68 THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONSTome, in the Gulf of Guinea, was not opened to settiement until the
1490s.)
These tiny islands do not seem much today. They have been reduced
to outposts, visited only by tourists or by residents returning from
studies or jobs on the mainland. In the decades following their dis
covery, however, they represented a major addition to European space.
Note that the Canaries were known to the ancient Romans, who
learned of them from the king of Mauretania. They did not add to
Roman space. It takes a mix of knowledge, means, and need to turn
discovery into opportunity.
All were there in the fifteenth century. In particular, the southern is
lands (Madeiras and Canaries) proved superbly suited to the cultivation
of sugar cane, destined to become Europe's greatest money crop. Eu
ropeans first encountered this plant in the Middle East, where the
Arabs had brought it from India and thence into the Mediterranean,
to Cyprus, Crete, and the Maghreb. Returning crusaders in turn in
troduced it into Europe—into Greece, Sicily, the Portuguese Algarve.
Sugar is powerfully addictive, naturally pleasing to the palate (not a
learned taste) and comforting to the human psyche. It cost a great
deal at first and was limited to pharmaceutical uses; one bought it at the
apothecary's, and most Europeans got their sweetness from fruit and
honey. But this was not the first time that a medicinal substance came
to appeal to the healthy as well as the sick. Thanks to spreading culti
vation, price fell to the point where sugar could be found at the gro
cer's. Now it began to be used as a condiment with all manner of fare;
as the German saying had it, there's no food can be spoiled by sugar.
(Germans still cook that way.) It also proved useful as a preservative or
flavor camouflage in a world of easy spoilage. In the fifteenth and six
teenth centuries, sugar was a luxury: mistresses locked the loaves up to
keep them from the servants; but it was becoming a necessity, spread
ing from the top of the social hierarchy on down.
As successful as the Mediterranean centers of cultivation were, they
could not compare with the Atiantic islands, for reasons both climatic
and social. Sugar cane grows best in tropical or subtropical climes. It
needs a lot of regular water, and it likes steady heat—both found in
these near-equatorial lands set down in the path of rain-heavy trade
winds. It also takes a lot of hard gang labor, the sort of thing shunned
by free men, so that cultivators preferred slaves where available. This
is what the crusaders found when they captured such Mediterranean is
lands as Cyprus: the Arab sugar industry ran on slave labor, most of it
brought in from East Africa.