In the year 1552, one of the largest ships in the world at the time was traveling around the southern tip of Africa with over 600 people aboard.

Before it made it though, several violent storms forced them to abandon ship off the coast of South Africa.

The more than 500 survivors were then forced to make a brutal trek hundreds of miles to the nearest settlement.

During this, they battled hunger, dehydration, and hundreds of miles to the nearest settlement.

During this, they battled hunger, dehydration, and worst of all, the people they encountered

along the way, and in the end, they never even made it to their destination.

Instead, they ended up somewhere far, far worse.

As always, viewer discretion is advised.

The spice trade is one of the earliest and most significant trade routes in human history and is thought to date all the way back to the people of the Neolithic period of the 10th millennium BC.

From that point and throughout the first millennium AD, spices that were plentiful in Asia

didn't have terribly far reach because they were transported mostly by land to as far

away as northern Africa.

However, by the 15th century, transportation options were rapidly shifting.

As a result of more efficient routes, spices start to spread further and further, and once

they made it to Europe, demand for them was off the charts.

Europeans marveled at what spices like cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, pepper and nutmeg did

to their food, and once they had a taste, they became insatiable.

And at the time, spice traders could travel over land up through the Persian

Gulf to the Red Sea before trekking through Arabia and Egypt to the Mediterranean. But this

would change in the late 1400s when several Portuguese explorers discovered a route to the

Indies around Africa. This discovery opened up a whole new world of trade, but unfortunately

it would be a violent one. As the Portuguese

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