Near a Thousand Tables (33 page)

Sugar was the only Atlantic product which could compete as a high-value condiment with the spices of the East. The Atlantic centers of production formed together a sort of rival spicerie—sugar islands of the West, rivaling the spice islands of the East. Cane sugar replaced honey as the Western world's sweetener. It may have been one of those cases where demand follows supply, for in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, when Atlantic sugar production “took off” with the development of new sugar lands in the Canaries, sugar confections were still luxuries, featuring prominently, for instance, in the household accounts of Isabella the Catholic as Christmas gifts for the royal children. But, as with tea and coffee in the eighteenth century and chocolate in the nineteenth, popular taste quickly responded to increased supply. By the time Piero de Cosimo painted his imaginative reconstruction of
The Discovery of Honey
in 1500, apiculture was, in a sense, already a thing of the past, a primitivist image, which could be used to typify
a remote age
. A few years later, the first sugar mill on Hispaniola opened and the slow transfer of the industry to the Americas began. In 1560 Henry II's physician reported that “sugar is used in place of honey…. There is hardly anything today prepared for the stomach without sugar. Sugar is added in bakery and mixed into wines. Water with sugar improves in taste and healthiness. Meat is sprinkled with sugar, as are fish and eggs. We make no more use of salt than
we do of sugar
.”

By then Vasco da Gama had opened a new route to the spice trade of the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, in 1497. The voyage has acquired legendary status in Western memory, though most of the contemporary sources have perished and those that survive convey an unglamorous, strenuous story, dogged by failure. The Cape route was occasionally broached as a possible target for explorers during the Middle Ages. Generally, however, it was dismissed as impracticable and those foolhardy enough to try it had disappeared—such as the famous Vivaldi brothers, who had launched an attempt from Genoa in 1291, and the searchers who had followed in their wake. According to the geography of Ptolemy, which became popular, especially in Portugal, in the fifteenth century, it was an impossibility, as the Indian Ocean was deemed to be landlocked. It is quite misleading—though depressingly common—to suppose that the voyage to the Cape of Bartolomeu Dias in 1487-88 inspired the breakthrough. On the contrary, though Dias did find that the coast began to trend northward beyond the Cape he had, if anything, contributed to the dampening of expectations. He had found a Cape of Storms and an entrance to the Indian Ocean guarded by ferocious currents.
This helps to explain the consequences that have baffled most inquirers: the fact that no known voyages followed up Dias's efforts for nine years.

Between 1488 and 1497, however, we do know of three or four positive developments. First, the pace of investment in Atlantic exploration quickened owing to the increase of returns on capital during the previous decade: this was the result of the growth of the sugar industry, the opening of new trading posts in Africa, with a resulting improvement in trade in such valuable commodities as gold and slaves, and an upturn in the long stagnant North Atlantic trades in such products as seal skins, whale blubber and walrus ivory. In consequence, Italian bankers in Lisbon became interested in new maritime ventures. Secondly, the first two voyages of Columbus had increased the pace of competition between Spain and Portugal for the rewards of oceanic expansion. Though few experts believed that Columbus had reached Asia, the possibility that he might yet do so could not be ruled out. On his third voyage, Columbus carried letters of commendation with which to greet Vasco should they meet in the East. Thirdly, the balance of factions at the Portuguese court changed with the accession of Manuel the Fortunate in 1495. The new king had always favored the idea of developing Portugal's long-range trade, rather than expending energy on crusading in North Africa. Finally, an intelligence-gathering expedition to India, Arabia and Ethiopia, dispatched from Portugal in 1490, had returned with a report. We do not know what the report said, but it seems likely that it established the fact that the Indian Ocean was not landlocked.

Vasco da Gama was a minor nobleman of some maritime experience but little personal prestige. His choice to command the expedition of 1497 shows that its prospects were not highly rated. Once he got to sea he made almost every possible error. The plan was to sail way out into the Atlantic to catch the westerlies of the far south. But Vasco turned east too early and instead of rounding the Cape, and avoiding the storms and currents discovered by Dias, he came up on the west coast of Africa by mistake. He was then condemned to a torturous struggle against the currents to get into the Indian Ocean. He was able to cross to India with local guidance but once he reached Calicut he alienated the authorities by his undiplomatic arrogance and mean gifts. By mistaking Hinduism for a form of Christianity, he seriously deluded the Portuguese who came after him. And when it was time to return home, he rejected expert advice about the timing of the monsoon and undertook a terrible, three-month voyage against the wind, at almost the worst season of the year, to get back to Africa. By the time his voyage was over, he had lost half his men and one of his ships.

Nevertheless, by demonstrating the viability of direct trade with Indian pepper producers, he inaugurated a new age in the history of the Atlantic. Instead
of a barrier to communication with the rest of the world, the ocean now became a highway. The effects on Portugal and, in the long run, on Western Europe generally, were profound. To the civilizations of maritime Asia, however, the arrival of the Portuguese was of little significance. They became one more community of intrusive traders, among hundreds of others. Their imperial adventures were tolerable: confined to a few coastal outputs and to what scholars now call a “shadow empire” of individuals who took service with indigenous kings or blended into the commercial networks of native states, beyond the reach of Portuguese rule. The Portuguese benefited the existing economy by adding shipping, by supplementing the existing intra-Asian trade and, from the producers' point of view, by adding to competition. They did not deflect or “siphon” existing trade from traditional routes. On the contrary, under the stimulus of improved communications, the total volume of the spice trade continued to grow and the amount handled along the traditional routes via Central Asia or the Persian Gulf or Red Sea was higher in the sixteenth century than ever before. When it faltered, it was because of political instability in Central Asia, which interrupted the peaceful conditions on which caravans relied, rather than because of Portuguese competition. The Portuguese handled 10 percent of the output of Malabar pepper in a good year. This was enough to supply Western Europe demand but left the old trade to the Middle East untouched. The myth that the opening of the Cape route “diverted” the spice trade of the East still appears in popular histories and textbooks; but scholarship has exploded it.

Spices would never make a major difference to the world balance of trade and power until Europeans succeeded in controlling supply as well as securing trade. The revolution in spice production was gradual, but it had specific critical moments. In the early seventeenth century Portuguese practice on Ceylon, the island which produced most of the world's cinnamon, demonstrated the possibilities. By heavily garrisoning the perimeter of the island and imposing production quotas and monopoly terms, Portugal was able to regulate supply to the point of virtual control. But this was a highly exceptional operation: generally, the Portuguese relied on local collaborators to supply their needs and kept costs down by accepting the constraints of the existing markets and submitting to the conditions imposed by native rulers.

When the Dutch broke into the Indian Ocean circle in the early seventeenth century, it looked as if their operation would merely be a more efficient version of what the Portuguese had already done. They cut costs by making as few stops en route as possible. In the second decade of the century they developed a new, fast, efficient route across the Indian Ocean, with the roaring forties and the Australia
Current—a great, sweeping arc, relying, for the outward voyage, on fixed winds and bypassing the monsoons with their slow seasonal rhythms and long turnaround times spent waiting for the wind. From 1619 the Dutch station at Batavia became the gateway to the new route.

Pricing was the essence of the competitive edge the Dutch achieved: their strategy was to drive down costs and maximize profits. Paradoxically, this committed them to escalatingly expensive political and military interventions in the market. The fate of Bantam, the Dutch residency in Java, demonstrated the trajectory that became typical. It boomed with the increased demand for pepper in China and Europe. Land was converted to pepper production until the island became a net importer of food. When the Dutch arrived they found a trade already established on a vast scale. Sancho Moluco, the leading native trader, could supply two hundred tons of pepper at a time. Islanders dealt on a vast scale with Chinese and Gujerati merchants. The Dutch could not handle, at most, more than about a quarter of the island's production, but they could not remain indifferent to the power of their competitors in the marketplace, nor the freedom producers enjoyed to adjust the market to suit themselves. After a series of disputes the founder and governor of Batavia, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, decided to destroy Bantam's trade. The war waged intermittently but ruthlessly for most of the 1620s. Over that period, the island's production fell by more than two thirds. Ironically, Lim Lakko, the sultan's Chinese adviser who had organized the cartel that provoked the Dutch, was obliged to move to Batavia, “utterly down and out,” to found a new fortune trading with Taiwan. Bantam switched to making sugar for the Chinese market. When pepper production revived for English customers in the 1670s, the Dutch moved in again in force and imposed a humiliating treaty on the sultan at gunpoint in 1684.

Meanwhile, an even more dramatic case of production wrested by force occurred further east. Makassar was a small sultanate on Sulawesi. In the first half of the seventeenth century her economy boomed with the work of refugees from Dutch aggression elsewhere. Malays filled her ships' crews. Moluccans brought savoir faire in spices. Expelled from their principal emporium at Melaka, the Portuguese introduced their long-range contacts. It became their “second and better Melaka” and, in the opinion of a Dominican who visited in 1658, it was “one of the greatest emporia of Asia.” The Kunstkammer of the ruler included a library of Spanish books, a globe and a striking clock. The mastermind of the sultanate's foreign and commercial policies was Francisco Vieira, the Portuguese factotum, a model of happy deracination, who moved through the East with ease on his luxuriously appointed yacht. Like other trading communities of maritime Asia, the
Makassarese were not particularly interested in the European market: it was too small and distant to be worth their while. For European traders in the East, however, their own rivalries were all-important. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch had already invested so much in the forcible elimination or restriction of Portuguese (and, to a lesser extent, English) rivals, that they could not tolerate a native state which effectively acted as a surrogate and refuge for continued Portuguese profiteering.

“Do you believe,” the sultan asked them, “that God has reserved for your trade alone islands which lie so distant from your homeland?” The first war they provoked against Makassar, from 1652 to 1656, left the sultanate with “no powder left, no munitions, nor anyone who could supply them.” The most heavily gunned fleet in the history of the Indian Ocean assembled in Batavia to finish the sultanate off. The Dutch renewed the war in 1659. On June 12, 1660—an almost forgotten date, but one which deserves to be remembered as a turning point in world history—Makassar fell when a Dutch landing party seized the fortress. The sultanate was reduced to subservience. The Dutch had now completed their ring of force around the spice islands. They could control supply at the source of production as well as the first level of distribution. According to their reading of the fluctuations of the market, they devastated lands, burned plantations, uprooted crops and destroyed competitors' ships. Plantings of clove, nutmeg and mace rapidly fell to a quarter of their former levels. In “depopulated lands and empty seas,” Southeast Asia's “age of commerce” came to an end as indigenous cultivators “retreated from the world economy.” Previously, the new routes tacked to world trade by European interlopers in the East had supplemented the traditional system and expanded its total volume, without modifying its essential character or shifting its main axis. Now a valuable slice of the gorgeous East really was held in fee and the economy of part of the Orient was impoverished for the benefit of the stockholders of the Dutch East India Company. This was a reversal of the eons-old balance of trade, which had enriched the East at
Western expense
. The results can still be seen on the Heerengeracht of Amsterdam, the avenue of merchant palaces lining a canal, where the spice-rich elite concealed what Simon Schama famously termed their “embarrassment of riches”—luxurious living behind unpretentious facades.

While it slipped into European control, the production of Oriental luxuries for the food trade remained regionally specialized. There were still “spice islands” and “pepper coasts.” Ceylon still specialized in cinnamon, Amboina in nutmeg, Ternate and Tidore in cloves and mace, Malabar in pepper. The expectation started by Columbus, that the New World would yield new, undiscovered spiceries, had proved disappointing. Gonzalo Pizarro lost an army seeking a “land
of cinnamon” in Peru. Chilies were more piquant than Oriental black pepper and ginger but could only supplement them—extending the culinary repertoire without replacing traditional dishes. In West Africa, Portuguese venturers had discovered “malaguetta pepper” in the fifteenth century, but this had never succeeded in the European market. So although the distribution of the profits changed in the seventeenth century, and the routes multiplied, the general direction of the spice trade remained much the same as ever.