Pepper (5 page)

Pepper was the primary reason why the East India Company was established, and naturally, its founding members were successful grocers. When Queen Elizabeth I granted the company its charter in 1600, a major part of its mission was to bring down the price of pepper to English consumers.

During the heyday of the pepper trade, the spice was more valuable than gold and silver. 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. The man took off before the grocer discovered the bartered merchandise was worthless. The surviving sailors of voyages to Asia were sometimes paid for their labors in quintals of pepper and other spices. A quintal was equivalent to about 125 pounds. The spices sailors received could set them up for the rest of their lives. Pepper was considered a legitimate form of money. It was used to pay taxes, custom duties, and even dowries. When Isabella married Charles I of Spain, also known as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, in 1526, her brother, John III of Portugal, paid part of her dowry in pepper. A man's wealth was expressed by how much pepper was in a household.

The origin of the word
spice
reflects its worth. Spice comes from the Latin word
species
, which means an item of special value. Following the defeat of the Spanish Armada by the British in 1588, King Philip II of Spain ran out of silver and couldn't pay some of his debts. In 1589, and again in 1591, he reached into his stores of pepper to square the difference.

Land was also purchased with pepper. The expression “peppercorn rent” arose to signify a fee lower than the usual rent, or a nominal fee, symbolized in some contracts by one peppercorn. In 1607 William III chartered Trinity Church in New York City (the lovely parish church in lower Manhattan near Ground Zero) and he demanded that the church vestry pay rent of one peppercorn annually to the crown. The peppercorn rent showed who really owned the property. The expression is still used in Britain today.

Nutmeg and cloves were more profitable, but pepper was used in greater quantities—six to eight times more pepper than cloves and nutmeg was shipped from Asia to Europe during the age of discovery. Historian Holden Furber, a scholar who has written extensively about the English East India Company and European trading networks in Asia, estimates that the annual demand for cloves, nutmeg (mace), and cinnamon was roughly one million pounds, compared to six to eight million pounds of pepper. In the eighteenth century, the largest quantity of nutmeg sold by the VOC in Holland was only 280,964 pounds.

The Dutch were well aware of the value of pepper, even as they obsessively pursued monopolies in other spices. This fact was not lost on their main rival, the English. During the seventeenth century, when the English and Dutch vied for control of port cities in India, Sumatra, and western Java, the directors of the English East India Company understood that pepper's value exceeded that of any other spice because it was used by everyone. Although they acknowledged that pepper was a “slight thing,” a mere commodity, the directors were well aware that whoever emerged victorious from a war over pepper would control “the British as well as the Indian seas.”

This insight informs the following passage from one of their letters: “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. But at the Bottom it will prove a war for the dominion of the British as well as the Indian seas, because if ever they come to be sole masters of that Commodity, as they already are of nutmegs, mace, clove, and cinamon [sic], the sole profitt of that one commodity pepper being of general use, will be more to them, than all the rest and in probability to defray the constant charge of a great navy in Europe.”

*   *   *

From its earliest days, European pepper trading turned a profit. Historian M. N. Pearson calculates that the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to ply an all-ocean trade route to the East, at one time made a profit of about 260 percent based on the purchase of a quintal of pepper (about 125 pounds) in India for six cruzados, and a minimum set selling price in Europe of twenty-two cruzados, the gold Portuguese coins. These numbers, however, pale in comparison to the mind-boggling profits made by American pepper traders from Salem, Massachusetts, in the early 1800s. They once made a net profit of
700 percent
on a single voyage to Sumatra. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese received especially good prices for Indian pepper because they exchanged it for copper, much needed in India.

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. Pearson calculates that
net
profits earned by the Portuguese from pepper imports in the first half of the sixteenth century were extraordinary, ranging from 89 percent to 152 percent. During the second half of the sixteenth century, European demand for spices from Asia doubled again, and prices skyrocketed, rising as much as threefold. Over this period, pepper comprised the bulk of the spices imported.

By the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese were not the only Europeans in the Indian Ocean; the Dutch and English had entered the pepper trade and the Dutch were especially successful. The demand for pepper in Europe doubled yet again, and by the 1620s the Dutch and the English had largely supplanted the Portuguese in the spice trade. The sea route around the Cape of Good Hope had replaced the Levant as the means for Asian goods to reach Europe, something which the Portuguese had failed to accomplish in the sixteenth century. The northern Europeans at this point accounted for 80 percent of the trade in pepper.

In 1622, Europeans were consuming about seven million pounds of pepper annually. By that time, the English East India Company was the only importer of the spice into England. In 1618, the
Charles
, a company ship, brought back more than 8,100 quintals (1,012,500 pounds) of pepper; in 1621, it returned to London laden with more than 6,400 quintals (800,000 pounds), and in 1625, it carried nearly 8,000 quintals (1,000,000 pounds) back to England.

Pepper dominated the Dutch trade in spices, too, even though the Dutch had built a monopoly in nutmeg and cloves after brutal campaigns to seize islands in the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, the only place in the world where clove trees grew, and the tiny Banda Islands, where nutmeg trees grew. The Hollanders, though, never lost sight of the fact that pepper was more valuable than clove and nutmeg, simply because so much more of it was used. During the eighteenth century, demand for pepper remained strong even as other commodities, particularly tea, surpassed the trade in the spice. In 1722, when tea was enjoying brisk trade, more than nine million pounds of pepper were still being exported to Europe from Asia.

*   *   *

The Chinese had a long and enduring appetite for black pepper. The spice was first brought into China from India as early as the second century, mainly for medicinal purposes. 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. The Chinese were trading with Java and with Sumatra at least since the tenth century.

When Marco Polo traveled to China in 1271 during the Yuan Dynasty (1271 to 1367), tremendous quantities of pepper were being imported into the country, where the spice was used widely in cooking. In
The Travels,
the Venetian traveler reported: “At the end of the five days' journey lies the splendid city of Zaiton [modern day Quanzhou], at which is the port for all the ships that arrive from India laden with costly wares and precious stones of great price and big pearls of fine quality. It is also a port for the merchants of Manzi that is, of all the surrounding territory, so that the total traffic in gems and other merchandise entering or leaving this port is a marvel to behold. From this city and its port goods are exported to the whole province of Manzi. And I assure you that for one spice ship that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere to pick up pepper for export to Christendom, Zaiton is visited by a hundred. For you must know that it is one of the two ports in the world with the biggest flow of merchandise.”

Marco Polo was also dazzled by the city of Hang-zhou, which he called Kinsai. He commented on its stately mansions and gardens, the canals crossed by numerous stone bridges, and the traders who brought supplies by carts and boats. The crowds flocking to its enormous marketplaces especially impressed the European. “… anyone seeing such a multitude would believe it a stark impossibility that food could be found to fill so many mouths,” Polo wrote. To convey the hugh quantities of provisions, including meat, wine, and groceries, that had to be brought into the city to meet the demand, Polo quoted a customs official who told him that the amount of pepper consumed daily in the city amounted to forty-three cartloads, each weighing 223 pounds.

Marco Polo also described the size of Chinese junks, which carried a much larger cargo than European ships. He estimated that 150 to 300 men were needed to crew the Chinese vessels, and one ship could take as much as “five or six thousand baskets of pepper.”

The consumption of pepper in China expanded even more following the extraordinary voyages of Zheng He during the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644). In the early 1400s, this commander began his historic voyages for the Emperor Zhu Di. Pepper was one of the primary reasons for the voyages of the magnificent Chinese Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne. A man named Ma Huan accompanied the fleet on three of its seven expeditions, acting as the official translator of either Arabic or Persian. He wrote about visiting Calicut, Malacca, and the port city of Pasai in northern Sumatra, where a large number of foreign ships came to buy black pepper.

In Calicut, pepper was extensively cultivated by the people living in the mountainous countryside who had established gardens, Ma Huan wrote in
The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores.
“When the period of the tenth moon arrives, the pepper ripens; [and] it is collected, dried in the sun, and sold,” he wrote. “Of course, big pepper-collectors come and collect it, and take it up to the official storehouse to be stored; if there is a buyer, an official gives permission for the sale; the duty calculated according to the amount [of the purchase price] and is paid in to the authorities. Each one
po-ho
of pepper is sold for two hundred gold coins.”

Zheng He's fleet sailed widely in the China Seas to Korea and Japan and in the Indian Ocean to India, the Persian Gulf, and the east coast of Africa. For the voyages of the Treasure Fleet, the Chinese built the biggest wooden sailing ships the world had ever seen. The largest were four hundred feet long. By comparison, Columbus's
Santa Maria
was tiny, measuring only eighty-five feet long.

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. Calicut was the destination of the first voyage of 317 junks in the fall of 1405. Outfitted with a crew of more than 27,000, and on later voyages with hundreds of medical officers and pharmacologists, the Chinese ships had watertight bulwark compartments and balanced rudders for steering, technical innovations that would not be incorporated into European shipbuilding until the late eighteenth century. The Chinese already had a long maritime history, and at various times had the finest boats sailing the Indian Ocean, but none could compare with the Treasure ships, which could be identified easily by the brightly painted dragon eye on their prows.

The affinity for pepper among the Chinese was well known among the Europeans in Asia. A Portuguese merchant based in Malaysia in the sixteenth century noted that the Chinese wanted pepper more than anything else, and were willing to buy as many boatloads as were available. He also noted that in the early 1500s, a quintal of pepper was worth four ducats in Malacca, but sold for fifteen ducats in China. And an Italian observer named Andrea Corsali reported in 1515 that there was “as great profit in taking spices to China as in taking them to Portugal.”

When the Ming dynasty, the last native rulers of China, fell in 1644 to the marauding Manchus, many southern Chinese fled overseas to Malaysia, where they took up pepper farming. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Chinese had established themselves as prominent pepper traders there. Their presence in Malaysia was noted by Charles Lockyer, an independent English merchant who traveled widely in Asia. In 1711, he described the city of Malacca as a “healthful place” where “the houses in the town make a good appearance, are built with stone, and ranged in streets, much like our small seaports in England.” He noted especially that the Chinese “keep the best shops in the place, which are well filled with the manufactures and produce of their own country…” The Chinese especially liked tea and sugar candy, and some had set up teahouses in the town.

In the succeeding centuries, overseas Chinese continued to play a major role in the pepper trade, and China remained a large consumer of pepper.