We used to raise peppers back on the farm where I grew up as a boy. They were big and green, the kind you like in salads, and we raised them in rows and rows of bushes. One time I asked my dad if there was a connection between those we raised and what we shook out of the pepper shaker on the table. He said he thought there must be; that the stuff in the shaker was probably just a dried version of green ones.

Well, I went along with that for years and years until one day a college professor told our class why Columbus had set out to find a new route to the Indies. Do you know why he sought the Indies? He wanted pepper. It seems that all the voyagers of those days were after spice, but what those men called spice is what we call pepper. Now, this did not seem correct to me, so I read up on pepper. Dad was wrong.

The kind of pepper we use on the table grows on a vine that climbs like ivy and has leaves like philodendron. The peppers are the berries of the vine, growing in a string or cluster like currants. The berries are dried and ground up into the black pepper we like, or the berries may be soaked until the black shell falls off, leaving white kernels that become mild white pepper after they are dried and powdered.

In the days of Columbus, the only place you could find pepper berries was along the southern coast of India and on the nearby islands, which were called “Indies.” To get to the Indies from Europe, a trader had to sail all the way around Africa and across the Indian Ocean. Columbus had an idea that he could get there sooner by sailing west; he got a chance to try his idea, but you know how that trip ended.

For hundreds of years the spice ships, including those famous New England clippers, made long trips to get pepper. It was worth so much that the profit on a single trip would pay for the whole ship. Today pepper is still big business all over the world. Why, Americans alone use forty million pounds of pepper a year. This is nothing to be sneezed at!