Pepper (12 page)

The old ruler was overjoyed with Lancaster's “good success” against the Portuguese. He even teased the English navigator about forgetting the most important piece of business—procuring “a fair Portugal maiden” for the sultan. Lancaster replied that “there was none so worthy that merited to be presented.” This reply elicited a big smile from the sultan, who said: “If there be anything here in my kingdom may pleasure thee, I would be glad to gratifie thy goodwill.” It isn't likely that Lancaster took him up on his offer. From the narrative of the voyage, it appears that Lancaster was a practical man entirely absorbed in lading his ships and returning safely to England. He gave the sultan presents from the Portuguese booty and said good-bye.

In early November, the
Ascension
was sent back to London, and the
Dragon
and
Hector
sailed south along Sumatra's west coast for Bantam in Java, where the Englishmen heard that pepper could be bought at a much more reasonable price than in Aceh. Before leaving Sumatra, they stopped in Priaman, where the
Susan
was lading pepper. The pepper here, they learned, was cultivated in the interior of Sumatra in a region called Minangkabau. The English merchants also heard about 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.”

The
Susan
was sent back to England, and Lancaster sailed ahead with the
Dragon
and
Hector
to Bantam, which they reached on December 16. They shot off a great bombard to announce their arrival, and went to see a boy king and his entourage of noblemen. Lancaster produced another letter from Queen Elizabeth, and the parties quickly came to an agreement allowing the English to buy great amounts of pepper at very reasonable prices. By February 1603, the two ships were fully loaded and ready to depart. Meanwhile, John Middleton, the captain of the
Hector
, had fallen sick and died, which was a great blow because he was well liked and came from a distinguished family of seamen who played leading roles in the early history of the East India Company. When the captain aboard the
Susan
died, Henry Middleton, John's brother, assumed the post and sailed the ship back to London. Henry would later return to the East Indies for the Company. Lancaster left three merchants in Bantam, who were to set up a factory to provide lading for the ships' return.

The voyage back to London was as treacherous as the outgoing journey. The
Hector
and
Dragon
got caught in a horrific storm somewhere south of Madagascar, causing leaks for the remainder of the voyage. The men barely had time to gather their rattled wits when another huge storm broke in early May. This violent maelstrom shook the rudder loose from the ironworks on the
Dragon
. With her rudder lost, she was at the complete mercy of the ocean, carried wherever by the wind. At some point the ship was nine or twelve miles from the Cape, but the winds pushed her south, where hail, snow, and sleet brought more misery. Meanwhile, the
Hector
remained close by. To save themselves, the desperate men on the rudderless
Dragon
wanted to be put on the
Hector
, but Lancaster refused to abandon the ship. After several solutions to the ship's predicament proved useless, Lancaster told the captain of the
Hector
to leave the
Dragon
and sail on.

But the next day, the
Hector
was still in sight; the men on the ship would not leave Lancaster stranded in the ocean. Within a few days, the carpenter aboard the
Dragon
managed to salvage the rudder, and with the help of the
Hector
's men, the
Dragon
was finally able to sail. On June 6 they passed the Tropic of Capricorn, and ten days later they reached the island of Saint Helena, some 1,150 miles off the west coast of Africa in the southern Atlantic Ocean, where they could finally come ashore and replenish their water and food.

The
Dragon
and
Hector
arrived in England in September 1603, but it was politically and economically a different country from the one Lancaster had left. During his voyage, Queen Elizabeth had died and James I had ascended to the throne. Plague had broken out and the market for pepper was stagnant. The Company merchants couldn't sell their pepper on the continent because of Dutch competition, and they discovered that their new sovereign had a great store of pepper, probably as a result of a raid on a Portuguese carrack a year earlier. The crown's pepper had to be sold first. Consequently, it took years for the Company's merchants to sell their pepper.

The long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope to the far side of the Indian Ocean had cost many lives. Only half of Lancaster's original crew of 480 men survived. The death rate hadn't improved much since da Gama had rounded the Cape more than a hundred years earlier. Nevertheless, Lancaster proved that English ships could bring home the pepper—his four ships brought back one million pounds—and plunder Portuguese ships in the Indian Ocean. He was knighted for his services and, despite the glut, the East India Company made plans for another expedition to the East Indies. The English had entered the pepper trade.

Only a few years later, the Company sought the exclusive right to import pepper into England, a request that the English merchants did not make initially to Queen Elizabeth when they asked permission to found the Company. Once again, the merchants used the Dutch to make their argument. They noted in a petition to the king that Dutch competition would lead to its downfall. “… [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.” In November 1609, the king issued a proclamation forbidding anyone from buying pepper except from the East India Company. With a lock on the domestic market, the Company went on to develop a valuable and robust reexport market to continental Europe, a far larger market than England by itself. The Company had its foundation commodity, a spice used by everyone, and it also served quite nicely as ballast in the East Indiamen returning to Europe from Asia.

Treasure hunters today wouldn't find many valuable items in the wrecks of pepper ships. In 1606 a Portuguese carrack returning with a cargo of peppercorns from Cochin, India, went down near Lisbon, sending out a long plume of black pepper, which people along the coast risked their lives to salvage. When the wreck was excavated in 1993, archeologists found a few silver and gold objects, Chinese porcelain, and other items all buried underneath a thick layer of black peppercorns.

*   *   *

Lancaster's welcome banquet in Aceh set the stage for envoys in the years to come: Foreign merchants often received a royal welcome. Letters would be placed ceremoniously in golden basins atop elephants. Envoys would proceed to the palace as part of a parade. Great feasts would follow, and perhaps an animal fight would be staged for the visitors. This was a time of wealth and sensuous pleasures, of blood sport and pageantry, when the power of the Acehnese sultanate was at its height under the rule of Iskandar Muda, who came to power in 1607. He was the grandson of Sultan Ala'ud-din Syah, whom Lancaster had befriended.

Iskandar Muda made Aceh even more powerful than his grandfather had by uniting the central growing regions in Sumatra. He set the terms for a large portion of the pepper sales in northern Sumatra, and merchants could not proceed to many other ports in Sumatra without his permission. By the early seventeenth century, the pepper gardens around Aceh were already becoming exhausted, and merchant ships had to visit other ports, such as Priaman and Tiku on the west coast, to obtain additional pepper.

This sultan wasn't easily cowed by the brass cannons of the Europeans. Iskandar Muda used his own heavily armed ships to bring his pepper to India to sell at the highest prices. In 1622 he even shut the Dutch and English out of the Acehnese pepper market, which included the important west coast ports.

Gold was another source of Aceh's fabulous wealth—the raw material for the gold dishes mentioned frequently in merchants' journals. In the central region of Sumatra, gold was sieved from rivers and mined in the hills of Minangkabau. Lancaster heard about river gold when the
Hector
and
Dragon
stopped in Priaman to meet the
Susan
. Iskandar Muda was said to have one hundred bahars (about 41,200 pounds) of gold and employ three hundred goldsmiths. He also was reported to have at his disposal thousands of women who formed part of his female guard. In the nineteenth century, Aceh's fierce women would play a role in defending the kingdom's northwestern shores against the United States, one of the newcomers to the pepper trade.

*   *   *

A tyrant, Iskandar Muda annihilated anyone who got in the way of his plans for expanding his domain or enriching himself. Far-reaching raids by his great fleet of ships struck fear in the hearts of Malaysians everywhere. On the Malay Peninsula, he conquered the cities of Pahang in 1618 and Kedah in 1619, and Perak on the island of Banka, valued for its tin, in 1620. Considering his mighty fleet, armed with cannon, it is surprising that he never secured Malacca or its neighbor Johore, though he tried in 1629.

Iskandar Muda assembled an enormous fleet of some 236 ships with nearly twenty thousand men and sent the great armada to Malacca to assault his longtime enemy, the Portuguese. The flotilla of thirty-six large galleys and other Acehnese ships landed in early July off of Malacca and laid siege. For as far as the eye could see, wrote a Portuguese observer, “nothing but the ships covered the sea…” Nevertheless, the Portuguese had prepared and put up a valiant fight, even though they were vastly outnumbered. In August, the Portuguese were obliged to burn down the convent of Madre de Deus, lying outside the city walls, after an Achenese assault, but the fortified walls of Malacca were not breached. The tides of war began to turn in October, when the Portuguese, aided by five relief ships that had come from Sri Lanka, stockaded the mouth of a river about four miles from the city, where almost the entire Acehnese fleet had put in. The Acehnese ships were harried by an almost continuous bombardment from which there was no escape.

At the end of November, the sultan of Johore, an ally of the Portuguese, arrived with some sixty boats and thousands of warriors to reinforce the blockade, causing some four thousand Achenese to flee into the jungle, which was so rugged that the Portuguese did not send men in pursuit. “They [the Acehnese] left the whole of their fleet bottled up in the river with many cannons great and small, and many sick, and some spoil which the lord governor allowed the soldiers to sack,” wrote the Portuguese Captain-General of Malacca António Pinto da Fonseca. In the following months, some Acehnese men emerged from the jungle to surrender to the Portuguese. The great sea battle diminished the ability of Aceh to wage war, and Iskandar Muda never again assaulted Malacca.

*   *   *

The punishments meted out during the sultan's long reign were particularly brutal. Cornish merchant Peter Mundy visited Aceh in 1637 and 1638, and he saw people without limbs, noses, and lips, and “privities” (genitals). “These maimed and dismembred people wee saw some about the towne,” he wrote, “the stumpes off their legges putt into bigge bamboes or canes, wherewith they goe as on stilts.” Before he died, Iskandar Muda had all of his male heirs killed. His son-in-law Iskandar Thani, who succeeded him, proved equally brutal during his brief reign. When he first came to power in 1638, the new ruler suspected treason and had four hundred people put to death in “inhumaine and bloudy executions,” which Mundy described in his journal. He wrote of “sundry sorts off exquisite torments,
viz.
, Divers Cutt in peeces; others sawne in 2, being made fast to tymbers, and as the wood is cutt soe goeth the saw through their Bodies by little and little; some hung on Iron hookes by the heeles, stretched wide abroad, and Molten lead powred into the Fundamentts of the Men and privities of the weomen to cause them [to] Conffesse where their Masters or husbands treasure lay.” Could any man endure molten lead in his throat or any woman molten lead in her vagina?

The rampages of these rulers caused fear and disgust among the Acehnese. After Iskandar Thani died, the leading chiefs of Aceh decided that they did not want any more bloody executions, and during the remainder of the seventeenth century, from 1641 to 1699, they placed four women in succession on the throne of Aceh.

Yet the Acehnese witnessed some joyous spectacles during the rule of the bellicose Iskandar Muda and his son-in-law. These Acehnese sultans staged opulent feasts, parades, blood sport, and hunting, and their subjects were well aware of these activities and even joined in on occasion. During Iskandar Muda's nearly thirty-year reign, royal feasts and ceremonial processions and the events staged for foreign visitors were quite elaborate. He amused his visitors with lavish banquets that offered hundreds of plates of food and enormous quantities of rice wine. He impressed his own people as well with his wealth and might by staging royal marriage celebrations that lasted for months, daylong water feasts and, most notably, animal fights involving elephants, buffalos, and rams. The forests of northern Sumatra were filled with the sounds of horns and the roars of elephants when the sultanate was at the height of its glory.

A man's wealth was measured by how many elephants he owned, and naturally Sultan Iskandar Muda made sure that he had more than anyone else. He was believed to have some nine hundred elephants, and each had a name. Most of the captive elephants in northern Sumatra belonged to him, and the sultan often sent elephants to envoys during their stay in Aceh, a considerable honor. At the time of his reign, elephants roamed widely in the forests of northern Sumatra. He had a passion for hunting elephant, a fact well known to foreign traders wishing to procure pepper in Aceh.