Meleguetta in the East, was Re: SC - Columbus' chilies

[David Dendy]

Bear wrote:
[not just snip, but great big chop]

>[Of obscure origin:  App. identical with med.L.melageta, the name of a
spice
>mentioned c1214 in connection with cloves and cardamoms, and said a1331 to
>be among the productions of Java >origin is possible.]
>{snip}
>The 1331 statement would seem to allude to something in Marco Polo (for
>there were no other reliable accounts at the time), but the passage he
wrote
>of Java (or Canba, as he callet it) is only a page long.  The entire
>relevant passage is:
>
>"This island is full of very great wealth.  They have pepper in this island
>and nutmegs and spikenard and galingale and cubebs and cloves and in short
>all other kinds of good and dear spicery which one could find in the
world."

Unfortunately, what this primarily shows is the unreliability of Marco
Polo's book  (Polo did indeed make the trip, but the book was ghost-written
[by a man named Rusticello or something like that -- my copy is not right at
hand] and plenty of nonmsense was added in, probably to make Polo's rather
plodding account more exciting). Java does produce pepper, cubebs,
galingale, and cubebs, but it does *not* produce nutmegs or cloves (products
of the Moluccas), nor spikenard (product of the Himalayas in north India).
However, as you may note, this passage from Marco Polo does not mention
either cardamom or meleguetta. There were indeed other sources on Java in
that period, and I assume the OED reference is to the account of Odoric of
Pordenone, who travelled in the East between 1320 and 1328: "In ipsa (insula
Jaua) nascuntur cubebae, melegetae, nuces que muscatae, multae que aliae
species pretiosae." (ascribing to Java cubebs, meleguetta, nutmegs, and
other precious spices). Here again we may quibble, since nutmegs are a
Moluccan product, not a Javan one. It is possible, since there are various
sorts of large coarse cardamoms which do grow in Java, that Odoric simply
confused them for meleguetta, which would look similar. But whatever the
case, this single casual reference would be a poor evidence for an Eastern
origin for Grains of Paradise, as compared with the ample evidence for an
origin in West Africa, as I gave in my other post. And the argument which I
have seen, that this account supports the idea that meleguetta was
*originally* the name of an Eastern spice, which was later applied to the
West African one, also will not hold water. The Odoric reference is from
1331, more than a hundred years *after* the first European reference to
meleguetta -- so the reasonable inference is that any such shift of name is
rather an effort to place a familiar name (of the West African product) on
to an unfamiliar Eastern spice.

By the by, did you notice the similarity of the two passages (Marco Polo and
Odoric)? Does it seem to you that a little plagiarism is going on?

Francesco Sirene