Pepper

Assembled from 10 blocks · 2 evidence · 8 related

1. Story
2. The cargo that paid for the Cape route, and the reason a European crown would fund a six-month voyage with a mortality rate that would close any modern enterprise. Black pepper is the dried fruit of Piper nigrum, grown principally on the Malabar coast of south-west India and in Sumatra, and its value came from a combination that is easy to state and was impossible to replicate: it grew in a limited tropical zone, kept indefinitely once dried, occupied little space for its price, and was wanted in bulk across Europe. Before 1500 it reached Europe through Indian Ocean, Red Sea and Mediterranean intermediaries, with each transfer taking a margin; the Portuguese proposition was simply to remove the intermediaries by carrying it themselves. What that proposition understated is that removing intermediaries from an existing, well-capitalised, thousand-year-old trading system requires either their consent or their coercion, and the Estado da Índia chose the second.
3. Knowledge
4. Pepper
5. Connections
6. The Cape route (Carreira da Índia)
7. Vasco da Gama reaches Calicut
8. Evidence
9. The standard single-volume account of Portuguese expansion: Ceuta, the African coast, the Cape route, the carreira da Índia, the Estado da Índia and the institutions that ran them. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. Boxer is a mid-twentieth-century imperial history and its framing has been substantially revised by later work, particularly on Asian agency and on the limits of Portuguese control; this pack uses it for structure, not for interpretation.
10. Supports the dates and course of the first Cape-route voyage to India and the reception at Calicut. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session. The dates 8 July 1497 and 20 May 1498 are given from the author's knowledge of the standard editions. The Roteiro's authorship is unknown and its account is one-sided.