Home sick, reading about spice

  • Me home sickI’m home today with a late Octo­ber sinus-flu-whoknowswhat bug, so it’s a good time to catch up on my read­ing. I’m not able to hold ter­ri­bly com­plex thoughts for long, so I’m pleas­antly sort of in and out men­tally as I try to fig­ure out my own ques­tion about the all-consuming pur­suit of spice.

    This is a ques­tion that slowly formed when we took the Caribbean cruise. Going around the islands, it became obvi­ous that when you delved very far into the his­tory, you were look­ing at an area where a mighty tug-o-war had hap­pened between the West­ern empires capa­ble of trav­el­ing to the New World. North Amer­ica was col­o­nized by the French, Eng­lish and Span­ish. South Amer­ica by the Span­ish and Por­tugese. But the Caribbean — the plethora of 7,000 or so islands whose land mass prob­a­bly doesn’t equal New England’s — was col­o­nized (if you can call it that) by all four, as well as the Dutch and Dan­ish. And they were fought over for decades at a time. (Antigua changed from French to Eng­lish 14 times; once it changed hands twice in one day.)

    But why bother? I know the His­tory 101 bot­tom line: the West Indies were part of the same mania that drove the explo­ration and con­quest of the East Indies — the mad quest for gold and spices. That’s what Colum­bus wanted to find. That’s what Cortes wanted to find (and actu­ally found the gold, unfor­tu­nately for the Aztecs).

    But why go to all the trou­ble? For gold? Okay. But spice? What the heck. Who flings them­selves across the ocean hop­ing for some­thing to make cin­na­mon toast with? That’s insane.

    Spice: The History of a TemptationSo the book I found at Barnes & Noble came to the res­cue — Spice: The His­tory of a Temp­ta­tion. Thank good­ness. Some­one else had been won­der­ing the same thing. What a good thing to fin­ish up on a sick day.

    .
    What’s spicy about spice?
    And one of the inter­est­ing things for author Jack Turner is that at the end of exhaus­tive research and great sto­ry­telling, there is some­thing about the desire for spices that sim­ply can’t be put into words we can under­stand. In that way, I’ll give my own spoiler and say that the book didn’t exactly answer my ques­tion. But there was some sur­pris­ing con­text that hints at a larger per­spec­tive (and some which allows me to include it in my Ortho­dox blog with­out a qualm of going off-topic). But I’ll get to that in a minute. First things first (as quick as I can because I feel a nap com­ing on):

    • By “spice” we’re talk­ing cin­na­mon, nut­meg, cloves, pep­per, mace, gin­ger and some oth­ers we don’t bother with now, like zedoary and grains of par­adise. Doesn’t sound like much now — just the stuff you would put in a strange-tasting pump­kin pie — but appar­ently the search for it was enough to make Queen Isabella hock the jew­els and throw Colum­bus into a boat.
    • The Spice Race that ended up dis­cov­er­ing new lands lasted from the end of the 15th cen­tury to the first half of the 16th. Then it kind of fiz­zled out.
    • The con­ven­tional wis­dom is that Euro­peans needed the spices to cover the taste of rot­ting meat, but that doesn’t turn out to quite cover it. Which after all, stands to rea­son. As Turner points out:

      Spices were expen­sive, and those with the money would gen­er­ally have had enough to acquire at least half-decent meat at a frac­tion of the cost of spices. Why waste good, expen­sive spices on poor, cheap meat? Rot­ting ingre­di­ents were a more seri­ous con­cern for the poor, and the poor lacked the money to buy spices in the first place.

    • What­ever the quest for these spices was, it didn’t start with medieval Europe. Archael­o­gists exca­vat­ing a vil­lage in Syria unearthed a clay pot dat­ing from 1721 BC that con­tained cloves. Doesn’t sound like a big deal until you real­ize that cloves didn’t grow in Syria. At the time, cloves only grew on five tiny vol­canic islands in Indone­sia. The inflated value placed on spices has traces in early Egypt and the Roman Empire.

    Part of the dif­fi­culty of nail­ing down what it was that drove the quest for spices is the com­plex­ity of defin­ing what they were used for, or what peo­ple used to think they could be used for. Spices were not only used to fla­vor food but also to help out uncer­tain wines and ales. And besides the issues of the palate, they were also used as med­i­cines, incenses, aphro­disi­acs (that seems like another thing Euro­peans were always quest­ing after), magic potions and embalm­ing aids.

    .
    More than just some­thing for pie fill­ing
    If adding all this together still doesn’t explain why men would risk death and kill each other, it’s worth leav­ing the ratio­nal world where easy ques­tions have easy answers and trekking into the area of dreams, desires and per­cep­tions. Spices weren’t just some­thing to pick from a tree or bush, they were sym­bols of some­thing unat­tain­able and mysterious.

    When spices arrived by ship or car­a­van from the East, they brought their own invis­i­ble cargo, a bulging bag of asso­ci­a­tions, myth, and fan­tasy, a cargo that to some was as repul­sive as oth­ers found it attrac­tive. For thou­sands of years spices have car­ried a whole swath of potent mes­sages, for which they have been both loved and loathed.

    If you think of how the word is used in Song of Songs or the feel­ing you get about that lovely thing — spice cake — you start to real­ize that there is some­thing that has been there and still is. We’re not bedev­illed by it now — the enor­mous demand even­tu­ally led to an enor­mous sup­ply, and once that was pro­vided in real­ity, the dreams of what spice might have been and the lands and peo­ples that might have pro­vided it couldn’t endure quite as force­fully. So the rage for pump­kin pie fla­vor­ings that made ships head out in all direc­tions even­tu­ally dwin­dled, and it was only then that Euro­peans could begin to mull over the impli­ca­tions of the other finds from the New World, like pota­toes, tobacco, corn, chile and a cou­ple new continents.

    In terms of Church his­tory, there’s a side­bar that I thought was inter­est­ing. One of the rea­sons Por­tu­gal didn’t bother to col­o­nize the West Indies as assid­u­ously as the other Euros was that they had already had incred­i­ble suc­cess in the East. And one of the most suc­cess­ful starts to that was a voy­age in 1497 by Vasco de Gama. In spite of a rough voy­age, he landed after ten months in Mal­abar, in an area of India later called The Spice Coast. Some Tunisians liv­ing there spoke a lit­tle Castil­ian and Genoese, and had this exchange with an emis­sary of the voy­age:
    Tunisians: What the devil brought you here?
    Emis­sary: We came in search of spices and Christians.

    .
    Which way to the Gar­den?
    The hope­ful request for Chris­tians wasn’t just made out of inter­ests in fel­low­ship or evan­ge­lism. It was a bit of a trial bal­loon. The pres­ence of Chris­tians might indi­cate that the land in ques­tion was the home of that elu­sive fel­low, Prester John. (For those who have never heard the name, Prester John was a mythic fig­ure thought to have descended from one of the Magi and to rule as king over a won­der­ful king­dom. The hunt for Prester John could fill another book eas­ily, but HERE’s a Wikipedia entry for quick back­ground.) And in spite of get­ting a less than sat­is­fac­tory answer to the first enquiry, when de Gama walked into the main city of Cali­cut, his zeal led him to jump to the wrong conclusions:

    On his march to Cali­cut to meet its ruler, the zamorin, de Gama was so over­whelmed by this pro­lif­er­a­tion of peo­ples and reli­gions, and so con­fi­dent of find­ing the East­ern lands of Prester John, that he mis­took a Hindu image of Devaki nurs­ing Krishna for a more famil­iar nurs­ing mother-and-son pair­ing. Though puz­zled by the teeth and horns on some of the stat­ues of the “saints,” he promply fell to his knees and thanked the Hindu gods for his safe arrival.

    Bet that made quite an impres­sion. But the part of it I think is inter­est­ing is that it points to a Chris­t­ian search more con­sum­ing than just the hunt for aro­matic plants — the search for Paradise.

    It was a romance writer’s stock in trade that spices per­fumed the air of the more beau­ti­ful dream­worlds that are such a fea­ture of medieval lit­er­a­ture. In a Castil­ian ver­sion of The Romance of Alexan­der writ­ten around the mid­dle of the thir­teenth cen­tury, galan­gal, cin­na­mon, gin­ger, cloves and zedoary waft through the air of the dreamscape. …

    While poets and mys­tics were gen­er­ally con­tent to per­fume their Par­adise with spices and leave it at that, oth­ers made more con­certed efforts to map the fab­u­lous locales were the spices grew. This was, nec­es­sar­ily, a highly cre­ative enter­prise. Since all reports of spices and Par­adise arrived alike sec­ond­hand, the medieval imag­i­na­tion was free to run riot. Though noth­ing could be con­firmed (or, more to the point, denied) what was gen­er­ally agreed was that spices came from a topsy-turvy world where the nor­mal rules of Euro­pean life did not apply. They were securely lodged in the same world of mar­vels and mis­shapen prodi­gies that writhe across the por­tals of Europe’s Romanesque churches or scam­per and cavort across its manuscripts. …

    Turner tells of one man­u­script that featured…

    ox-worshiping Cyno­cephales, corpse-eating sav­ages, and gems engen­dered from the tears of Adam and Eve. Such was the world where the spices grew. Along with drag­ons and moun­tains of gold, they were one of its dis­tin­guish­ing features.

    This was the clos­est I came to under­stand­ing what might have fueled the quest for spices. If they truly acquired the scent of Chris­t­ian mys­tery to them, it begins to fol­low that money and life were no object.

    I think that a fas­ci­nat­ing his­tory of the world is still wait­ing to be writ­ten — one that talks in real and sym­pa­thetic terms of the man­ner in which those in the Church Age have sought God and sought to antic­i­pate, plot and hurry the Sec­ond Com­ing. I swear that the more I look into his­tory the more it seems like this is the moti­va­tion behind a lot of what has hap­pened since Christ walked the earth.

    Well, that’s the biggest thought I can man­age for now. Way past naptime.


    Related posts:

    1. Rec­om­mended read­ing (and a rant)
    2. Cou­ple last Caribbean thoughts
    3. Sea­sons change — in church, at home

    October 22nd, 2006 | Grace | 1 Comment |

One Response and Counting...

  • Mimi 10.22.2006

    I hope you feel bet­ter soon.

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required