I’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.

So 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.