Pepper (30 page)

“… conconction, to discuss wind, to do good against the cold affects of the stomack, and yet not to heat the liver or the blood, wherein consisteth as singular propertie of this medicine.”
A Short Discourse on Three Kinds of Peppers in Common Use,
William Bailey, 1588. New York Academy of Medicine, Rare Books. Bailey relied on the work of Galen, a renowned Roman physician, for his description of pepper's healing powers.

“… wholesome for the brain.”
A Rich Store-house or Treasury for the Diseased
: Wherein, are many approved medicines for diverse and sundry diseases, which have long been hidden, and not come to light before this time.… By A. T. Rebus. London, printed for Thomas Purfoot, and Raph [sic] Bower, 1596. New York Academy of Medicine, Rare Books.

 …
another published a year later recommended the spice alone or combined with other substances for conditions ranging from headaches and gas to leprous facial sores and tumors.
William Langham's
The Garden of Health
(London: 1597), a popular herbal treatise. Langham described sixty-four medical uses for pepper.

a Pfeffersack (pepper sack) was a common expression that referred to a merchant who made handsome profits from the pepper trade. Cambridge World History of Food
, editors Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (Cambridge University Press, 2000) p. 436.

But for most people, pepper was too expensive—in 1439, a pound of pepper was roughly equal to more than two days' wages in England.
This calculation by John Munro, an economic historian, is cited in Paul Freedman's
Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination
(Yale University Press, 2008) p. 127. Pepper wasn't the most expensive luxury good. By comparison, velvet would have cost between two and three hundred days' wages in 1439.

Voltaire
wrote
that
after the year 1500 there was no pepper obtained in Calicut that was “not dyed red with blood.”
Calicut, an important pepper port along the southwest coast of India, was where Vasco da Gama first made landfall in south Asia in 1498, and it played a prominent role in the pepper trade in the following centuries.

“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.”
Bartholomew, a thirteenth-century encylopedist, is quoted in Lorna J. Sass's
To the King's Taste
(St. Martin's/Marek, 1975) p. 24.

Garcia da Orta, who lived in Goa …
One of the pioneers of tropical medicine, da Orta was the first European to catalogue South Asian medicinal herbs and to describe cholera. He described three kinds of pepper: black, white, and long, and mistakenly believed that white pepper and black pepper were different climbing plants. He appreciated the trade value of the spice and knew that the greatest quantities of black pepper were found in Malabar and Sumatra. His book,
Conversations on the Simples, Drugs and the Medicinal Substances of India,
was abridged and annotated by a leading European botanist named Charles Lécluse, who published it in Antwerp in 1567. The abridged version was translated into many languages without acknowledgment of da Orta's authorship. Da Orta was born in Portugal around 1501, after his Jewish parents were forced to flee the Inquisition in Spain and convert to Christianity. He settled in Goa in 1538. Although he wasn't hounded by the Inquisition in Goa, he was tried postmortem as a “crypto Jew” and his bones were exhumed and burned. A year after his death, his sister was burned at the stake.

“Att the Foote of these trees they sett the pepper plant…” The Travels of Peter Mundy,
Vol. III, Part I (The Hakluyt Society, 1919) and reprinted in 1967 by Kraus Reprint Limited, p. 79.

“The betel nut is cut in four pieces and wraped up (one each in an Arek leaf), which they spread with a soft paste made of lime or Plaifter and then chew it altogether.…”
William Dampier,
Voyage Around the World,
Vol. I, 1685, p. 318. This edition of his book is from the Rare Books and Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library. Dampier's book is available on Google Books.

“… everyone knows what the Betel-Leaves and Arequa Nuts are…” The Voyage of François Leguat of Bresse to Rodriguez, Mauritius, Java, and the Cape of Good Hope,
edited and annotated by Captain Pasfield Oliver (The Hakluyt Society, 1891) p. 229.

“
… when ladies go out in Jakarta, they are invariably attended by four or more female slaves, one of whom bears the betel-box.”
J. S. Stavorinus
Voyages to the East Indies
, translated by S. H. Wilcocke, 1798 (reprinted by Dawsons of Pall Mall, London, 1969) Vol. I, p. 322.

“makes their spittle of a crimson colour…”
Ibid., p. 317.

“longer than the most inveterate tobacco chewer over his plug.”
Gorham P. Low,
The Sea Made Men: The Story of a Gloucester Lad
, edited by Elizabeth L. Alling (Fleming H. Revell Company, 1937) p. 192.

“I do not recognize them, for which I feel the greatest sorrow in the world.”
Lardicci, Francesca, editor,
A Synoptic Edition of the Log of Columbus's First Voyage
(Brepols, 1999) p. 58. Columbus's original journals have been lost. The accounts of his four voyages are based mainly on a biography written by his second son, Fernando Colón, who had access to his father's papers, and on the
History of the Indies
by Spanish historian Bartolomé de Las Casas, who knew Columbus's family and had consulted their archives. Las Casas also made a handwritten copy of Columbus's log of the first voyage, although it isn't considered to be complete. Undoubtedly, the Spanish monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand did not want their enemies to profit from Columbus's discoveries.

Two: The King of Spices

“Pepper is small in quantity and great in virtue.”
Plato's quote is cited in Waverly Root's
Food: An Authoritative and Visual History and Dictionary of the Foods of the World
(Simon and Schuster, 1980) p. 341.

“The King of Portugal, Lord of Spices, has set … prices just as he pleases, for pepper, which, at any cost, no matter how dear, will not long go unsold to the Germans.”
Cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch's engaging book
Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants
(Pantheon, 1992) p. 12.

Pepper's worth had not escaped the Goth. His army finally left Rome laden with thousands of pounds of gold and silver, thousands of silk tunics and scarlet-dyed skins, and three thousand pounds of pepper.
This information is attributed to Gibbon, who wrote that Alaric the Goth lifted the siege “on the immediate payment of five thousand pounds of gold, of thirty thousand pounds of silver, of four thousand robes of silk, of three thousand pieces of fine scarlet cloth, and of three thousand pounds weight of pepper.” See “Spices and Silk: Aspects of World Trade in the First Seven Centuries of the Christian Era,” by Michael Loewe,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland,
No. 2, (1971), p. 175.

“Apicius showed it [pepper] employed, ground or whole, black or white, in almost every recipe…”
Innes Miller,
The Spice Trade of the Roman Empire, 29 BC to AD 641,
(Clarendon Press, 1969) p. 83. See alsoSally Grainger's article “The Myth of Apicius,” in the journal
Gastronomica
, Spring 2007, for a diverting discussion of the epicure as greedy and obsessed.

For the Feast of St. Edward in 1264, Master William, a saucier, prepared a sauce that incorporated 15 pounds of cinnamon, 12.5 pounds of cumin, and 20 pounds (320 ounces) of pepper.
See Pamela Nightingale,
A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers' Company and the Politics and Trade of London,
1000–1485 (Yale University Press, 1995) p. 74.

Two hundreds years later, Duke Karl of Bourgogne, considered one of the wealthiest men in Europe, ordered
380 pounds
of pepper for his wedding dinner in 1468. The Cambridge World History of Food
, Vol. 2, edited by Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (Cambridge University Press, 2000) p. 436.

“No less than Palmyra and Petra, the city [Venice] owed everything to its preeminence in Oriental trade—a term that was virtually synonymous with spices—and was proud to proclaim it.”
John Keay,
The Spice Route: A History
, (London: John Murray, 2005) p. 139.

“History has shown that the hunger for spices was capable of mobilizing forces very much as the present-day need for energy sources has done.”
Schivelbusch,
Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants
, p. 9.

“Throughout the middle ages the Garden was believed, somehow, to have survived the flood…” The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise
(Yale University Press, 1982) p. 9.

“
In the thirteenth century, cinnamon, ginger, and other spices were believed to float down the Nile from Paradise. Fishermen cast their nets into the river to gather this aromatic bounty.”
Ibid, p. 30.

“fantasies of absurd plentitude”
Paul Freedman,
Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination
(Yale University Press, 2008) p. 137.

“After our departure from Batavia [modern-day Jakarta] wee arrived att Suratt the 23th October last. And going ashore to the villadg called Swalley, wee sawe there manie people that perished of hunger; and whereas heretofore where were in that towne 260 familllyes, ther was not remaininge alive above 10 or 11 famillyes.” The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667,
Vol. II (The Hakluyt Society, 1919; reprinted in 1967 by Kraus Reprint Limited) p. 344.

 … that helped allay the Queen's fears that an English trading company would anger the Spanish.
See Heidi Brayman Hackel and Peter C. Mancall, “Richard Hakluyt the Younger's Notes for the East India Company in 1601: A Transcription of Huntington Library Manuscript EL 2360,”
The Huntington Library Quarterly,
Vol. 67, No. 3 (2004), pp. 423–436, 2004.

“in an age wherein God hath raised so general a desire in the youth of this realm to discover all parts of the face of the earth.”
Quote from Richard Hakluyt cited in Russell Shorto's
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic History of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that shaped America,
(New York: Doubleday, 2004) p. 20.

In 1418, an irate English grocer reported that he had been defrauded by a man who gave him tin spoons and stones rather than silver spoons, silver, and jewels in exchange for twelve pounds of pepper.
Anecdote related in Aubrey Joseph Rees,
The Grocery Trade: Its History and Romance
(Duckworth and Company, Ltd, 1910) p. 94.

When Isabella married Charles I of Spain … in 1524, her brother, John III of Portugal, paid part of her dowry in pepper.
Cited in Waverley Root,
Food: An Authoritative and Visual History and Dictionary of the Foods of the World
(Simon and Schuster, 1980) p. 338.

In the eighteenth century, the largest quantity of nutmeg sold by the VOC in Holland was only 280,964 pounds.
Figure cited in
Voyages to the East Indies,
by J. S. Stavorinus, translated by S. H. Wilcocke, 1798 (reprinted by Dawsons of Pall Mall, London, 1969) Vol. I, p. 334.

“If the present misunderstandings between the two nations should ferment to an open war it would thought by the vulgar, but a war for pepper which they think to be [a] slight thing, because each family spends but a little [on] it.…”
Quote is from
The British in West Sumatra (1685–1825): A selection of documents, mainly from the East India Company records preserved in the India Office Library, Commonwealth Relations Office, London,
with an introduction and notes by John Bastin (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1965) p. xi.

Around 1515 Portugal made about one million cruzados from the trade in spices, equal to all of its ecclesiastical revenues and double the value of its trade in gold and metals.
Figures cited in
Spices in the India Ocean World,
edited by M. N. Pearson (Ashgate Variorum, 1996) p. xxvi.

Under the Sung Dynasty (960 to 1127) the trade in pepper expanded and the spice was often brought as tribute from visiting Southeast Asian embassies.
Historian Yung-Ho Ts'ao enumerates the trade embassies carrying pepper as tribute and describes the pepper trade in China in the subsequent centuries in his article “Pepper Trade in East Asia” (T'oung Pao [Netherlands], 1982) 68 (4–5): 221–247.

“At the end of the five days' journey lies the splendid city of Zaiton [modern-day Quanzhou].…”
Marco Polo:
The Travels,
translated and with an introduction by Ronald Latham (Penguin Books, 1958) p. 237.

“… anyone seeing such a multitude would believe”
Ibid., pp. 216–217.

“When the period of the tenth moon arrives, the pepper ripens; [and] it is collected, dried in the sun, and sold.…”
Ma Huan,
The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores
(published for the Hakluyt Society by Cambridge University Press, 1970) p. 143.

The Chinese implemented an extraordinary campaign to obtain the wood for their massive ships by planting more than fifty million trees in the Nanking area in 1391.
From Jacque Gernet,
A History of Chinese Civilization
(Cambridge University Press, 1982) p. 399.