Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/97

Rh the diet of a Charles V? Is the art of cooking so far advanced that we are no longer obliged to cover up taint with aromatics? But after answering such questions, and after making allowance for changes in taste, it is a striking fact that spices should at any time have entered into questions of state policies.

As an antithesis to an active life Herrick says of a rustic hero:

Was not the zest to control spice due to its use, not as a condiment as it is with us, but as a preservative? Ice appears to have had a small place in preserving perishable articles. Salt is a coarse agent and impairs both the flavor and digestibility of food when used in sufficient quantity to arrest decomposition, and with the exception of the olive is not applicable to fruits. Spices are highly antiseptic. Oil of cloves is used by microscopists in preserving sections of tissue. Oil of cinnamon is one of the most valuable antiseptics in the modern materia medica. Spices increase the preservative power of sugar, an article of luxury in the middle ages and far out of the reach of the masses. If this view of the importance of spices be conceded, we can understand their value as something over and above their use to improve a defective cuisine, increase flavor, and add variety to diet. We must also remember that while the attempts to find new routes to the Spice Islands by sailing west failed, the early voyagers discovered in the American tropics vast tracts of arable land which were adapted to the growing of many of the spices; they also succeeded in bringing to the European market new condiments in capsicum and allspice. Besides this, rapid transportation places fresh fruit early in the market, and the discoveries of chemistry have done away with the necessity of resorting to spices for preservatives, benzoic acid alone supplanting most of them in the keeping of vegetable products. Thus geographical and chemical sciences have brought about changes in national policy.

While no future administrator is likely to repeat the experience of a Raffles in giving excuse for European control of the Spice Islands, the role that he played was one but little less in importance to the East (especially in Java) than that of the Dutch administrators who preceded and followed him.

Raffles secured Singapore in 1818, and thus transferred to British interests the waters by which the best passage from the Indian seas to the Pacific Ocean is possible. His opportunity came with the Napoleonic wars, by which the loss of Holland to the French