Pepper (32 page)

“foure Barks riding in the Bay, three of Arabia, and one of Pegu (Burma), that came to lade Pepper.” The Voyages and Works of John Davis
(The Hakluyt Society, 1877) p. 140.

“the Queene, of her Basha's, and how she could hold warres with so great a King as the Spaniard?”
Ibid., p. 143.

“by reason of their gold mines, and the frequent resort of strangers, they are richer, and live in greater plenty.”
William Dampier. A collection of voyages: in four volumes: containing Captain William Dampier's
Voyages Around the World
 … London, 1729, p. 129 (Sabin Americana. Gale, Gengate Learning. New York University. Gale document number CY3803300281).

“consists of 7 or 8000 houses and in it there are always a great many merchant-strangers, viz. English, Dutch, Danes, Portuguese, Chinese, Guzarats, etc. The houses of this city are generally larger than those I saw at Mindinao, and better furnished with household goods.”
Ibid., p. 129.

“like hops from a planted root, and windeth about a stake set by it until it grow to a great bushie tree.” The Voyages and Works of John Davis
(The Hakluyt Society, 1877) p. 146.

 … total quantity of pepper shipped to Europe reached a peak of some fourteen million pounds in the 1670s, nearly double the amount from earlier decades.
These estimates are from Anthony Reid's essay “Humans and Forests in Pre-colonial Southeast Asia” in
Nature and the Orient: The Environmental History of South and Southeast Asia,
edited by Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran, Satpal Sangwan (Oxford University Press, 1998) p. 116.

“… there is much pepper, and it is better than that from India or Malabar, so much that yearly one should be able to load four or five thousand quintals of pepper, Portuguese weight.”
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten's
Itinerario
, quoted in Julie Berger Hochstrasser,
Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age
(Yale University Press, 2007) p. 102.

“hundred sixe and fortie buts of wine, an hundred threescore and sixteene jarres of oyle, twelve barrels of oyle, and five and fiftie hogsheads and fats [vats] of meale, which was a great helpe to us in the whole voyage after.…” The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster
(Hakluyt Society, 1940) p.78, from the account in
Purchas His Pilgrimes,
originally published in 1625. Richard Hakluyt published logs, journals, and many other historic and geographic records of ocean voyages in the age of discovery, and after he died in 1616 all of the unpublished material went to Reverend Samuel Purchas, who was most likely given the material by Sir Thomas Smythe, the first governor of the East India Company. Unfortunately, Purchas drastically abridged the voluminous materials and was said to have been careless with them. Nevertheless, he published an enormous amount of material; the 1905 reprint is twenty volumes. The original manuscripts of Lancaster's journals were lost, and the anonymous account in
Purchas
was probably written by a merchant on the
Dragon
.

“certain bottles of the juice of limons [lemons]
and gave
three spoonfuls each morning
to each man on the ship.” Ibid., p. 79.

“good things of his creation,” are dispersed “into the most remote places of the universal world…”
Ibid., p. 94.

“The biggest of these elephants was about thirteen or fourteen feet high.…”
Ibid., p. 91.

“as strong as any of our aquavita: a little will serve to bring one asleep.”
Ibid., p. 93.

“and these women were richly attired and adorned with bracelets and jewels…”
Ibid., p. 93.

“If there be anything here in my kingdom may pleasure thee, I would be glad to gratifie thy goodwill.”
Ibid., p. 109.

“
… a good store of gold, in dust and small graines, which they wash out of the sands of rivers, after the great flouds of raine that fall from the mountaines, from whence it is brought.”
Ibid., p. 113.

“… [the Dutch] will so watch their times as they will hurt us either by affording to our people bad pepper better cheap, to beat down the price of our better pepper … or by some other device as by experience we daily find.”
Quote cited in K.N. Chaudhuri,
The English East India Company: The study of an Early Joint-Stock Company
,
1600–1640
, (reprinted by Routledge/Thoemmes, 1999) p. 155.

In 1606 a Portuguese carrack returning with a cargo of peppercorns from Cochin, India, went down near Lisbon.…
See Filipe Castro, “The Pepper Wreck, and early 17th-century Portuguese Indiaman at the mouth of the Tagus River, Portugal,”
The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology
(2003) 32.1:6–23.

Iskandar Muda made Aceh even more powerful than his grandfather.
One of the best and most comprehensive descriptions of the golden age of Aceh is found in Anthony Reid's
An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra
(Singapore University Press, 2005) pp. 94–136, and in his masterwork
Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce
, Volume One,
The Lands Below the Winds
(Yale University Press, 1988) and Volume Two,
Expansion and Crisis
(Yale, 1993), which also provide a wonderful overview of entrepôts in Southeast Asia.

Iskandar Muda was said to have one hundred bahars of gold.…
Anthony Reid,
Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce,
Volume One, p. 98. The bahar varied widely in Asia, and especially in Southeast Asia, where one bahar equaled 369 pounds in Bantam, Java, and 560 in Benkoolen in West Sumatra. In Achin, one bahar equaled about 412 pounds, according to Furber's
Rival Empires of Trade
. Thus, 100 bahars would be about 41,200 pounds. Other sources state that the bahar in Achin was equal to 395 pounds.

“nothing but the ships covered the sea…”
C. R. Boxer, “The Acehnese Attack on Malacca in 1629, as described in contemporary Portuguese sources” in
Malayan and Indonesia Studies
, edited by John Bastin and R. Roolvink (Clarendon, 1964) pp. 105–121.

“They [the Acehnese] left the whole of their fleet bottled up in the river with many cannons great and small,…”
Ibid., p. 119. Excerpt from a letter by the Portuguese Captain-General of Malacca, António Pinto da Fonseca, to the governors of India.

“These maimed and dismembred people wee saw some about the towne…” The Travels of Peter Mundy,
Vol. III, Part II (The Hakluyt Society, 1919; reprinted in 1967 by Karaus Reprint Limited) p. 330.

“sundry sorts off exquisite torments, viz., divers cutt in peeces;…”
Ibid., p. 331.

“… Then came a squadron of Elephantts with certain things like little low turretts on their backes,…” The Travels of Peter Mundy,
Vol. III, Part I (The Hakluyt Society, 1919; reprinted in 1967) p. 121–123.

“Doing their uttermost to hurt each other and Drive backe by shooving…”
Ibid., p. 127.

“… full of strength and sleight, seeming therein to have a kind of discourse, and was indeed the most pleasing fight twixt beasts I ever saw.” The East India Company Journals of Captain William Keeling and Master Thomas Bonner, 1615–1617,
edited by Michael Strachan and Boies Penrose (University of Minnesota Press, 1972) p. 136.

“… which made a very excellent and fierce fight. Their fearcenes such that hardly 60 to 80 men coulde parte them, fastening ropes to their hind legs to drawe them asunder.” The Voyage of Thomas Best,
edited by Sir William Foster (The Hakluyt Society, 1934) p. 52.

“… which likewise made very greate fight; and so continued till it was darke, that wee coulde not see longer.”
Ibid., p. 52.

“bankett of at least 40 dishes, with such plenty of hott drincks as might have suffized a druncken armye.”
Ibid., p. 52.

“They are here, as at Mindanao, very superstitious in washing and cleansing themselves from defilements,…”
William Dampier, quoted in Anthony Reid's
Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce
,
Volume One,
p. 50.

“They came to a place wher they washed themselves; the King sitting upon a seatt in the midst of the river,…”
“The Standish-Croft Journal” in
The Voyage of Thomas Best,
edited by Sir William Foster (The Hakluyt Society, 1934) p. 158.

“I … attended him to the spring of the river about 5 or 6 mile from the towne where we dyned w[i]th him & and his nobilitie sitting above the waist in water, the cleerest and coolest I ever saw or felt.” The East India Company Journals of Captain William Keeling and Master Thomas Bonner, 1615–1617
, edited by Michael Strachan and Boies Penrose (University of Minnesota Press, 1971) p. 137.

“I sent to the King and bought 300 bayars of his pepper from Pryaman…”
Ibid., p. 138.

“I came aboard the
Dragon
as well to prepare the Peppercorne to her speedy lading [of] pepper as for my health, now too impaired by a long flux [dysentery],”
Ibid., p. 138.

It has been estimated that each raft reaching downstream ports in Jambi could carry 150 piculs [about 19,950 pounds], and that forty thousand to fifty thousand bags of pepper were taken annually from the Jambi highlands.
Figures cited in Barbara Watson Andaya's
To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
(University of Hawaii Press, 1993) p. 49.

Five: The British Invade

“Of those productions of Sumatra, which are regarded as articles of commerce, the most important and most abundant is pepper.”
William Marsden,
The History of Sumatra
(Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 129.

“This [Benkulen] is without exception the most wretched place I ever beheld.”
Lady Raffles,
Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
,
F.R.S. &c.
(London: 1830) p. 293.

“how long we may be able to keep our station…”
Quoted in K. N. Chaudhuri and Jonathan I. Israel, “The English and Dutch East India Companies and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9,” in
The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact,
edited by Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 416.

…
the Dutch could not dislodge the English from the Malabar Coast.
The VOC's attempts to take over the pepper trade in India have been described by many historians, including John Bastin, “The Changing Balance of the Southeast Asian Pepper Trade,” in
Essays on Indonesian and Malayan History;
George D. Winius and Marcus P. M. Vink
, The Merchant-Warrior Pacified;
and Holden Furber,
Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient 1600–1800
.

Pepper is “the bride around which everyone dances on this coast and she has many lovers, namely the English, Danish, Portuguese and Surat traders, etc.,”
See George D. Winius and Marcus P. M. Vink,
The Merchant-Warrior Pacified
(Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 68.

By 1672, a particularly robust year for pepper, the English East India Company was enjoying a huge increase in its pepper imports, shipping more than seven million pounds of the spice from Indonesia to Europe compared to only some 465,000 pounds from the Malabar Coast.
From tables compiled by K. N. Chaudhuri and Jonathan I. Israel, “The English and Dutch East India Companies and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9,” in
The Anglo-Dutch Moment
, edited by Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge University Press, 1991) pp. 414–415.

“'Tis said the Dutch have more Forces coming and if they land their men, undoubtedly Bantam is theirs.”
From “A True Account of the Burning and sad condition of Bantam in the East-Indies,” a letter published in March 1681 by the English East India Company, p. 2.

“This force serves nominally to defend the person of the king from all hostile attempts; but, in fact, to have him always in the Company's power,”
Voyages to the East Indies
, by J. S. Stavorinus, translated by S. H. Wilcocke, 1798 (reprinted by Dawsons of Pall Mall, London, 1969) Vol. 1, p. 62.

Their dismissal from Bantam did teach the English a valuable lesson—if they wanted to establish another factory in Indonesia, they had best build a real fortification.
This idea is drawn from Anthony Farrington's essay “Bengkulu: An Anglo-Chinese partnership” in
The Worlds of the East India Company
, edited by H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Boydell Press, 2002) pp. 111–117.

Elihu Yale,
a black pepper trader, led the ill-fated negotiations for a fort in Priaman and donated the fortune he earned on his private trading account to establish Yale University. See James W. Gould, “America's Pepperpot 1784–1873,” Essex Institute Historical Collections, XCII (1956), pp 83–89.

“It was a fatall and never enough to be repented errour of our President and Council of Fort St George [Madras]…”
John Bastin,
The British in West Sumatra (1685–1825)
(University of Malaya Press, 1965) p. viii. Historian John Bastin, one of the leading scholars on the British in Southeast Asia, published a wide selection of documents related to the Benkoolen residency from the voluminous records of the East India Company. His book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the Company's disastrous settlement in Sumatra.