Pepper (29 page)

Like black pepper (
Piper nigrum
), betel is used in Ayurvedic medicine for constipation, headaches, ringworm, conjunctivitis, and other conditions. We know that it also produces a sense of well-being and increases alertness. In India today, preparations of betel quid, which may combine sliced areca nut, lime, aniseed, clove, coriander, cardamom, or other ingredients with betel leaves, are still offered on ceremonial occasions, such as marriages and religious festivals. As in the days when Europeans first traveled to Asia, it is still considered impolite not to offer a guest a chew. India isn't the only country where betel is chewed—millions of people in China, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other countries also partake. The leaf is probably the most widely exploited
Piper
sibling, second only to black pepper itself. In fact, some six hundred million people are estimated to consume betel daily. The controversial association of betel leaf with mouth cancer is mainly due to other ingredients, such as areca nuts and tobacco, which are combined with betel to make quid. While in most parts of Asia the betel leaf is essential for making paan, people in the Chinese city of Xiangtan in Hunan Province like to chew only the husk of fresh areca nut, which they call “binglang,” the basis for a 1.18-billion-dollar industry. Blackened gums and stained teeth are the hallmarks of crunching the nut.

The interest in natural products has cast a new light on betel, and the spotlight is shining on betel's antimicrobial properties, which probably explain why the leaf seems to preserve one's teeth, as Tomé Pires observed nearly five hundred years ago. Indeed, a study from the department of oral biology at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, reported that extracts from
Piper betle
and
Psidium guajava
(guava) suppressed the growth of bacteria that contribute to dental plaque.

Other researchers are evaluating an entirely different property of betel, its capacity to inhibit an enzyme called xanthine oxidase. The enzyme is critical to the production of uric acid in the body. High levels of the acid may lead to gout and kidney stones. The drug allopurinol, which inhibits the enzyme, is a treatment. But the drug has serious side effects, such as kidney failure, allergic reactions, and impaired functioning of the liver. Alternatives are being investigated by a research group in Japan. The characteristics of the chemicals found among the plants in the
Piper
family inspired the group to screen black pepper and its siblings for activity against xanthine oxidase. Among all the plant extracts tested, betel was the most potent inhibitor of the enzyme. They subsequently identified a chemical in betel called hydroxychavicol, which appeared to be responsible for shutting down the enzyme.

Most important are reports in the scientific literature suggesting that betel may combat the parasite that causes a disease called leishmaniasis, which is transmitted through the bite of a tiny sand fly. As many as two million people in the world are currently infected, and every year another one to two million new cases occur, according to the World Health Organization. Few countries are unaffected. There are two forms of the disease, cutaneous and visceral. The manifestations of the cutaneous form are skin sores that can last for years before healing on their own. The sores can be disfiguring if they occur on the face, and some of these volcano-like eruptions are painful.

The visceral, more severe form of the disease affects the internal organs and can be fatal. More than 90 percent of people infected with visceral leishmaniasis live in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sudan, and Brazil, according the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Current therapies for the visceral form of the disease aren't very effective and have a variety of side effects. Drug resistance is also increasing. So there is a real need to develop new drugs to fight leishmaniasis, and several laboratories in India report that extracts from betel kill leishmania parasites in a laboratory setting.

Scientists are just beginning to explore betel's potential utility as a medicine. While there is no guarantee that these early observations will eventually be turned into therapies, there is hope that its great potential will bring healing to millions.

 

Epilogue

The roster of countries that produce pepper today hasn't changed much since Europeans first crossed the Indian Ocean to find the spice. It is, after all, a tropical plant with a penchant for a particular type of soil and climate, and it cannot be easily transplanted, as the Portuguese learned when they tried to cultivate the plant in Brazil during the seventeenth century. It took nearly three hundred years for that particular experiment to work, and it was the Japanese who first introduced large-scale pepper plantations into Brazil in 1933. After World War II, pepper was introduced in Africa, and its production expanded in Southeast Asia, particularly in Vietnam and parts of southern China.

Today Vietnam has emerged as the leading pepper grower, contributing about 30 percent of worldwide production, followed by India, Brazil, China, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Black pepper is an integral part of food consumed everywhere, and some 640 million pounds are harvested each year in the world. The highest quality pepper—Malabar garbled and Tellicherry extra bold—is grown in India, which exports the most pepper to the United States. Traders bet on the market prices of pepper in India, where the spice is traded on a commodity exchange in Kochi. Pepper is the world's biggest selling spice, and its profitability depends on the vagaries of weather and soil. Demand fluctuates slightly but generally remains fairly steady year to year.

The biggest problem facing pepper growers today is foot rot disease, caused by a fungus with the scientific name of
Phytophthora
. The fungus has spread throughout the world's pepper-growing regions since it was first detected in Indonesia in the late nineteenth century. The invading fungus quickly wilts the green leaves of pepper vines and strangles the roots of the plant, and it has destroyed many small-scale homestead pepper farms in Kerala in India, along with farms in many other pepper-growing areas. In Vietnam the devastating disease is called
quick wilt
or
quick death
. Efforts to keep crops free of this dreaded disease have led to the extensive use of fungicides. An intensive search is underway for hybrid strains that can resist the fungus and reduce the use of fungicides.

*   *   *

Surveying the wreckage of colonization and subjugation in Latin America, the writer Eduardo Galeano observes that “places privileged by nature have been cursed by history.” His words could easily apply to black pepper in Asia. The spice that lured the West to Asia gave birth to the modern age of global trade, with all of its attendant miseries. The brutal and racist men who plied the Indian Ocean in search of pepper or in defense of pepper, from Vasco da Gama in the sixteenth century, to the infamous Jan Pieterszoon Coen and Cornelis Speelman in the seventeenth century, and to John Downes in the nineteenth century, reflected to some extent the prevailing beliefs of their day. But there were men who sailed to Asia who did try to understand other cultures, who were revolted by violence, and who felt inspired by the sheer natural beauty of the places they visited. Their voices, too, deserve to be heard above the din of conquest and imperialism, slavery and genocide. There was the Cornish traveler Peter Mundy, who described in almost adoring terms a pepper garden in India. There was William Keeling, the English East India Company captain who spent a delirious day being fêted in the clear-flowing waters of Aceh. There was the adventurer William Dampier, who was disgusted by the way in which an English administrator of the Benkoolen pepper settlement treated Malaysians. There was the American seaman Levi Lincoln, who unflinchingly reported how the Americans cheated the pepper-weighing scales in western Sumatra. Even Stamford Raffles, the ever-political, ever-calculating servant of the English East India Company, the model of the Company man, reformed the racist laws in the Benkoolen settlement. There were also Europeans who adopted Asia as their homeland, who went native, like Judith of Malacca, the shipwrecked English maidservant who Peter Mundy mentioned in his journals.

Certainly the history of pepper cannot be detached from the rise in the seventeenth century of two great Western mercantile companies, the Dutch and English East India companies. Their rabid, almost never-ending quest for supremacy in Asia over a period of some two hundred years was ferocious, even though in Europe the English and the Dutch were sometimes allied with each other against the Spanish or the French. Occasionally peace prevailed when politics obliged the English and the Dutch to work together in Asia to dispel a common enemy. Over the course of its existence, the VOC employed hundreds of thousands of men and was a vital engine for the economy of the Netherlands, especially during the golden seventeenth century of Dutch history. The company paid large dividends, making its shareholders rich, but the demands of supporting and arming such a far-flung, fundamentally corrupt organization finally brought the VOC down. The VOC was millions of guilders in debt when it went bankrupt in 1799.

The English East India Company had to adopt the tactics of its Dutch rival in order to thrive, and in the eighteenth century it became a military and political entity to protect its interests in Asia, especially in India. The Company generally left the spice trade to the Dutch and concentrated its efforts in India and China. Its powers began to wane in the late eighteenth century when the movement toward free and open trade took precedence over monopoly trade. The Company withdrew from trade in the East in 1833, but it remained infamously tied to British imperialism in India. The same held true for the VOC, although the Dutch company was always seen as an arm of government. After the company was disbanded, the Dutch government inherited the VOC's holdings, eventually becoming the overseer of the Dutch East Indies, which it ruled until 1949. Both companies left an indelible and horrific mark on the lands and peoples they conquered.

Black pepper, the spice that was the primary reason the northern Europeans established their trading companies, lives on today as a commodity, a common seasoning, and as a potentially valuable medicine in the West. Its history, though, as Voltaire observed more than two hundred years ago, is soaked in blood.

 

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

In a book like this, I mined the work of historians who have written about the age of discovery, when Europeans sailed to Asia. C. R. Boxer, Anthony Reid, John Bastin, Holden Furber, and M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz are among the pioneers in this field, and their books and articles were my constant companions. Many books about the Dutch East India Company have been published; among the best are those by Femme S. Gaastra. In order to understand the East India Company, I turned mainly to John Keay. But most of all, I owe gratitude to those men and women who died long ago and left diaries and journals about their travels, especially Peter Mundy, J. S. Stavorinus, William Dampier, Thomas Best, and the sailors and merchants aboard the Indiamen who left the Downs in southeastern England, and whose words were published by the Hakluyt Society.

I am grateful to many people who offered support and encouragement along the way. Many thanks to David Oshinsky and Anna Shapiro, who took the time to read and comment on the manuscript, and to Mark Pendergrast, for suggesting an epilogue with information about plant diseases that affect pepper today. I am grateful to Krishnapura Srinivasan, one of the world's experts on pepper's chemical properties, who reviewed the chapter on medicinal pepper and patiently answered my seemingly endless questions.

Sybille Millard, an extraordinary photo researcher, helped gather the illustrations, photos, and maps and negotiated far better prices than I ever could. She was enormously helpful. I also want to thank Larry W. Bowman, who collects antiquarian books and other material about the Indian Ocean, for leading me to the Aldabra tortoises.

I had the pleasure of working in various libraries throughout the years it took me to research this book. The Wertheim Study at the New York Public Library provided a haven, and I want to thank the librarians at the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, who welcomed me and steered me to the logbooks of U.S. pepper ships of the nineteenth century. Thanks also to the librarians at the New York Academy of Medicine Library, Bobst Library at New York University, and the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden (NYBL), in the Bronx. I am grateful to Stephen Tabor of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, for obtaining the illustration from Linschoten's
Itinerario
and to Marie Long of NYBL for sorting out the provenance of Garcia da Orta's drawing of a peppercorn.

This book was written at the Writer's Room in New York City, where I finally found a place where I could settle down and write. My employer, NYU School of Medicine, allowed me to work part-time to write this book, and I want to especially thank my colleagues Lynn Odell and Thomas Ranieri for their support. Finally, my agent, Joanne Wang, provided crucial support throughout the entire process of researching and writing this book. She never lost faith in me, and I was fortunate to have her by my side.

 

N
OTES

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

One: Meet the Pipers

“Pepper is the bride around which everyone dances.”
Jacob Hustaert's quote is cited in George D. Winius and Marcus P. M. Vink's
The Merchant-Warrior Pacified
(Oxford University Press, 1991) p. 35.

“The virtue of all peppers … is to heat, to move a man to make water, to digest, to draw to, to drive away by resolution, and to scour away those things that darken the eyesight.”
This quote from Dioscorides is from
A New Herball,
by William Turner, three volumes (1551–1568), volume two, edited by George T. L. Chapman, Frank McCombie, Anne Wesencraft (Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 507–508. Turner, known as the father of English botany, was born around 1508.