Customer Reviews

The Scents of Eden: A Narrative of the Spice Trade

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I just finished "Nathaniel's Nutmeg" last week and since I had not yet had my fill of spices I decided to keep right on going with this book. It was a good decision. Both books are excellent. "Nathaniel's Nutmeg" covers a shorter period of time and the author is mainly interested in the power struggle between the Dutch and English. In "The Scents of Eden", Mr. Corn uses a broader canvas. He gives information about the Portuguese, who preceded the other countries. He provides interesting character sketches of Magellan and other explorers, which you might have expected to find in a book such as this, but he also traces the exploits of the Jesuit, Francis Xavier. The book then moves into the battle between the Dutch and the English and we get interesting little asides, such as at the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh when Sir Walter asked to run his finger along the executioner's blade and then quipped: "This is sharp medicine, but it is a sure cure for all diseases." Mr. Corn continues past the struggle between Holland and England and gives some interesting information about the entrance of the United States into the spice trade and the rise of Salem (yes, that Salem!) as a major player in pepper. I also learned that in 1873 the Dutch started a war in the East Indies against Aceh. This struggle continued for 40 years and Holland lost 250,000 men. I consider myself pretty well read but I had never known anything about this. The book is full of interesting things like this but don't get the impression that it is dry or boring. Mr. Corn is equally adept at giving well crafted descriptions of men and scenery and life aboard ship. You will be both educated and entertained. What more could you want?

"In The Scents of Eden: A History of the Spice Trade" American writer Charles Corn dishes up a pungent tale of the West's involvement in the eastern spice trade. Although the use of these condiments can be traced back to antiquity, the history of the origins of its commerce is sketchy at best. Until the arrival of the European explorers on the coast of East Indies, the trade had been firmly in the hands of Indian nakhodas and the real-life alter ego's of Sindbad the Sailor for centuries. Hardly any accounts of their exploits survive, at least not in any language accessible to the author.

In the wake of their victory over the last Muslim vestiges on the Iberian Peninsula, Portuguese navigators set out to find their own way to the riches of the orient. By obtaining them at their source they would ensure that the dazzling profits to be made in this business would solely be theirs. In this first part of his historical account, Corn introduces a number of colorful characters: swaggering adventurers of a type later immortalized by Joseph Conrad in "Lord Jim", as well as zealots like the warrior-priest Francis Xavier, whose proselytizing efforts took him all over Asia. Thus we are presented with an animated image of early European colonialism, an era in which the protagonists served both treasury and the cross.

Much gloomier is the picture painted of the next phase of European exploits. In an attempt to obtain a unchallenged monopoly over the trade in both pepper and the `holy trinity of spices': clove, nutmeg and mace, the merchants of the Dutch Republic have no qualms about exterminating the native population of the isles or subjecting their competitors to unspeakable cruelty. The figure of Jan Pietersz. Coen, a dour accountant turned Governor General, looms large over this episode, serving as the archetype of the unscrupulous East India Company official. Unfeeling and clinical, he sees terror as a tool to reach his objective: total Dutch control over all trade in the Far East. With surgical precision he executes his plans. His letters to the company directors back home in the Netherlands read like present-day management reports, in which the firing of thousands of workers and the muscling-out of competitors of a market are rendered in the same benign prose. While he retains a certain sympathy for Portuguese and English, the Dutch - to Corn - are insensitive, greedy, amoral, in short: plain evil.

But it must be said: Corn spins a magnificent yarn. It is unfortunate that, towards the end of the third part of the book - dedicated to the American participation in the global spice trade, he derails into a moralistic tale, in which the New England merchants and skippers from Salem, Massachusetts, are cast in the unlikely role of `Hollywood' white knights. Here Corn puts his credibility as a competent historian in jeopardy. While one of the contemporary actors in the episode displays a willingness to accept that not all of his fellow countrymen were of unblemished repute, Corn wants nothing of that. So when, after his ship has been hijacked by the Malays, Captain Charles Endicott surmises that this may be the result of the practices of certain dishonest American traders, Corn rejects this out of hand as he writes: `this speculation on Endicott's part is unconvincing. A more likely explanation is that three centuries of infidel European colonization in the Indies - the successive waves of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English - had bred a profound distrust of Christian Europeans on the part of Muslim Malays in a part of the world where word spread across the waters with the wind [...] The straight-talking, square-dealing sons of Salem had not earned the natives' contempt 250 years later, they merely inherited it from their predecessors."

At first it seems that Corn has fallen victim to the kind of naivité or innocence he wants to celebrate in his heroes. But as he elaborates further on the episode and the ensuing punitive campaign organized by the US navy, one can not dispel the thoght that the author is actually employing the incident as the paradigm for future American interventions elsewhere in the world: protecting American interests overseas is (always) done for morally sound reasons. In underlying message seems to be that in its current, self-appointed role as the world's policeman, the US is confronted with the consequences of wrongs committed by others. And so a well-told `tale of sea' suddenly appears to get political undertones. What a pity.

Charles Corn's "The Scents of Eden" seeks to document the history of the spice trade, focusing on the control of a few key islands in the East Indies where the historically most valuable spices (notably cloves and nutmeg) originated. Corn's effort is a little spotty: I found him both interesting and readable in some places, and neither in many other places.

I think about 60% of this book presents interesting and relevant material, but the remaining 40% felt like filler to me. The portions of the book where Corn discusses the key spice-producing islands, their discovery and the imperialistic practices that controlled them, were generally very interesting, and read quickly and with satisfaction. Moreover, I found Corn's writing style generally pleasant to read, and appropriate (or at least acceptable) for "popular" history. The early chapters were among the better ones.

However, Corn doesn't seem to have enough material to make all 319 pages interesting, or perhaps the topic just isn't robust enough for that much book. Either way, I found many chapters off topic, and felt like I was suffering through a droning lecture. For example, Corn provides long descriptions of Amsterdam, London and Salem, none of which seemed more than peripherally relevant to me. More irritating was a rather gratuitous description of Dutch atrocities to both native inhabitants and other pesky Europeans (most notably, the English). While these seemed well documented (among the best documented material Corn presents), I thought he'd made his point adequately in earlier discussions of the topic, and this elaboration didn't seem to add anything to the book.

For my money, "The Scents of Eden" isn't polished enough to make for a serious academic work, and isn't interesting or consistent enough to be top shelf "popular" history. While it had its moments, I found myself struggling through mediocre material in the later parts. And the abundance of chapters that I found off-topic made me question the significance of the entire subject. If you're considering reading this, you may enjoy the book somewhat, but I'd recommend something by Tuchman or Gleeson well ahead of this book.

I didn't like this book. In fact, it was so annoying that I didn't finish it. The writing is at times ridiculously fancy - e.g., "as exotic as the plumage of a bird of paradise." YUK! The documentation is worthless. For example, in the preface the author claims that Europeans didn't know how to transplant trees and plants until the late 18th Century. I found this claim hard to believe and tried to look up the reference in the bibliography. When I got to the bibliography it was just a couple of pages of notes for the entire book. None of the references corresponded to pages in the text, not even to chapters, but rather only to Parts I, II & III. In the bibliography the author says things like, "So and so's book is very informative on 17th Century English commerce." That just won't do - even for popular history. The sloppy documentation just made the many distracting bursts of baroque verbiage unbearable. I made it through the first 100 pages, then couldn't stand it any longer. In sum, I feel for this author. A good editor could have corrected many of these problems before the book went into print.

Nice, interesting historical read. This book filled in a lot of gaps in my historical knowledge. The book is a nicely interwoven tale of various personas involved in the spice trade as well as the macro-history of this trade.

My only complaint is that at times the book would give overly-flowery descriptions within the historical context. I understand that this is done to make the book more readable, it just over does it at times. Or it could be that I'm being overly-critical because I read Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel right before reading this (Diamond's book does an absolutely perfect job of walking the line between readability and scientific rigor).

Great history. Too many errors. On page xxi,Corn writes "rose in value one hundred percent each time they changed hands-----they changed hands hundreds of times". Impossible! He probably means,'increased in value hundreds of times'.Even if you start with one penny per pound and increased it 100% just 30 times,you would have ONE BILLION PENNIES! Also 3 different dates relating to same incident. Page 134,line 11,states 1608 Page 135,line1 ,states 1609 Page 137,4th line from bottom,states 1509. This should not be multiple choice. Corn writes about building a fort "on the other side of the river",what river? These and other shortcomings interrupted the normal flow of reading. Otherwise,quite informative and exciting story.

In "The Scents of Eden: A Narrative of the Spice Trade," Charles Corn weaves a compelling story of adventure, betrayal and greed which shaped global economies, and drove the discovery of nations. He breathes life into historical figures, describing how they overcame tremendous odds but also succumbed to common human failings. All the while, the reader inhales deeply of the heady descriptions of clove, mace and nutmeg.

In this book, spice, once relegated to infrequent and uninspired use in American cooking, is imbued with the passion and intrigue that propelled the early explorers. As Americans take interest in the Far East, they have been re-discovering the flavors indigenous to that area of the world. Restaurants that serve Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese and Malaysian cuisine have been proliferating. With Indonesia so often in the news these days, Corn's book gives the current state of affairs and interest in the Far East a tumultuous historic backdrop. This is the story behind the intriguing aromas that drove the development of the global economy.

I agree with other reviewers here, it could have used one more edit. But overall, a fascinating read. I was transported.

This is the worst sort of "docu-tainment". Neither a historical romance nor history. Absolutely no documentation. To paraphrase the author: One searches in vain for a subject here. The author permits himself some outrageous rubbish like this: "Though it was only a fresco of the imagination springing from his work among a strangely mutant people..." What in the world does this mean? Then on the very next page we are forced to swallow this: "One searches Xavier's writings in vain for his take on Java's wild beauty, the miraculous dawns at sea, and the tinted skies of early evening, and can only conjecture..." Right, so your subject is silent about the stuff you want to rhapsodize on, but that doesn't stop you. The key word here is "conjecture". Of the 100 pages I managed to read before disgust set in, there is nothing here but conjecture.

The final absurdity was the five page rhapsody on Elizabethan London (which has of course nothing to do with the subject and is of a level of a poorly written travel guide). Worse yet, he refers to Chaucer as his authority for understanding this London. Chaucer wrote 200 years before this period! It was probably too much trouble to read any books by Elizabethan writers, so he took down the old Cliff Notes on Chaucer to save time.

Just before the Chaucer madness came a discussion of Mendes Pinto's "Travels" written "in the tradition of 'Don Quixote'." Cervantes's book was published 30 years after Pinto's.

An author with no sense of chronology has no place writing "conjectural" histories. All this is only made worse by the ineptly flowery prose that serves no purpose and gives even less pleasure.

I want my money back from the author.

This is a great book if you are interested in history. Since I am a Portuguese-American, I found this book fascinating since it includes the experiences of both countries in this highly lucrative trade between the 15th and 19th centuries.

I did not enjoy history as it was taught in school based on dates, wars, generals, and kings. It is much more interesting to learn history based on a particular theme such as the spice trade. I had a hard time putting this book down until I finally finished it.

A fascinating subject made even more so by the author's skillful writing. I was totally drawn into the book and recommend it to anyone interested in the history of this area ... or man's early obsession with spices.