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The Science of Spices:Empiricism and Economic Botanyin the Early Spanish Empire*

PAULA DE VOSSan Diego State University

Itis a little-known fact among historians that the Spanish crown

sought out and encouraged the cultivation of spices for most of itsimperial history, both in the Americas and in the Philippines. We arewell aware that the search for direct access to the Eastern spice tradewas amajor motivation for support for Columbus's voyages--but onceit became clear that Columbus had found no such route, our attention

veers away from spices. Yet for colonial Spanish administrators andentrepreneurs, spices continued to be a product of considerable interest and investment throughout the three centuries of Spanish rule inthe Americas. The purpose of this essay is to trace the various manifestations of that interest in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and to discuss what it reveals about Spanish imperial aspirationsand the strategies used to accomplish them.

Why is it that Spanish efforts to cultivate spices have received so

* I would like to thank the participants of the University of SouthernCalifornia-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute's conference Plants and Insects inthe Early Modern World, 28-30 April 2005, and the UC-World History Workshop,Between the Local and the Global, 7-8 May 2005, for their valuable comments. In addition, Carla Rahn Phillips, Marcy Norton, and Antonio Barrera helped me to polish an earlier draft of this essay; Ravi Rajan and David Christian supplied valuable insights and bibliographic suggestions; and Alix Cooper put much time and effort into providing me with

very useful and thought-provoking commentary. Finally, I would like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the NationalEndowment for the Humanities for providing funding support for the research and writingof this essay.

Journal ofWorld History, Vol. 17, No. 4? 2006 by University of Hawai'i Press

399

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little attention from historians? It could be argued that the lack ofattention is due to the fact that a significant spice trade never resulted.The Eastern spice trade continued to be dominated by Portuguese merchants in the sixteenth century and was overtaken by the Dutch EastIndia Company in the seventeenth. Most spices collected in Indonesiaand China still made their way to Europe westward along the routes ofthe monsoon fleets, from Macao to Goa, across the Indian Oceanand round the Cape of Good Hope to their European destinations.And although the Manila galleon trade route between Manila and

Acapulco did supply Mexico with some of its cinnamon, Spain's American colonies continued to receive most of their Eastern spices fromSpain?via the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic rather than the moredirect route across the Pacific.

Yet what appear to be the doomed efforts of the crown to overtakethe spice trade actually reveal much about the crown's imperial aimsand help to clarify the rationale behind policies that have often beendeemed inefficient at best. Accounts of the rise of English and Dutchglobal commerce in the early modern period often dismiss the Spanish imperial system as one steeped in secrecy and xenophobia, basedon protectionist principles that choked entrepreneurial spirit and hindered economic development. What these assumptions fail to recognize, however, is that many of the protectionist policies of the Spanish crown were not only perfectly rational given the goals and needsof imperial policy, but actually fostered innovative practices usuallyseen as distinctly modern. To illustrate this point, this essay focuseson one particular area of the imperial economy?the support for spicecultivation and trade?in order to demonstrate how this support constituted a policy of state-sponsored economic botany initiated in thesixteenth century and pursued for three centuries.Economic botany is essentially the practice of studying the botanical properties of plants that may be of use to human society and cultivating them for profit. According to the modern, formalized definition put forth by economic botanists, it is the study of plants, fungi,algae and bacteria that directly or indirectly, positively or adverselyaffect man, his livestock, and the maintenance of the environment.

The effects may be domestic, commercial, environmental, or purelyaesthetic; their use may belong to the past, the present, or the future. 1

1Gerald E. Wickers, Economie Botany: Principles and Practices (Dordrecht: KluwerAcademic Publishers, 2001), pp. 2-4. Ethnobotany, a subfield of economic botany, hasbeen a subject of considerable controversy as of late. It involves research into plants ofchiefly medicinal use, where indigenous knowledge of plants has been used by multina



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De Vos: The Science of Spices 401

The term economic botany originated in the mid-nineteenthcentury, with economic referring to the utilitarian aspects of theplant. It is still practiced today as a subdivision of botany, though its

multidisciplinary roots and applications are readily acknowledged. Inthe early modern period, botany was an especially useful endeavor forthe global empires of European nations. The type of imperial economic botany?or colonial botany as it has been recently termed?that they practiced served economic and political ends in addition tothe scientific. According to historians Londa Schiebinger and ClaudiaSwan, early modern botany both facilitated and profited from colonialism and long-distance trade, and . . . the development of botanyand Europe's commercial and territorial expansion are closely associated developments. 2 The practice of economic botany producedwhat historians have termed green gold for early modern Europeanempires?an alternative to mineral wealth where there was none tobe found.3

Thus, the goals of botany coincided well with the goals of empire:

tional pharmaceutical and biotech corporations to develop new medicines in the Westernmedical tradition. The patents given these corporations then make the cost of the medicine prohibitive to its native populations. Recent debates have taken place over the ethicsof such practices, revolving around the issue of who owns the plant genome, or whetherit belongs to a global patrimony and ought to thus be available to all. In this way, the issuesdeveloped here have continuing relevance and reverberations in the present day. See JackKloppenburg Jr., ed., Seeds and Sovereignty: The Use and Control of Plant Genetic Resources(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1988) and Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire:Colonial Bioprospecting in theAtlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,2004), pp. 15-17.2 Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, andPolitics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p.3. Although this project in many ways coincides with and aims to further the work ofSchiebinger and Swan, I have continued to call the practices analyzed here economicbotany (in an imperial context) rather than colonial botany, since the botanical investigations that took place have as a common theme utilitarian and commercial aims. Indeed,Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, p. 6, argues that early modern botany enveloped several different traditions that are today considered separate subfields of botany, including appliedbotany (economic and medicinal botany), horticulture and agriculture, and what today wecall theoretical botany, especially nomenclature and taxonomy.3 This term is used by Londa Schiebinger in Prospecting for Drugs: European Naturalists in the West Indies, in Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany, p. 119, and in Plantsand Empire, p. 7, and by Jorge Ca?izares-Esguerra in How Derivative Was Humboldt? inSchiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany, p. 163, who says, The new wealth of the Americas suddenly turned 'green.' It should be pointed out that both authors used this term withregard to a shift they see happening in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from asearch for mineral wealth to a realization that vegetable wealth could be even more profitable?and sustainable. However, this essay finds that such a realization was present fromthe start of the Spanish empire and throughout the sixteenth century, as evidenced in thetransplantation efforts described here.



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to find, identify, and categorize new and useful plants; to study theirconstituent parts, climate, behavior, and nutritional needs; to determine the feasibility of their transplantation; and to devise methods bywhich to advertise and market their uses for commercial profit. Theinformation generated in the study of botany was then used by entrepreneurs?either through private or organized imperial initiative?toorganize large-scale agricultural projects to cultivate these useful plantsin the most efficient and economical method possible. The final stepwas to establish widespread?and of course very lucrative?trade inthese products. The proliferation of botanical gardens throughoutEurope and European colonies during the early modern period greatlyfacilitated the aims of economic botanists and provides testament tothe growing significance of botany as a policy of empire.4This paper will trace the practices of economic botany in the investigation and cultivation of spices in the Spanish empire in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, beginning with the first reportsof spices found in the New World by Columbus and progressing on tolater attempts to transplant and cultivate Eastern spices both in the

Americas and in Spain. In doing so, I aim first to highlight the epistemological significance of the transplantations that occurred and thegeneral significance of economic botany in the Spanish empire forworld history and the historiography of the Scientific Revolution. Ithen turn to spices themselves and their uses and importance in theearly modern world, which serve to explain why first Columbus andthen Magellan set out into uncharted seas in search of them.

4 There were approximately i ,600 botanical gardens worldwide?in Europe and European colonies?by the end of the eighteenth century. See Schiebinger and Swan, Introduction, in Colonial Botany, p. 13, and Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, pp. 57-58. This isnot to say that botanical gardens were a European invention of the eighteenth century.Botanical gardens have a long history, dating back at least to the time of the Zoroastrians,and the concept was transmitted to Europe through the Islamic empires. See Andrew Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983), especially pp. 88-90 and 117-119. In Christian traditions the idea of recreating a Garden of Eden lent further stimulation to the establishment of botanical gardens.

However, as part of the European imperial enterprise, they seem to have proliferated mostspectacularly during the eighteenth century. See John Prest, The Garden of Eden: TheBotanic Garden and the Re-Creation of Paradise (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,1981); Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens andthe Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995), pp. 175-179; and Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain,and the Improvement of theWorld (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), who

point out the religious, aesthetic, and cultural, in addition to the utilitarian, roles of botanical gardens.



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And they did find spices, especially in the East, including cinnamon, cloves, pepper, ginger, nutmeg, and mace. Once it became clear,however, that Portuguese (and later Dutch) domination of the SpiceIslands trade would not budge under Spanish pressure, Spanish entrepreneurs and the crown looked for other methods to procure them andcame up with two possibilities: they could look for new varieties ofspices in the lands they controlled?the Philippines and the temperateregions of the Americas?or they could transplant known varieties tonew locations, taking care to record the botanical properties of thespice flora, the best methods for collection and transport, and theclimate and soil conditions in which they grew best. Although both

methods were tried, it is the latter on which this essay focuses, as thetransplantation solution seems to have been the one most utilized inthe early years of colonization. Thus I go on to present several cases ofproposed and actual spice transplantation, first from the Spice Islandsand China toMexico and the Caribbean, and then from the Caribbeanto Spain. These transplantations reveal an aspect of Spanish imperialism in the sixteenth century that is receiving increasing attention from

historians: that the Spanish imperialist project was one inherently tiedto the production, testing, and circulation of knowledge crucial for thedevelopment of Western science.

Economic Botany in World History

The significance of natural history and particularly of botany as globalenterprises has come under recent investigation. Historians of sciencehave referred to the natural history collecting and botanical expeditions that were part and parcel of the early modern imperial programsas big science and big business, a product of global trade and theearliest long-distance (some have even said multinational ) corporations.5 Despite its global connections, however, until very recentlyeconomic botany has been treated in the Anglophone literature as analmost exclusively British endeavor. The typical Anglophone account

5 Steven Harris, Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography ofKnowledge, Configurations 6, no. 2 (1998): 270. See also Harold Cook The Cutting Edgeof a Revolution? Medicine and Natural History Near the Shores of the North Sea inRenaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen, and Natural Philosophers in EarlyModern Europe, ed. J.V. Field and Frank A. J. L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1993), pp. 45-61, and Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, p. 5.



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of economic botany's history associates itmainly with the practices ofthe British empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.6These accounts focus on English naturalists who collected exoticplants from far-off lands, and sent seeds and seedlings to Kew Gardenswhere they were cultivated and studied, then shipped off to a part ofthe empire where they could be best grown in large quantities. ThusKew acted as a kind of botanical and agricultural laboratory pro

moting, according to one geographer, a benign kind of agriculturalimperialism. 7

In many ways, this picture is not inaccurate: in the cultivation oftea plants, quinine, and rubber trees, and in the introduction of newstrains of sugar cane in the Caribbean, British colonies took centerstage in the nineteenth century. Yet the impression in the Anglophoneliterature that this is a modern, largely British phenomenon ignoresearlier practices in other empires.8 Swan and Schiebinger's recent volume Colonial Botany (2005) sets out explicitly to correct this imbal

6When historical background is discussed in the current debates over the control ofthe germplasm, for example, economic botany's history is presented with regard to Britishefforts only. See Lucille Brockway, Plant Science and Colonial Expansion: The BotanicalChess Game, in Kloppenburg, Seeds and Sovereignty, pp. 49-66, and Wickers, Economic

Botany, p. 13. Examples of histories of British imperial economic botany?which comprisea distinguished collection of groundbreaking works of sophisticated analysis?includeBrockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Garden (NewYork: Academic Press, 1979); Drayton, Nature's Government; Donald P.McKracken, Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of theVictorian British Empire (London: Leicester University Press, 1997); Ray Desmond, Kew: The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens (London:Harvill Press with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1995); Daniel Headrick, Botany,Chemistry, and Tropical Development, Journal ofWorld History 7 (1996): 1-20; and Satpal Sangwan, Natural History in Colonial Contest: Profit or Pursuit? British BotanicalEnterprise in India 17 78-1820, in Science and Empires: Historical Studies About ScientificDevelopment and European Expansion, ed. Patrick Petitjean et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), pp. 281-298. Historians of the Royal Botanical Gardens (Jardindes Plantes) in France have begun to add to the historiography, particularly Emma Spary,Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime toRevolution (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2000).7 J.H. Galloway, Botany in the Service of Empire: The Barbados Cane-Breeding Program and the Revival of the Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1880S-1930S Annals of theAssociation of American Geographers 86, no. 4 (December 1996): 683-706.8 It must be noted that Spanish-language historians in Spain and Latin America areaware of Spain's activities and contributions in natural history and botany, especially for theeighteenth-century scientific expeditions. See for example Francisco Javier Puerto Sarmiento, La ilusi?n quebrada: Bot?nica, sanidad y pol?tica cient?fica en la Espa?a ilustrada (Barcelona: Serbal; Madrid: CSIC, 1988). But Iwould argue that the literature they have producedalso fails to take into account the full extent and significance of Spain's imperial scientificendeavors, particularly for the sixteenth century. For amore detailed discussion of and bibliography for this argument, see Paula De Vos, Research, Development, and Empire: State

Support of Science in the Later Spanish Empire, Colonial Latin American Review 15, no. 1(June 2006): 55-79, particularly the section titled Historiography of Science and Empire.



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De Vos: The Science of Spices 405anee by recognizing the multiplicity of actors, methods, purposes, andperspectives involved in the pursuit of colonial botanical study. Theirsis an inherently comparative approach that sets out the great varietyin colonial governance in different parts of the world, as well as thediversity of commercial and scientific establishments planted aroundthe globe. 9 In this way, the volume is consciously responding to RoyMacLeod's call for a more inclusive treatment of imperial systems withregard to history of science, one that problematizes the dichotomybetween metropolitan center and colonial periphery in the dissemination of knowledge as well as in the production of and trade in

natural resources.10For all their focus on comparative developments within global

imperial systems, however, these works still have the metropolitanEuropean powers as their focus and speak primarily to and about European historical narratives of scientific development. Andrew Watson's

Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (1983), however,clearly demonstrates that botanical exchange through deliberate acclimatization was not a product of the modern Christian and Christianizing world. Rather, in tracing the diffusion of a variety of staple crops,fruits, and fibrous plants (cotton), Watson concludes that plant diffusion had occurred for millennia and intensified particularly during theearly centuries of Islamic expansion.11 The extensive infrastructure andcommon systems of communication and exchange present within theIslamic empires, which at their greatest extent stretched from northern India to central Spain, made them unusually receptive to all thatwas new in terms of the efficient diffusion of known plants and thedevelopment of new varieties.12 These cultivars diffused through a variety of agents, including both peasant cultivators and rulers who collected exotic specimens in royal botanical gardens.13 Although Watsondoes not make the argument explicitly, it is very plausible that themethods of acclimatization employed under the Spanish caliphates

9 Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany, pp. 4, 8.10Roy MacLeod, Introduction, in Nature and Empire: Science and the ColonialEnterprise, ed. Roy MacLeod, special issue, Osiris 15 (2000): 6. This volume and ColonialBotany as well have attempted to redress this imbalance in the literature, including severalessays on Spanish imperial science.11Watson, Agricultural Innovation.12 Ibid., pp. 2, 82-83, and 91-92. In fact, Watson specifically suggests reasons whyplant diffusion slowed considerably upon reaching medieval Europe, citing lower population densities, the inability of the land tenure system to support new experimental crops,an unfavorable climate, and an unskilled European peasantry.13 Ibid., pp. 87-98.



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left a legacy of botanical expertise geared toward the transplantationand acclimatization of both useful and ornamental plants. The Spanish efforts described here may well be the result of this legacy, a legacywhereby Christian Europe, through Spain, learned of the advantagesand techniques of agricultural and botanical innovation from itsIslamic predecessors.14

Economic Botany, the Columbian Exchange,and the Scientific RevolutionThus economic botany was a global, imperial endeavor that may oweits origins at least in part to the practices of the Islamic world. YetSpanish efforts in economic botany have epistemological ramificationsspecific to the early modern period, for they involved a series of empirical practices that were arguably scientific, and, when understood inthat way, can serve to enhance our understanding of two further historiographical themes in world history: the Columbian exchange andthe Scientific Revolution. Alfred Crosby's conceptions of the Columbian exchange and ecological imperialism, which allowed for the proliferation of neo-Europes throughout much of the temperate world,have been of immense importance to world history in helping tounderstand the global environmental factors that have shaped muchof the modern world.15 Yet his work largely focuses on the impersonalforces of nature and the inadvertent, unintentional consequence of thespread of biological materials from pathogens to weeds to rodents.16The story presented here aims to augment this work for Latin America by showing the conscious introductions of new plants, the organizational, institutional complex that initiated and supported them, andthe epistemological ramifications of the empirical and experimental?that is, the scientific?methods that they entailed, all of which arerepresented in the practice of economic botany. In this way, the study

14This is an issue that deserves further research, not only with regard to the Europeaninheritance through Spain of Islamic botanical practice, but of medical and pharmacological knowledge as well.15See Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973), Ecological Imperialism: The Biological

Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and Germs,Seeds, and Animals: Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).16The same can be said of a more recent work on world environmental history by JohnE Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modem World(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).



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of economic botany in the Spanish empire can serve to emphasize therole of human agency in the specific manipulation of nature and therole of botanical science in the ecological and environmental changesthat that manipulation brought about.17The story of economic botany presented here also serves to refocusour understanding of the origins of the Scientific Revolution, a subjectthat has undergone much debate in the last few decades.18 Recentworks by Jorge Ca?izares-Esguerra and Antonio Barrera have contributed to those debates by bringing attention to Spain's role in thedevelopment of the modern Western scientific tradition.19 The story

17The same theme is true for the development of a global marketplace for goods in theearly modern period. Economic historians and, more recently, cultural and world historianshave paid much attention to the establishment of global commerce, particularly the development of and demand for cash crops?coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, cotton, spices, dyestuffs?and the means of production and labor relations which resulted from them. SeeKenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World that Trade Created: Society, Culture, andtheWorld Economy, 1400-the Present (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999); Sidney Mintz,Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar inModem History (New York: Viking, 1985); andPhilip Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade inWorld History (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984) and The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays inAtlantic History, 2nded. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Again, the science involved in thedevelopment has received less attention, even though the development of the plantationcomplex and the world that trade created depended on botanical investigations of anempirical and experimental nature that are described here. To the extent that historianshave addressed scientific or technological concerns in the establishment of world trade,they tend to highlight navigation, cartography, and cosmology rather than natural history,botany, or agronomy. The interrelationship between science and commerce, the importance of natural history in early modern science, and the changing meaning of economicin the early modern period have been the subject of recent elaboration and are promisingareas for further research. See for example Lisbet Koerner, Linneaus: Nature and Nation(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen,Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art inEarly Modem Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002); John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and theWorld of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); and Margaret Schabas and Neil de Marchi, eds., Oeconomies in the

Age of Newton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).18The concept, the definition, and indeed the very existence of a European ScientificRevolution have undergone serious questioning over the last several decades. For anoverview of these debates, see Steven ]. Harris, Introduction: Thinking Locally, ActingGlobally, Configurations 6, no. 2 (1998): 131-139. In this essay, Harris calls for a new typeof history for the Scientfic Revolution, one that attempts to resolve (or at least address)tensions between the internalist and externalist approaches to history of science andbetween the local and the global.19 Jorge Ca?izares-Esguerra, How toWrite theHistory of theNew World: Histories, Epis

temologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, Calif.: StanfordUniversity Press, 2001) and Iberian Colonial Science, Isis 96 (2005): 64-70, and Antonio Barrera, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early ScientificRevolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). The subject of Spain's many contributions to the Scientific Revolution?indeed, its leading role in some instances?and the



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of economic botany presented here builds on their work in that theknowledge-gathering efforts that accompanied economic botany constituted one aspect of what Barrera has termed the information-gathering and knowledge-producing practices relating to the natural worldof the Indies that the Spanish crown carried out.20 According to Barrera, these practices, which included sending out questionnaires, com

missioning the writing of natural history tomes, hosting scientificexpeditions, and testing the products found, provided a protocol forthe articulation of empirical information within the empire. Ca?izares-Esguerra has also pointed to the utilitarian nature of Spanishcontributions to botanical knowledge in the sixteenth century andtheir importance in the development of European natural history.21This type of empirical information gathering, codification, and utilitarianism was important to the development of European science intwo ways. First, as Harold Cook has pointed out, natural history wasthe empirical science of the early modern period, a time of the firstperiod of globalization, inwhich ... a worldwide natural science rootedin descriptive natural history also developed for the first time. 22 Second, the Spanish system

of economicbotany that

was inplace allowedadministrators to collect, process, and disseminate useful botanical

knowledge and specimens in a way that made it, according to BrunoLatour's definition, a center of calculation. 23 In this way, the Spanish empire, with its state-directed effort in the collection of empiricalknowledge and encouragement of experimental practice, anticipatedthe methodological and epistemological groundwork of the ScientificRevolution. It also provided a model for imperial information gathering that was based on a close relationship between state support, scientific knowledge and practice, economic policy, and commercial aims.

lack of recognition of this among Anglophone historians of science came up in severalpanel discussions at a recent meeting of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese HistoricalStudies in Charleston, South Carolina, 11-13 March 2005 and is the subject of JorgeCa?izares-Esguerra, Iberian Science in the Renaissance: Ignored How Much Longer, Perspectives on Science 12, no. 1 (2004): 86-124.20Antonio Barrera, Empire and Empirical Practices: Commodities and Reports fromthe New World, Colonial Latin American Review 15, no. 1 (June 2006): 39-54, and Local

Herbs, Global Medicines: Commerce, Knowledge, and Commodities in Spanish Americain Smith and Findlen, Merchants and Marvels, pp. 163-181.21Ca?izares-Esguerra, Iberian Science in the Renaissance, pp. 98-103.22Harold Cook, Global Economies and Local Knowledge in the East Indies, in

Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany, p. 101.23 Bruno Latour, Science inAction: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), chap. 6, especially pp. 222,232-233.



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In wedding commercial pursuits with scientific research, the crown waspromoting a form of colonial policy that would be followed by otherEuropean nations (whether consciously or not) for the next four centuries and that served to enhance its commercial potential?in theoryifnot in practice?for the next three.The Spanish crown's empirical and experimental approach toNewWorld nature also ties into broader discussions about the developmentof science in world history. Historian David Christian has recentlyargued that the establishment of transoceanic lines of communicationestablished in the Atlantic and Pacific brought together the New andOld Worlds in a way that made Europe a clearinghouse of information?information that not only served to decenter traditional reliance on ancient and Biblical texts for knowledge of the world, but thatallowed for the collection and testing of knowledge in a way that hadnot been possible before.24 The empirical approaches fostered by economic botany and the global transplantation of plants at this time, Iwould argue, represent the type of information collection and testingthat Christian refers to and thus provide a concrete, localized exampleof the global forces at work in the early modern period.

Spices in the Spanish Empire

Imperial efforts in the cultivation of spices, therefore, constituted anearly program of economic botany that has important historiographicaland epistemological ramifications. Let us now turn to the spices themselves, which continued to be a significant aim of Spanish colonization

24David Christian, Science in the Mirror of 'Big History/ in The Changing Image ofthe Sciences, ed. Ida H. Stamhuis, Teun Koetsier, Cornelis de Pater, and Albert Van Helden(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), pp. 141-169. There is another dimensionof Christian's argument that I do not address here: that from a world history perspective,the Scientific Revolution is not qualitatively different from earlier knowledge systems.

Rather, it is quantitatively different, in that the global nature of knowledge testing allowedthe system to become what it was, not because of any canny choices made by Europeans.For histories of the impact of the New World on European thought, see Anthony Grafton,New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); John H. Elliott, The Old World and the New1492-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed.,America in European Consciousness, 1493-1750 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of

Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with theNew World: FromRenaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993) and The Fallof Natural Man: The American Indian and theOrigins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1982).



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throughout the sixteenth century and beyond. The lucrative nature ofthe trade, and the recognition that sea routes often posed less dangerthan the traditional overland transport of the Silk Roads, would havebeen motivation enough, and we are all aware of the benefits of spicesin improving the culinary arts. Yet the significance of spice cultivationgoes beyond these more obvious benefits. In fact, spices served anotherimportant purpose as well: they were key ingredients in a number ofmedicines in the early modern European pharmacopoeia.25 Cinna

mon, cloves, cardamom, and nutmeg, for example, were medicinal staples and of central importance in the preparation of early moderncures. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spanish pharmacy booksinclude entire sections on what were termed the aromatics, medicalpreparations made from ginger, cinnamon, aloe, sandalwood, nutmeg,clove, and cardamom that cured a wide variety of common ailments.For example, cinnamon water fortified the heart, stomach, and headand cured epilepsy and palsy.26 Nutmeg oil calmed the stomach,relieved colds, and helped eliminate acrid humors, which causeddiarrhea and vomiting.27 And cardamom oil soothed intestinal painand reduced flatulence.28

Thus, control over the spice trade brought great commercial advantages in the areas of both food and medicine. These spices came from

many different regions in the East?mainly from India, China, and, ofcourse, the Spice Islands of Indonesia. Spices, then, were associatedwith the East, the ultimate goal of Columbus's voyages. Yet spices werealso found in the Americas. If the accounts of colonial explorers andentrepreneurs are to be believed, there were naturally occurring varieties of cinnamon, nutmeg, and pepper found in the Caribbean, Yucat?n, and parts of present-day Colombia and Ecuador. Columbus himselfattested to the presence of spices in Hispaniola. In a letter to crownofficials upon his return to Spain after the first voyage, he claimed tohave come across abundant and marvelous trees, fruits, and otherplants, especially spices, claiming that there are many spices and great

25This topic is treated more fully in my dissertation, The Art of Pharmacy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Mexico (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley,2001).26 Felix Palacios, Palestra Pharmace?tica Chy mico-Gal?nica en la quai se trata de la elecci?n de los Simples, sus Preparaciones Chymicas y Gal?nicas. Facsimile of 1706 ed. (Madrid:Juan Garcia Insan?on, 1706), Parte IV,Cap?tulo IV, pp. 344-345.27 Ibid., pp. 250-251.28 Ibid., pp. 266-267.



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mines of gold on the island.29 If Ferdinand and Isabela would lend himfurther assistance, Columbus promised that they would have spice . . .as much as their highnesses shall command, including rhubarb, cinnamon, and aloe, which he believed he had identified.30 Clearly, spiceswere still very much on Columbus's mind, and understandably so,because he believed that he was near to the Spice Islands of the EastIndies.

It was soon obvious to the crown, navigators, and explorers alike(though never to Columbus) that these islands were in fact on theoutskirts of two continents hitherto unknown to the Old World. They

presented a formidable barrier to the sought-after Spice Islands andthe silks, porcelain, and perfumes of India and China, but that doesnot mean that the crown abandoned its intentions of tapping into thetrade. Encouraged by Columbus's accounts and by the temperate climate of the Caribbean regions, the crown supported efforts to establish spice cultivation there and inNew Spain. Explorers also went onto explore Pacific islands in search of spices and eventually claimedthe Philippine Islands, where, again, spices were objects of considerable interest.

Eastern Spices and American Varieties

Indeed, the story of economic botany in the Spanish empire beginswhere Columbus left off: with Magellan's voyage around the world(1519-1522), which had the express purpose of casting out across thePacific in search of the famed Spice Islands, which had come under

Portuguese maritime control in 1513. Royal instructions to Magellanstipulated that he make a treaty of peace or trade with native leaders in the Spice Islands and that he negotiate the best terms possiblefor Spanish goods in exchange for spices. A well-known publishedaccount of the circumnavigation by Antonio Pigafetta, a member ofthe expedition, includes detailed information on the cost and amountof spices that were garnered from native leaders in the Moluccas. Yetthe interest in spices was not only commercial, as Pigafetta duly noted

29Christopher Columbus, Letter to Santangel, inNew Iberian World: A DocumentaryHistory of theDiscovery and Settlement of Latin America to the Early ijth Century, vol. 2,The Caribbean, ed. J.H. Parry and Robert G. Keith (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,

1984), p. 60.30 Ibid., p. 62.



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their botanical characteristics as well. The trees and shrubs that produced cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and especially cloves were subjectsof scrutiny. For each, Pigafetta described the contour and dimensionsof leaves, trunk, and branches, the climate in which they grew, andthe time of year and manner in which their all-important fruits wereharvested (or in the case of cinnamon, its bark).

For example, according to Pigafetta the best cinnamon that canbe found on the islands grew in a tall tree with leaves similar to thelaurel and branches as thick as fingers whose bark was collectedtwice a year.31 The nutmeg tree resembled that of the walnut, whosefruit yielded a bright red rind of mace that surrounded the nutmeginside of it.32Ginger consisted of a small shrub whose roots could beeaten green or dried.33 Cloves were probably the most sought afterand expensive spice, as they were known to grow only on the five SpiceIslands of Ternate, Tidore, Mutir, Machian, and Bacchian. A testament to their importance was the fact that Pigafetta went ashore onthe islands specifically to study how they grew, noting the trees' heightand thickness? tall and as big around as aman ?as well as the shapeof their leaves, color of the bark, and fructification?the cloves themselves.34 Pigafetta also recorded the climactic conditions of the cloves,which were gathered twice a year, in June and December, during themost temperate weather. The cloves grew in very specific locales inthe mountains of the Spice Islands, where each day a cloud apparentlydescended and surrounded them, and due to the moisture and coolertemperatures that this would have effected, the cloves become perfect. These specific conditions were not met elsewhere, as if any ofthese trees are planted in another place, they will not live.. ..And nocloves are grown in the world except on the five mountains of thesefive islands. 35 Such attention to detail would serve the Spaniards whenlater on they wished to cultivate the cloves on their own.

Although Magellan's much reduced crew returned to Spain on aship loaded down with large quantities of valuable cloves?and anotherhad foundered because it was so overloaded with spices?Spanishefforts to infiltrate the Spice Islands trade were never ultimately sue

31 See Antonio Pigafetta, The Voyage of Magellan, trans. Paula Spurlin Paige (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969), p. 104. See also Emma Helen Blair and JamesAlexander Robertson, eds., The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, vol. 1, De Moluccis Insulis(Cleveland: A. H. Clark company, 1903-1909), pp. 330-335.32 Pigafetta, Voyage of Magellan, p. 122.33 Ibid., p. 12934 Ibid., p. 112.35 Ibid., p. 121.



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De Vos: The Science of Spices 413cessful.36 The Portuguese remained in control of the spice-bearingmonsoon fleets that crisscrossed the Indian Ocean.37 Portuguese dominance, in fact, continued well into the seventeenth century (when itwas taken over by the Dutch) despite the fact that Spain not only tookover part of the island of Ternate and established a garrison there in1606, but also became the nominal ruler of Portugal due to the dynastic succession of Philip II to the Portuguese throne in 1580. The reason for continued Portuguese hold over the trade stemmed from atreaty signed at the time of the union of the crowns that Spanish merchants and seamen were forced to respect. The Treaty of Zaragoza(1529), furthermore, established once and for all that the dividing linebetween Spanish and Portuguese interests in the Pacific put the SpiceIslands squarely in Portuguese territory.Foiled in their desire to take over the Spice Islands, then, the

Spaniards were left with two choices, both of which involved the practice of economic botany: they could search for varieties of spice florain other locations, or they could acquire seeds and seedlings and transplant them elsewhere. In fact, they did both. Subsequent Spanishexpeditions to the East Indies led to the successful establishment of acolony in the Philippines (which after some debate was deemed withinSpain's area of demarcation), where settlers eagerly looked for andoften found local varieties of pepper, cinnamon, and nutmeg.38 Cinnamon was said to be so common, for example, that it was burned for

36 Ian Cameron, Magellan and the First Circumnavigation of theWorld (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973), p. 201. The ship that foundered was later captured by the Portuguese in the Moluccas.37 For an overview of the spice trade and European rivalry over the Indian Ocean traderoutes, see Carla Rahn Phillips, The Growth and Composition of Trade in the IberianEmpires, 1450-1750, in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the EarlyModern World, 1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1990), pp. 34-101.38 For information specific to spice cultivation in the Spanish colonial Philippines, seePaula De Vos, The Spice Trade and the Colonization of the Philippines, Mains'l Haul: A

Journal of Pacific Maritime History 41, no. 4/42, no. 1 (Fall 2005/Winter 2006): 33-42, andMaria Lourdes D?az-Trechuelo, Eighteenth-Century Philippine Economy: Agriculture,Philippine Studies 14 (1966): 65-126. See Nicholas Cushner, Spain in the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University, 1971) for a good general English-language overview of colonial history of the Philippines. For further reading on Spanish exploration ofthe Pacific and Spanish imperial aims, see O. H. K. Spate, The Spanish Lake (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1979), and John M. Headley, Spain's Asian Presence,

1565-1590: Structures and Aspirations, Hispanic America Historical Review 75, no. 4(1995): 623-646. For the development of the Manila galleon trade, see William Lytle

Schurz, The Manila Galleon: The Romantic History of the Spanish Galleons Trading betweenManila and Acapuko (New York: Dutton, 1939), and, more recently, Katharine Bjork, TheLink that Kept the Philippines Spanish, Journal ofWorld History 9 (1998): 25-50.



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fuel, and Legaspi noted in his 1559 expedition to the islands thatalthough wild pepper trees abounded, the islanders did not cultivatethem, but native chiefs kept them in their houses as objects of curiosity.39 In 1639, a local Franciscan friar assured the crown that certain

parts of the islands would produce harvests of nutmeg and clove asabundant as those of the Moluccas. The crown in turn ordered thegovernor to introduce and establish the cultivation of nutmeg andclove ... in each area [of the islands] where the disposition of the soilpermits it. 40

Spices were sought after not only in the Philippines, but in theAmericas as well. As discussed earlier, Columbus claimed to havefound naturally occurring varieties of cinnamon and rhubarb in theCaribbean. Nicol?s Monardes, a Spanish physician who collected andexperimented with various spices and other medicines coming intoSeville from the Indies fleets, provided evidence of several new varieties in the Americas in his Medicinal History of Things Brought fromOur West Indies.*1 One was the Long Pepper (Pimienta luenga) foundalong the coast of Tierra Firme (present-day Panama) and around

Cartagena de Indias (on the Caribbeancoast of Colombia), which,

according to Monardes, was more flavorful, healthful, and spicy thanthe Eastern black pepper due to its greater aromaticity (aromaticidad).*2 Another American variety was that of cinnamon, found in aprovince near Quito. Monardes deemed some of the varieties withwhich he was presented to have the same flavor, odor, aromaticity,astringency, and fragrance as the cinnamon brought to Europe from

39 Blair and Robertson, Philippine Islands, vol. 2, The Expedition of Ruy L?pez de Villalobos, 1541-46, p. 227, copy of a letter sent from Sevilla toMiguel Salvador of Valencia, andp. 241, Miguel Lopez de Legazpi to Philip II, 26 June 1568.40Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla (hereafter AGI/S) Filipinas, 330, L. 4, f. 280.41Monardes has been the subject of extensive writing among Spanish-language authorsand is receiving increasing recognition inAnglophone literature. For biographical and bibliographical information on Monardes, see Francisco Guerra, Nicol?s Bautista Monardes: Suvida y su obra (1493-1588) (M?xico, D.F., 1961); Francisco Rodr?guez Marin, La verdaderabiograf?a de Nicolas Monardes (Seville: Padilla Libros, 1988); Javier Lasso de la Vega y Cortezo, Biograf?a y estudio cr?tico de las obras del m?dico Nicol?s Monardes (Seville: Padilla Libros,1988); and Juan Jim?nez-Castellanos y Calvo-Rubio, Pr?logo, inHistoria medicinal de lascosas que se traen de nuestras Indias occidentales que sirven de medicina, by Nicol?s Monardes(Seville: Padilla Libros, 1988). For recent Anglophone histories, see Marcia Susan Norton,New World of Goods: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Spanish Empire,1492-1700 (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2000) and Daniela Bleichmar,Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounters with New WorldMateria Medica, in Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany, pp. 83-99, which discusses the

ways in which Monardes gathered and interpreted information about American medicinesthat came into Seville.42Monardes, Historia Medicinal, 86r-v.



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India by the Portuguese.43 Others, however, had a thicker bark thathad neither taste nor aroma? the opposite of the cinnamon broughtfrom East India ?leading some to argue that itwas not cinnamon atall, a point with which Monardes disagreed.44

Disputes aside, clearly, not all spice varieties were created equally,and Spanish bureaucrats, naturalists, and entrepreneurs set about trying to cultivate new varieties that would rival ifnot surpass the spicesimported by the Portuguese. However, experimentation with new varieties and arguments as to their qualities vis-?-vis established strains,

and debates over their naming and classification are subjects moreappropriate for the eighteenth century and thus beyond the scope ofthis paper.45 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish solutions to the problem of how to procure spices tended to focus on methods of transplantation, and it is to these transplantations that we willnow turn.

Transplantation of Spices:From the Spice Islands to Mexico

The transplantation of spices appears to be the method of spice procurement most favored in the early years of the Spanish empire. Thecases described below include both proposals for and actual transplantations of spices from the East Indies to theWest Indies, and from thereon to Spain. The archival record for the transplantations is in someparts fragmentary, but enough of the story is apparent to deduce whattook place, and there are enough cases to show a pattern and a plan.

Overall, the transplantations took place through a combination ofefforts on the part of the state in coordination with colonial leaders andlocal entrepreneurs. The state consisted of the Spanish crown and theCouncil of the Indies, the highest governing body with respect to theIndies, created in 1524. They worked in concert with the Casa de la

Contrataci?n, or customs house, established in Seville in 1503 to deal

43 Ibid., 98r-v.44 Ibid., 98v.45 For an example of the kind of rivalry that took place over the identification of spicevarieties and the search for the true spice in the French colonial system, see E. C. Spary,Of Nutmegs and Botanists: The Colonial Cultivation of Botanical Identity, inSchiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany, pp. 187-203. For examples in the Spanish empire,see Daniela Bleichmar, Visual Culture in Eighteenth-Century Natural History: BotanicalIllustrations and Expeditions in the Spanish Atlantic (PhD diss., Princeton University,2005).



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with the regulation of trade and navigation between Spain and theAmericas?though we see here that itwas also involved in natural his

tory and botanical investigation. Casa officials in turn relied on colonial administrators?the viceroy of New Spain, the governor of thePhilippines, and the audiencia (high court) of Santo Domingo in thecases below?for the provision of expert opinion and information.The crown and council typically issued orders for transplantations anddictated the economic terms under which cultivation and exportwould take place; the Casa de laContrataci?n then oversaw the collection of information concerning the methods and success of thetransplantation. In the colonies, local entrepreneurs cultivated thespices and would have recorded and conveyed the pertinent data tothe local administrative body (viceroy, governor, or audiencia).This network of administrative, economic, and knowledge-gathering responsibilities illustrates an important point of larger historicaland historiographical significance in that it serves to challenge certainassumptions about the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Traditional historical treatment of the development ofWestern science inimperial

contexts has assumed thatWestern science diffused out fromametropolitan, European center and that any science that took placein colonial settings as derivative by definition.46 Yet in the cases oftransplantation described below, the expert that the council and thecasa turned to for advice and direction was the viceroy of Mexico, whowas asked on one occasion to send an instruction booklet along withseedlings he sent to Spain. Furthermore, it is clear that no one involvedin this network was a trained naturalist, and though they consultedwith doctors and apothecaries for botanical knowledge, their work wasto provide empirical data and careful, meticulous observation as well.47

Thus, rather than disseminating from an obvious European metropolis to an obvious colonial periphery, the knowledge created in thesecases was a product of circulation?of a moving metropolis ratherthan a strictly defined center, through which knowledge moved multidirectionally and thus served creative purposes on both sides of the

46The classic work that originated the so-called diffusionist approach is GeorgeBasalla, The Spread of Western Science, Science 156 (1967): 616-622.47There is growing awareness among historians of science that much European scientific development of the early modern period came not from learned experts, but rather fromartists, artisans, merchants, and other entrepreneurs. See, for example, Smith and Findlen,Merchants and Marvels, of which Antonio Barrera's Local Herbs, Global Medicines, pp.163-181, is particularly relevant, and Pamela H. Smith, The Body of theArtisan: Art and

Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).



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Atlantic and of the Pacific.48 In this way, the unit under observation isless a strictly political entity than one also defined by transoceanictravel, and as such serves to highlight another way in which it is partof a larger, global narrative.49

Francisco de Mendoza's AsientoThe earliest evidence of long-distance transplantation of spices in theSpanish empire took place sometime in the 1550s and involved thetransport of spice seeds from the East Indies toNew Spain (present-dayMexico and the U.S. southwest). It isnot clear how the seeds came toarrive inMexico, but we can assume that it involved some illegal activity. It seems that they were smuggled out of Portuguese India and cametoMexico by way of Spain, since at this time the navigational courseeastward across the Pacific was not yet known to Spanish navigators.InMexico, they appeared in the possession of Antonio de Mendoza,the first viceroy of New Spain.50 Mendoza had indicated an interest in

cultivating products from the East as early as 1542, when he orderedthat an expedition to the Philippines under the direction of Villaloboscollect and send him specimens of all the products of the land thatyou can secure. 51

The Villalobos expedition ended in disaster, and itwas therefore anunlikely source of the stolen seeds. At any rate, by 1558 the viceroy hadsuccessfully obtained them and was able to keep such precious commodities in his family's possession, as he was most likely very instrumental in securing for his son Francisco monopoly rights to cultivatethe seeds in 1558. Like his father, Francisco Mendoza also exhibited

48 The literature on issues of center and periphery iswide ranging. For issues specificto imperial and colonial science, see Roy MacLeod, On Visiting the 'Moving Metropolis':Reflections on the Architecture of Imperial Science, in Scientific Colonialism: A CrossCultural Comparison, ed. Nathan Reingold and Marc Rothenberg (Washington, D.C.:Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987). Iwould also like to point out that the multidirectional movement of knowledge and expertise throughout the Spanish empire that Idescribebelow demonstrates that for the empire, there was not simply one center of calculation ?the obvious one centered on the customs house in Seville?but rather multiple centers,including Mexico City, where the viceroy was looked upon to gather expert advice ontransplantations.49This idea fits in with Jerry Bentley's call for using sea and ocean basins as units forthe study of world history as an alternative to national parameters that modern historianstend to adhere to. See Jerry H. Bentley, Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis, Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999): 215-224.50 I thank Antonio Ba?era for providing me with this information.51 Blair and Robertson, Philippine Islands, 2:58.



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evidence of a long-standing interest in indigenous products, as it washe who commissioned the Badianus manuscript, a codex containinginformation on Aztec medicines, as a gift for Charles V.52 In the agreement between Francisco Mendoza and the crown about the spice trans

plantation, the economic side of economic botany is clearly evidentand indicates an empire-wide policy of monopolistic practices thatwould ensure the regular collection of royal taxes through two mainpractices. The first was the practice of assigning asientos, the exclusiveright to the production of and trade in a particular commodity, toselect individuals. For the crown, asientos provided a method of regulating trade with the Indies that in turn allowed customs officials to

keep track of colonial revenues and ensure that the crown received itsshare, or rights (derechos), of taxes. The other method involved theestablishment of estancos, or royal monopolies on the sale of certaingoods.Thus the transplantation and cultivation of spices brought fromthe Spice Islands to New Spain was put under the charge of Franciscode Mendoza, who in 1558 was granted an asiento to plant seeds of blackpeppers, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, saffron, sandal wood, and Chinaroot, a purgative medicine used to treat fevers.53 The conditions ofthe asiento were rather specific: they granted Mendoza exclusive rightsto plant the various seeds inNew Spain and other parts of the Indies.

According to the terms, no one else could cultivate these spices, norcould they contract with the spice estanco?such privileges werereserved only for Mendoza.54 In addition, Mendoza would be given allthe land necessary for his enterprise and would receive half the profits (the crown receiving the other half).55 The Council of the Indieswas initially quite opposed to the asiento, not because they opposedthe practice of the asiento itself, but because council members felt thatthe spices would not do well inNew Spain's climate and because if theydid indeed flourish, the practice of giving unlimited-lands for their cultivation would interfere with indigenous land rights and the grazing oflivestock. They also felt that limiting the rights to contract with theestanco to Mendoza only?in perpetuity no less?was an intolerablepractice.56

52 See Bleichmar, Books, Bodies, and Fields, in Schiebinger and Swan, ColonialBotany, p. 87.53AGI/S 606 L. 2, f. i2ir.54AGI/S Indiferente, 738, N. 47, f. ir.55 Ibid., f. IV.56 Ibid., fs. ir-v.



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Although the record at this point is fragmentary, despite the Council's strong reservations, it is clear that the asiento was ultimatelygranted. Mendoza enjoyed at least limited success with some of theproducts until his untimely death. What evidence I do have as to theenterprise's development comes mainly from the work of Nicol?sMonardes. Monardes writes that Don Francisco de Mendoza, son ofthe Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, grew in New Spain clove, pepper,ginger, and other spices brought from East India, [but] the enterprisewas lost due to his death. 57 Only two spices seem to have flourished:ginger, because it grew well in those parts, and China root.58 Indeed,China root was the source of a conversation between Mendoza and

Monardes in Seville at some point when Mendoza had returned fromthe Americas. Mendoza showed Monardes several roots, askingMonardes to identify them. Monardes responded that they wereclearly examples of China root, but he was confused because theylooked so fresh?not their usual condition after the long trip fromChina. When Mendoza responded that in fact they had recently comefrom New Spain, where they had been cultivated along with a largequantity of [other] spices, Monardes was shocked ( yo me espante1),because he believed that China root was to be found only inChina. 59 Mendoza then explained to him about the contract (contractaci?n) he had with the crown that had allowed him to bring to

Spain large quantities of spices, which he had already started planting and cultivating.60 It is not clear exactly when this conversationtook place, asMonardes carried out experiments with American medicines for decades prior to publishing his work, and publication took

place over several years. However, given that this account occurs inthe first part of three that were ultimately published, the conversationprobably took place sometime between 1558 and 1565, when he firstbegan publishing his material.

Although Monardes had been in contact at some point with Mendoza, the Council of the Indies apparently remained in the dark aboutwhat was taking place. Indeed, a full forty years after his 1558 agree

57Monardes, Historia medicinal, 99V.58 China root may be ginseng. According to Monardes, it was a root with someknots on it, which iswhite on the inside, sometimes a little reddish too, and brown on theoutside. It was especially effective in curing fevers because itwas marvelous at provoking sweats. See ibid., i6v-i7r.59 Ibid., p. i6v.60The phrase large quantity of spices (mucha cantidad de Especer?a) occurs twicewithin the passage, and Ihave quoted it twice in order to emphasize that Mendoza's effortsdid at one point yield substantial fruit.



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ment with the crown, the council sent a request to the viceroy of NewSpain for information as to the progress of spice cultivation in thoselands. It is in this request that the empirical, information-seeking practices of the Spanish crown become clear, showing the possibility of scientific activity and knowledge production within the very strict commercial and economic boundaries set up by the terms of the asiento. In1597, the Council of the Indies admitted that it is unknown whether[Mendoza] ever executed the cultivation of pepper, cloves, cinnamon,

Chinese ginger, or sandalwood. In the interest of their great potentialand utility for the state, the council requested information, presumably from the viceroy of Mexico, as toMendoza's efforts in this regardand sent along a treatise titled Seedlings and Plantings ( Sementerasy Plantios ) to help with any current projects.61 Most importantly, thecouncil desired to know if the spice cultivation had been successful,and if so, why, and ifnot, why not. They requested very particularlyinformation on the disposition and condition of the earth, ... inwhich lands, what climate, and where and how these seeds were cultivated, and the uses which result from them. 62 This type of information, which delved into the specific habitat and ecology of spice flora,represents an early example of the methods of economic botany.

The Transplantation of ClovesIn the early seventeenth century, cloves became another target forcolonial transplantation. Cloves were one of the most valuable of theEastern spices. Not only were they a highly prized spice, but, as mentioned above, they grew in only a tiny area, the northern islands of theMoluccas. There was a healthy trade in cloves throughout Southeastand East Asia, with as much as five thousand to seven thousand baharproduced annually around the turn of the sixteenth century.63 Portuguese infiltration into the area around this time made them the dominant merchants for carrying the spice to Europe. Cloves, then, entered

Europe mainly through the port of Lisbon. Castilian acceptance of Por

61AGI/S Indiferente, 606, L. 2, fs. 121-122.62 Ibid., f. 122.63Roderich Ptak, Asian Trade in Cloves, circa 1500: Quantities and Trade Routes?A Synopsis of Portuguese and Other Sources, in The Portuguese and the Pacific, ed. FrancisA. Dutra and Joao Camilo dos Santos (Santa Barbara: Center for Portuguese Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1995), p. 151. A bahar is a weight used in the EastIndies that can vary considerably, usually between 223 and 625 pounds. According to Ptak,5,000-7,000 bahar was the equivalent of approximately 1.2 million kg, or 2.64 millionpounds.



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tug?ese commerce even after the Union of Crowns in 1580, however,did not mean that Spanish merchants were not disgruntled, and indeedcomplained of the high duties placed on it.64 Such dissatisfaction wasprobably the motivation for a 1607 proposal to grow cloves in NewSpain. The proposal originated from the suggestion of the governor ofthe Philippines, who recommended to the king and the Council of theIndies that growing cloves in New Spain could be a very profitableenterprise, provided that cultivation were successful. Building on thissuggestion, the proposal stipulated that cloves be collected in Ternate(which was by this time under Spanish control) and transported toNew Spain via the Manila galleons, where they would in turn be

planted in regions with the appropriate climactic and soil conditions.65But first, it was necessary to determine the feasibility of such anexperiment, and the responsibility for that fell on the shoulders of theviceroy of New Spain, Luis de Velasco. The proposal, addressed toVelasco, stated that he was to first communicate with people who arethe both learned and disinterested and who could tell him whatmethods would best serve to cultivate and care for the cloves, and thebest way to collect them from the Kingdom of Terrenate [sic], and bywhat means they could be brought [toNew Spain] with the least riskand cost, and how to best and most usefully serve the Royal Treasuryand my subjects and vassals. 66 Thus, the crown wished to implementa program of transplanting the cloves from their original habitat toanother area halfway around the globe, and their intentions are fairlyclear that if the transplantation were successful, cloves would be cultivated on a large scale for export from New Spain. Yet in order to doso, the crown recognized the need for gathering specific informationfrom experts as to the conditions both for transporting and for growing the cloves. Here again, then, is another example of an empire thatfunctioned by gathering empirical information, in this case in thebotanical realm.

It is not clear whether this early initiative to transplant and cultivate cloves was ever deemed feasible. Apart from a response by theviceroy that to me, it seems right to follow the opinion of the expertsin such matters, the documentary trail ends here.67 One can assume,however, that it did not meet with much success, because cloves neverbecame part of New Spain's exports and because efforts to grow cloves

64AGI/S Filipinas, 19, R. 5, N. 82, fs. 1-2.65AGI /S Filipinas, 329, L. 1, f. 13 ir.66 Ibid., fs. 131-132.67AGI/S Mexico, 27, N. 52, 4V.



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and slave labor?on Caribbean society. Yet the production of gingerin sixteenth-century Hispaniola was prodigious, and in the early 1580sitwas being produced in large quantities and received higher prices inEurope than sugar did.72 By 1587, two million pounds of ginger reachedSeville annually, worth 250,000 ducats.13 Such a profitable enterprisedrew labor and capital away from sugar plantations. In 1606, for example, of 9,648 slaves in Hispaniola, 6,742 worked producing ginger,while only eight hundred served in the sugar mills.74 By 1624, gingerproduction had spread to the island of Puerto Rico, which becameanother major producer of the spice, and to other Caribbean islands aswell.75

Yet, in the end it seems that ginger was almost too successful Altogether, the islands began to produce too much ginger for Spanish consumption. Oversupply of the spice meant that there was no one tobuy it and it rotted, so that those who had paid most to grow andtransport it profited the least. 76 In response to the problem, the crownsought tomonitor and control ginger's production. Colonial Spaniardsin Hispaniola had always had to apply to the audiencia of Santo

Domingo for royal licenses in order to produce and sell many differentgoods, including ginger, hides, and sugar.77 In 1599 the Council of theIndies stepped up its regulatory responsibilities and ordered that theproduction of ginger be limited to the islands of Hispaniola and PuertoRico only. These two islands, the Council declared, produced morethan enough ginger to supply the needs of Spain. The council finishedby requesting that the audiencia of Santo Domingo keep council members abreast of developments in the production of ginger by sendingthem a report detailing most particularly the benefits and inconveniences associated with the limitation on ginger cultivation, and ofthe quantity that ought to be brought to Spain . . . and the quantitiesthat are now planted and harvested there as well as the quantitiesgrown on other islands and if it would be better to enforce the pro

72 Frank Moya Pons, Historia colonial de Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: UCMM,1974), p. 89.73These statistics come from Schiebinger, Plants and Empire, p. 4, who cites MauricioNieto Olarte, Remedies for the Empire: The Eighteenth-Century Spanish Botanical

Expeditions to the New World (PhD diss., History of Science and Technology, ImperialCollege, London, 1993). Moya Pons, Historia colonial, p. 89, states that by 1607, Hispaniola was producing more than 170,000 pounds of ginger worth approximately 103 millionmaravedis.74Moya Pons, Historia colonial, p. 89.75AGI/S Santo Domingo, 869, L. 7, fs. 25^r-v.76AGI/S Santo Dominto, 868, L. 4, f. 34r.77AGI/S Santo Domingo, 870, L. 8, f. i46r.



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duct ion of sugar [on these islands]. 78 In this way, although the crownsought to inhibit the production of ginger, the council was still veryinterested in collecting knowledge, via the detailed reports, about howto best manage its production.Yet the problems did not end there. Ginger continued to be soprofitable that sugar mill owners had abandoned their mills in favor ofgrowing the spice. Given the problems of oversupply of ginger, crownofficials in 1607 banned the sugar planters from growing ginger.

According to the Council of the Indies, eight sugar mills on the islandof Hispaniola were no longer in service, and the island had producedonly three thousand arrobas ( 1 arroba is the equivalent of twenty-fivepounds?so seventy-five thousand pounds) of sugar that year, when itwas capable of producing at least twelve thousand. The council's solution was to order the mill owners to devote themselves solely to theproduction of sugar and forbid them from planting any ginger.79

Ginger Transplantation in SpainThe cultivation of ginger also stimulated research and experimentationin the areas of botany and agriculture. In the early 1570s, a series oforders issued from the Council of the Indies requesting detailed information about the cultivation of ginger in Hispaniola and ordering itstransport to Spain for experimental cultivation. These orders coincided with the Relaciones Geogr?ficas of 15 70-15 71 recently codifiedby the royal cosmographer of the Casa de la Contrataci?n of Seville.The Relaciones consisted of a series of questionnaires sent to colonialofficials in the Americas requesting information about the geography,ethnography, natural history, and economic prospects of each region.80

They constituted one of the most important and representative examples of what Antonio Barrera has referred to as the information-gathering mechanisms of the Spanish empire in the production of knowledge about nature in the sixteenth century.81 Iwould argue that therequests for information about ginger's cultivation from the Council ofthe Indies were also part of the culture of this information-gathering

78AGI/S Santo Domingo, 868, L. 4, fs.34r-v.79AGI/S Santo Domingo, 869, L. 6, fs. 55T-V.80 See Howard F.Cline, The Relaciones Geogr?ficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577-1648inGuide to the Ethno-historical Sources, ed. Howard R Cline, 183-242, vol. 12, Handbook ofMiddle American Indians, general ed. Robert Wauchope (Austin: University of Texas Press,1964-1976), for an excellent overview of the Relaciones.81 Barrera, Experiencing Nature and Empire and Empirical Practices.



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De Vos: The Science of Spices 425mission and part of the processing network of a center of calcu

lation.In its quest for knowledge of ginger's properties, the Council of theIndies wrote to the Audiencia of Santo Domingo in 1573 requestingthem to pay much attention and care to this important enterprise sothat itwill continue to develop and grow and to send to the Casa dela Contrataci?n a quantity of fine examples of ginger. Along withthe ginger, they desired a detailed set of instructions as to the uses of

ginger, and in what season and type of earth to plant it and how it iscultivated so that in these lands [reinos] we may be able to cultivateit. 82This request for the transplantation of ginger from Hispaniola toSpain also highlights the scientific culture of Spain under Philip II.Recent historians have begun to recognize that important scientificdevelopments were taking place in the court of Philip II. AlthoughPhilip II is often characterized as a devout and pious Catholic whoclosed Spain's borders to outside ideas and travel, new findings demonstrate that the king himself was dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of knowledge in his kingdoms and in fact sponsored theestablishment of an academy of mathematics, a royal chemistry laboratory, and the cultivation of new plants in royal botanical gardens.83Thus spice transplantations that occurred with economic botanywere a component of Philip IPs sponsorship of the natural sciences, asevident in another crown request to the viceroy of New Spain in 1572that he organize a shipment of a quantity of ginger to be planted inSeville, to see if it would bear fruit [grow], as up to this time, itsmethod of cultivation is not wholly understood. 84 This experiment(espirencia) was orchestrated by the crown in order to see if ginger couldbe grown and sold in Spain on a large scale, or if it should be culti

vated only in the Indies. To initiate the experiment, the viceroy wasto send instructions as to how to best cultivate the ginger, and customshouse officials were to send notice with the very next fleet to NewSpain of the plants' progress, the methods of cultivation used, and the

82AGI/S Santo Dominto, 868, L. 3, f. i6v. Subsequent orders also requested similarinformation concerning the cultivation of cotton and rice and the management of livestock on the island.83 See David C. Goodman, Power and Penury: Government, Technology, and Science inPhilip IPs Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Enrique Martinez Ruiz,dir. Felipe II, laCiencia y la T?cnica (Madrid: Actas Editorial, 1999), especially Jos? Mar?aL?pez Pinero, Actividad cient?fica y sociedad en la Espa?a de Felipe II, 17-36 and F J.Campos y Fern?ndez De Sevilla, dir. La Ciencia en el Escorial (Madrid: Ediciones Escurialenses, 1992).84AGI/S Indiferente, 1956, L. 1, f. 67r.



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quality of the ginger?if it bore richer fruit in Spain than inMexico,and in what season it grew best.85 The officials dutifully wrote backthat, indeed, the ginger had done quite well in and around Seville.Plantings were done in several local gardens, including that of theAlcazar (royal palace), and in various locations within three leagues ofthe city. With the report they sent several specimens of the plant,including seeds, and canes of a little more than four fingers' in height,

and some roots. 86The experiment did not end there, however. Hoping to capitalize

on this apparent success, the crown took it one step further. InNovember 1573, customs house officials were once again directed to overseethe cultivation of twelve boxes of green ginger that had recentlyarrived from New Spain along with instructions as to how to best carefor them. This time, however, officials were to distribute the gingerthroughout Spain to those areas whose soil the officials deemed capable of growing it.Along with the ginger, the Casa officials would alsosend a copy of the instruction book that had come from New Spainand had to make sure that local growers take much care and pay closeattention to this matter and send reports of their progress, whichwould then be sent on to the crown.87 Officials were also admonishedto make sure that the planting began as soon as possible, while theseedlings were still viable, and to inform the council once ithad takenplace. The records that Ihave been able to uncover unfortunately stophere. No doubt the requested reports lie somewhere among the uncatalogued documents of the indiferente (miscellaneous) section of theArchive of the Indies, awaiting the intrepid historian. Nevertheless, itis probably safe to assume that these experiments did not lead to bigbusiness, because ginger never became a major export product inSpain. Yet I argue that the efforts and aims in and of themselves are ofsignificance to the history of economic botany and to the history ofscience in the Spanish empire.

ConclusionThus from Columbus to Magellan to Mendoza to the Dominicanplanters, spices continued to be an important commodity?a source of

green gold ?throughout the sixteenth century and into the seven

85 Ibid., fs. 67PV.86 Ibid., f. 21 or.87 Ibid., f. 33or.



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teenth. In conjunction with these explorers and entrepreneurs, theSpanish crown, the Council of the Indies, the Casa de la Contrataci?n, and various levels of the colonial administration in the Americas directed the transplantation of several different spices, but particularly ginger, from the East Indies to the Americas, and then from theAmericas to Spain. Despite the successes of ginger in the Caribbean,however, the most significant aspect of the transplantations was notin the actual commercial outcome, but rather in the collection ofdetailed reports and information that accompanied them, for the dataconsisted of empirical information about the geography, climate, soilconditions, and botanical properties of potentially useful plants, andas such were part of a project of economic botany that has wideranging?indeed global?epistemological significance. Not only doesit bring a very particular kind of human agency and intent to theColumbian exchange, but it also serves to direct our thinking aboutthe origins of the Scientific Revolution to the encounter between theNew and Old Worlds. In this way, economic botany in the Spanishempire highlights the interconnection between science and commerce,and between local knowledge and global imperial aspirations in theearly modern world.

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