The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [64]
Merchants from all over the Indian Ocean area and even further afield came to Melaka to buy spices and other products. The extensive trade to China was handled by Chinese merchants, and that to the west by a host of traders, many of them Muslims from a wide range of homelands. The dominant group may well have been those from Gujarat. A famous contemporary description, by the apothecary Tomé Pires, claimed that 'Malacca cannot live without Cambay, nor Cambay without Malacca, if they are to be very rich and prosperous.' He also pointed to the route the spices took after Melaka, for he pointed out that 'Cambay [sc. Gujarat] chiefly stretches out two arms, with her right arm she reaches out towards Aden and with the other toward Malacca, as the most important places to sail to'.69 The usual route was for the spices and other products to travel to Calicut, from where they were taken either north to Gujarat and the great markets of northern India, or across the Arabian Sea to the Gulf and the Red Sea, from where they were distributed all over the Middle East and ottoman Turkey. Some of these spices in turn went through Egypt to Alexandria, where Italian merchants, especially Venetians, bought them for sale in Europe.
In the fifteenth century, and later, most Asian spices were consumed by Asians. India alone consumed twice as many fine spices as Europe. Of the total Asian spice production in 1500, Europe took at most one-quarter. China was a huge consumer of pepper, taking around 75 per cent of total southeast Asian production. Marco Polo wrote of Zayton [Quanzhou], which is
frequented by all the ships of India, which bring thither spicery and all other kinds of costly wares.... And I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for Christendom, there come a hundred such, aye and more too, to this haven of Zayton; for it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce.
Later, a little more soberly, he claimed that for one ship that took spices to the west, to Aden and on to Alexandria, ten went north to China.70 Roderich Ptak has done some intriguing estimates for the (admittedly rather minor) clove trade. Around 1500, total production may have been 6,000 bahars, (a bahar is about 210 kg) of which 5,000 went to Melaka, and of this 60–70 per cent was taken to the west by Gujaratis. Europe took about 300 bahars, or a mere 5 per cent of the total.71
Asian trade in spices was a well-integrated one. For example, the great trade centre of Melaka and the great production centres in the Malukus both lived on imported food. Many other products, notably cloths from India, were woven in to the woof and warp of this trade. The profits could be very high, despite taxes in some trans-shipment areas and frequent losses from storm and shipwreck. In the fifteenth century a kilo of pepper cost 1–2 grammes of silver at the production point, 10–14 in Alexandria, 14–18 in Venice, and 20–30 for the European consumer. But costs and taxes were high, so the Venetians, the main European traders, made a profit of only about 40 per cent. There were indeed huge margins: early in the sixteenth century traders made 400 per cent profit taking pepper from Melaka to China. In Calicut mace cost twelve or fifteen times the cost of production in the Banda Islands, and nutmeg thirty times.
There was a range of other high-value products traded over long distances. One example is ambergris, a concretion in the intestine of the sperm whale which is grey at first, and develops a fine smell rather like musk after it changes