Pepper

node · earth · Malabar coast and Sumatra; sold across Europe

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.