Trade Routes

The usual stages of this journey—the Spice Route—can be set out briefly. Indonesian spices came, in successive local steps, to one or another of the early ports neighboring the Straits of Malacca. From there, if going west, they crossed the Bay of Bengal, with the monsoon, to the neighborhood of Madras in southeastern India; the Indian peninsula itself, relatively narrow at this point, was then often crossed by land. The South Indian spices, if going east, followed the return route of the same ships.