Free Pepper by Marjorie Shaffer

prominent Malaysian scholar who witnessed the demolition described elephant- and house-sized pieces of the fort blown into the air and cascading into the sea. “Everyone was startled,” he wrote, “when they heard the noise, their surprise all the greater because never in their lives had they heard such a sound or seen how the power of gunpowder can lift bits or rock as big as houses.” The stones from the fortress were carried away to build houses, and the British used pieces to make warning buoys.
    Once the Portuguese secured the port city in 1511, they cast their eye farther east to the Spice Islands, or the Moluccas, the little volcanic islands that transfixed the world as its only source of clove. These islands—Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian, Bacan—lie some two thousand miles east of Malacca, and their names were well known during the age of discovery, although few sailors knew their exact location.
    The islands were immortalized by the poet John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667):
    â€¦ the Iles
    of Ternate and Tidore, where Merchants bring their spicie Drugs …
    The Portuguese poet de Camões described them more closely in The Lusiads :
    Look there, how the seas of the Orient,
    Are scattered with islands beyond number;
    See Tidore, then Ternate with its burning
    Summit, leaping with volcanic flames.
    Observe the orchards of hot cloves
    Portuguese will buy with their blood;
    And birds of paradise, which never alight,
    But fall to earth the day they end their flight.
    Even the Chinese had not ventured to the Moluccas, partly because their junks were too large to travel among the islands. Some historians argue that even Arab traders did not go to the Spice Islands before the arrival of the Europeans. Javanese and Malaysian sailors most likely transported the aromatic spice from the Spice Islands to Java, where it was purchased by the Chinese and by Indian and Arab traders. The Chinese had been using cloves since at least 300 B.C. as a perfume and breath freshener. In the West cloves were known since at least the time of the ancient Romans, when the physician Galen recommended using the dried flower buds in prescriptions for ointments. Cloves, saffron, pepper, and other aromatic spices were said to have been presented in gold and silver caskets to a bishop in Rome in the fourth century. Cloves were especially prized for their superb ability to mask odors.
    Only four months after Malacca was conquered, Albuquerque dispatched three ships to the Spice Islands. The islanders weren’t overjoyed to see the foreign ships on their shores, and they resisted these unusual interlopers who, unlike Malaysian and Javanese traders, were clearly interested in subjugating them. The Spice Islands were ardently pursued because cloves, like pepper, were used as a spice and as a medicine, and the spices’ geographic isolation made them even more valuable. Magellan took cloves on his round-the-world voyage in order to show locals what he was after, and when the only ship of his fleet to have survived the harrowing voyage returned to Lisbon in 1521, it carried a skeleton crew and some 53,000 pounds of cloves, which earned a profit of some 2,500 percent . Nearly sixty years later, England’s great seafaring hero Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe, and he was the first Englishman to import cloves directly to England.
    Along with Goa and Malacca, the port of Hormuz on the Persian Gulf was an important hub for Indian and Indonesian spices transported in the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese conquered Hormuz in 1515 but failed to capture Aden at the entrance to the Red Sea, the key to the traditional spice trade in the Levant. The old trade route through the Levant, which encompasses the eastern Mediterranean, parts of the Middle East, and Turkey, persisted and thrived. In the middle of the sixteenth century, according to the estimates of some historians, almost half of Europe’s pepper was still