In the autumn of 1523 the authorities in the Chinese port of Canton put on a memorably gruesome spectacle. More than a year earlier they had intercepted a Portuguese trading fleet, which had sailed east in the hope of making a tidy profit. The Cantonese, however, had no interest in doing business with their European visitors, who came, they believed, “to deceive the country of China”.
For months the Portuguese sailors rotted in prison. Then, one grim September day, the end came. After being paraded through the city, most of the Portuguese were “cut into pieces — heads, legs, arms, and their private parts placed in their mouths, the trunk of the body being divided into two pieces round the belly”. These gory pieces were carried through the city in a great parade, with the “playing of musical instruments and rejoicings”, before being thrown into the dunghills. And so, one lucky survivor recorded, “it was resolved not to allow any more Portuguese into the country, nor other strangers”.
If you’ve ever found the story of the European conquest of the New World a little drab and undramatic, then Roger Crowley’s rollicking, blood-soaked account of the race for the Spice Islands of east Asia is the book for you. At its heart is the competition between Portugal and Spain for the Moluccas, now the Maluku islands in eastern Indonesia.
The Portuguese got there first, sending an expedition from modern-day Malaysia in 1511, and were delighted by what they found — an unparalleled supply of cloves and nutmeg, then among the most valuable commodities on earth. That ignited a century-long struggle for control of the Asian market, which ended with the Spanish establishing a vast new trading hub at Manila in the Philippines.
For Crowley, who specialises in swashbuckling tales of 16th-century derring-do, this is really just the pretext for a story of tremendous verve and scope. In many ways it’s the tale of the people who succeeded where Columbus had failed, finding new sea lanes to the stupefying riches of east Asia. But success came at a high cost.
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In one entertainingly horrible section, for example, he tells the story of Ferdinand Magellan, whose expedition between 1519 and 1522 became the first to circumnavigate the earth. Whether Magellan deserves much of the credit is doubtful. Although he discovered the route through Tierra del Fuego from the Atlantic to the Pacific, he ended up on the wrong end of a bamboo spear during a skirmish in the Philippines, and it was his Basque lieutenant Juan Sebastián Elcano who led a very bedraggled band of survivors back to Spain.
For sheer drama, though, Magellan’s story is hard to beat. Before he had even passed South America, some of his men had mutinied, which was the cue for all sorts of quartering, disjointing and spiking on poles. Next, although he was short of supplies, he decided it was better to strike out across the Pacific (“a short hop to the Moluccas”, Crowley comments drily) than to turn back.
For more than three months his men had no fresh food at all, drinking putrid water and dining on the ox hides used to cover their sails. The going price for a rat was half a ducat; but they soon ran out. The men’s gums swelled with scurvy; some became so inflamed the sufferers couldn’t eat and died of starvation. The only thing that saved their comrades, bizarrely, was that Magellan had packed 50 pots of quince jelly, perhaps in anticipation of finding some colossal Moluccan cheese trolley. “It was probably spoonfuls of this,” Crowley writes, “that saved the ship from drifting lifelessly on a sea of death.”
Even so, very few of them returned alive. Magellan had set sail with 265 men, but when Elcano stumbled back on to Spanish soil two years later, only 18, “more ghosts than human beings”, trudged behind him. But it was worth it. When Elcano showed the Spanish king his samples of east Asian spices, the courtiers’ jaws dropped in disbelief. A year later he was granted his own coat of arms. Fittingly it was illustrated with images of nutmeg, cloves and a cinnamon stick.
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If nothing else, Crowley’s book is a testament to the lengths to which people will go to make their fortunes. In 1553 Hugh Willoughby led an expedition to discover the Northeast Passage around the top of Russia, hoping that it might be a shortcut to the spices of Asia. It wasn’t. His ships became separated in a storm, his pilot Richard Chancellor ended up making a detour to the court of Ivan the Terrible in Moscow, and Willoughby was forced to hole up for the winter on the northern coast. A few months later a group of Lapp fishermen spotted his ships anchored by the shore. Every man aboard had died, almost certainly of carbon monoxide poisoning after Willoughby decided to close all the hatches and burn sea coal in the stoves. Some of them, the Venetian ambassador reported, were frozen “in the act of writing, pen still in hand”.
Crowley’s book ends with the birth of the first truly global trading network, a spider’s web connecting Seville, Mexico City and Manila, along which passed astounding quantities of spices, silver, tea and porcelain. When, in the 1570s, the Chinese emperor demanded that all taxes must be paid in silver, it was the terrifyingly dangerous mines of Spanish Bolivia that met the demand. No doubt those Cantonese executioners would have been disappointed. But as this book shows, there is very little that most people won’t do for money.
Spice: The 16th-Century Contest That Shaped the Modern World by Roger Crowley (Yale, £20, pp304). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
