Spices have their own riveting, piquant history

Spice. By Roger Crowley. Yale University Press; 320 pages; $25 and £20

They looked humble enough. One observer compared clove plants to laurel shrubs, while nutmeg, he noticed, grew on something resembling the pear tree. Despite their common appearance, in the 16th century these spices were special—and not just because, by a fluke of evolution, they grew only on a handful of islands in the Malay Archipelago, which came to be known as the Spice Islands. As Roger Crowley, a British maritime historian, explains in an engaging new look at seasoning’s long ago seasons, nutmeg and cloves would have effects far beyond the kitchen, kindling revolutions from mapmaking to spycraft.

For centuries many were in doubt about the spices’ origins. Marco Polo, the famed Venetian explorer, thought cloves came from China and nutmeg from Java. Mr Crowley begins his story in 1511, when the Portuguese began muscling into the South-East Asian spice trade. Eager for profit, their Spanish and English competitors soon joined them. In 1553 a trio of ships left London on a journey to reach the Spice Islands via Russia and the Arctic. Their voyage ended in disaster, but their fervour is not hard to understand.

Light and long-lasting, aromatics could fetch markups of 1,000% by the time they reached European markets. That made them more precious than their weight in gold, and the ports that unloaded them soon shimmered, too. “You are no city”, wrote Fernando de Herrera, Seville’s poet laureate, “you are a universe.”

Just as the ancient Egyptians carved reliefs of spice fleets on their tombs, and the Romans valued them as portals to the gods, these explorers fell for spices’ allure. “The scent of the clove is said to be the most fragrant in the world,” claimed Garcia de Orta, a Portuguese botanist, adding that it smelled as sweet as “forests of flowers”. Others marvelled at how spices interacted with the wider ecosystem. Encountering the bright green nutmeg trees, Portuguese sailors delighted in the “multitude of parrots and various other birds” that swooped and spread their seeds.

With cloves came conflict. In the war for spices, Portuguese and Spanish explorers killed locals, and each other, with gusto. Soon enough naval expeditions and the spices and other goods that inspired them would draw a “maritime belt” around the planet, Mr Crowley explains.

But competition for spices also fired up human ingenuity. Wherever they went, sailors kept scrupulous logs, detailing narrows and shoals for future adventurers. As more information became available in Europe—Portuguese captains were, among other things, expected to record latitudes—cartography became more common. In 1548 an Italian mapmaker produced the first pocket atlas. Spain and Portugal each held a master map of the world, constantly updated and jealously guarded from rivals.

That battle for intelligence helped to hone nations’ spycraft. Ca’Masser, a Venetian agent posing as a merchant, learned a lot by loitering on the waterfront in Lisbon. “I have seen the sailing charts of the route to India,” he reported back in code. Mr Crowley describes the 16th century as a “golden age” of cryptography.

Ultimately the Portuguese monopoly on spices was upended by a Dutch spy, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, who worked as secretary for the bishop of Goa in the 1580s and copied his charts, maps and navigational secrets. They formed the basis of a book, “Itinerario”, which helped “launch the Dutch assault on the spice trade” and “dismantle the Portuguese empire” in the Spice Islands. Not bad for a secretary.

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