Roger Crowley

And the only reason that we know this guy, Bartolomeu Dias, had actually found his way around the Cape, the crew wouldn't go any further.

They were frightened they were going to fall off the edge of the world.

The only reason we know about this is that Columbus was in Portugal at the time and made a marginal note in his diary.

But this is the point at which suddenly we've learned something about the world that we didn't know.

That yes, there is a way around Africa.

Ptolemy's geography, which thought that land wrapped all the way around the Indian Ocean, you couldn't get into it.

Suddenly they realized they could get into it.

And this is now the springboard for a major attempt to work its way into what will be known as the Indian Ocean and to try and get to the source of spices.

The rarest would have been cloves and nutmeg because they came from the furthest away, but they were expensive.

These things were expensive.

The markup could be 1,000% from source to consumer.

It's very difficult for us now to understand exactly why spices had this...

magical attraction for people.

And it's a whole range of things.

They thought they were analgesics, that they were antiseptics, they were aphrodisiacs, that they conjured up an idea of paradise out there, a better world.

And behind this, of course, we have to factor in the influence of Marco Polo's travels of the world out there that was rich and stuff.

and another Italian called Lodovico di Vathema at the end of the 15th century, who wrote an account of getting to the Spice Islands.

There was in the minds of these people an idea of an Eden, of a paradise.

So all these things wrapped around it.

Also, I think on some level, it just cheered up very dull food.