Pepper by Marjorie Shaffer Page B

preceded the harvesting of souls. The Portuguese and the Spanish, the first European countries to entertain ocean exploration, were not timid about their aspirations. The Portuguese rallied to “Species and Souls,” while the Spanish adopted “Gold, Glory, and Gospel” as their motto.
    The Portuguese, ruled by a Catholic monarchy, were the first to support the Jesuits, the Catholic order most often associated with European exploration. Therefore, it is generally assumed that the purchase of pepper—and by extension conquest—was mixed up with missionaries and the pursuit of souls from the beginning of ocean travel. In some ways, it clearly was. In the early days, the Jesuits, regardless of their nationality, sailed to Asia aboard Portuguese carracks. Wherever the traders went, the missionaries followed. When new lands were “discovered,” the Portuguese and the Spanish claimed the divine right to convert the “conquered,” finance missionary activities, and provide transportation to new territorial acquisitions. These rights, called Padroado by the Portuguese and Vicariato Regio by the Spanish, solidified the grip of the Catholic monarchies on missionary activity, which even Rome could not pry loose. But the missionaries and the spice traders never mixed very well, even though the Jesuits engaged in the spice trade to shore up their own shaky finances in Asia. Nearly 16 percent of the Jesuits’ annual income in the seventeenth century was derived from Eastern spices, and spices continued to be a source of income for the order into the eighteenth century. The Jesuits, however, never liked the European traders in their midst, especially the Portuguese. In the beginning, the Jesuits were quite careful to distinguish themselves from the Portuguese traders in Macao. They didn’t want the Chinese to mistake them for coarse, uneducated traders. Nevertheless, the Jesuits had to rely on the Portuguese, and the first Jesuit foray into mainland China from Macao, a Portuguese territory, was made by accompanying Portuguese traders to Canton in 1583.
    The Portuguese and Spanish, the first out of the gate in terms of discovery, argued like schoolchildren over how to divide what they considered the unexplored world. Finally, in 1494, they signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, named after a town in Spain, which modestly divided up the world between them. This agreement moved their previous line of demarcation seventy miles to the west so that Portugal could pocket Brazil in South America, as well as all of Africa, and India, Japan, China, and the Philippines. Spain received the rest of the Americas, but in 1565, it violated its own treaty when it invaded the Philippines. Of course, the English and the Dutch—Protestant countries—and the Asians ignored the Catholics’ treaty.
    In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were the dominant Europeans in Asia, and they were the first to establish forts there. It was their extraordinary good luck that they entered the Indian Ocean some sixty-five years after the Chinese abruptly quit official maritime trade. At the end of his reign, the Ming emperor Zhu Di, an ardent supporter of oceanic trade, suffered a series of calamities that led him to suspend future voyages of the Treasure Fleet. When his son, Zhu Gaozhi, became emperor in 1424, his first order was to stop all voyages and to send home immediately all foreign officials in the capital. He never explained his decision. Some historians suggest he was following the precepts of a rigid Confucian system that had placed great store in social and familial relations, and played down the value of trade. However, there was one more voyage of the great fleet. In 1432, Zheng He led the seventh and last voyage to Calicut with more than a hundred ships and 27,500 men. The great commander died on that journey at the age of sixty-two. Although the Chinese continued to trade unofficially for many centuries