Authors: Marjorie Shaffer
“In the Land of Pepper,” a woodcut published in Germany in 1904, shows how pepper was cultivated in small gardens and brought downriver by rafts to waiting ships. Pepper leaves and berries adorn the engraving, and the poles at each side depict climbing pepper vines.
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HOTO: AKG-IMAGES
A drawing from a widely circulated pamphlet describing the torture and beheading of ten Englishmen in Amboyna in 1623.
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IBRARY, WITH PERMISSION
Acclaimed Dutch cartographer Johannes van Keulen's seventeenth-century map of the Indian Ocean, India, and the East Indies. The map, published in 1680, shows many of the pepper and spice ports in India and Indonesia that were part of the VOC's vast trading network in Asia.
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UK/ © B
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BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
M
ARJORIE
S
HAFFER
has written for
The New York Times, The Financial Times,
and
Popular Science
magazine. She was a business reporter for Reuters and a former Knight science journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently a science writer and editor at New York University School of Medicine. She lives in New York City.
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THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin's Press.
PEPPER.
Copyright © 2013 by Marjorie Shaffer. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Maps by Alison Muñoz
Cover design by Young Jin Lim
Cover photograph of peppercorns by Melina Hammer/Getty Images
Cover photograph of cut from peppercorn plant by Neil Fletcher & Matthew Ward/Getty Images
ISBN 978-0-312-56989-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-02100-7 (e-book)
First Edition: April 2013