1575) of Spanish court cartographer Juan López de Velasco. The earliest map to name all of the Philippine islands, based on the manuscript world map (ca. Plate 14 from Herrera’s Descripción de las Indias Occidentales (Madrid, 1601). “Descripcion de las Indias del Poniente.” Copperplate map, with added color, 20 × 28 cm. The copper-engraved maps of this mid-sixteenth century period represented the final transition away from the use of woodblocks that had dominated map printing since the beginning.ġ601: Herrera y Tordesillas, Antonio de, d. (Porcacchi copied the map, using a smaller format, from Girolamo Ruscelli’s edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia that was printed in Venice in 1561.) By naming the whole area the Moluccas, Porcacchi is probably reflecting the contemporary confusion on the exact whereabouts of the Spice Islands.
The book went through a number of editions through 1686 to meet the increasing demand for information about remote places, but the maps remained unchanged. įollowing in the footsteps of his countryman Benedetto Bordon (1450-1530), Porcacchi issued an updated isolario, or island map book, in Venice in 1572. from Porcacchi’s L’isole piu famose del mondo (Venice, 1576?).
*A bahar is a unit of weight approximating 400 pounds.ġ576?: Porcacchi, Thomaso, ca. We saw almost every day a cloud descend and encircle first one of those mountains and then the other, whereby the cloves become more perfect. Nowhere in the world do good cloves grow except on five mountains of those five islands. And when the year is hotter, and there is less rain, they gather three or four hundred bahar* of cloves in each of those islands, and they grow only in the mountains. They gather them twice a year, at Christmas and again on the feast of St John the Baptist, because at these two seasons the air is most temperate, but more so at Christmas. When the cloves sprout, they are white when ripe, red and when dried, black. These trees almost always bear more of them on one side than on the other, according to the season. The cloves come at the tip of branches, ten or twenty together. The leaf is like that of a laurel, and the bark of the color of brown tan.
Its branches in the center spread out widely, but at the top they grow into a kind of peak. On that day of Sunday I went ashore to see how the cloves grow. Shown with the permission of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. “Figure of the Five Islands Where Grow the Cloves, and of Their Tree.” From volume 2 of Magellan’s Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation. Largely because of the magnetic force of spices, European ships risked sailing into unknown waters (Portuguese ventures down and around Africa), “found” a New World (Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic), and first circled the globe (Magellan’s crossing of the Pacific).ġ521: Pigafetta, Antonio, ca. However, the historical significance of these islands cannot be overstated. Gradually, the spice was cultivated in other places of the world, like Brazil, the West Indies, and Zanzibar, reducing prices and making the commodity more available. But, as one might expect, the Dutch tactic also instilled hatred and fomented rebellion among the islanders. As a result, cloves were worth more than their weight in gold. When the Dutch took over control of the Moluccas in the seventeenth century, they eradicated the clove trees from all the islands except Amboina (and a few adjacent islands) in order to enforce the spice’s scarcity, keeping prices high.
One of the native traditions was to plant a clove tree when a child was born, linking the child symbolically to the life of the tree. The Portuguese strengthened their stranglehold on the spice trade during the sixteenth century, when they found the central locus of the spices to be these islands. Their monopoly was broken by the Portuguese after Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1497. Until the 1700s, these rain-forested, luxuriant, volcanic islands were the only or best sources of such spices as cloves, nutmeg, and mace.Īrab traders introduced cloves to Europeans around the fourth century but sought to keep their sources secret. Though there are hundreds of islands in the group (most are very small), only a handful figure prominently in the history of the European spice trade, including today’s Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian, and Bacan-essentially the ones shown on the surrounding maps. The Indonesian archipelago of the Moluccas (or Maluku Islands), commonly referred to as the Spice Islands, lies on the equator north of Australia and west of New Guinea. Spice Islands (Moluccas): 250 Years of Maps (1521–1760)
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