“As for cinnamon, they [Arabians] gather it in an even stranger way. Where it comes from and what land produces it they cannot say, except that it is reported, reasonably enough, to grow in the places where Dionysus was reared. There are great birds, it is said, that take these dry sticks which we have learned from the Phoenicians to call cinnamon and carry them off to nests stuck with mud to precipitous cliffs, where man has no means of approach. The Arabian solution to this is to cut dead oxen and asses and other beasts of burden into the largest possible pieces, then to set these near the eyries and withdraw far off. The birds then fly down (it is said) and carry the pieces of the beasts up to their nests, while these, not being able to bear the weight, break and fall down the mountain side, and then the Arabians come and gather them up. Thus is cinnamon said to be gathered, and so to come from Arabia to other lands.”
Cinnamon bark drying by the roadside in Ternate, Indonesia
This fantastic tale about the cinnamon collection, written roughly 2500 years ago, is amusing and horrifying at the same time. Part of a longer description on the arduous efforts of Arab merchants to collect spices and sell them to distant lands, Herodotus’ (BC 484-425) story is amusing because of the elaborate inventiveness of the plot. Much like today, there is an element of the spectacular – in all its fantastic improbability – that attracts and sells. Here, cinnamon becomes an extraordinary and highly desired object not only because of its medicinal or culinary qualities but also because of the exceptional means involved in acquiring it. (And, naturally, a merchant could charge a much higher price for something that involves treacherous terrains and elaborate trickery of giant birds, than a mundane process of peeling the bark off of cinnamon trees.)
But the spectacular derives not only from amusement (and our hindsight that the story is fabricated). There is an additional, and far more sinister dimension at play: horror.
The story is memorable because of the complex role of violence and the fact that it is part of the entertainment value of the story. On the one hand, violence is made central to the collection of cinnamon (slaughter of animals, destruction of birds’ nests). On the other, violence is also central to the economic calculus and pricing of cinnamon. Without the violent interaction (or the impression of such), the merchants might have difficulties striking a profitable bargain. The normalisation of violence, and particularly the logic of calculating violence into the price of the commodity, makes the story horrific.
A mural of sea-side spice markets and merchants in Java at the Maritime Museum, Jaka
Certainly, these are just interpretations of ancient narratives that provide glimpses into the ways in which people, objects, and stories have circulated around the world for millennia. But narratives and objects do more than just circulate – Europe’s increasing and arguably irrational craving for Asian spices from the 15th century onward, for instance, eventually shaped the world as we know it today. Bolstered by myths not dissimilar to those of Herodotus, an elite desire for extravagance, and practical medicinal promise, the allure of spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves led to an era of unprecedented connectivity, underpinned by widespread colonial violence. Something as mundane as the bark of a tree, became an object of great appeal because of its distinct aroma and taste. But the narratives of its acquisition and sale over the centuries are anything but mundane. As historian John Keay (2005) writes of the spice trade:
“No other trade was so hotly contested, and no other group of commodities so exercised nations or so changed the course of history. Thanks to, among other spices, the pepper, cinnamon, sandalwood and camphor of the Indies, the cloves of the north Moluccas and the mace and nutmegs of the Bandas, man first acquired a comprehensive understanding of the geography of his planet.”
Perhaps the historical role of cinnamon and spice in shaping the modern world also relies to an extent on hyperbole and spectacle, but the specific costs and rewards of the journey for spice can be readily traced. The journey of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan to the East Indies in the early 16th century, for example, signifies not only the first successful circumnavigation of the globe, but also the spectacular horror necessary for acquisition of spices. Months after Magellan had successfully courted King Charles V of Spain to support his journey to the Banda and Moluccan islands in search of nature’s only “store-house” for nutmegs and mace, with much of the original crew dead from starvation and disease and Magellan himself killed in the Philippines, the remaining ships made it to the Moluccan island of Tidore in 1521. With dozens of tons of cloves, nutmeg, mace, and cinnamon spilling from cargo holds, the surviving captain, Juan Sebastián Elcano, began an equally perilous journey home that would require an additional nine months and inflict dysentery and death upon half of the crew. After The Victoria and her captain finally arrived back in Seville, King Charles V was so overjoyed that he honored the captain with a coat of arms designed with three nutmegs, twelve cloves, and two sticks of cinnamon. (Milton, 1999).
Here the fantastic and violent are carved into a gleaming history, as a coat of spice signals the frontier beyond those once unreachable precipitous cliffs and the exceptional means necessary for such scaling.