Pepper (7 page)

The crew also had to endure each other; drunkenness abounded and reckless behavior sent quite a few ships up in flames, as Pyrard related when his ship was wrecked off the Maldive Islands. The voyages were always accompanied by the deaths of fellow travelers from scurvy and dysentery, another major killer. The ships stank. Hygiene was awful and the sick would often lie in their own excrement. Cockroaches, rats, and other vermin abounded. It isn't known exactly how many European sailors perished during the early days of Indian Ocean sailing, when a round-trip voyage could take up to two years—including a layover in India of three to four months to load spices—but the losses were great. Among the Dutch, only about one in three sailors survived the ordeal of travel to Asia, and the Portuguese, Spanish, and English probably fared no better.

In the journals that survive of these voyages, deaths were recorded, and the cause was usually “flux” or “bloody flux” (dysentery). Oftentimes men died on consecutive days, as is evident in the dreary roll call of names in the following journal entry of a merchant on one of the early voyages: “The sixteenth day our general departed Bantam and came aboard to proceed on his voyage to the Malucos; this night died Henry Dewbry of the flux … The seventeenth day died of the flux William Lewed, John Jenkens, and Samuel Porter.”

Even if they survived the voyage, the Bombay proverb, “two monsoons were the life [of] a man” described the fate of many Europeans in Asia. Unless one had a serious death wish, why would anyone want to leave Europe under these circumstances? The usual answer is money (spices) and religion. They were going to strike it rich or they were sailing for the glory of God, and riches usually preceded the harvesting of souls. The Portuguese and the Spanish, the first European countries to entertain ocean exploration, were not timid about their aspirations. The Portuguese rallied to “Species and Souls,” while the Spanish adopted “Gold, Glory, and Gospel” as their motto.

The Portuguese, ruled by a Catholic monarchy, were the first to support the Jesuits, the Catholic order most often associated with European exploration. Therefore, it is generally assumed that the purchase of pepper—and by extension conquest—was mixed up with missionaries and the pursuit of souls from the beginning of ocean travel. In some ways, it clearly was. In the early days, the Jesuits, regardless of their nationality, sailed to Asia aboard Portuguese carracks. Wherever the traders went, the missionaries followed. When new lands were “discovered,” the Portuguese and the Spanish claimed the divine right to convert the “conquered,” finance missionary activities, and provide transportation to new territorial acquisitions. These rights, called
Padroado
by the Portuguese and
Vicariato Regio
by the Spanish, solidified the grip of the Catholic monarchies on missionary activity, which even Rome could not pry loose. But the missionaries and the spice traders never mixed very well, even though the Jesuits engaged in the spice trade to shore up their own shaky finances in Asia. Nearly 16 percent of the Jesuits' annual income in the seventeenth century was derived from Eastern spices, and spices continued to be a source of income for the order into the eighteenth century. The Jesuits, however, never liked the European traders in their midst, especially the Portuguese. In the beginning, the Jesuits were quite careful to distinguish themselves from the Portuguese traders in Macao. They didn't want the Chinese to mistake them for coarse, uneducated traders. Nevertheless, the Jesuits had to rely on the Portuguese, and the first Jesuit foray into mainland China from Macao, a Portuguese territory, was made by accompanying Portuguese traders to Canton in 1583.

The Portuguese and Spanish, the first out of the gate in terms of discovery, argued like schoolchildren over how to divide what they considered the unexplored world. Finally, in 1494, they signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, named after a town in Spain, which modestly divided up the world between them. This agreement moved their previous line of demarcation seventy miles to the west so that Portugal could pocket Brazil in South America, as well as all of Africa, and India, Japan, China, and the Philippines. Spain received the rest of the Americas, but in 1565, it violated its own treaty when it invaded the Philippines. Of course, the English and the Dutch—Protestant countries—and the Asians ignored the Catholics' treaty.

In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were the dominant Europeans in Asia, and they were the first to establish forts there. It was their extraordinary good luck that they entered the Indian Ocean some sixty-five years after the Chinese abruptly quit official maritime trade. At the end of his reign, the Ming emperor Zhu Di, an ardent supporter of oceanic trade, suffered a series of calamities that led him to suspend future voyages of the Treasure Fleet. When his son, Zhu Gaozhi, became emperor in 1424, his first order was to stop all voyages and to send home immediately all foreign officials in the capital. He never explained his decision. Some historians suggest he was following the precepts of a rigid Confucian system that had placed great store in social and familial relations, and played down the value of trade. However, there was one more voyage of the great fleet. In 1432, Zheng He led the seventh and last voyage to Calicut with more than a hundred ships and 27,500 men. The great commander died on that journey at the age of sixty-two. Although the Chinese continued to trade unofficially for many centuries through their southern ports, they never regained mastery of the ocean. In 1525, an imperial edict ordered the destruction of all ocean-bound ships and the arrest of all merchants who sailed on them. It's always tempting to speculate that world history would have proceeded along a different course if the Chinese had remained a dominating maritime power.

The sudden withdrawal of the Treasure Fleet had a huge impact, leaving a gaping hole in trade in the eastern half of the Indian Ocean. Bengalis, Tamils, and especially Gujaratis from the west coast of India—who traded widely in the Indian Ocean—wasted little time in filling the void left by the Chinese.

It was also lucky for the Portuguese that the Indian Ocean could accommodate many more traders, and that the reliable monsoons acted like a giant conveyor belt, pushing ships back and forth across the ocean with relative ease. During the summer, the powerful southwest monsoons helped propel ships from Africa to India and beyond to Southeast Asia. In the late fall, the more benign northeast monsoons swept the ships back to Africa. The monsoons were the reason why Arab traders called Southeast Asia “The Land below the Winds.” The pattern of the monsoons obliged ships to sail only during certain seasons lest they be caught in the tropical storms that raged off the Cape of Good Hope. So, ideally, ships leaving Lisbon before Easter would round the Cape after the stormy season, leaving an adequate amount of time to ride the southwest monsoon to India in September or October.

On the return trip, the ships would leave India in late fall or around Christmas and reach the Cape before May when stormy weather emerged. In practice, many of the Portuguese ships were delayed because of administrative problems, the prolonged wait for a full cargo of pepper, or lack of cash to buy pepper ahead of time. The delays often were disastrous for the ships, and led to many shipwrecks off the Cape. The sailors who plied the Indian Ocean long before the arrival of the Portuguese carefully guarded their knowledge about the monsoons. The Portuguese did bring cannon and firearms into the trading network of the Indian Ocean, which probably wasn't novel. But it was their willingness to use force, and their desire to claim territory, that brought a new, unwelcome dimension to trade. Cruzado, the Portuguese gold coin bearing the distinctive cross of St. George, means crusade.

It didn't take long for the Portuguese to become the most reviled Europeans sailing on the Indian Ocean. Many travelers to the East expressed their scorn. “The Portuguese, as at other places in India, are a degenerate race of people, well stocked with cunning and deceit; instead of that courage and magnanimity their own writings are so full of,” wrote English trader Charles Lockyer in 1711, echoing the distaste for the Portuguese that had become widespread by that time. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the English pirate William Dampier noted that the Portuguese had “insulted” the natives, and “being grown rich in trade, they fell to all manner of looseness and debauchery; the usual concomitant of wealth, and as commonly the forerunner of ruin.” Dampier also had heard that in Malacca the Portuguese made use of native women “such as they liked they took without control.”

Relatively few Portuguese women ventured to Asia; most married men left their wives at home, preferring a household of slave girls while stationed in Goa and elsewhere in Asia. From time to time, the Portuguese crown encouraged their men to have liaisons with native women, and many European observers reported that mixed marriages were not uncommon, although Dampier clearly implied that the Portuguese took native women by force: “they as little restrained their lust in other places; for the breed of them [the children of Portuguese men and Asian women] is scattered all over India.” It should be remembered that the Portuguese recruited grave robbers and other criminals to serve as crew for their ships. Da Gama had sent ashore a convict in Calicut. These men, if they survived, were far beyond the reach of Lisbon, and they behaved according to their own standards. As news spread about the hazards of the voyages to Asia, it became increasingly difficult to recruit enough Portuguese men for the Indiamen. The voyages were so unpopular that in 1623 it was reported that sailors had to be abducted and kept in irons until an India-bound ship had sailed. They must have known that their chances of surviving were slim.

The monster carracks of the Portuguese, reaching some two thousand tons, suffered great losses. François Pyrard described a fleet of four carracks, each carrying about a thousand soldiers, sailors, and passengers, which departed Lisbon in 1609. When the ships arrived in Goa, only three hundred men were alive on each of the ships. On the ships that were overcrowded, mortality was especially high. A report from a Jesuit in the late 1500s underscores the appalling number of deaths on these voyages: On one ship more than five hundred of 1,140 people and on another three hundred of eight hundred people perished. In the seventeenth century, the Portuguese sent thousands of soldiers to replenish their garrisons in India. Between 1629 and 1634, only 2,495 of 5,228 soldiers who left Lisbon survived the trip to Goa. Survival was hardly guaranteed once they got to India. In the seventeenth century, Europeans survived an average of three years in India. In Goa, some 25,000 Portuguese soldiers perished from cholera alone between 1604 and 1634. Is it any wonder that men had to be put in leg irons to ensure that they would sail to the East?

*   *   *

The Portuguese did attempt to monopolize the pepper trade in the Indian Ocean, but they were only partially successful. In 1510, they captured Goa, famous in our day for the hordes of hippies it attracts. The city on the west coast of India lies some 318 miles north of Calicut, 240 miles south of modern-day Mumbai, formerly Bombay, and 10,450 miles from Lisbon via the Cape of Good Hope, a long way from the clutches of the Portuguese monarchy and the pope in Rome. Since it has one of the finest harbors in India, Goa became the center of Portuguese enterprise in Asia in terms of trade and missionary work. The first Jesuit to reach the East, Francis Xavier, arrived in Goa in 1541.

After capturing Goa, the Portuguese quickly stretched eastward in their quest for greater control of the spice trade. Naturally, they looked to Malacca, the great port city on the southwest coast of the Malay Peninsula that controlled the sea lane connecting the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean, and which enjoyed unusually mild weather. As one observer noted: “The country abounds with timber and is fruitful in other respects; the air is wholesome, the heat moderate, and every thing else, as agreeable to European constitutions as can be expected in a climate within 2 deg. 30 min. of the equator.” Malacca was the crucial transit point for spices and many other commodities heading east to China and west to India and Europe, and a port city quite dependent on the trade in pepper. It also relied on trade for its survival, since foodstuffs such as rice and fruit had to be imported into the city from Java and Siam (today Thailand); Malacca was truly a port city since it could only be reached by water. Fish, however, were plentiful. Like the ports along the west coast of India, Malacca's trading seasons were dictated by the monsoons, and ships could not arrive or depart from May to the end of October.

Malacca in the fifteenth century was at the height of its power as one of the greatest seaports in the world—a cosmopolitan place where Africans, Gujaratis, Tamils, Bengalis, Chinese, Javanese, Persians, and Malaysians traded and lived together. Historian M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz describes how Malacca rose from provincial backwater to powerful sultanate in less than a hundred years in her classic work on the impact of Europeans on trade in the Indonesian archipelago. The population of the port city reflected the reach of the Indian Ocean from the east coast of Africa to the Persian Gulf, India, the Malay Peninsula, and the island of Sumatra. China and Japan lay to the east of the Strait of Malacca. Zheng He, the commander of the Treasure Fleet, visited Malacca in 1409; subsequently it became a tribute nation to China.

The Europeans who visited Malacca in the following century were awestruck. “This city of Malacca is the richest seaport with the greatest number of wholesale merchants and abundance of shipping and trade that can be found in the whole world,” gushed Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese sea captain, in 1517. “No trading port as large as Malacca is known, nor any where they deal in such fine and highly prized merchandise. Goods from all over the East are found here; goods from all over the West are sold here,” wrote Tomé Pires, a hapless Portuguese ambassador who offended the emperor of China and eventually died in a prison in Canton in 1524.