Penny le Couteur & Jay Burreson Read Online Free PDF

from wresting the East Indies spice trade from the Portuguese, kept Magellan sailing west with three ships. The nearly thirteen-thousand-mile journey across the vast Pacific, a far wider ocean than anyone had imagined, with no maps, only rudimentary navigational instruments, little food, and almost depleted water stores, was worse than the passage around the tip of South America. The expedition’s landfall on March 6, 1521, at Guam in the Marianas, offered the crew a reprieve from certain death by starvation or scurvy.
    Ten days later Magellan made his last landfall, on the small Philip-pine island of Mactan. Killed in a skirmish with the natives, he never did reach the Moluccas, although his ships and remaining crew sailed on to Ternate, the home of cloves. Three years after leaving Spain, a depleted crew of eighteen survivors sailed upriver to Seville with twenty-six tons of spices in the battered hull of the Victoria, the last remaining ship of Magellan’s small armada.

THE AROMATIC MOLECULES OF CLOVES AND NUTMEG
    Although cloves and nutmeg come from different plant families and from remote island groups separated by hundreds of miles of mainly open sea, their distinctively different odors are due to extremely similar molecules. The main component of oil of cloves is eugenol; the fragrant compound in oil of nutmeg is isoeugenol. These two aromatic molecules—aromatic in both smell and chemical structure—differ only in the position of a double bond:

    The sole difference in these two compounds—the double bond position—is arrowed.
    The similarities between the structures of these two compounds and of zingerone (from ginger) are also obvious. Again the smell of ginger is quite distinctive from that of either cloves or nutmeg.

    Zingerone
    Plants do not produce these highly scented molecules for our benefit. As they cannot retreat from grazing animals, from sap-sucking and leaf-eating insects, or from fungal infestations, plants protect themselves with chemical warfare involving molecules such as eugenol and isoeugenol, as well as piperine, capsaicin, and zingerone. These are natural pesticides—very potent molecules. Humans can consume such compounds in small amounts since the detoxification process that occurs in our livers is very efficient. While a massive dose of a particular compound could theoretically overpower one of the liver’s many metabolic pathways, it’s reassuring to know that ingesting enough pepper or cloves to do this would be quite difficult.
    Even at a distance from a clove tree, the wonderful smell of eugenol is apparent. The compound is found in many parts of the plant, in addition to the dried flower buds that we’re familiar with. As long ago as 200 B.C., in the time of the Han dynasty, cloves were used as breath sweeteners for courtiers in the Chinese imperial court. Oil of clove was valued as a powerful antiseptic and a remedy for toothache. It is still sometimes used as a topical anesthetic in dentistry.

    Drying cloves on the street in Northern Sulawesi, Indonesia. (Photo by Penny Le Couteur)
    The nutmeg spice is one of two produced by the nutmeg tree, the other being mace. Nutmeg is ground from the shiny brown seed, or nut, of the apricotlike fruit, whereas mace comes from the red-colored covering layer, or aril, surrounding the nut. Nutmeg has long been used medicinally, in China to treat rheumatism and stomach pains, and in Southeast Asia for dysentery or colic. In Europe, as well as being considered an aphrodisiac and a soporific, nutmeg was worn in a small bag around the neck to protect against the Black Death, which swept Europe with regularity after its first recorded occurrence in 1347. While epidemics of other diseases (typhus, smallpox) periodically visited parts of Europe, the plague was the most feared. It occurred in three forms. The bubonic form manifested in painful buboes or swellings in the groin and armpits; internal hemorrhaging and