PEPPER, MAKER AND BREAKER OF NATIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 134, 8 June 1935, Page 25

PEPPER, MAKER AND BREAKER OF NATIONS

Pepper is in the news again, as it has been for hundreds of years. It is reported that "Mincing Lane is uneasy" because the new crop from the East Indies is practically unsaleable. That would have been regarded as "hot news" by our ancestors, who had to pay heavily for their pepper, says a writer in the "News-Chronicle." And they wanted it, too, the hotter the better. For in those far-off medieval days, when fare was plain and meal and salted meat formed an unpalatable diet, "pepper and spice and all that's nice" were much in demand.

The demand kept the price up, so that pepper and other spices were reserved for the rich and the epicures; the poor could not afford pepper in the good old days.

One reason for the high price was that pepper came from the Indies, and the route to Europe from the Indies was a long and difficult one, as Ser Marco Polo attested.

There was no Suez Canal to begin with, and the result was that the overland caravans from the mystic East took years and years to arrive with their precious burdens. They had to traverse India, Baluchistan, Persia, Asia Minor, and other strange and unknown countries until, after many delays and perils, the precious pepper arrived at the great European entrepot of Venice.

In those days Venice was the Queen of the Seas; all trade went to and from Venice, which was the most powerful State in Europe. Her power rested chiefly on the fact that it was the European market for pepper, of which she had the monoply. Venice decided the price of pepper, as Mincing Lane decides it today.

The question was how to get over this monopoly, and Portugal solved the problem by finding a new route to the pepper markets of the East.

That doughty navigator, Vasco da Gama, found his way round the Cape and then across the Indian Ocean to Calicut, where he found tons of pepp.er and other spices at ridiculously

low prices compared with the Venetian rates. He brought his ships back to the Tagus laden with pepper, and thereafter Lisbon, not Venice, became the pepper market of Western Europe. Portugal flourished exceedingly for 100 years. But the Dutch, who were pretty good seamen, did not see why Portugal should have a monopoly of this trade, so the Dutchmen sent out their styps and established a complete control over the East Indies and finally pushed the Portuguese out of it altogether. Incidentally, when the Dutch ships were running to the East for Batavia and Malacca in search of the pepper markets, some of them overshot the mark.

The wind bowled them on and they struck a new coast which they called "New Holland," so that you may say that the search for,pepper ended in the discovery of Australia. And then the English, seeing that the Dutch were on a good thing, formed the East India Company and gradually they pushed out the Dutch and finally got control of the whole Indian Ocean, leaving the Dutch to pick up the pieces in the shape of Java and Sumatra, while even today the Portuguese have a few odds and ends in British India, like Goa and Div, leftovers from the days of Vasco da Gama.

In the course of years, the pepper centre moved from Calicut to Malacca and then to Singapore, where it remains now—all British.

This insignificant seed, the peppercorn, which has become a symbol of "no value," has been the cause of the rise and fall of great Powers.

When Venice lost the pepper market she declined, and in turn was followed by Portugal and Holland. Pepper was primarily responsible for the discovery of the'sea route round the Cape of Good Hope, and for the opening up of trade between East and West, and pepper was responsible for the fact that on maps of Australia today we read such names as Dirk Hartog Island, the Leeuwin, and Tasmania,