It was an ignoble end to the enterprise. Many voices – among them de Haro’s – were raised in protest at the king’s short-termism. With the annual profit from the islands estimated at 40,000 ducats, the settlement represented less than a decade’s return. Compounding the investors’ disappointment was the fact that so far these profits had failed to materialise. Even the return of the Victoria had brought de Haro and the other investors little cheer. Among the quayside celebrations, one of the interested parties prepared a breakdown of the expedition’s costs and returns in a document unearthed three hundred years later by the scholar Martín Fernández Navarrete. Known as the ‘discharge document’, this unadorned summary of inputs and outputs makes for fascinating reading. Though at only eighty-five tons the second-smallest vessel of the expedition, the leaking hold of the Victoria yielded 381 bags of cloves, the legacy of the frantic buying that followed its arrival on Tidore. The net weight was calculated at 520 quintals, one arroba and eleven pounds: 60,060 pounds, or 27,300 kilograms. There were also samples of other spices: cinnamon, mace and nutmeg, plus, oddly, one feather (a bird of paradise?).
In the debit column alongside is a listing of expenses: weapons, victuals, hammers, lanterns, drums ‘para diversión’, pitch and tar, gloves, one piece of Valencian cochineal, twenty pounds of saffron, lead, crystal, mirrors, six metal astrolabes, combs, coloured velvets, darts, compasses, various trinkets and other sundry expenses. Taking into account the loss of four of the five ships, the advances paid to the crews, back pay for the survivors and pensions and rewards for the pilot, it emerges that once the Victoria’s 381 bags of cloves had been brought to market the expedition registered a modest net profit. For the investors it was a disappointment, paltry in comparison with the astronomical returns then being enjoyed by Portuguese in the East; but it was a profit nonetheless. The conclusion must rate as one of accountancy’s more dramatic moments: a small hold-full of cloves funded the first circumnavigation of the globe.
It is an orchard of delights. With all the sweetness of spices. Paradise as described in the Cursor Mundi, a Northumbrian poem written c.1325.
Columbus, da Gama and Magellan, the three standard-bearers of the age of discovery, were spice-seekers before they became discoverers. Many lesser names followed where they had led. In the wake of their first groping feelers into the unknown, other navigators, traders, pirates and finally armies of various European powers hunted down the source of the spices and squabbled, bloodily and desperately, over their possession.
After the early successes of the Iberian powers, the spice trade took a Protestant turn. At the close of the sixteenth century English and Dutch traders made their first appearance in Asian waters, impelled by a desire for spice, as Conrad would phrase it, that burned in their breasts ‘like a flame of love’. Better organised and more ruthless than any traders yet seen in Atlantic or Asian waters, they fought off the Catholic powers, each other and all Asian rivals and smugglers for the advantage of bringing spices direct to Amsterdam’s Herengracht or London’s Pepper Lane.
At the hands of the northern newcomers Portugal’s Estado da India endured a protracted, undignified senescence, though it was barely a century old. Raiders preyed on the corpse and lopped off the choicest pieces. The first Dutch ships called at the North Moluccas in 1599, returning to Amsterdam low in the water from the weight of the cloves they carried: ‘So long as Holland has been Holland,’ one crewmember claimed, ‘such richly laden ships have never been seen.’ The English followed them east in 1601, James Lancaster leading a fleet under the auspices of the newly formed ‘Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’ – better known as the East India Company.* Sailing from the Javanese port of Bantam, an English pinnace reached the Bandas and their nutmeg groves in March 1603. Others followed, setting sail in vessels with such optimistic names as Clove or Peppercorn. With a toehold on the tiny islands of Ai and Run, James I was, for a time, proud to style himself ‘King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon’. For the sake of their nutmeg the latter two tiny islands shade Bermuda as England’s first overseas possessions.
Though these early voyages enjoyed mixed results, malaria, scurvy and inexperience taking a heavy toll, the northern intruders soon struck at the ‘Portingall’ with devastating swiftness. The first assets to go were the remotest, the distant Spice Islands. Here a handful of Portuguese, having long since incurred the loathing of the Muslim population, clung on in a state of permanent siege in a string of mouldering forts. Ternate fell in 1605. Shortly after the Dutch seized the Portuguese fort on Ambon, midway between the North and South Moluccas. Worse was to come, as the conquests of da Gama and his successor Albuquerque (1453–1515) were steadily rolled back. In the disastrous decade of the 1630s, Ceylon and its cinnamon forests fell to combined Ceylonese-Dutch forces – a marriage of convenience the Ceylonese would soon have cause to regret. The Portuguese Jesuit Fernão de Queyroz claimed the Dutch were ‘so disliked by the Natives, that the very stones will rise against them’, but his prediction of independence was some three hundred years premature. Malacca, the bottleneck and entrepôt of the East, surrendered to the Dutch in 1641; the pepper ports of Malabar followed in 1661–63. Spices were now, in effect, a Protestant concern.
The drama was played out on a global stage. The golden age of discovery was also the golden age of European piracy, when freebooters could plunder their way to royal favour and enrichment. The talismanic figure in this respect was Sir Francis Drake, whose Golden Hind was only the second ship to circumnavigate the globe. On the way he called at Ternate in 1579, sailing off with a cargo of cloves and agreement from Sultan Babu to reserve the trade in cloves to the English. For his part, Drake promised to build forts and factories, and ‘to decorate that sea with ships’. It was a bargain that would never be fulfilled, yet the treaty was more far-reaching in its ramifications even than the lordly haul of stolen Spanish silver and gold that had the Spanish ambassador in London demanding Drake’s head. With such dizzying profits in the air, Drake’s treaty with Babu sent shivers of excitement up the spines of the investors, and would-be imitators lined up to follow his lead. In view of the effect the treaty seems likely to have had on the merchants of London, culminating in the formation of the East India Company two decades later, Drake’s agreement with Babu was quite possibly the single most lasting achievement of his voyage.
Like Drake, these spice-seekers were seldom chary of robust methods. A spice ship represented a fortune afloat, and from a strictly commercial point of view it was considerably cheaper and easier to plunder the returning ships than to make the long and dangerous voyage for oneself. Galleons and caravels returning from the Indies ran a gauntlet of pirates and raiders, lurking in the Atlantic to deprive the exhausted and disease-depleted crews of their precious cargoes. One such haul was witnessed by Samuel Pepys in November 1665, when as Surveyor-Victualler to the Royal Navy he inspected two captured Dutch East Indiamen. On board he saw ‘the greatest wealth lie in confusion that a man can see in the world – pepper scatter[ed] through every chink, you trod upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs, I walked above the knees – whole rooms full … as noble a sight as ever I saw in my life’.
By now, however, this was a token victory for the English, since their own outposts in the Spice Islands had long since gone the way of the Portuguese before them. One English merchant in the Moluccas reported that the Dutch ‘grew starke madde’ at having to share the proceeds from the Moluccas’ cloves and nutmeg. Accordingly, in February 1623 the staff of the English factory on the central Moluccan island of Ambon were rounded up, tortured and killed. Their fate had been foreshadowed a few years earlier by the destruction of the English outpost on the nutmeg island of Run, which was then denuded of its trees for good measure. The ‘crying business of Amboyna’ prompted