The spice trade: pepper, cloves and nutmeg

Until the 1500s, nutmeg grew naturally in only one place in the world: the Banda Islands, a group of small islands in what is now eastern Indonesia.

Why people paid so much for a seasoning

Black pepper, cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg were luxuries in medieval Europe. Wealthy households used them in cooking, in medicine and in sweet spiced wine, and serving them at a feast showed that the host could afford goods carried from the far side of the world. Pepper was valuable enough to change hands as rent, dowry and tax, which is where the English phrase “peppercorn rent” comes from. An old story says that people needed spices to hide the taste of rotten meat. Historians doubt it: anyone rich enough to buy cloves could also buy fresh meat, and the poor, who ate whatever they could get, could not afford spices at all. People bought spices because they liked the taste and because rare things carried prestige.

Where each spice grew

Each spice came from a particular corner of Asia. Black pepper is the dried fruit of a vine that grew along the Malabar coast of southwest India, in today’s state of Kerala. The best cinnamon was the bark of a tree from Sri Lanka. Cloves, the dried flower buds of a tree, grew on a handful of small islands in northern Maluku, including Ternate and Tidore. Nutmeg was rarer still. Until the 16th century the nutmeg tree grew only on the Banda Islands, a cluster of about ten islands far to the east of Java. One fruit gave two spices: nutmeg is the seed, and mace is the red, lacy covering wrapped around it.

A long chain of merchants

No single merchant carried a clove from Maluku to London. Malay, Javanese, Chinese, Indian, Arab and Persian traders each carried goods along one stretch of the route. Ships crossed the Indian Ocean with the monsoon, the seasonal wind that blows from the southwest in summer and from the northeast in winter, so a captain sailed out one season and back the next. Ports such as Malacca and Calicut were great markets where cargoes changed hands. From India, spices went up the Red Sea to Egypt or up the Persian Gulf to Iraq and Syria. In Alexandria and the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, merchants from Venice and Genoa bought them and sold them across Europe. Every handover added a profit and a tax, so pepper bought cheaply in India cost many times as much by the time it reached Paris or London.

Why Portugal went looking for a sea route

It is often said that the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 cut the spice routes. In fact spices kept reaching Venice through Egypt after 1453. What drew Portugal, and later Spain, was the chance to skip the middlemen and keep the profit for themselves by sailing straight to the places where spices grew. After Vasco da Gama reached India by sea in 1498, Lisbon became the leading pepper port of Europe for much of the 16th century. In 1511 the Portuguese commander Afonso de Albuquerque captured Malacca, the great market on the strait between Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, and in early 1512 a small Portuguese expedition under António de Abreu became the first Europeans known to reach the Banda Islands.

The Dutch and the Banda Islands

Around 1600 the Dutch and the English arrived in force. The Dutch East India Company, known by its initials VOC, was founded in 1602 and was one of the first companies to raise money by selling shares to investors. It wanted a monopoly over nutmeg and cloves, and it used violence to get one. In 1621 its governor-general, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, conquered the Banda Islands; a large part of the Bandanese population was killed, enslaved or driven from the islands, and the company brought in enslaved workers to run the nutmeg groves. Later the VOC paid the rulers of Ternate and Tidore to let it cut down clove trees outside its own plantations, so that it could control the supply.