Pepper (8 page)

Pires arrived in Malacca eleven months after the Portuguese conquered the city, and he spent two years and seven months there. He allegedly coined the famous phrase, “Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.” In those days wild elephants and tigers, as well as deer, roamed the port city. Pires's renowned
Suma Oriental
, an account of Asian trade that he wrote between 1512 and 1515, was the first description of Malaysia by a European. He also has the distinction of being the first European to describe the use of chopsticks. The Portuguese were notorious for holding on to information about their “discoveries.” King Manuel I decreed in 1504 that all information about exploration was a state secret. It wasn't until 1944 that Pires's journals were published in their entirety.

In 1522 the Portuguese conquered Malacca under the command of the fierce Alfonso de Albuquerque. It was a brutal campaign. A Malaysian observer of the invasion described the incessant bombardment of the city. “And the Franks engaged the men of Malaka in battle, and they fired their cannon from their ships so that the cannon balls came like rain,” he wrote. “And the noise of the cannon was as the noise of thunder in the heavens and the flashes of fire of their guns were like flashes of lightning in the sky: and the noise of their matchlocks was like that of ground-nuts popping in the frying-pan.” Among those who overtook the city was Ferdinand Magellan.

In a city where most of the buildings were made of wood, the Portuguese quickly went about constructing an enormous medieval-style fortress on the banks of the Malacca River and alongside the sea to fortify their position and make sure that ships could still supply the garrison even during a siege. Built with slave labor on the ruins of a great mosque, the fortress was constructed in part with stones from the mausoleums of former Malaysian sultans and from religious buildings. The imposing A Formosa, or The Famous, had walls eight feet thick. “The walls of the fortress are of great width; as for the keep, where they are usually built, you will find few of five storeys like this,” wrote Tomé Pires in his
Suma Oriental
. “The artillery, both large and small, fires on all sides.”

This commanding fortress, a symbol of Portuguese might, served as the residence of the various Europeans who controlled Malacca, and it also accommodated two hospitals, five churches, a palace for the governor, a prison, and other buildings. Surrounded by a wall nearly one mile long, the fortress was believed to be impregnable. In the nineteenth century it was destroyed by the British. A prominent Malaysian scholar who witnessed the demolition described elephant- and house-sized pieces of the fort blown into the air and cascading into the sea. “Everyone was startled,” he wrote, “when they heard the noise, their surprise all the greater because never in their lives had they heard such a sound or seen how the power of gunpowder can lift bits or rock as big as houses.” The stones from the fortress were carried away to build houses, and the British used pieces to make warning buoys.

Once the Portuguese secured the port city in 1511, they cast their eye farther east to the Spice Islands, or the Moluccas, the little volcanic islands that transfixed the world as its only source of clove. These islands—Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian, Bacan—lie some two thousand miles east of Malacca, and their names were well known during the age of discovery, although few sailors knew their exact location.

The islands were immortalized by the poet John Milton in
Paradise Lost
(1667):

… the Iles

of Ternate and Tidore, where Merchants bring their spicie Drugs …

The Portuguese poet de Camões described them more closely in
The Lusiads
:

Look there, how the seas of the Orient,

Are scattered with islands beyond number;

See Tidore, then Ternate with its burning

Summit, leaping with volcanic flames.

Observe the orchards of hot cloves

Portuguese will buy with their blood;

And birds of paradise, which never alight,

But fall to earth the day they end their flight.

Even the Chinese had not ventured to the Moluccas, partly because their junks were too large to travel among the islands. Some historians argue that even Arab traders did not go to the Spice Islands before the arrival of the Europeans. Javanese and Malaysian sailors most likely transported the aromatic spice from the Spice Islands to Java, where it was purchased by the Chinese and by Indian and Arab traders. The Chinese had been using cloves since at least 300 B.C. as a perfume and breath freshener. In the West cloves were known since at least the time of the ancient Romans, when the physician Galen recommended using the dried flower buds in prescriptions for ointments. Cloves, saffron, pepper, and other aromatic spices were said to have been presented in gold and silver caskets to a bishop in Rome in the fourth century. Cloves were especially prized for their superb ability to mask odors.

Only four months after Malacca was conquered, Albuquerque dispatched three ships to the Spice Islands. The islanders weren't overjoyed to see the foreign ships on their shores, and they resisted these unusual interlopers who, unlike Malaysian and Javanese traders, were clearly interested in subjugating them. The Spice Islands were ardently pursued because cloves, like pepper, were used as a spice and as a medicine, and the spices' geographic isolation made them even more valuable. Magellan took cloves on his round-the-world voyage in order to show locals what he was after, and when the only ship of his fleet to have survived the harrowing voyage returned to Lisbon in 1521, it carried a skeleton crew and some 53,000 pounds of cloves, which earned a profit of some
2,500 percent
. Nearly sixty years later, England's great seafaring hero Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe, and he was the first Englishman to import cloves directly to England.

Along with Goa and Malacca, the port of Hormuz on the Persian Gulf was an important hub for Indian and Indonesian spices transported in the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese conquered Hormuz in 1515 but failed to capture Aden at the entrance to the Red Sea, the key to the traditional spice trade in the Levant. The old trade route through the Levant, which encompasses the eastern Mediterranean, parts of the Middle East, and Turkey, persisted and thrived. In the middle of the sixteenth century, according to the estimates of some historians, almost half of Europe's pepper was still being supplied by ships via the Levant, an indication of the relative inability of Portugal to assert itself in the Indian Ocean and force all trade around the Cape. Muslim merchants, bypassing areas in the Indian Ocean dominated by the Portuguese, simply shipped their pepper to ports on the Red Sea, as they had for centuries, where the spice was taken overland to ports in Syria and Egypt on the Mediterranean and from there to ships that would finally take the spice to Venice.

There were other holes in the Portuguese net. Muslim traders, too, could bypass the Strait of Malacca altogether by shipping spices from the far eastern Spice Islands through the Strait of Sunda. Consequently, the Portuguese never had complete control of the spice trade, and what they did control was challenged by Arab, Indian, and Malaysian traders—and later by the Dutch and English. Portugal did try to assert its power by setting up a system of passes for all ships sailing the Indian Ocean, but this system was barely functional. Because of the long distances and huge expense involved in shipping spices from India, Sumatra, and the Spice Islands, the Portuguese conducted much of their trade with Asians. Most of the Portuguese ships had Asian crews because there weren't enough Portuguese sailors. The Portuguese did not dominate the spice trade for a long time. By the early seventeenth century, they were already beginning to lose their footholds in East Asia, and by the 1620s they had already been eclipsed by the far more successful English and Dutch, who accounted for most of the pepper trade. By the time Dampier traveled in Asia in 1688, the Portuguese had lost control of Malacca in Malaysia and of Ternate in the Moluccas.

Nevertheless, historian A. J. R. Russell-Wood points out that the Portuguese influence was extraordinary. Linguistically, the Portuguese language has had a more far-reaching impact than the Dutch language, even though the Dutch largely usurped the Portuguese in the pepper trade in the seventeenth century. Portuguese was for many years the dominant language in most of the maritime ports of Asia, and vestiges of the language could still be heard in Malacca and along the Malabar Coast in the twentieth century.

The Portuguese held on to Goa until 1961 and didn't relinquish their grip on Macao, the little island off the southeast coast of mainland China, until 1999. In the sixteenth century, the Chinese allowed the Portuguese to settle on the island in exchange for their help in defeating pirates. By 1562, historians estimate that Macao had about 800 to 900 Portuguese, and a few modest churches. In his journals, Matteo Ricci, the phenomenally gifted and indefatigable Italian Jesuit who lived in China for twenty-seven years, from 1583 to 1610, described Macao as a place where people gathered “eager to barter for all sorts of merchandise brought from Europe, India, and the Islands of the Moluccas. The prospects of quick fortunes were an enticement to the Chinese merchants to take up residence on the island, and in the course of a few years the trading post began to assume the appearance of a city. Numerous houses were built when the Portuguese and the Chinese began to intermarry, and before long the rock point was developed into a respectable port and a prominent market.”

*   *   *

The number of Jesuits who went to Asia was small compared to the number of ordinary people who sailed to the East. The Jesuits were inveterate letter writers, in part because they were obliged to report on their activities, and their words are preserved. But the voices of ordinary people tend to be lost to history. Who would want to venture out on an unknown ocean, surrounded by filth, ragged men, and the prospect of disease? Surely, convicts had little choice in the matter, but families went, too. The voyage to the East must have been especially difficult for the few women who accompanied their husbands to India, although little is known about them. On the rare occasions when Portuguese vessels bound for Goa from Lisbon carried women, there were no more than twenty. Some bizarre solutions were put forth to remedy the chronic lack of European women in Portuguese strongholds. A Jesuit in the sixteenth century in Brazil suggested sending prostitutes. Convents were popular among married European women who needed a refuge while their husbands were away. The Augustinian convent of Santa Monica, established in Goa during the early seventeenth century, would far exceed its capacity of one hundred nuns.

Despite the obstacles, some European women managed to establish themselves in Asia in the early days of European exploration. One of them was an Englishwoman named Judith who survived a shipwreck off the coast of China. Judith was the maidservant of an English family sent to the East in 1619. She accompanied Richard Forbusher, a master carpenter for the East India Company, and his wife and two young sons aboard a ship named
Hope
. Only a sketchy account of their ordeal survives. Forbusher is mentioned several times in the company's court minutes, which provide details of transactions brought before the court. We know that he was an able carpenter. In the company's court minutes dated February 26, 1619, Forbusher was described as an “old servant who built a pinnace in the Somers Islands, and is known to be very skilful, and willing to go and live in India for seven years with his two sons.”

When they arrived in Bantam, the family and maidservant debarked and were apparently put on the
Unicorne
, which was bound for Japan. This ship was wrecked off the coast of China, where they were taken captive by the Portuguese and shipped off to Malacca. At some point, Forbusher was slain, the children “detained,” and Judith turned “Catholic,” according to the company's records. On October 25, 1626, Forbusher's wife, Johan Cranfield, petitioned the company for her husband's wages. She related that she was ransomed for two Portuguese men and had made it all the way back to London. Her children had apparently died. Only Judith remained in Malacca. We do not hear again about this family in the company's records. It isn't known whether Johan ever got her money, although the company did pay a widow her husband's wages.

In 1637 Judith suddenly appears in the journal of Peter Mundy. He arrived in Malacca in May of that year and describes “an Englishwoman Married to a Portugall Mestizo of some quallity, are well to live, and have beetweene them one pretty boy.” He relates that when Judith arrived in Malacca she went to live with the “Misericordia,” an order that takes care of orphans. “She was called Judith and now Julia de la gracia.” We don't know much more about Judith, but we can imagine that she might have found a measure of happiness in Malacca.

In later years some women risked their lives to go to Asia and earn their fortunes by disguising themselves as men. Johan Splinter Stavorinus, a captain for the Dutch East India Company from 1768 to 1778 who made several voyages to Africa and Asia during his employment, describes in his richly detailed journal a woman named Margaret Reymers who dressed in men's clothes and enlisted as a solider aboard the ship
Schoonzicht
.

A farmer's daughter in her early twenties, Margaret left the duchy of Oldenburg because of “ill treatment,” according to Stavorinus. She met a Dutch recruiting officer in Hamburgh, who advised her to don men's clothes and go to India, where she would make her fortune. Margaret was tall and “of a large and coarse make, by which she could easily pass for a man, in her soldiers' uniform,” Stavorinus observed. She remained unnoticed for two months on the
Schoonzicht
, but after her subterfuge was discovered, she was put ashore at the Cape of Good Hope and kept there in order to be sent back to Holland with a homeward bound Dutch Indiaman. When Stavorinus's ship arrived at the Cape, Margaret was put aboard. An arrangement was made for her to serve as a maid to a lady on the ship who was sailing from Batavia (modern-day Jakarta) to Holland. Nothing seemed amiss until she suddenly gave birth. Margaret told Stavorinus that while she was at the Cape, a surgeon's mate had seduced and abandoned her. Six months pregnant when she came aboard Stavorinus's ship, Margaret had “hoped that the ship would have reached its destination before the time of her delivery.”