At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Nutmeg and mace were the most valuable because of their extreme rarity.* Both came from a tree, Myristica fragrans, which was found on the lower slopes of just nine small volcanic islands rising sheer from the Banda Sea, amid a mass of other islands—none with quite the right soils and microclimates to support the nutmeg tree—between Borneo and New Guinea in what is now Indonesia. Cloves, the dried flowerbuds of a type of myrtle tree, grew on six similarly selective islands some two hundred miles to the north in the same chain, known to geography as the Moluccas but to history as the Spice Islands. Just to put this in perspective, the Indonesian archipelago consists of sixteen thousand islands scattered over 735,000 square miles of sea, so it is little wonder that the locations of fifteen of them remained a mystery to Europeans for so long.

Columbus’s real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States. He filled his holds with valueless iron pyrite (thinking it was gold) and with what he confidently believed to be cinnamon and pepper. The first was actually a worthless tree bark, and the second were not true peppers but chili peppers—excellent when you have grasped the general idea of them, but a little eye-wateringly astonishing on first hearty chomp.

Vasco da Gama, sailing for Portugal, decided to go the other way to the Orient, around the bottom of Africa. This was a much trickier proposition than it sounds. Contrary prevailing winds and currents wouldn’t allow a southern-sailing vessel to simply follow the coastline, as logic would indicate. Instead it was necessary for Gama to sail far out into the Atlantic Ocean—almost to Brazil, in fact, though he didn’t know it—to catch easterly breezes that would shoot his fleet around the southern cape. This made it a truly epic voyage. Europeans had never sailed this far before. Gama’s ships were out of sight of land for as much as three months at a time. This was the voyage that effectively discovered scurvy. No earlier sea voyages had been long enough for the symptoms of scurvy to take hold. It also brought two other unhappy traditions to the maritime world. One was the introduction of syphilis to Asia—just five years after Columbus’s men conveyed it to Europe from the Americas—helping make it a truly international disease. The other was the casual infliction of extreme violence on innocent people. Vasco da Gama was a breathtakingly vicious man. On one occasion he captured a Muslim ship carrying hundreds of men, women, and children, locked the passengers and crew in the hold, carried off everything of value, and then—gratuitously, appallingly—set the ship ablaze. Almost everywhere he went, Gama abused or slaughtered people he encountered, and so set a tone of distrust and br...

Vasco da Gama never got to the Spice Islands. Like most others, he thought the East Indies were just a little east of India—hence their name, of course—but in fact they proved to be way beyond India, so far beyond that Europeans arriving there began to wonder if they had sailed most of the way around the world and were almost back to the Americas.

In 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set off in five leaky ships, in a brave but seriously underfunded operation, to find a western route. What he discovered was that between the Americas and Asia was a greater emptiness than anyone had ever imagined Earth had room for: the Pacific Ocean. No one has ever suffered more in the quest to get rich than Ferdinand Magellan and his crew as they sailed in growing disbelief across the Pacific in 1521. Their provisions all but exhausted, they devised perhaps the least appetizing dish ever served: rat droppings mixed with wood shavings. “We ate biscuit which was no longer biscuit but powder of biscuits swarming with worms,” recorded one crew member. “It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that had been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard … and often we ate sawdust from boards.” They went three months and twenty days without fresh food or water before finding relief and a shoreline in Guam—and all in a quest to fill the ships’ holds with dried flowerbuds, bits of tree bark, and other aromatic scrapings to sprinkle on food and make into pomanders.

In the end, only 18 of 260 men survived the voyage. Magellan himself was killed in a skirmish with natives in the Philippines. The survivors did very well out of the voyage, however. In the Spice Islands they loaded up with fifty-three thousand pounds of cloves, which they sold in Europe for a profit of 2,500 percent, and almost incidentally in the process became the first human beings to circle the globe. The real significance of Magellan’s voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.

Although Columbus had little idea of what he was doing, it was his voyages that ultimately proved the most important, and we can date the moment that that became so with precision. On November 5, 1492, on Cuba, two of his crewmen returned to the ship carrying something no one from their world had ever seen before: “a sort of grain [that the natives] call maiz which was well tasted, bak’d, dry’d and made into flour.” In the same week, they saw some Taino Indians sticking cylinders of smoldering weed in their mouths, drawing smoke into their chests, and pronouncing the exercise satisfying. Columbus took some of this odd product home with him, too.

And so began the process known to anthropologists as the Columbian Exchange—the transfer of foods and other materials from the New World to the Old World and vice versa. By the time the first Europeans arrived in the New World, farmers there were harvesting more than a hundred kinds of edible plants—potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants, avocados, sweet potatoes, peanuts, cashews, pineapples, papaya, guava, yams, manioc (or cassava), pumpkins, vanilla, a whole slew of beans and squashes, four types of chili peppers, and chocolate, among rather a lot else—not a bad haul.

It has been estimated that 60 percent of all the crops grown in the world today originated in the Americas. These foods weren’t just incorporated into foreign cuisines. They effectively became the foreign cuisines. Imagine Italian food without tomatoes, Greek food without eggplant, Thai and Indonesian foods without peanut sauce, curries without chilies, hamburgers without French fries or ketchup, African food without cassava. There was scarcely...

The Americas, it may be said, gained much from Europe in return. Before the Europeans stormed into their lives, people in Central America had only five domesticated creatures—the turkey, duck, dog, bee, and cochineal insect—and no dairy products. Without European meat and cheese, Mexican food as we know it could not exist. Wheat in Kansas, coffee in Brazil, beef in Argentina, and a great deal more would not be possible.

Less happily, the Columbian Exchange also involved disease. With no immunity to many European diseases, the natives sickened easily and “died in heapes.” One epidemic, probably viral hepatitis, killed an estimated 90 percent of the natives in coastal Massachusetts. A once-mighty tribal group in the region of modern Texas and Arkansas, the Caddo, saw its population fall from an estimated 200,000 to just 1,400—a drop of nearly 96 percent. An equivalent outbreak in modern New York would reduce the population to 56,000—“not enough to fill Yankee Stadium,” in the chilling phrase of Charles C. Mann. Altogether, disease and slaughter reduced the native population of Mesoamerica by an estimated 90 percent in the first century of European contact. In return, the natives gave Columbus’s men syphilis.

People continued to fight over the more exotic spices for another century or so, and sometimes even over the more common ones. In 1599, eighty British merchants, exasperated by the rising cost of pepper, formed the British East India Company with a view to getting a piece of the market for themselves. This was the initiative that brought King James the treasured isles of Puloway and Puloroon, but in fact the British never had much success in the East Indies, and in 1667, in the Treaty of Breda, they ceded all claims to the region to the Dutch in return for a small piece of land of no great significance in North America. The piece of land was called Manhattan.

Two years before his unhappy adventure with “many worms creeping,” Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary a rather more prosaic milestone in his life. On September 25, 1660, he tried a new hot beverage for the first time, recording in his diary: “And afterwards I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink), of which I never had drank before.” Whether he liked it or not Pepys didn’t say, which is a shame, as it is the first mention we have in English of anyone’s drinking a cup of tea.

A century and a half later, in 1812, a Scottish historian named David Macpherson, in a dry piece of work called The History of the European Commerce with India, quoted the tea-drinking passage from Pepys’s diary. That was a very surprising thing to do, because in 1812 Pepys’s diaries were supposedly still unknown. Although they resided in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and so were available for inspection, no one had ever looked into them—so it was thought—because they were written in a private code that had yet to be deciphered. How Macpherson managed to find and translate the relevant passage in six volumes of dense and secret scribblings, not to mention what gave him the inspiration to look there in the first place, are mysteries that are some distance beyond being answerable.

Credit for coffee’s popularity in England belongs to a man named Pasqua Rosee, Sicilian by birth and Greek by background, who worked as a servant for Daniel Edwards, a British trader in Smyrna, now Izmir, in Turkey. Moving to England with Edwards, Rosee served coffee to Edwards’s guests, and this proved so popular that he was emboldened to open a café—the first in London—in a shed in the churchyard of St. Michael Cornhill in the City of London in 1652.

Rosee promoted coffee for its health benefits, claiming that it cured or prevented headaches, “defluxion of rheums,” wind, gout, scurvy, miscarriages, sore eyes, and much else.

The coffee served in the coffeehouses wasn’t necessarily very good coffee. Because of the way coffee was taxed in Britain (by the gallon), the practice was to brew it in large batches, store it cold in barrels, and reheat it a little at a time for serving. So coffee’s appeal in Britain had less to do with being a quality beverage than with being a social lubricant. People went to coffeehouses to meet people of shared interests, gossip, read the latest journals and newspapers—a brand-new word and concept in the 1660s—and exchange information of value to their lives and business.

Although pepper and spices were what brought the East India Company into being, the company’s destiny was tea. In 1696, the government introduced the first in a series of cuts in the tea tax. The effect on consumption was immediate. Between 1699 and 1721, tea imports increased almost a hundredfold, from 13,000 pounds to 1.2 million pounds, then quadrupled again in the thirty years to 1750. Tea was slurped by laborers and daintily sipped by ladies. It was taken at breakfast, dinner, and supper. It was the first beverage in history to belong to no class, and the first to have its own ritual slot in the day: teatime. It was easier to make at home than coffee, and it also went especially well with another great gustatory treat that was suddenly becoming affordable for the average wage earner: sugar. Britons came to adore sweet, milky tea as no other nation had (or even perhaps could). For something over a century and a half, tea was at the heart of the East India Company, and the East India Company was at the heart of the British Empire.

The British had always loved sugar, so much so that when they first got easy access to it, about the time of Henry VIII, they put it on or in almost everything from eggs to meat to wine. They scooped it onto potatoes, sprinkled it over greens, and ate it straight off the spoon if they could afford to. Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn’t turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were. But now, thanks to plantations in the West Indies, sugar was becoming increasingly affordable, and people were discovering that it went particularly well with tea.

Sugar also played a big role in a less commendable development: the slave trade. Nearly all the sugar Britons consumed was grown on West Indian estates worked by slaves. We have a narrow tendency to associate slavery exclusively with the plantation economy of the southern United States, but in fact plenty of other people got rich from slavery, not least the traders who shipped 3.1 million Africans across the ocean before the United Kingdom abolished the trade in humans in 1807.

Tea was taxed in America as part of the hated Townshend duties. In 1770, these duties were repealed on everything but tea in what proved to be a fatal misjudgment. They were kept on tea partly to remind colonists of their subjugation to the crown and partly to help the East India Company out of a deep and sudden hole. The company had become hopelessly overextended. It had accumulated seventeen million pounds of tea—a huge amount of a perishable product—and, perversely, had tried to create an air of well-being by paying out more in dividends than it could really afford. Bankruptcy loomed unless it could reduce its stockpiles. Hoping to ease it through the crisis, the British government gave the company an effective monopoly on tea sales in America. Every American knows what happened next.

On December 16, 1773, a group of eighty or so colonists dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded British ships in Boston Harbor, broke open 342 tea chests, and dumped the contents overboard. That sounds like a fairly moderate act of vandalism. In fact, it was a year’s supply of tea for Boston, with a value of £18,000, and so it was a grave and capital offense, and everyone involved knew so. Nobody at the time, incidentally, called it the Boston Tea Party; that name wasn’t first used until 1834.

So there was nothing at all jovial about tarring and feathering, and we can only imagine Malcolm’s dismay that December day as he was hauled wriggling from his house a second time and given another “Yankee jacket,” as it was also known. Once the tar dried, it took days of delicate picking and scrubbing to remove it. Malcolm sent a square of charred and blackened epidermis back to England with a note asking if he could please come home. His wish was granted. Meanwhile, however, America and Britain were implacably on the road to war. The first shots were fired fifteen months later.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather Warren Delano made much of the family’s fortune by trading opium, a fact that the Roosevelt family has never exactly crowed about.

To the unending exasperation of the Chinese authorities, Britain became particularly skilled at persuading Chinese citizens to become opium addicts—university courses in the history of marketing really ought to begin with British opium sales—so much so that by 1838 Britain was selling almost five million pounds of opium to China every year.

The problem was that the Chinese had always been secretive about the complicated processes of turning tea leaves into a refreshing beverage, and no one outside China knew how to get an industry going. Enter a remarkable Scotsman named Robert Fortune. For three years in the 1840s, Fortune traveled all around China, disguised as a native, collecting information on how tea was grown and processed. It was risky work: had he been caught, he would certainly have been imprisoned and could well have been executed. Although Fortune spoke none of the languages of China, he got around that problem by pretending always to come from a distant province where another dialect prevailed. In the course of his travels, he not only learned the secrets of tea production but also introduced to the West many valuable plants, among them the fan palm, the kumquat, and several varieties of azaleas and chrysanthemums.