History: One of the epic feats of human endurance was Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe in the early 16th century. When the three Spanish ships put into the East Indies, after a year-and-a-half of turbulent sailing, the crew were in a sorry state.
Sick, exhausted and wretchedly disheartened, they had failed in a mutiny, lost two of their convoy, and had had no fresh food or water for 99 days. After the dry old ship's biscuits softened in rancid water had run out, they ate sawdust mixed with rat droppings, and gnawed on the leather from the yard arms.
With the kind of insane, black humour that often accompanies such horrifying deprivation, they may well have opened their scurvied, near-toothless mouths and laughed out loud at the irony of it all. Their quarry, you see, was spice.
Magellan was killed soon after in an altercation with the natives, and never saw the northern Moluccas, the five tiny volcanic islands on which grew the world's entire store of cloves. With a combined land mass of just a few dozen square miles, the search for the home of the clove among the 16,000 islands in the Malay Archipelago was difficult, to say the least. Twenty-five months after leaving Spain, the ships (now down to a pair) arrived on the 10-mile-long island of Tidore.
A mile across the water, on Ternate, the Portuguese, who had staked their claim (and cornered the world's clove market), fumed at the Spaniards' arrival.
In the end, it was one of the unsuccessful mutineers, Juan Sebastián de Elcano, who led the skeleton crew back to Spain, and who garnered the prize for completing Magellan's brave project. He was awarded a coat of arms with a globe set over two cinnamon sticks, 12 cloves and three nutmegs, while two Malay kings held branches of a spice tree. The motto: "Primus circumdedisti me" means "You were the first to encompass me".
The chronicle above is just one of the "thousand unruly, aromatic skeins of history" that Jack Turner has woven into the colourful fabric of his first book, Spice: the History of a Temptation. His is the latest offering in what has now become a popular genre, larder history. In recent years, Mark Kurlansky has given us both Cod and Salt, Giles Milton has produced Nathaniel's Nutmeg, while Coffee has come from Antony Wild.
In Spice, Jack Turner draws on hundreds of sources, flooding the reader with an astonishing deluge of information - which occasionally necessitates surfacing for air. Nonetheless, his writing is often elegant, and always clever.
The book starts engagingly, in the schoolroom of his youth in Australia, where a class of 10-year-olds are "doing" the Age of Discovery. The medieval Europeans' food, they learned, was so utterly ghastly that it impelled explorers to set off all over the globe in search of spices to make it edible. To a boy whose school dinners were "lousy", this made perfect sense.
Of course, as Turner soon shows us in his own circumnavigation of the world of spice - in which he tacks back and forth through both space and time - food enhancement is just one of the many uses to which the major tropical Asian spices (cinnamon, pepper, clove, nutmeg and mace) were put.
Besides helping to preserve food and make it palatable, spices have had sacred, medical and aphrodisiac applications through the ages. They were also used as currency before coinage was standardised: the "peppercorn rent" dates back to medieval Europe when pepper was commonly paid by tenant to landlord.
At times spices were among the most expensive commodities in the world: during the 17th century the difference between purchase cost and final sale price for cloves was 2,000 per cent. The Dutch kept spice prices artificially high by limiting the quantity for sale. In 1735, writes Turner, "1,250,000 pounds of nutmeg were burned in Amsterdam alone. One witness saw a bonfire of nutmeg so great that the oil flowed out and wet the spectators' feet".
The quest for spices opened the great oceans of the world to navigation. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to lay claim to the east, blasting away all who resisted, with their ferocious naval artillery. Their aim, says Turner neatly, "was to make the Indian Ocean a Portuguese lake".
But long before the Portuguese commandeered the spice corridors, the valuable plant-stuffs were travelling the world - by complex routes that are lost to history. Cloves were found by archaeologists deep under the Syrian desert, and have been dated to 1721 BC. The mummified corpse of the Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses the Second, had peppercorns (from Malabar in India) inserted in his nose sometime around 1224 BC.
Spices were used for embalming in many civilisations, usually for the corpses of the wealthy. In 15th-century France, however, the decapitated heads of criminals were preserved by parboiling and seasoning before being exhibited as rather grisly, if aromatic, deterrents.
And Thomas More's severed head was carefully preserved in spices by his daughter, Margaret Roper, after it was removed from its spike on London Bridge.
Until a couple of hundred years ago, food and medicine were inextricably intertwined: ill-health was often seen as an imbalance of one of the essential humours - heat, cold, moisture and dryness - and could be remedied by ingesting a compensatory substance. For instance, a heating spice such as pepper could warm a too-cold body, and prevent everything from cancer of the mouth and gangrene to shivers and "bad burps".
During Europe's devastating epidemics of the Black Death, spices and other fragrances were used to counteract the disease that was believed to descend on its victims in the form of bad air. We know now that bubonic plague's real cause was a bacterium carried by the black rat, and transmitted by flea bites. Chillingly, Turner points out that this Asian rat may well have travelled to Europe on the same boats that brought the spices to counteract its lethal pathogens.
• Jane Powers is Gardening Correspondent of The Irish Times