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The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade
Clothed in mystery and lost in uncharted seas, the Spice Islands of the early sixteenth century tantalized European imagination to the point of obsession. As the only place on Earth where grew the "holy trinity" of spices-cloves, nutmeg, and mace-these minuscule islands quickly became a
wellspring of international intrigue and personal fortune, occasioning the rise and fall of nations across the globe. It is the history of these islands, their mystique, and the men who tried to tame them, that is the fascinating bounty of THE SCENTS OF EDEN.
wellspring of international intrigue and personal fortune, occasioning the rise and fall of nations across the globe. It is the history of these islands, their mystique, and the men who tried to tame them, that is the fascinating bounty of THE SCENTS OF EDEN.
368 pages, Paperback
First published February 2, 1998
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October 24, 2014
"I have found a New World," Franscisco Serrao wrote ecstatically to his friend, Fernao de Magalhaos (aka Ferdinand Magellan).
Well, he didn't really 'find' it; Chinese traders, and later Moors, had known these places and the treacherous routes to the spice islands for hundreds of years. But Serrao was among the first Europeans to come to know these islands well. Serrao got separated from two other ships in a Portugues armada and, more or less by chance, he ended up on Ternate, one of twin volcanic cones, circled by coral reefs and forested with clove trees--'the richest garden the world had ever known.'
Ternate and Tidore, the enchanted spice islands.
I wavered between two and three stars for The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade, but in the end, the lively portraits of a host of explorers won me over, despite Charles Corn's awkward, uneven and overblown prose style.
Among the astonishing characters you will meet in this book:
* Francis Xavier, 'a tall, strikingly handsome, extroverted and athletic' aristocrat from the Basque country of Northern Spain. With his mentor, Ignatius Loyola, Xavier helped found a new Catholic order, the Society of Jesus. Beginning in 1540, the charming and intrepid Xavier started on 'a lifetime of journeys that would eventually take him thirty-eight thousand miles...all the way to the Spice Islands at the eastern edge of the known world.'
* Sir Walter Raleigh , explorer and courtier, who turned out for his death on the scaffold 'in a fine satin doublet, black taffeta breeches, a black embroidered waistcoat, ash-colored silk stockings, a ruff band, and a finely worked black velvet cloak....Offering his forgiveness and purse to the headsman, he asked to see the axe and felt the well-honed blade. "This is sharp medicine," he said with a smile before resting his head on the curved block, "but it is a sure cure for all diseases."
* Pierre Poivre , whose early life reads like something straight out of The Count of Monte Cristo. Given his name, it seems that Poivre was fated for greatness in the spice trade. Over the course of several voyages between 1751 and 1767, Poivre successfully transplanted smuggled clove and nutmeg saplings to his plantation on Mauritius. Poivre became a true horticulturalist, growing mangos, avocados, mangosteen, durian and other delights on Mauritius. He was also enough of a visionary to insist that seedlings be distributed far and wide through France's colonial possessions. By the 1790s Zanzibar, Madagascar, Martinique and Grenada all had thriving spice gardens. The Dutch spice monopoly was broken.
Content Rating: G with occasional beheadings.
Entry for Ternate and Tidor, in my Around-the-World challenge, but Indonesia is so vast that I have to give it more than one book :)
Well, he didn't really 'find' it; Chinese traders, and later Moors, had known these places and the treacherous routes to the spice islands for hundreds of years. But Serrao was among the first Europeans to come to know these islands well. Serrao got separated from two other ships in a Portugues armada and, more or less by chance, he ended up on Ternate, one of twin volcanic cones, circled by coral reefs and forested with clove trees--'the richest garden the world had ever known.'
Ternate and Tidore, the enchanted spice islands.
I wavered between two and three stars for The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade, but in the end, the lively portraits of a host of explorers won me over, despite Charles Corn's awkward, uneven and overblown prose style.
Among the astonishing characters you will meet in this book:
* Francis Xavier, 'a tall, strikingly handsome, extroverted and athletic' aristocrat from the Basque country of Northern Spain. With his mentor, Ignatius Loyola, Xavier helped found a new Catholic order, the Society of Jesus. Beginning in 1540, the charming and intrepid Xavier started on 'a lifetime of journeys that would eventually take him thirty-eight thousand miles...all the way to the Spice Islands at the eastern edge of the known world.'
* Sir Walter Raleigh , explorer and courtier, who turned out for his death on the scaffold 'in a fine satin doublet, black taffeta breeches, a black embroidered waistcoat, ash-colored silk stockings, a ruff band, and a finely worked black velvet cloak....Offering his forgiveness and purse to the headsman, he asked to see the axe and felt the well-honed blade. "This is sharp medicine," he said with a smile before resting his head on the curved block, "but it is a sure cure for all diseases."
* Pierre Poivre , whose early life reads like something straight out of The Count of Monte Cristo. Given his name, it seems that Poivre was fated for greatness in the spice trade. Over the course of several voyages between 1751 and 1767, Poivre successfully transplanted smuggled clove and nutmeg saplings to his plantation on Mauritius. Poivre became a true horticulturalist, growing mangos, avocados, mangosteen, durian and other delights on Mauritius. He was also enough of a visionary to insist that seedlings be distributed far and wide through France's colonial possessions. By the 1790s Zanzibar, Madagascar, Martinique and Grenada all had thriving spice gardens. The Dutch spice monopoly was broken.
Content Rating: G with occasional beheadings.
Entry for Ternate and Tidor, in my Around-the-World challenge, but Indonesia is so vast that I have to give it more than one book :)
November 23, 2019
Interesting and engaging history of the conflicts and personalities of the spice trade and occasionally some of the trade itself, this book focused mainly on some of the more interesting people and events (often bloody battles and massacres) associated with trade in the spices from the days of Magellan all the way through the 19th century (the spices in this case for most of the book being the “holy trinity” of spices - cloves, nutmeg, and mace – though later on in the book cinnamon and pepper feature quite a bit or even in the case of pepper dominate the narrative). If you are looking for the natural history of the plants involved, how they are grown and harvested, details on their application culinarily or medicinally (beyond a page or two), you will be disappointed, but if you want to read about how Europeans came to discover the sources of the spices, fought over control of them (both against rival European powers and native groups), and some of the exploits of the often outrageous adventurers, schemers, plotters, and murderers who were deeply involved in the trade, this is the book for you.
The book is divided into three sections after the prologue, with the first part, “Iberian Dreams,” detailing Portuguese conquest of the sources for spices and their conflict with both native powers (such as Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula) and the Spanish. Much of the narrative takes place either in and around Malacca or around the various Spice Islands of the Moluccas (Ternate, Tidore, and the Banda Islands, sources for clove especially). Of the three parts of the book, this one had the least overall details of the spice trade itself and focused the most on the gigantic personalities and conflicts associated with the trade and is filled with battles and a good bit of brutality. The main characters who figure into this part are Ferdinand Magellan (who at times to me seemed only of peripheral interest to a narrative on the spice trade but nevertheless made for interesting reading), his friend and possible cousin Francisco Serrao (who did figure mightily into the spice trade narrative and was instrumental in getting Magellan into the region, a fascinating figure who was regarded as a renegade by his native Portugal and was seen as “a prophet without honor and a turncoat who went native,” becoming without any orders from the King an advisor to a local ruler, the author noting that “anachronism aside, a twentieth-century reader familiar with the work of Joseph Conrad might find something decidedly Conradian about Serrao and his circumstances”), and Francis Xavier, cofounder of the Jesuits and “the Apostle of the East,” very active in all of the lands covered in the book, and as “with Magellan and Serrao, his rendezvous with fate occurred in the Far East, realized in a quest that was dissimilar but parallel to theirs.”
Part II, “Northern Desire,” centered around the conflict between the Dutch and the English for control of the Spice Trade, two nations for much of the narrative at peace at home but “came to loggerheads on the other side of the world,” examples of a “savage, exuberant age,” with much of the book centered again on the Spice Islands (though there a chapter devoted to describing the Amsterdam of this era). A good bit of the section also detailed the rise and fall of the Dutch as a major world power (I liked that and it was interesting) and sadly Dutch massacres and genocide in maintain their control of their empire. Major historical figures given a lot of ink are Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a governor-general of the Dutch East India Company responsible for some rather barbaric actions including clearing whole islands of people and not a few massacres as well as being breathtakingly elitist and racist (even towards his own people) and engaging in slavery (the author stressed again and again how bloody Coen’s tenure was, as he “essentially depopulated” the Banda Islands, with killing thousands, leaving of an original population of 15,000 about a thousand, the remainder killed or fled to other islands), and Pierre Poivre, a Frenchmen who smuggled and cultivated plants outside the East Indies and broke the Dutch monopoly in the late 18th century (a much happier, non-murderous person to read about).
Part II also has a brief, strange, but interesting interlude on Arctic exploration, of trying to find a northern passage north of Eurasia to the Spice Islands (namely Willem Barentsz” three unsuccessful voyages in the 16th century, discovering Bear Island and Spitsbergen, spending a winter trapped by the ice, and later dying of scurvy), these disastrous expeditions the talk of Europe, even influencing Shakespeare (a line in Twelfth Night where Fabian tells Sir Andrew “You are now sailed into the North of my lady’s opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard” references these ill-fated voyages.
Part III, “New England Passion,” focused on the spice trade from Salem, Massachusetts (I had no idea prior to this book that the town was so heavily involved in the spice trade) and various adventures in and around modern Banda Aceh (the northern end of island of Sumatra, source of most if not all the pepper those from Salem bought but also an area filled with pirates, who often apparently were the same people that sold the Americans pepper in the first place), this time the book much more narrowly focused on the pepper trade. Of all the sections, this part had the most overcall coverage of the specifics of the spice trade from funding voyages to acquiring cargoes to making profits. It didn’t have quite the murder, treachery, and massacres of the first two parts, though there were well-described battles (I didn’t know the U.S. Navy sent punitive expeditions on at least two occasions to deal with pirates and bandits). Major personalities include Jonathan Carnes, who made a fortune in the Sumatra pepper trade and became one of America’s first millionaires, and Elias Hasket Derby Sr., who “established for Salem ships the role of supercargo, or traveling business agent,” “was most likely the first American merchant to send ships to sea with coppered bottoms,” and was “the first Salem merchant to dispatch ships to such distant ports as Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Manila.” It was also interesting in the chapter to note the vivid contrast between the Dutch, English, and Portuguese (who came to settle the Spice Islands and Malacca to varying degrees) and the Americans who “were not colonizers, nor were they so tempted to be,” who viewed settling in Sumatra or the Banda Islands as exile and that exile “was anathema” (the author noting that Americans very much settled far in their empire, but that empire was in North America, “a continent of magnificent wilderness stretching from sea to sea that Jefferson believed would take centuries to settle,” as the “empire of the United States lay not in Banda’s fragrant nutmeg groves or Ternate’s clove-scented slopes.”
The book closed with an epilogue where the author visited the various places in Asia described in the book and showing how they are today (the book was published in 1998).
It was interesting to learn just how restricted the product of especially the holy trinity of spices was for centuries. Europeans having to deal with Arab or Venetian middlemen I knew about, but I had no idea that the production area for say cloves was so restricted (“on a sprinkling of islands with a total area of forty square miles”) nor until the mid-eighteenth century Europeans had no little or no idea these plants could be grown elsewhere (and even when they did start to realize this, either failed to properly cultivate the plants or had to deal with the Dutch, who did everything in their power including cutting down entire groves of trees to prevent living plants from leaving their domain).
An enjoyable book, I liked the vivid description of several of the battles, the feel for what the various areas of spice production actually were like, and I was surprised at the fairly good coverage of the various indigenous peoples the Europeans and later the Americans had to deal with in terms of trade and conflict. There is an extensive section on notes and sources, a thorough index, a multi-page timeline, and a good map of the region.
The book is divided into three sections after the prologue, with the first part, “Iberian Dreams,” detailing Portuguese conquest of the sources for spices and their conflict with both native powers (such as Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula) and the Spanish. Much of the narrative takes place either in and around Malacca or around the various Spice Islands of the Moluccas (Ternate, Tidore, and the Banda Islands, sources for clove especially). Of the three parts of the book, this one had the least overall details of the spice trade itself and focused the most on the gigantic personalities and conflicts associated with the trade and is filled with battles and a good bit of brutality. The main characters who figure into this part are Ferdinand Magellan (who at times to me seemed only of peripheral interest to a narrative on the spice trade but nevertheless made for interesting reading), his friend and possible cousin Francisco Serrao (who did figure mightily into the spice trade narrative and was instrumental in getting Magellan into the region, a fascinating figure who was regarded as a renegade by his native Portugal and was seen as “a prophet without honor and a turncoat who went native,” becoming without any orders from the King an advisor to a local ruler, the author noting that “anachronism aside, a twentieth-century reader familiar with the work of Joseph Conrad might find something decidedly Conradian about Serrao and his circumstances”), and Francis Xavier, cofounder of the Jesuits and “the Apostle of the East,” very active in all of the lands covered in the book, and as “with Magellan and Serrao, his rendezvous with fate occurred in the Far East, realized in a quest that was dissimilar but parallel to theirs.”
Part II, “Northern Desire,” centered around the conflict between the Dutch and the English for control of the Spice Trade, two nations for much of the narrative at peace at home but “came to loggerheads on the other side of the world,” examples of a “savage, exuberant age,” with much of the book centered again on the Spice Islands (though there a chapter devoted to describing the Amsterdam of this era). A good bit of the section also detailed the rise and fall of the Dutch as a major world power (I liked that and it was interesting) and sadly Dutch massacres and genocide in maintain their control of their empire. Major historical figures given a lot of ink are Jan Pieterszoon Coen, a governor-general of the Dutch East India Company responsible for some rather barbaric actions including clearing whole islands of people and not a few massacres as well as being breathtakingly elitist and racist (even towards his own people) and engaging in slavery (the author stressed again and again how bloody Coen’s tenure was, as he “essentially depopulated” the Banda Islands, with killing thousands, leaving of an original population of 15,000 about a thousand, the remainder killed or fled to other islands), and Pierre Poivre, a Frenchmen who smuggled and cultivated plants outside the East Indies and broke the Dutch monopoly in the late 18th century (a much happier, non-murderous person to read about).
Part II also has a brief, strange, but interesting interlude on Arctic exploration, of trying to find a northern passage north of Eurasia to the Spice Islands (namely Willem Barentsz” three unsuccessful voyages in the 16th century, discovering Bear Island and Spitsbergen, spending a winter trapped by the ice, and later dying of scurvy), these disastrous expeditions the talk of Europe, even influencing Shakespeare (a line in Twelfth Night where Fabian tells Sir Andrew “You are now sailed into the North of my lady’s opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard” references these ill-fated voyages.
Part III, “New England Passion,” focused on the spice trade from Salem, Massachusetts (I had no idea prior to this book that the town was so heavily involved in the spice trade) and various adventures in and around modern Banda Aceh (the northern end of island of Sumatra, source of most if not all the pepper those from Salem bought but also an area filled with pirates, who often apparently were the same people that sold the Americans pepper in the first place), this time the book much more narrowly focused on the pepper trade. Of all the sections, this part had the most overcall coverage of the specifics of the spice trade from funding voyages to acquiring cargoes to making profits. It didn’t have quite the murder, treachery, and massacres of the first two parts, though there were well-described battles (I didn’t know the U.S. Navy sent punitive expeditions on at least two occasions to deal with pirates and bandits). Major personalities include Jonathan Carnes, who made a fortune in the Sumatra pepper trade and became one of America’s first millionaires, and Elias Hasket Derby Sr., who “established for Salem ships the role of supercargo, or traveling business agent,” “was most likely the first American merchant to send ships to sea with coppered bottoms,” and was “the first Salem merchant to dispatch ships to such distant ports as Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Manila.” It was also interesting in the chapter to note the vivid contrast between the Dutch, English, and Portuguese (who came to settle the Spice Islands and Malacca to varying degrees) and the Americans who “were not colonizers, nor were they so tempted to be,” who viewed settling in Sumatra or the Banda Islands as exile and that exile “was anathema” (the author noting that Americans very much settled far in their empire, but that empire was in North America, “a continent of magnificent wilderness stretching from sea to sea that Jefferson believed would take centuries to settle,” as the “empire of the United States lay not in Banda’s fragrant nutmeg groves or Ternate’s clove-scented slopes.”
The book closed with an epilogue where the author visited the various places in Asia described in the book and showing how they are today (the book was published in 1998).
It was interesting to learn just how restricted the product of especially the holy trinity of spices was for centuries. Europeans having to deal with Arab or Venetian middlemen I knew about, but I had no idea that the production area for say cloves was so restricted (“on a sprinkling of islands with a total area of forty square miles”) nor until the mid-eighteenth century Europeans had no little or no idea these plants could be grown elsewhere (and even when they did start to realize this, either failed to properly cultivate the plants or had to deal with the Dutch, who did everything in their power including cutting down entire groves of trees to prevent living plants from leaving their domain).
An enjoyable book, I liked the vivid description of several of the battles, the feel for what the various areas of spice production actually were like, and I was surprised at the fairly good coverage of the various indigenous peoples the Europeans and later the Americans had to deal with in terms of trade and conflict. There is an extensive section on notes and sources, a thorough index, a multi-page timeline, and a good map of the region.
August 1, 2016
Corn manages to fit a lot more than the spice trade into the book. I found it very interesting and informative. Why was the spice trade as big as it was (and how big was it)? When and why did it fade? From the first discoveries of the voyages of Europeans to early America, Corn shows you the breadth. He also goes into detail about particular people and their roles in the trade.
May 4, 2021
I made it halfway through this book. It really just got boring. It has some interesting facts and ocsassionally some entertaining stories, but overall it was just not very engaging. I may try it again later.
March 23, 2018
Decent history of the spice trade in Southeast Asia, but some of the writing is a bit pretentious and overwrought.
August 25, 2022
Excellent read - loved it! I learned about this book from Peter FitzSimons book Batavia. The Scents of Eden really helped me finally understand the Spice Trade and the Dutch East India Company much better. I've read lots of "seafaring" books over the years (mostly British), and they constantly refer to "Indiamen" with a hint of awe/untouchability. Now I know why.
I also realize that I know I've read a good book when I end up scouring the Notes for future reading ideas, or insights behind the authors writing. I definitely did that with The Scents of Eden!
I also realize that I know I've read a good book when I end up scouring the Notes for future reading ideas, or insights behind the authors writing. I definitely did that with The Scents of Eden!
April 17, 2012
I found Charles Corn's "Scents of Eden" to be a comprehensive scholarly readable examination of trade and commerce in Southeast Asia's spice islands. The Moluccas are a legendary archipelago or series of remote islands west of New Guinea that grow the "holy trinity" of spices, which are, nutmeg, cloves, and mace. The most noteworthy tiny island group are the Bandas. Run is an island where nutmeg is indigenous. More on that later. The timeline in the front of the book is a useful reference of the region's long history. Chinese traders explored the islands before Christ was born. Arab traders brought Islam during the Middle Ages. The Portuguese brought Christianity in the 1600's and the English and Dutch were soon to follow. The Dutch East India Company ruled the region in trade throughout the 1600's and 1700's and exported hundreds of millions of pounds of spices back to Holland bringing immense wealth to Amsterdam. The English ceded the island of Run to the Dutch in exchange for the island of Manhattan, as a result of the Peace of Breda in 1667. Corn writes a chapter on the Salem traders of Massachusetts voyaging to Sumatra for pepper. This spice trade created tremendous wealth in the New England port city in the early days of America's young republic. In wrap-up, Corn gives the reader a fascinating look at the history of the spice trade.
October 10, 2015
A collection of narratives about the West's exploitation of the spice trade from the area known today as Indonesia (16th-19th century). Spice was one of the most valuable trade item those days, and successive Western nations struggled to exploit its trade. The book is divided to 3 parts according to the "protagonist" Western nations in its set of stories (the Spanish and the Portuguese, then the Dutch and the English, and then Americans out of Massachusetts).
The stories are quite entertaining, depicting historical events and also the protagonists' points of view. However, the coverage seems unbalanced, all of the main characters are European/American, and it very rarely covers the other participants point of views (e.g. the native people or other traders such as the Arabs and the Chinese). The native characters are simplistically depicted, mostly as either weak or deceptive.
The stories are quite entertaining, depicting historical events and also the protagonists' points of view. However, the coverage seems unbalanced, all of the main characters are European/American, and it very rarely covers the other participants point of views (e.g. the native people or other traders such as the Arabs and the Chinese). The native characters are simplistically depicted, mostly as either weak or deceptive.
August 13, 2007
It's hard to believe, but there was a time when pepper was more valuable than gold. Europe craved the novelty of new spices, and explorers from many different countries set out to make their fortunes in the spice trade. Corn relates the history of the spice islands and those who discovered and exploited them in all of their cruel and exciting glory.
July 17, 2008
The history of the spice trade didn't exactly sound very fascinating to me at first, but this book is a great read for anyone who loves history. It has high seas adventure, mutiny, intrigue, basically the incredibly interesting rise and fall of power over the spice trade and how it influenced Europe's own power and control over the rest of the world. Read it!
May 19, 2012
Fascinating subject matter. Writing style is a little dry at times, and a little rushed at other times. I often felt lost as to what era or country the author was describing. And the final few chapters seemed to be quite hurried. Still, worth a read if you are interested in spices, world history, or economics.
December 20, 2012
I very much enjoyed this book. It was entertaining and informative and so descriptive I felt like I was on the Spice Islands. The history was well researched and presented in an approachable and entertaining matter. I could feel the author's passion for the topic and it drew me in. Highly recommended.
February 10, 2015
A decent narrative of the spice trade but with some clumsy attempts at poetic-sounding language which end up just sounding flat and over-the-top. Some of the peripheral historical references sound a bit off to me and then the book starts to get unnecessarily detailed when we get to America with the spices coming into Salem. But nothing egregious here - an enjoyable read for the most part.
May 8, 2007
Well paced but historically accurate narrative of the spice trade. Well researched and comprehensive.
July 12, 2009
This is a terrific story-narrative of early 16th-century Euro spice trade in the tiny islands of Indonesia. Charles Corn is worth checking out.
November 4, 2009
The language of this at times almost poetic, not dry, love of the story-teller. It took me on a fascinating voyage through history, back to the islands.
December 31, 2015
perhaps the best book I have read
August 12, 2016
A well written introduction to the era of the spice trade, a subject which has not received much attention from historians.
June 8, 2008
Interesting history of European colonization of the spice islands.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews