The Triumph of Seeds (21 page)

In the fifteenth century, spices reached Europe only after passing through so many intermediaries, along such a complex network of Asian and Arab trade routes, that people on the receiving end saw only the finished products, with little hint of how or where they grew. Popular myths suggested looking for flaming trees guarded by serpents, examining the sticks in Arabian bird nests, or harvesting twigs and berries from Paradise itself. Marco Polo, at least, attributed spices to real plants growing in real places: India and the Moluccas. But those were little more than names in a story to people back home—people didn’t understand their geography, let alone their flora. Whenever Christopher Columbus encountered a new plant, he must have sniffed its bark for hints of cinnamon, tasted the flower buds hoping for cloves, and scratched at a root in search of ginger. Then he would have turned his attention to its seeds, home to the most valuable spices of the day—nutmeg, mace, and pepper.
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F
IGURE
9.1.  Christopher Columbus scoured the New World for any sign of Asian spices, filling the logbook from his first voyage with more than 250 botanical descriptions. While nutmeg, mace, and black pepper eluded him, he did bring home the tasty seeds of allspice and chili peppers.
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Scholars often compare the historical craving for spices to the modern appetite for petroleum. Both situations combined limited supply with virtually limitless demand, creating commodities that anchored the global economy. But where oil reserves already show signs of dwindling, the harvest of spices remained constant and even increased, extending their reign for centuries. Tracing that story reads like a history of commerce, exploration, and civilization itself. In ancient Egypt, for example, peppercorns from India’s Malabar Coast somehow made their way up the nostrils of dead pharaohs—they were the royal embalmers’ most prized preservative. When Rome found itself surrounded by Visigoths in
AD
408, the barbarians demanded 3,000 pounds of pepper as part of their ransom to end the siege. King Charlemagne issued a decree in 795 that called for cumin, caraway, coriander, mustard, and a host of other flavorful seeds to be grown in gardens throughout the Frankish Empire. Paying feudal tithes with spices became common during the Middle Ages, and the practice still persists: when the current Duke of Cornwall (alternatively known as the Prince of Wales), England’s Prince Charles, officially accepted his title in 1973, he was presented with a pound each of pepper and cumin.

Some of the most telling spice statistics of all, however, boil down to simple economics. In fact, they sound like the prospectus for a stock offering. During its first fifty years, the Dutch East India Company dominated world trade in nutmeg, mace, pepper, and cloves, experiencing one of the greatest eras of profit in the history of business. Gross margins never dipped below 300 percent, and the company paid lavish dividends, both in cash and in spices. Original shareholders who held on to their stock enjoyed average annual returns above 27 percent for forty-six years, a rate that would have turned a modest $5,000 investment into a fortune of more than
$2.5 billion over that time. (For comparison, Exxon Mobil—currently the world’s most profitable enterprise—earns total returns of around 8 percent a year.) With that kind of money at stake, it’s no wonder the Dutch happily gave Manhattan to the British in 1674 in exchange for a tiny, nutmeg-producing island in Malaysia. And it’s not surprising, either, to learn that one of the only pirate chests ever recovered—buried by Captain William Kidd in 1699—contained not gold or silver, but a few bolts of fancy cloth and a bale of nutmeg and cloves.

In terms of exploration, however, nothing puts Christopher Columbus’s spice worries in better context than the results of a voyage only slightly less famous than his own. When Ferdinand Magellan set sail a quarter century after Columbus, he promised his backers the same result: a direct western trade route to the Spice Islands. Three years later, four of his five ships were lost and Magellan was dead, along with his second-in-command, third-in-command, fourth-in-command, fifth-in-command, and over two hundred crewmembers. Yet when eighteen survivors limped into Seville on the sole remaining vessel in 1522, they had more to show for their trouble than a global circumnavigation. Their small cargo included nutmeg, mace, cloves, and cinnamon from the Malaccan island of Ternate. When sold, the spices brought in more than enough cash to pay for the lost ships and compensate the families of the deceased, turning the journey into one of discovery
and
profit. Without finding spices, Christopher Columbus would never manage that feat.

History remembers Columbus for his epoch-making first trip across the Atlantic and for helping usher in a new era of exploration and conquest. But people often gloss over the fact that he returned to the New World three more times, searching in vain for spices, gold, or other valuable commodities. On the second voyage, he found every member of his new colony on Hispaniola murdered
by natives. He returned from the third journey in chains, accused of tyranny, and he ended the fourth expedition shipwrecked on Jamaica for more than a year. As one biographer put it, “money was continually being spent on ships and supplies; where was the return for it? . . . What about the Land of Spices? . . . To the most impartial eyes it began to appear as though Columbus were either an
impostor or a fool.” While others suspected he’d found something new, the admiral stuck to his claim that the Caribbean Islands and surrounding coastlines were indeed parts of Asia, and that spices—not to mention Japan, China, and India—would
turn up in time. But though Columbus would go to his grave without knowing what continent he’d discovered, one thing is certain: he knew he’d found the wrong pepper.

“There is also much
aji
, which is their pepper and is worth more than our pepper,” he wrote, after dining with the locals on Hispaniola. Though he’d never seen black pepper growing, the difference in flavor and pungency, not to mention the shape and color of the seeds and fruits, told him that this spice was different. His claim about its value can be chalked up as good old-fashioned spin-doctoring. In the waning days of that first voyage, he needed to put the best face on whatever seeds, plants, and scraps of gold he’d cobbled together for a cargo. But in retrospect, Columbus’s words seem prophetic, because by most measures the chili peppers he brought back across the Atlantic have gone on to become the most popular spice in the world.

Dried and ground or added whole, the fruits and seeds of
Capsicum
chili peppers now flavor everything from Thai curries to Hungarian goulash to African groundnut stew. From four wild species native to the New World, over 2,000 cultivars have been developed, ranging in spiciness from the mildest paprika to the fieriest habañero and beyond. (Bell peppers also come from this stock, but are bred for size and sweetness instead of pungency.) One in four people around the world eat chili peppers daily, and in a twist that might have pleased the frustrated admiral, they’ve replaced black
pepper as the hot spice of choice throughout India and Southeast Asia. He may have failed to reach the Spice Islands, but in the end, he did manage to change their spices.

In fact, Columbus and his chili peppers ultimately changed the whole spice industry. By transporting the seeds across an ocean, he showed that chili plants were like any other crop. Given the right conditions, they could flourish far outside their native range. Once this idea took hold, the trend was unstoppable. By the end of the eighteenth century, nutmeg had moved to Grenada, cloves and cinnamon had shown up in Zanzibar, and people had started planting black pepper wherever a tropical vine could climb a tree stump. Cheap product flooded the market, prices plummeted, and spices lost their exotic cachet. Though it remained a valuable enterprise, the spice trade never again sparked wars, founded empires, or inspired voyages of discovery. But for centuries, the lust for spices shaped history, and seeds lay at the heart of it. Seeds still dominate the contents of a typical grocery-store spice aisle, but though people pinch, grind, dash, and otherwise consume them every day, few consider the biology behind that simple act. Why are spices spicy? As it happens, no story answers that question more completely than the story of chilies, the peppers of Columbus.

“It all comes down to seed production,” Noelle Machnicki told me, and she ought to know. As the author of a doctoral dissertation titled “How the Chili Got Its Spice,” Noelle has spent more time thinking about hot peppers than just about anyone. When I caught up with her, she’d recently defended her thesis and was busy holding down two different jobs at different universities in different cities. “I’m sort of living a double life right now,” she admitted wearily, sipping from a large coffee. Noelle has dark hair, dark eyebrows, and an expressive face that can shift from wariness to warmth in an instant. When the conversation turned to chilies, all signs of fatigue disappeared and she suddenly spoke with the enthusiasm of someone who can’t wait to tell you a secret. Her work caps fifteen years of research by the “Chili Team” at the University of Washington’s Tewksbury Lab. Taken together, their research papers epitomize how science is supposed to function: questions leading to insights, leading to new questions, until a fascinating drama lies revealed. For Noelle, it all started with a love of mushrooms.

F
IGURE
9.2.  Chili pepper (
Capsicum
sp.). The thousands of varieties of domestic chili peppers descend from four species native to South America. In the wild, their pungency repels seed-killing fungi as well as rodents and other mammals that can’t take the heat. I
LLUSTRATION
© 2014
BY
S
UZANNE
O
LIVE
.

“I’m basically a mycologist,” she said, and explained how the prolific toadstools of the rainy Pacific Northwest had helped draw her from her home near Chicago. She studied them on the forested campus of Washington’s Evergreen State College, and then entered graduate school to pursue a particular passion. “I’m fascinated by how fungi interact with plants,” she told me—how they exchange nutrients with roots in the soil and show up everywhere from bark
to flowers to the insides of leaves. So when biology professor Joshua Tewksbury asked her to help identify a fungus growing on wild chili-pepper seeds, she was all ears. At the time, Tewksbury had already followed his research on chilies from the American Southwest to the Chaco region of Bolivia, where he’d discovered a species that varied in pungency from completely mild in dry habitats to what Noelle described as “definitely hotter than Tabasco” in wet ones. Intermediate places had the two forms growing side by side, and the only way to tell the difference was to taste them—sometimes hundreds in a day. Luckily for Tewksbury, he’d found the ideal collaborator: a mycologist who liked spicy foods. “I do tolerate chilies better than the average person,” she allowed. But when I pressed the question, she laughed, and confessed to keeping a bottle of hot sauce in her desk drawer at work. “Josh does too!” she added.

The Bolivian chilies presented a rare opportunity. They seemed to preserve that key moment in time when pungency was just evolving. “We know the first chilies weren’t hot,” Noelle said firmly, and explained that all modern species, no matter how spicy, descended from a mild common ancestor. Whatever ecological dilemma caused that distinctive hotness to evolve appeared to be ongoing in Bolivia, where some chilies had made the switch and some hadn’t. If Noelle and the rest of the team could figure out what was going on, they would indeed know how, and why, the chili got its spice. Chemically, the answer was already in the bag.