The Spice Route

Some of the world's most consequential voyages were made for the sake of flavor. For two thousand years, pepper from India, cinnamon from Sri Lanka, and cloves and nutmeg from a few small islands in eastern Indonesia traveled by sea and caravan to the tables of Rome, Cairo, and Venice, gaining value at every port. The prices those spices fetched in Europe sent Columbus west and Vasco da Gama around Africa, and they led the Portuguese, Dutch, and English to fight for control of islands most Europeans could not have found on a map. The Spice Route overlaps the Maritime Silk Road, but its story is the one that pulled Europe into Asia.

The trade began at its sources. Cloves grew only on a few islands of the northern Moluccas, among them Ternate and Tidore, and nutmeg and mace came almost entirely from the tiny Banda Islands. Pepper came from the Malabar Coast of southwest India, and the finest cinnamon from Sri Lanka. From the islands, cargoes moved west through the Java Sea and the Strait of Malacca, across the Bay of Bengal to Indian ports such as Calicut, then over the Arabian Sea. One branch ran up the Red Sea to Egypt and Alexandria, the other through the Strait of Hormuz to Basra and overland to the Levant, where Venetian and Genoese ships carried the spices into Europe.

Roman ships used the monsoon to sail from Egypt's Red Sea ports to the Indian port of Muziris, and Pliny the Elder complained of the gold flowing east. Arab, Persian, Gujarati, Malay, and Chinese merchants later ran the Indian Ocean legs, and Venice grew rich on the final one. Vasco da Gama's arrival at Calicut in 1498 opened a direct sea route around the Cape of Good Hope. Portugal seized Malacca in 1511, and the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, conquered the Banda Islands in 1621, killing or deporting most of their people, to monopolize nutmeg. Under the 1667 Treaty of Breda, England kept Manhattan and the Dutch kept the Banda island of Run. The monopolies broke after French agents smuggled clove and nutmeg seedlings to Mauritius around 1770. India remains the world's largest producer of spices.

• Portugal
  Europe's Atlantic edge, from port wine valleys to ocean-going history contested by
• New York City
  America's largest city, a global capital of finance and culture Manhattan traded for Run, 1667
• Netherlands
  A low country reclaimed from the sea, dense and inventive monopolized by
• The Maritime Silk Road
  The monsoon sea lanes from China to India, Arabia, and East Africa, and the name of China's 21st-century port initiative overlaps with
• Red Sea
  A young ocean in the making, splitting Africa from Arabia passes through
• The Strait of Malacca
  The long channel between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, the world's busiest oil chokepoint passes through
• The Cape of Good Hope Route
  The long way around Africa between Asia and Europe, revived by the Red Sea crisis and the 2026 Iran war rerouted around Africa by
• Sri Lanka
  A teardrop island of tea, temples, and tropical biodiversity source of cinnamon
• Indonesia
  The world's largest archipelago, spanning two oceans source of cloves and nutmeg
• India
  The world's most populous nation and largest democracy source of pepper