self up entirely to Providence … and at an Age already advanc'd beyond its Prime, I thought I wou'd endeavor to live in a Place where I might be free from the common and frequent Dangers to which I was expose'd. I had nothing to lose…”

Leguat and nine young compatriots left the Texel in July 1690 aboard the
Hirondelle
, a small frigate under the command of a man named Antoine Valleau. The frigate subsequently joined a convoy of twenty-four English and Dutch ships that sailed north of Scotland to avoid a French squadron in the English Channel. When his ship reached the Cape of Good Hope, it was not clear whether French warships had visited Réunion or had gone to India without stopping at the island. Whether Valleau set sail from the Cape for Réunion or Rodrigues isn't known, but a cyclone hit the frigate after it left the Cape and he lost his bearings. Dutch-controlled Mauritius, not Réunion, was first sighted by him in early April 1691, and Valleau set the frigate's course for Rodrigues.

The
Hirondelle
arrived at Rodrigues and Leguat and seven other men decided to remain there. Valleau sailed away and never returned. Left on their own in an island paradise, the men had little trouble surviving—there were many sources of fresh spring water, rivers crowded with eels, thousands of huge tortoises on the land, numerous shellfish along the shore, enormous sea turtles, large, easy-to-catch flightless birds, and an edible palm that yielded a tasty juice, or “palm-wine.” They built huts and settled in as castaways on the pristine island. Although food and water was plentiful, the isolation became unbearable and two years after they arrived, they began to make plans to leave the island.

The resourceful men built a boat and were able to set it afloat. After a difficult voyage to Mauritius, some 406 miles to the west, their suffering did not end. The Dutch there threw them into prison, where they stayed for three years. In 1696 the Frenchmen were sent to Batavia, where they remained for one year. When they were finally allowed to leave, only three of the castaways were still alive, Leguat and two of his companions. They finally arrived in Holland in 1698. Ten years later, Leguat published his incredible story,
A New Voyage to the East-Indies,
in French, English, and Dutch. Leguat himself lived a remarkably long time after his ordeal, and died at the age of 97 in 1735.

Leguat's description of the wildlife on Rodrigues was almost immediately questioned, especially his account of the solitarie, a bird he obviously adored. “The Females are wonderfully beautiful, some fair, some brown; I call them fair, because they are of the colour of fair Hair: They have a sort of Peak like a Widow's cap upon their Breasts, which is of a dun color.… They walk with so much Stateliness and good Grace, that one cannot help admiring and loving them …

“Tho' these Birds will sometimes very familiarly come up near enough to one, when we do not run after them, yet they will never grow Tame: As soon as they are caught they shed Tears without Crying, and (obstinately) refuse all manner of Sustenance till they die.” His affection for the bird did not deter him from making a meal of the animal. He reports that its flesh tasted “admirably well, especially while they are young…”

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By the time other visitors came to Rodrigues, most notably to view the transit of Venus (when the planet passes between the Earth and Sun) in 1761, the solitaire was gone, casting further suspicion on Leguat's descriptions of the bird. A little over one hundred years later, bones were finally discovered on Rodrigues that confirmed Leguat's story, especially an unusually small, round bony mass under the feathers of the wings in both male and female solitaires.

Leguat's account is filled with many other interesting observations, but perhaps the most memorable is a description of the startling number of tortoises on Rodrigues, which provoked much skepticism. “… such a plenty of Land-Turtles in this Isle, that sometimes you see two or three thousands of them in a Flock, so that you may go above a hundred paces on their Backs; or, to speak more properly on their
Carapaces
, without setting foot to the Ground,” wrote Leguat.

The giant tortoises of the Indian Ocean once thrived on all the Mascarene Islands, but by the time Leguat was in Rodrigues these animals were already becoming less abundant on Mauritius and Réunion. Prized for their healthful oil as well as tasty meat, the tortoises weighed more than a hundred pounds. “This Flesh is very wholsom, and tastes something like Mutton but 'tis more delicate: The Fat is extreamly white, and never Congeals nor rises in your stomach, eat as much as you will of it,” wrote Leguat. “We all unanimously agreed, 'twas better than the best Butter in Europe. To anoint one's self with this Oil, is an excellent remedy for Surfeits, Colds, Cramps and several Distempers. The Liver of this Animal is extraordinarily delicate, 'tis so Delicious that one may say of it, it always carries its own Sauce with it, dress it how you will.”

Once the French lifted a ban on the removal of reptiles from Rodrigues in 1735, the destruction of tortoises and sea turtles on the island accelerated, and by the end of the century the tortoises had been destroyed. In one killing spree, about thirty thousand tortoises from the island were killed for fresh meat during an eighteen-month period. Tortoises on Mauritius, Réunion, and the nearby Seychelles were slaughtered similarly. It took only a few decades to drive the giant land tortoises on Rodrigues into extinction.

The only giant tortoises that survive today in the Indian Ocean live on the Aldabra atoll. Lying about 250 miles north of Madagascar, Aldabra comprises a small group of three islands surrounding an enormous central lagoon. Writer David Doubilet took a motor boat into the nearly untouched atoll in 1995. “Channels like witches' hands reach into the green cauldron of Aldabra,” he writes in
National Geographic
magazine. “A crust of land surrounds a lagoon so large that Manhattan could float in it like a bathtub toy.”

In 1874 Aldabra was going to be exploited for its mangrove timber. Fortunately, a number of notable men rallied to save the tortoises on the atoll, among them Charles Darwin. By that time, there was some concern that the animals might become extinct. A party landing on Aldabra in 1878 took three days to find one animal. In the 1960s, the atoll's fauna and flora was again in peril after the British announced plans to build an air base with a nine-thousand-foot-long runway. An outcry from scientists and conservationists caused the plans to be shelved, and in 1982 Aldabra was named a world heritage site by UNESCO.

Today, about a hundred thousand tortoises survive there, compared with a few thousand tortoises that live on the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. It is amazing that any of the giant land tortoises survive. Their delicious meat and valuable oil, coupled with their inability to escape their captors, made them easy targets for hungry seamen during the age of discovery and beyond. Live animals were packed onto ships like stacked crates.

Herman Melville wrote an unforgettable account of the giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands in
The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles
, a series of ten short “sketches” published in the 1850s. He describes the islands as “heaps of cinders” unparalleled in their desolation and melancholy. In the sketch titled “Two Sides to a Tortoise,” Melville characterizes the “spectre-tortoise,” whose breastplate of a “faint yellowish or golden tinge” helps brighten the unmitigated gloom of the islands. In the sketch, a group of men go ashore and bring back three “huge antediluvian-looking tortoises” that require a great deal of effort to haul on board. “… behold these really wondrous tortoises—none of your schoolboy mud-turtles—but black as widower's weeds, heavy as chests of plate, with vast shells medallioned and orbed like shields, and dented and blistered like shields that have breasted a battle, shaggy, too here and there, with dark green moss, and slimy with spray of the sea. These mystic creatures suddenly translated by night from unutterable solitudes to our peopled deck, affected me in a manner not easy to unfold.…

“The great feeling inspired by these creatures was that of age:—dateless, indefinite endurance.”

The three “ponderous strangers” drag themselves around the deck of the ship and refuse to go around obstacles. Melville marveled at their intransigence but was haunted by their slow-motion nudging and trudging. Their “crowning curse,” he wrote, “is their drudging impulse to straightforwardness in a belittered world.” Despite his admiration, the next evening, “strange to say, I sat down with my shipmates, and made a merry repast from tortoise steaks and tortoise stews; and supper over, out knife, and helped convert the three mighty concave shells into three fanciful soup-tureens, and polished the three flat yellowish calipees into three gorgeous salvers.”

Tens of thousands of giant tortoises met a similar fate.

 

Nine

Medicinal Pepper

THE ANCIENT ALLURE OF PEPPER AS A MEDICINE IS ATTRACTING ATTENTION TODAY. SCIENTISTS IN THE WEST ARE INTRIGUED BY PEPPER'S ABILITY TO QUELL INFLAMMATION. EXPERIMENTS SUGGEST THE SPICE COULD HAVE A ROLE IN COMBATING CANCER. BETEL, ONE OF PEPPER'S SIBLINGS, APPEARS TO BE A PROMISING TREATMENT FOR THE PARASITIC DISEASE LEISHMANIASIS.

Piper nigrum
L. (Piperacea) has insecticidal properties and could potentially be utilized as an alternative to synthetic insecticides.

—J
OURNAL OF
A
GRICULTURAL AND
F
OOD
C
HEMISTRY

Traditional plant remedies, particularly those used in traditional Chinese medicine and Indian Ayurvedic medicine have, in many cases, been observed to yield positive results.

—
P
LANTA
M
EDICA

“Many physiological effects of black pepper, its extracts or its major active principle, piperine, have been reported in recent decades.”

—
K
RISHNAPURA
S
RINIVASAN,
D
EPARTMENT OF
B
IOCHEMISTRY AND
N
UTRITION,
C
ENTRAL
F
OOD
T
ECHNOLOGY
R
ESEARCH
I
NSTITUTE,
M
YSORE,
I
NDIA