The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade Book

Interesting and engaging history of the conflicts and personalities of the spice trade and occasionally some of the trade itself, this book focused mainly on some of the more interesting people and events (often bloody battles and massacres) associated with trade in the spices from the days of Magellan all the way through the 19th century (the spices in this case for most of the book being the "holy trinity" of spices - cloves, nutmeg, and mace - though later on in the book cinnamon and pepper feature quite a bit or even in the case of pepper dominate the narrative). If you are looking for the natural history of the plants involved, how they are grown and harvested, details on their application culinarily or medicinally (beyond a page or two), you will be disappointed, but if you want to read about how Europeans came to discover the sources of the spices, fought over control of them (both against rival European powers and native groups), and some of the exploits of the often outrageous adventurers, schemers, plotters, and murderers who were deeply involved in the trade, this is the book for you.

The book is divided into three sections after the prologue, with the first part, "Iberian Dreams," detailing Portuguese conquest of the sources for spices and their conflict with both native powers (such as Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula) and the Spanish. Much of the narrative takes place either in and around Malacca or around the various Spice Islands of the Moluccas (Ternate, Tidore, and the Banda Islands, sources for clove especially). Of the three parts of the book, this one had the least overall details of the spice trade itself and focused the most on the gigantic personalities and conflicts associated with the trade and is filled with battles and a good bit of brutality. The main characters who figure into this part are Ferdinand Magellan (who at times to me seemed only of peripheral interest to a narrative on the spice trade but nevertheless made for interesting reading), his friend and possible cousin Francisco Serrao (who did figure mightily into the spice trade narrative and was instrumental in getting Magellan into the region, a fascinating figure who was regarded as a renegade by his native Portugal and was seen as "a prophet without honor and a turncoat who went native," becoming without any orders from the King an advisor to a local ruler, the author noting that "anachronism aside, a twentieth-century reader familiar with the work of Joseph Conrad might find something decidedly Conradian about Serrao and his circumstances"), and Francis Xavier, cofounder of the Jesuits and "the Apostle of the East," very active in all of the lands covered in the book, and as "with Magellan and Serrao, his rendezvous with fate occurred in the Far East, realized in a quest that was dissimilar but parallel to theirs."


Part II, "Northern Desire," centered around the conflict between the Dutch and the English for control of the Spice Trade, two nations for much of the narrative at peace at home but "came to loggerheads on the other side of the world," examples of a "savage, exuberant age," with much of the book centered again on the Spice Islands (though there a chapter devoted to describing the Amsterdam of this era). A good bit of the section also detailed the rise and fall of the Dutch as a major world power (I liked that and it was interesting) and sadly Dutch massacres and genocide in maintain their control of their empire. Major historical figures given a lot of ink are Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a governor-general of the Dutch East India Company responsible for some rather barbaric actions including clearing whole islands of people and not a few massacres as well as being breathtakingly elitist and racist (even towards his own people) and engaging in slavery (the author stressed again and again how bloody Coen's tenure was, as he "essentially depopulated" the Banda Islands, with killing thousands, leaving of an original population of 15,000 about a thousand, the remainder killed or fled to other islands), and Pierre Poivre, a Frenchmen who smuggled and cultivated plants outside the East Indies and broke the Dutch monopoly in the late 18th century (a much happier, non-murderous person to read about).

Part II also has a brief, strange, but interesting interlude on Arctic exploration, of trying to find a northern passage north of Eurasia to the Spice Islands (namely Willem Barentsz" three unsuccessful voyages in the 16th century, discovering Bear Island and Spitsbergen, spending a winter trapped by the ice, and later dying of scurvy), these disastrous expeditions the talk of Europe, even influencing Shakespeare (a line in Twelfth Night where Fabian tells Sir Andrew "You are now sailed into the North of my lady's opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard" references these ill-fated voyages.

Part III, "New England Passion," focused on the spice trade from Salem, Massachusetts (I had no idea prior to this book that the town was so heavily involved in the spice trade) and various adventures in and around modern Banda Aceh (the northern end of island of Sumatra, source of most if not all the pepper those from Salem bought but also an area filled with pirates, who often apparently were the same people that sold the Americans pepper in the first place), this time the book much more narrowly focused on the pepper trade. Of all the sections, this part had the most overcall coverage of the specifics of the spice trade from funding voyages to acquiring cargoes to making profits. It didn't have quite the murder, treachery, and massacres of the first two parts, though there were well-described battles (I didn't know the U.S. Navy sent punitive expeditions on at least two occasions to deal with pirates and bandits). Major personalities include Jonathan Carnes, who made a fortune in the Sumatra pepper trade and became one of America's first millionaires, and Elias Hasket Derby Sr., who "established for Salem ships the role of supercargo, or traveling business agent," "was most likely the first American merchant to send ships to sea with coppered bottoms," and was "the first Salem merchant to dispatch ships to such distant ports as Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Manila." It was also interesting in the chapter to note the vivid contrast between the Dutch, English, and Portuguese (who came to settle the Spice Islands and Malacca to varying degrees) and the Americans who "were not colonizers, nor were they so tempted to be," who viewed settling in Sumatra or the Banda Islands as exile and that exile "was anathema" (the author noting that Americans very much settled far in their empire, but that empire was in North America, "a continent of magnificent wilderness stretching from sea to sea that Jefferson believed would take centuries to settle," as the "empire of the United States lay not in Banda's fragrant nutmeg groves or Ternate's clove-scented slopes."

The book closed with an epilogue where the author visited the various places in Asia described in the book and showing how they are today (the book was published in 1998).

It was interesting to learn just how restricted the product of especially the holy trinity of spices was for centuries. Europeans having to deal with Arab or Venetian middlemen I knew about, but I had no idea that the production area for say cloves was so restricted ("on a sprinkling of islands with a total area of forty square miles") nor until the mid-eighteenth century Europeans had no little or no idea these plants could be grown elsewhere (and even when they did start to realize this, either failed to properly cultivate the plants or had to deal with the Dutch, who did everything in their power including cutting down entire groves of trees to prevent living plants from leaving their domain).

An enjoyable book, I liked the vivid description of several of the battles, the feel for what the various areas of spice production actually were like, and I was surprised at the fairly good coverage of the various indigenous peoples the Europeans and later the Americans had to deal with in terms of trade and conflict. There is an extensive section on notes and sources, a thorough index, a multi-page timeline, and a good map of the region.