Note 117 — V. HERE FOLLOWETH CONCERNING INDIA THE GREATER.
Reading edition
The black pepper vine is indigenous in the forests of Malabar and Travancore (the districts which the Bishop has in his eye); and the Malabar pepper is acknowledged to be the best that is produced. The vines are planted at the base of trees with rough bark, the mango and others, and will climb twenty or thirty feet if allowed. After being gathered, the berries are dried on mats in the sun, turning from red to black. Pepper was for ages the staple article of export to Europe from India, and it was with it that Vasco de Gama loaded his ships on his first voyage. A very interesting article on pepper will be found in that treasury of knowledge, Crawfurd’s Dictionary of the Archipelago.
The Bishop’s mention of “long pepper” shews confusion, probably in his amanuensis or copyist; for long pepper is the produce of a different genus (Chavica), which is not a vine, but a shrub, whose stems are annual. The chemical composition and properties are nearly the same as those of black pepper. Crawfurd draws attention to the fact that, by Pliny’s account, piper longum bore between three and four times the price of black pepper in the Roman market. (Drury in voc.—Crawfurd’s Dict.) Though long pepper is now cultivated in Malabar, it was not so, or at least not exported, in the sixteenth century. Linschoten says expressly that the “long pepper groweth onely in Bengala and Java.” (p. 111.) Its price at Rome was probably therefore a fancy one, due to its rarity. It is curious that Pliny supposed pepper to grow in pods, and that the long pepper was the immature pod picked and prepared for the market. He corrects a popular error that ginger was the root of the pepper tree (bk. xii). Ibn Batuta, like our Bishop, contradicts what “some have said, that they boil it in order to dry it,” as without foundation. But their predecessor, R. Benjamin, says—“the pepper is originally white, but when they collect it, they put it in basins and pour hot water upon it; it is then exposed to the heat of the sun,” etc.