Floating Medicine Chests 
Steven Shapin
- Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age by Harold Cook Buy this book
In 1617, the governors of the Dutch East India Company placed an order for goods to be procured by their agents. The shopping list included a hundred thousand bags of black pepper and thousands of pounds of other sorts of pepper; as much in the way of cloves, ginger and cinnamon as the ships could carry; 1000 barrels of nutmeg and 300 of mace; 3000 pounds of cassia wood (closely related to cinnamon); 6000 pounds of camphor; and the same amount of the ginger-like galingale. That sort of cargo came from Asia: the pepper from Kerala, Java or Sumatra; the cassia probably from India or Sri Lanka; and the other spices mainly from the Moluccan (or Spice) Islands. They were extremely profitable goods: nutmeg sold for three hundred times more in Amsterdam than it cost Dutch merchants in the Spice Islands. And they were luxury goods: in Restoration London a pound of nutmeg went at wholesale for the present-day equivalent of Ł46; cloves for Ł76. Nutmeg was so valuable that the Treaty of Breda, ending the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, delivered the tiny nutmeg island of Run to the Dutch in exchange for another island colony in America then known as New Amsterdam. When Samuel Pepys inspected a captured Dutch East India Company ship, seized in 1665, he was amazed by its cargo: ‘The greatest wealth . . . that a man can see in the world. Pepper scattered through every chink, you trod upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs, I walked above the knees; whole rooms full . . . As noble a sight as ever I saw in my life.’
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Steven Shapin is the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard. The Life of Science: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation will appear in the autumn.
Other articles by this contributor:
Tod aus Luft · The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber
Don’t let that crybaby in here again · The Manhattan Project
The Great Neurotic Art · Steven Shapin tucks into Atkins
Megaton Man · The Original Dr Strangelove
I’m a Surfer · What’s the Genome Worth?
Hedonistic Fruit Bombs · How good is Château Pavie?
Guests in the President’s House · Science Inc.
Dear Prudence · Stephen Toulmin
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