Read Pepper for Free Online Page A

Although they acknowledged that pepper was a “slight thing,” a mere commodity, the directors were well aware that whoever emerged victorious from a war over pepper would control “the British as well as the Indian seas.”
    This insight informs the following passage from one of their letters: “If the present misunderstandings between the two nations should ferment to an open war it would thought by the vulgar, but a war for pepper which they think to be [a] slight thing, because each family spends but a little [on] it. But at the Bottom it will prove a war for the dominion of the British as well as the Indian seas, because if ever they come to be sole masters of that Commodity, as they already are of nutmegs, mace, clove, and cinamon [sic], the sole profitt of that one commodity pepper being of general use, will be more to them, than all the rest and in probability to defray the constant charge of a great navy in Europe.”
    *   *   *
    From its earliest days, European pepper trading turned a profit. Historian M. N. Pearson calculates that the Portuguese, who were the first Europeans to ply an all-ocean trade route to the East, at one time made a profit of about 260 percent based on the purchase of a quintal of pepper (about 125 pounds) in India for six cruzados, and a minimum set selling price in Europe of twenty-two cruzados, the gold Portuguese coins. These numbers, however, pale in comparison to the mind-boggling profits made by American pepper traders from Salem, Massachusetts, in the early 1800s. They once made a net profit of 700 percent on a single voyage to Sumatra. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese received especially good prices for Indian pepper because they exchanged it for copper, much needed in India.
    Around 1515 Portugal made about one million cruzados from the trade in spices, equal to all of its ecclesiastical revenues and double the value of its trade in gold and metals. Pearson calculates that net profits earned by the Portuguese from pepper imports in the first half of the sixteenth century were extraordinary, ranging from 89 percent to 152 percent. During the second half of the sixteenth century, European demand for spices from Asia doubled again, and prices skyrocketed, rising as much as threefold. Over this period, pepper comprised the bulk of the spices imported.
    By the early seventeenth century, the Portuguese were not the only Europeans in the Indian Ocean; the Dutch and English had entered the pepper trade and the Dutch were especially successful. The demand for pepper in Europe doubled yet again, and by the 1620s the Dutch and the English had largely supplanted the Portuguese in the spice trade. The sea route around the Cape of Good Hope had replaced the Levant as the means for Asian goods to reach Europe, something which the Portuguese had failed to accomplish in the sixteenth century. The northern Europeans at this point accounted for 80 percent of the trade in pepper.
    In 1622, Europeans were consuming about seven million pounds of pepper annually. By that time, the English East India Company was the only importer of the spice into England. In 1618, the Charles , a company ship, brought back more than 8,100 quintals (1,012,500 pounds) of pepper; in 1621, it returned to London laden with more than 6,400 quintals (800,000 pounds), and in 1625, it carried nearly 8,000 quintals (1,000,000 pounds) back to England.
    Pepper dominated the Dutch trade in spices, too, even though the Dutch had built a monopoly in nutmeg and cloves after brutal campaigns to seize islands in the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, the only place in the world where clove trees grew, and the tiny Banda Islands, where nutmeg trees grew. The Hollanders, though, never lost sight of the fact that pepper was more valuable than clove and nutmeg, simply because so much more of it was used. During the eighteenth century, demand for pepper remained strong even as other commodities,