Europe Went Looking for India's Pepper and Cinnamon. It Found America by Mistake.

On 4 November 1492, on the coast of Cuba, the master of the Pinta told Christopher Columbus he had found cinnamon trees. Columbus went to see. The summary of his log that survives records that he “found that they were not cinnamon trees.”

So he tried the direct approach. He had brought samples of cinnamon and pepper from Castile, and he showed them to the people on the shore. They recognised them, the log says, and “said, by signs, that there was plenty in the vicinity, pointing to the S.E.”

The pepper in that sample bag came from a vine native to the Malabar coast of southwest India, in what is now Kerala. Europe had been paying heavily for it since Roman times. Columbus was looking for a shorter way to reach it. Two continents were in the way.

A vine from the Malabar coast

Britannica calls black pepper “one of the earliest spices known” and puts its home on the Malabar Coast. True cinnamon, the bark of Cinnamomum verum, is native to Sri Lanka and the neighbouring Malabar coast.

When the Portuguese finally got there in 1498, the anonymous diarist of Vasco da Gama’s fleet was blunt about it. From Calicut, he wrote, “come the spices which are consumed in the East and the West, in Portugal, as in all other countries of the world.” The city grew its own “ginger and pepper and cinnamon,” though the finest cinnamon came from Ceylon, eight days’ sail away. Wherever the bark grew, “Calecut is the staple for all this cinnamon.” Calicut was where you bought it.

The plant was Indian, and the customers were everyone else. Fifteen centuries of trade ran on that arrangement.

Rome paid in gold

The Tamil poets saw the trade from the dock. A poem in the Akananuru, one of the Sangam anthologies of early Tamil verse, describes the Chera port of Muciri, which Greek and Roman writers called Muziris: “The Yavanas come with their fine ships, bearing gold, and leave with pepper.” Yavana was the word early Indian literature used for Greeks and Romans. One Chera chief, Nedunjeral Adan, is said to have attacked Yavana ships and held the traders for ransom, which tells you who needed whom.

In Rome, Pliny the Elder could not see the appeal. Pepper, he complained in the first century CE, has nothing going for it except “a certain pungency; and yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India!” He noted the prices anyway: long pepper at fifteen denarii a pound, white at seven, black at four.

With the monsoon wind he calls Hippalus behind you, he wrote, a ship from the Red Sea could reach “the nearest mart of India, Muziris by name,” in forty days, if you didn’t mind the pirates. He also grumbled about the bill. “In no year does India drain our empire” of less than a vast sum, he wrote, for goods “sold among us at fully one hundred times their prime cost.”

Eighteen centuries later Indian economists would make the same complaint about Britain, with the money flowing the other way. That story is how Britain drained India.

One ship, 552 tonnes of pepper

The best single document of this trade is a papyrus in Vienna’s national library, written around the middle of the second century CE. One side holds part of a loan contract, agreed in Alexandria, for a voyage to India. The other values, for tax, the cargo that came back on a ship called the Hermapollon.

The historian Federico De Romanis, who has reconstructed its damaged figures, puts the Hermapollon’s cargo at about 635 tonnes, of which about 552 tonnes was pepper. Also aboard were malabathron, the coast’s other main export, and 167 elephant tusks weighing 3,228.5 kilograms. Rome’s customs officials took a quarter of everything as tax, the tetarte.

Since 2007 the Kerala Council for Historical Research has been digging at Pattanam, about 25 kilometres north of Kochi. After five seasons it had around 6,000 sherds of Roman amphorae, the clay jars that carried wine and fish sauce across the ocean, some of them from Gaul. The British Museum’s Roberta Tomber dated the busiest years to “the later first century BCE and first century CE.”

Roman coins, the 2011 report noted dryly, were marking their presence “with striking absence.” Early Chera coins stamped with an elephant and a bow did turn up. Whether Pattanam was Muziris itself is, in the archaeologist Jaya Menon’s words, “still a matter of conjecture.” Some scholars prefer Kodungallur, about 8 kilometres away.

Every hand took a cut

The Indian Ocean was a busy sea long before any European ship arrived in it; five centuries before da Gama, Chola fleets were taxing the lanes between Arabia and China. By the fifteenth century a peppercorn reached Europe by relay, and da Gama’s diarist traced the route. Ships took the spices from Calicut to Jidda, where the sultan’s customs officers were waiting. Smaller boats carried them up the Red Sea, to be taxed again near Mount Sinai. Camels, hired at four cruzados each, carried it ten days to Cairo, where “duties are paid again.” A Nile boat took it to Rosetta, where duties were paid “once more,” and camels took it on to Alexandria. There the galleys of Venice and Genoa bought it, and the sultan, the diarist heard, drew 600,000 cruzados a year in duties.

E. G. Ravenstein, who translated the diary in 1898, set its Alexandria prices beside those the Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa recorded at Calicut. By his sums, pepper cost about three pence a pound in Calicut and about seventeen pence in Alexandria, and that was before any Venetian had sold it on. Venice and Genoa held what Britannica calls a “virtual monopoly” of distribution in Europe, and that grip helped push others to look for a sea route east.

Constantinople did not close the road

You may have been taught a tidier story, in which the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 shut the spice road and forced Europe onto the ocean. Historians dispute it. In 1915 the historian A. H. Lybyer argued that Western spice prices showed “no discernible permanent elevation” after 1453, and that trade through Egypt and Syria ran “unbroken down to 1502.” What emptied that route was the Portuguese buying pepper at the source. “The galleys of Venice found very few spices at Alexandria and Beirut,” Lybyer wrote; “in 1504 they found none at all.”

Sailing west to reach the east

Columbus’s plan was a shortcut. The physician Paolo Toscanelli, in a letter that survives only in later copies, told him, “I perceive your magnificent and great desire to find a way to where the spices grow.” An earlier letter he enclosed, with a chart, asked the reader not to be surprised “if I call the parts where the spices are west, when they usually call them east.”

The prologue to Columbus’s journal says Ferdinand and Isabella sent him “to the said parts of India,” ordering that he “should not go by land to the eastward, as had been customary, but that I should go by way of the west.” He left on Friday 3 August 1492. At two in the morning on 12 October his crews sighted an island its people called Guanahani.

The journal itself is lost. What survives is a long summary by the friar Bartolomé de las Casas, with many passages copied in the admiral’s own words. By 23 October those words sound like a man shopping without a list. The land, he wrote, would be “rich in spices. That I have no personal knowledge of these products causes me the greatest sorrow in the world.”

A pepper that was not pepper

The journal calls the people Columbus met “Indians” from the first landfall. Britannica traces the name to his mistaken belief that he had reached South Asia, which is why he called them “Indios.”

The cinnamon trees came to nothing, but on 15 January 1493, on Hispaniola, the log reports something better. “There is also plenty of aji,” it reads, “which is their pepper, which is more valuable than pepper, and all the people eat nothing else, it being very wholesome.” Fifty caravels a year could be loaded with it, the admiral reckoned.

Aji was the chilli. It is no relation of black pepper, but Columbus thought it resembled the spice from India, so the chilli got pepper’s name and kept it.

Christians and spices

The Portuguese, meanwhile, went the long way round Africa. At Malindi, in what is now Kenya, Vasco da Gama took on a Gujarati pilot who knew the road to Calicut. Twenty-three days later the Western Ghats came into view, and on 20 May 1498 the fleet anchored off Calicut, then the most important trading centre in southern India.

The next day da Gama sent one of his convicts ashore. He was taken to two traders from Tunis who spoke Castilian and Genoese, and whose first words were “May the Devil take thee! What brought you hither?” The convict explained that they had come “in search of Christians and of spices.” The Tunisians asked the obvious question: “Why does not the King of Castile, the King of France, or the Signoria of Venice send hither?”

The Christians took some finding. The Portuguese had decided the Hindus of Calicut were Christians, and they were led to what the diarist calls “a large church.” Inside was an image “they said represented Our Lady,” and da Gama said his prayers before it. The saints painted on the walls had “teeth protruding an inch from the mouth, and four or five arms.” Ravenstein’s footnote is dry. “This ‘church’ was, of course, a pagoda or temple.”

The Zamorin was not impressed

The Zamorin, as the Portuguese wrote the title of Calicut’s Hindu king, received da Gama reclining on a couch covered in green velvet, with a golden spittoon at hand. Da Gama then prepared his gifts: “twelve pieces of lambel, four scarlet hoods, six hats, four strings of coral, a case containing six wash-hand basins, a case of sugar, two casks of oil, and two of honey.”

The king’s factor and another official “laughed at it.” They told da Gama that “the poorest merchant from Mecca, or any other part of India, gave more,” and that a present for a king should be in gold.

The Zamorin sent a palm-leaf letter back to Lisbon all the same. “My country is rich in cinnamon, cloves, ginger, pepper, and precious stones,” it said. “That which I ask of you in exchange is gold, silver, corals and scarlet cloth.” It reads like a price list.

Of da Gama’s 170 men, 55 got home. He came back in 1502 with a bigger fleet, bombarded Calicut and massacred 38 hostages.

The pepper that sailed back

The aji of Hispaniola did not stay put. According to the Dumbarton Oaks Plant Humanities Initiative, Portuguese ships brought chillies to India around 1542, and one early name for them was “Pernambuco pepper,” after the Portuguese colony in Brazil.

India’s Ministry of Food Processing Industries now describes the country as “the largest producer, consumer and exporter of chilli in the world,” handling almost half of the global chilli trade, a crop that did not exist anywhere in the country before a Portuguese ship brought it from Brazil.