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were also precious and were a lot rarer than pepper. Both originated in the fabled Spice Islands or Moluccas, now the Indonesian province of Maluku. The nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans, grew only on the Banda Islands, an isolated cluster of seven islands in the Banda Sea, about sixteen hundred miles east of Jakarta. These islands are tiny—the largest is less than ten kilometers long and the smallest barely a few kilometers. In the north of the Moluccas are the equally small neighboring islands of Ternate and Tidore, the only places in the world where Eugenia aromatica, the clove tree, could be found.
    For centuries the people of both these island groups had harvested the fragrant product of their trees, selling spices to visiting Arab, Malay, and Chinese traders to be shipped to Asia and to Europe. Trade routes were well established, and whether they were transported via India, Arabia, Persia, or Egypt, spices would pass through as many as twelve hands before reaching consumers in western Europe. As every transaction could double the price, it was no wonder that the governor of Portuguese India, Afonso de Albuquerque, set his sights farther afield, landing first at Ceylon and later capturing Malacca, on the Malay Peninsula, then the center of the East Indian spice trade. By 1512 he reached the sources of nutmeg and cloves, established a Portuguese monopoly trading directly with the Moluccas, and soon surpassed the Venetian merchants.
    Spain, too, coveted the spice trade. In 1518 the Portuguese mariner Ferdinand Magellan, whose plans for an expedition had been rejected by his own country, convinced the Spanish crown that it would not only be possible to approach the Spice Islands by traveling westward but that the route would be shorter. Spain had good reasons for supporting such an expedition. A new route to the East Indies would allow their ships to avoid Portuguese ports and shipping on the eastern passage via Africa and India. As well, a previous decree by Pope Alexander VI had awarded Portugal all non-Christian lands east of an imaginary north-south line one hundred leagues (about three hundred miles) west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain was allowed all non-Christian lands to the west of this line. That the world was round—a fact accepted by many scholars and mariners of the time—had been overlooked or ignored by the Vatican. So approaching by traveling west could give Spain a legitimate claim to the Spice Islands.
    Magellan convinced the Spanish crown that he had knowledge of a pass through the American continent, and he had also convinced himself. He left Spain in September 1519, sailing southwest to cross the Atlantic and then down the coasts of what are now Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. When the 140-mile-wide mouth of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, leading to the present-day city of Buenos Aires, turned out to be just that—an estuary—his disbelief and disappointment must have been enormous. But he continued southward, confident that a passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific was always just around the next headland. The journey for his five small ships with 265 crewmen was only to get worse. The farther south Magellan sailed, the shorter the days became and the more constant the gales. A dangerous coastline with surging tides, deteriorating weather, huge waves, steady hail, sleet and ice, and the very real threat of a slip from frozen rigging added to the misery of the voyage. At 50 degrees south with no obvious passageway in sight and having already subdued one mutiny, Magellan decided to wait out the remainder of the southern winter before sailing on to eventually discover and navigate the treacherous waters that now bear his name.
    By October 1520, four of his ships had made it through the Strait of Magellan. With supplies running low, Magellan’s officers argued that they should turn back. But the lure of cloves and nutmeg, and the glory and wealth that would result