COLUMBUS FOUND AMERICA, Magellan circumnavigated the globe, and Vasco da Gama sailed around Mica to India. These three adventurers were the standard-bearers for the age of discovery, but were in fact driven not so much by a passion for exploration as by the potential rewards for satisfyng Europe’s all-consuming hunger for spice. Jack Turner’s history of the spice race, and of the tastes and appetites that ignited it, is a tour de force, and it gives a full account of the exploits of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries’ explorers.

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