The Taste of Conquest (33 page)

As any economic historian will be quick to tell you, irrational exuberance is hardly a modern phenomenon. The Dutch were just as susceptible to falling for an overhyped investment opportunity as any twenty-first-century day trader, perhaps even more so. Given the times, it’s not hard to understand. Put yourself in the shoes of the average Amsterdam taverngoer circa 1600. Every day, new books are being published full of the wonders of worlds revealed by Columbus, Cabot, da Gama, and Magellan. Your brand-new nation has beaten off the armies of the greatest (or at least the largest) empire the world had ever known. Dutch sailors have sailed right up to Gibraltar and sunk a good portion of the Most Catholic King’s fleet. Doesn’t that make it abundantly clear whose side God is really on? Rumor on the street has it that a group of rich and respected merchants is organizing a grand venture that will wrest the Portuguese spice empire from the Spanish tyrant and that small investors are especially welcome. Is it any wonder that grocers, masons, and midwives lined up to pour their pennies into the new company?

Just to be clear, though, when the governing States General granted the VOC its charter, they had more in mind than organizing a get-rich-quick scheme for the man on the street. The country was at war, and accordingly, the East India Company was seen as a potentially strategic asset. The charter makes this clear. Even while it deals mostly with financial affairs, one particular clause makes it evident that this was to be a special sort of corporation. The article authorizes the newly created company to make treaties with princes and potentates in the government’s name. Moreover, it allows the VOC directors to build forts and garrisons where they deem necessary and to appoint governors and judges to police these new possessions. In effect, the Dutch government created a state within a state, a paramilitary corporation designed to attack Spanish interests even while making a profit for the shareholders. In this way, it had a mixed mission, just like the Estado da Índia. But whereas the Portuguese organization often worked at cross-purposes when it came to the Christians and spices, with the VOC, there was no mistaking that profit came first. In this, the Dutch were much more like the Venetians than the Portuguese; while the organizational structure would have been unfamiliar to the crusading doge Enrico Dandolo, I’m sure he would have fully understood the need to secure the trading empire by any means necessary. The goal of building an empire in East Asia may not have been contemplated by the signers of the Dutch charter, yet the fine print made it almost inevitable. It certainly did not bode well for the current residents of the far-off spice archipelago.

T
HE
S
PICE
A
RCHIPELAGO

On today’s map, the tiny specks where nutmeg and cloves used to grow are lost amid the countless islands that make up Indonesia. The once-fabled Moluccas are a world away not only from Holland but from anywhere, some thousand miles south of Manila, a thousand miles north of Australia, and more than fifteen hundred miles east of the Indonesian capital at Jakarta. Some, like the clove-growing island of Ternate, rise to smoldering volcanic peaks, their rugged hillsides covered by shaggy jungle with palm trees thrust above like scruffy mops. The Banda group, once covered with tall and graceful nutmeg trees, is ringed with coral beaches that yield to transparent azure sea, surrounded by reefs unspoiled as a consequence of their isolation. The Europeans who were convinced that spices grew in paradise weren’t so far off the mark. This particular Eden, though, has seen a lot of strife since the Portuguese and Dutch arrived. Today, if you’ve heard of the Spice Islands at all, it is because you happen to follow State Department warnings on civil unrest. Ternate and the surrounding islands were the site of ethnic and religious conflict in 1999 and 2000, a vicious bloodbath that resulted in more than a thousand people killed and more than ten thousand refugees.

The few foreigners who set foot on Banda today mostly come to dive in the crystalline waters. Ternate sees the occasional intrepid vulcanologist. But almost nobody comes here for the spices. Most of the world’s cloves are now produced off the east coast of Africa on islands such as Madagascar and Zanzibar. Banda produces about one-tenth of the nutmeg it did a hundred years ago. Today, the nutmeg superpower is the Caribbean island of Grenada, where the spice has become so central to the economy that the country has even put a nutmeg on its flag. In the meantime, the Indonesian islands have been submerged by the tides of history. Their fate was set back at VOC headquarters on Hoogstraat, some seven thousand miles away.

When the Dutch ships set out on their first sortie to the spiceries, the locals had been in the spice business here for at least a thousand years. Even the Portuguese arrival had not shaken things up in Southeast Asia as it had in the western Indian Ocean. Most of the spices grown in what is now Indonesia continued to be sold to Asian customers. Javanese and Gujarati traders sold pepper to the Chinese and the Persians; Chinese cassia and Ceylonese cinnamon filled junks and dhows; and the cloves, nutmeg, and mace that grew only on the isolated Moluccas were distributed by Muslim and Chinese merchants from Kyoto to Cairo. The modest leftovers made it to the kitchens and pharmacies of Europe.

While pepper was by far the most widely traded of all spices, pound for pound, the Moluccan spices were vastly more valuable: perhaps three to six times as expensive, depending on the place and time.
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It was simply a matter of supply and demand. Whereas pepper and ginger grew across thousands of acres in South India and Java, cloves (
Syzygium aromaticum
) were limited to a line of minor volcanic protuberances straddling the equator in the Molucca Sea. If you put together Ternate and its neighbors—Tidore, Makian, Motir, and Bacan—they wouldn’t be much bigger than Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket combined. Nutmeg and mace (
Myristica fragrans
) were more restricted yet, growing on the Banda group of islands, a collection of even smaller flecks of igneous debris some four hundred miles south of Ternate.

Over the centuries, the Bandanese had increasingly come to depend on nutmeg for their livelihood. Much like soybean farmers in Iowa, they sold off their solitary cash crop in order to buy their bread and butter—or, in this case, rice and sago. (The starchy interior of the sago palm is a local staple.) At times, they sailed their junks as far as Java to deliver their perfumed crop and pick up groceries.

Nutmegs grow much like lemons or plums on trees that, given the room, rise in handsome symmetrical cones of lustrous green foliage. When ripe, the apricot-sized globes turn the color of pale flesh, then split and fall. The fallen fruit is undeniably luscious. As the nutmeg ripens, its tan flesh spreads open into a deep slit, revealing the brilliant carmine filaments of the mace and, deeper yet within, the jet-black shell of the nutmeg itself. As is still evident from the name given to mace by several European languages (in French, it is
fleur de muscade;
in German,
Muskatblüte
), medieval Europeans mistakenly thought that mace was the flower of the nutmeg tree. (Technically, the membrane covering the nutmeg shell is called the aril.) The mistake, made by Marco Polo and others, is a natural one. As you would expect of a flower, when dried, mace is more aromatic than nutmeg and fades to a lovely pink color.

By the sixteen hundreds, Europeans could read plenty of more or less factual descriptions of this legendary evergreen. The Spanish colonial historian Argensola left us a particularly evocative image when he wrote about the spice in 1609 (the translation is from 1708):

Wood-block prints, such as this one from an herbal by the sixteenth-century Florentine Pier Andrea Mattioli, made plants like nutmeg much less exotic to the European public.

They are like the European Pear-Trees, and their Fruit resembles Pairs [
sic
], or rather in Roundness the Melocotones [peaches]. When the Nutmegs blosom, they spread a cordial Fragrancy; by degrees they lose their Native Green, which is original in all Vegetables; and then succeeds a Blew, intermix’d with Grey, Cherry-Colour, and a pale Gold Colour, as we see in the Rainbow, tho’ not in that regular Division, but in Spots like the Jaspar Stone. Infinite Numbers of Parrots, and other Birds of various Plumage, most delightful to behold, come to sit upon the Branches, attracted by the sweet Odour. The Nuts, when dry, cast off the Shell it grows cover’d with, and is the Mace, within which is a white Kernel, not so sharp in Taste as the Nuts…. Of this Mace, which is hot and dry in the second Degree, and within the third, the Bandese make a most precious Oil to cure all Distempers in the Nerves, and Aches, caus’d by cold…. With [the nuts] they cure, or correct stinking Breath, clear the Eyes, comfort the Stomach, Liver, and Spleen, and digest Meat. They are a Remedy against many other Distempers, and serve to add outward Lustre to the Face.

Whereas some confused mace with a bloom, cloves are, in fact, flowers—or, more accurately, the buds of a bushy tropical tree. The shoots grow in clusters, in a bouquet of some thirty yellow blossoms, each little bud looking like a tubby, lemon yellow clove. Surrounded by fleshy foliage, they are reminiscent of rhododendrons in bloom—except these trees may reach some fifty feet tall. The entire plant is intensely aromatic; not just the flowers but also the leaves have the unmistakable, slightly sickly smell of cloves. After a tropical downpour, the smell of a clove plantation is almost unbearable. The sixteenth-century Portuguese botanist da Orta reports smelling clove-laden ships from miles away:

The scent of the clove is said to be the most fragrant in the world. I experienced this coming from Cochin to Goa, with the wind from the shore, and at night it was calm when we were a league from the land. The scent was so strong and so delicious that I thought there must be forests of flowers. On enquiry I found that we were near a ship coming from Maluco [the Moluccas] with cloves.

The dried buds fetched the best price, but there was also a market for clove stems. While noticeably less aromatic, they were a lot less expensive—at times as cheap as pepper in the Mediterranean market.

While just about every spice has been used for its medical properties (real or imagined), both nutmeg and cloves have demonstrable pharmacological effects. Both the buds and leaves of cloves contain eugenol, which can be used as an effective local anesthetic, a fact long appreciated by dentists (and their patients). The little dried buds used to be made into a preserve with vinegar or with sugar for export to India. In South Asia, they were used for perfuming the breath, for chewing with betel, as well as for their anesthetic properties.

Nutmeg has more psychedelic effects. Taken in small doses, it can act as a sedative. When I had lunch with Frank Lavooij, he recommended taking nutmeg in a glass of warm milk to put you to sleep, though it is just as well he is a trader rather than a pharmacist—the quantity he suggested would have sent me tripping.
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A chemical in nutmeg called myristicin is believed to account for the spice’s hallucinogenic effects. Though I can’t vouch for it from personal experience, the spice’s psychotropic effects are apparently a widely shared secret. Both American prison inmates and hippies grooving on Goa’s beaches have gotten high on nutmeg. In Zanzibar local women will chew nutmeg in lieu of smoking the local marijuana. The Spanish missionary Frei Sebastien Manrique describes how in Bengal in the early 1600s, junkies would mix opium with nutmeg, mace, and other aromatics to supercharge their fix. Apparently, the response to nutmeg intoxication is extremely varied: some individuals experience a profound distortion of time and space, while others have visual hallucinations. The first recorded hallucinogenic effect was noted by the Flemish physician Lobelius in 1576, when he described a pregnant English lady who “became deliriously inebriated after eating 10–12 nutmegs,” apparently while trying to induce an abortion. For readers looking for a cheap high, it should be noted that tripping on nutmeg can have all sorts of nasty side effects, such as vomiting, headaches, and prolonged disorientation.