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By Root 383 0

Roman times, they had never been available in any quantity and could only be afforded by the rich. To get as far north as the Dutch Republic, they had to travel enormous distances. The annual harvest was first carried in small boats and on the backs of animals to the great trading ports of China, Indonesia, and the Coromandel Coast, where merchants from Asia, Persia, and Arabia paid good prices for it. From there the spice road headed west and north, eventually terminating in the Italian quarter of Constantinople. Venetian and Genoan skippers then carried the precious spices west, until at last they reached the markets of Italy, then France and Spain, and—finally—the cities of the United Provinces, where they were used to flavor roasts and stews, turned into medicines, and valued as preservatives. The whole voyage from Asian tree to European table took the best part of two years, and until the middle of the fifteenth century the merchants of the West had no real control over either the supply of spices or their price, which in the course of the long journey could increase a hundredfold.

It was only in 1498, when men from Portugal first rounded Africa and found their way to the Indian coast, that Europeans gained direct access to the markets of the East. For another century, the Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, the Spaniards explored the archipelagos that stretched from Sumatra to the Philippines and produced the spice so greatly coveted at home. They kept their hard-won knowledge of the sea routes secret, reserving for themselves the lucrative new trade with the Indies. Profits from these ventures flowed into the coffers of the kings of Portugal and Spain.

By Jeronimus’s day, however, fierce competition from the Netherlands and England had robbed Iberia of its monopoly. The Dutch and English East India Companies now controlled most of the markets of the East and shipped their wares home to London and the seaports of the United Provinces. Thousands of sacks of spices, to which were added tons of precious metals, porcelain, and cotton, were unloaded in the warehouses of these companies each year, and the wealth generated by their sale defied belief. The ships that thronged the busy roadsteads north of Amsterdam went halfway round the world to sail home full of spice; the closely guarded warehouses grouped along the wharves bulged with it; and the auction houses and the grocers’ shops along the grander streets sold it, all at profits so enormous that men traveled to the town from all over Europe in the hope of sharing in them. The city had become a place where a man’s readiness to chance a long voyage east was more important than his past, and where one or two successful speculations were all it took to restore a fortune. These were the qualities that attracted Jeronimus Cornelisz.

Dutch interest in the Indies dated to the 1590s, when merchant immigrants from the south began to have an impact on the city’s trade. During this decade herring, salt, and timber became less significant to Amsterdam than the more valuable commodities of the rich trades. Fleets were fitted out and dispatched north and west in search of all manner of luxury goods. Dutch merchants sailed to Muscovy to buy up furs, whale oil, and caviar, and to the Americas for sugar and silver. But it was clear, even at this early date, that the riches of the East would far surpass them all.

The Indies trade was at this time still in the hands of Portugal and Spain, whose domination of the Spiceries had been ratified a hundred years earlier by the so-called Treaty of Tordesillas. This agreement, sponsored by Pope Alexander VI, was signed in 1494, and under its terms Portugal and Spain agreed to split the world between them. The treaty assigned to Spain all undiscovered territories to the west of a line of longitude that ran from pole to pole a few hundred miles to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, and to Portugal all new lands to the east. In this way the Spaniards gained a formal title to the Americas and the Portuguese the right to exploit the Indies. Between