‘Spice’ by Roger Crowley review

As we slide towards Earth’s sixth extinction event and look covetously towards planets endowed with precious rare metals, Roger Crowley’s new book should be required reading for those commanding future conquests of resource extraction. Written with the verve of a detective novel, Crowley charts a 16th-century version of the ‘moon shot’ to the fabled ‘Spice Islands’ of the Moluccas.

Then the sole known source of cloves, nutmeg, mace and sandalwood, trading profits on these rare but easily portable commodities could reach a thousand per cent. Such profits were the stuff of dreams, spawning a frenzy of map-making, schools of navigation, travel accounts, commercial espionage, state-sponsored exploration and oversight bodies, with Seville’s Casa de la Contratación de las Indias (established in 1503) leading the way. It would not last, but for a moment in the 16th century, buoyed by the silver of the New World, it would catapult Spain to superpower status.

Crowley’s book spans an action-packed 60 years, stretching from the Portuguese conquest of Malacca (Melaka) on 15 August 1511 to the Spanish conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi’s capture of Manila on 24 June 1571. Both provided secure bases for the Iberians in the Malay world and the Philippines thus ensuring them a temporary global advantage: ‘Whoever is Lord of Melaka has his hand on the throat of Venice’, as the astute Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires put it. The fact that both victories occurred on major Catholic feast days – the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St John the Baptist’s Day respectively – was not lost on the pious Iberians.

This combination of late medieval piety and early modern scientific enquiry provided the twin poles for the Iberian voyages of exploration. It led to some almost insane acts of bravery (and stupidity) culminating in Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of South America and the discovery of his eponymous strait, followed by his suicidal assault on the Cebuano chief, Lapulapu, where the would-be conquistador waded ashore at dawn across half a kilometre of shallow sea in heavy plate armour with just 49 similarly clad Iberians to confront 1,500 warriors with poison-tipped arrows and fire-hardened stakes.

And what was the point of all this violence and bravado? Just a century earlier, the Chinese admiral Zheng He had navigated the same archipelagic seas in seven great voyages of trade and tribute-collection. His junk fleets, which sailed through Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa, were vast: the initial voyage in 1405 saw no less than 317 ships and 28,000 crewmen setting out from Suzhou. There was no threat here of the scurvy which decimated European ships until well into the early 19th century; the admiral’s massive vessels were floating vegetable gardens. No danger, either, of his war junks foundering at sea like the Toledo boring-worm ridden Iberian galleons, because the Chinese shipwrights had mastered the art of watertight compartments and bulkheads, a technique only adopted by the Royal Navy in the late 1790s following Sir Samuel Bentham’s study of Chinese junk construction in Russian Siberia. The Iberian navigational expeditions were picayune and woefully under-resourced by comparison.

Yet despite their size and fire power, there was hardly a hint of violence in Zheng He’s voyages. Instead, they produced great works of descriptive literature such as the Chinese Muslim interpreter Ma Huan’s Overall Survey the Ocean’s Shores (1433), a personal observation of 20 countries from Champa (southern Vietnam) in the east to Mecca in the west. At the same time, great temple complexes – Sam Poo Kong in Semarang, for example – were dedicated to the admiral’s memory and ancestral links with his sailors were boasted of by at least one of Indonesia’s subsequent presidents, Abdurrahman Wahid, who claimed descent from one of Zheng He’s deck hands.

When one turns to the Iberians – and the British and Dutch who followed them – what does one find? A dismal default setting of violence. Starting with Afonso de Albuquerque’s sack of Malacca, a city six times larger than Henry VII’s London, and ending with Robert Mansergh’s street-by-street reduction of Indonesia’s second city, Surabaya, in November 1945, the passage of the Europeans in Southeast Asia is written in blood.

Crowley, to his credit, pulls no punches. We encounter the remnants of Garcia Jofre de Loaísa’s disastrous 1525 expedition, with suppurating gums and dysentery-drenched breeches, still firing at their enemies in the Moluccan microwars between the two Iberian powers and their local supporters. ‘If I had to record all the encounters we had with the Portuguese and their Indian allies and the destruction we wreaked on the settlements of [the latter] there would never be an end to it’ noted the Spanish explorer Andrés de Urdaneta.

In this litany of gunfire, bloodshed and double-crossing, there are few shards of light. Urdaneta, who would later become an Augustinian friar, had lived by his wits in the Moluccas for eight years and spoke many local languages. He would also, by dint of his meticulous navigational skills, pioneer the easterly route back across the Pacific Ocean from the Philippines to Acapulco in Mexico, thus establishing the annual Manila galleon trade route. This lasted 250 years until 1815. Known as ‘the Protector of the Indians’, Urdaneta’s humanitarian record is matched by Fray Martín de Rada, the ‘apostle of the Christian faith in Cebu’ who became the first Augustinian regional superior in the Philippines. De Rada’s warning to his captain-general and fellow Basque (an ethnicity which gets a good press in Crowley’s pages), Legazpi, that ‘any conquest in these islands by force of arms would be unjust, even if there was good reason for doing so’ should stand as an epitaph for what might have been had the Iberians come to Southeast Asia in peace – as Zheng He had done a century and a half earlier.

• Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World
  Roger Crowley
  Yale University Press, 320pp, £20
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Peter Carey is Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College, Oxford and former Adjunct Professor in Humanities at the University of Indonesia.