What Columbus could see for certain, on the other hand, was the potential of great things to come. If the first samples of ‘Indian’ spices left much to be desired, his evidence and testimony were at least enough to convince the crown that he was onto something.* Preparations for a second and much larger expedition were immediately put in place, a fleet of at least seventeen ships and several hundred men sailing from Cádiz on 25 September 1493, carrying with them the same freight of unfounded optimism. In the Caribbean forests Diego Alvarez Chanca, the expedition’s physician, found evidence of fabulous wealth tantalisingly out of reach: ‘There are trees which, I think, bear nutmegs, but they were so far without fruit, and I say that I think this because the taste and the smell of the bark is like nutmegs. I saw a root of ginger which an Indian carried hanging around his neck. There are also aloes, although not of the kind which has hitherto been seen in our parts, but there is no doubt that they are of the species of aloes which doctors use.’ As he shared his commander’s illusions, so Chanca also shared his excuses: ‘There is also found a kind of cinnamon; it is true that it is not so fine as that which is known at home. We do not know whether by chance this is due to lack of knowledge of the time to gather it when it should be gathered, or whether by chance the land does not produce better.’
However not all these spice-seekers were quite so naïve or gullible as their cavalier tree-spotting might suggest. In order to assist in the search, each of Columbus’s expeditions took along samples of all the major spices to show the Indians, who would then, so it was hoped, direct them to the real thing. Yet such was the strength of the Europeans’ conviction that even their samples failed to clear up their misunderstanding – rather, the reverse was the case. During the first voyage, two crewmembers were sent on an expedition into the Cuban hinterland with samples of spices, reporting back on 2 November 1493: ‘The Spaniards showed them the cinnamon and pepper and other spices that the Admiral had given them; and the Indians told them by signs that there was a lot of it near there to the south-east, but that right there they did not know if there was any.’ It was the same story everywhere they went. ‘The Admiral showed to some of the Indians of that place cinnamon and pepper … and they recognised it … and indicated by signs that near there there was much of it, towards the south-east.’
The Spaniards’ error was, then, of the sort that has always bemused strangers in a strange land: shortcomings of intelligence; problems of communication; they were finding what they wanted to find, regardless of the reality. The script was repeated with every new landfall. The Indians, already sufficiently puzzled by the pale, bearded strangers, were accosted with samples of dried plants they had no way of recognising. Anxious to get rid of their visitors, or perhaps keen to help but reluctant to admit ignorance of the directions – a still-flourishing Caribbean tradition – the Indians fobbed them off with a wave of the hand and a vague report of gold and spices ‘further on’. And the Spaniards, incapable of rejecting their convictions, refusing to believe the awful possibility, willingly accepted the version of events that suited them best. Exceptions to their expectations were discarded as anomalies, not the smoking gun of falsification. No one could see that the empire had no spice.
Everywhere they went, on this and on subsequent voyages, it was the same story. Yet before long the excuses started to wear a little thin, and in due course Columbus’s inability to make good his promises of gold and spices would contribute to the loss of his credibility. On each of his four voyages to the Caribbean he was compelled to turn for home with little more than paltry samples of gold and his indifferent ‘spices’, just enough to save him from ridicule, leaving others behind to carry on the search, each time with his excuses at the ready. Ferdinand’s patience with his dreamy admiral wore thin, as did the patience of those who served under him. An anonymous memo of 1496 stated what was becoming increasingly clear to all but Columbus: that the islands’ so-called spices were worthless. One who had his feet more firmly planted on the ground, and perhaps the first to appreciate the realities of the situation, was a crewmember of the second voyage, Michele de Cuneo. Writing from the island of Isabella during the second voyage, on 20 January 1494, he was quick to accommodate himself to a spice-free America. When an expedition was dispatched into the hinterland, returning with two Indians, their failure to find any spices was compensated for by their samples of gold: ‘All of us made merry, not caring any longer about any sort of spicery but only of this blessed gold.’ And indeed gold was where the future lay.
Even now, however, and for decades after, the hope of American spices lingered on. As late as 1518, Bartolomé de las Casas was still prepared to believe that New Spain was ‘very good’ for ginger, cloves and pepper. Remarkably, Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztecs, was perturbed by America’s elusive spices – this in spite of his having delivered a quite colossal fortune into the royal treasury from the conquered empire of Montezuma. In a string of letters to the king he repeatedly promised to find a new route to the Spice Islands, and offered a string of shamefaced apologies for his failure to deliver any cloves or nutmeg in the treasure ships now regularly sailing back to Castile. His men, he pleaded, were still looking. In his fifth letter of 1526, like Columbus before him, he asked for a little forbearance. Given time, he promises, ‘I will undertake to discover a route to the Spice Islands and many others … if this should not prove to be so, Your Majesty may punish me as one who does not tell his king the truth.’
Fortunately for Cortés his bluff was not called. He found no spices, but neither was he punished. For several decades more the conquistadors kept looking, yet all, like Columbus, found themselves chasing a will-of-the-wisp. In the south of the continent, Gonzalo Pizarro set off on a deluded, disastrous quest for cinnamon, plunging from the icy heights of the Peruvian altiplano into the Amazonian jungle, half a planet away from the real thing. Others sailed north, searching for nutmeg and a north-west passage deep in the icy wastes of the Canadian backlands. In due course the New World garnered new dreams and new fortunes from gold and silver; after, there was sugar, fur, cotton, cod and slaves. It was not for well over a hundred years after Columbus first looked that the myth of America’s spices was finally dispelled.
And yet the search was not quite the failure it seemed at the time. The Central American jungle yielded vanilla, and Jamaica allspice – its hybrid taste and pepper-like appearance the source of much confusion. There were, besides, other vegetal riches ripe for the plucking: tobacco, maize, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate. Columbus himself brought back pineapple and cassava. Centuries later, Asian spices were eventually introduced to the Americas, with such success that Grenada is now a major producer of nutmeg; the island republic features a nutmeg on its flag. And even Columbus, his delusions and false dawns notwithstanding, found one reasonable approximation to a spice. In his log for 15 January 1492 he writes of Hispaniola that ‘there is also plenty of aji, which is their pepper, which is more valuable than [black] pepper, and all the people eat nothing else, it being very wholesome. Fifty caravels might be annually loaded with it [from Hispaniola].’ Peter Martyr, the Italian humanist at the Spanish court, noted that five grains of the new plant brought back by Columbus were hotter and more flavourful than twenty grains of Malabar pepper. Columbus himself was taken aback by its heat, reporting to the king and queen (like many an unwary newcomer since) that he found Caribbean food ‘extremely hot’. The natives seemed to put their incendiary pepper in everything.
Not even such a dreamer as Columbus could have foreseen the future success of his ‘aji’: it was, of