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The story of vanilla, as with most truly international crops, criss-crosses a world atlas. But vanilla did not originate in Madagascar, despite the country's current global dominance of its trade. Instead, it started in the jungles of Mexico and Central America, where a long, windy vine evolved to develop that distinctive, penetrating aroma that we all know so well. What is perhaps most compelling about vanilla is the fact that its multi-billion dollar industry exists because of a 12-year-old enslaved boy who lived 180 years ago on a remote Indian Ocean Island. But the orchid, whose pod-shaped fruits contain the sweet vanilla essence, would take a wild journey to get there from Mexico, where the Totonac Indigenous people, who settled around 600 CE on Mexico's Atlantic coast, first noticed the scent. "The Totonacs collected the pods from the wild and did not have an organised cultivation system," said Rebecca Menchaca García, who runs the Orchid Garden and Lab at the Center for Tropical Research of the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico. "It was so scarce and valued that the Aztecs demanded it as a tribute after they conquered the Totonac civilisation [in the late 1400s]". The Aztecs used vanilla to flavour xocoatl, the drink they produced from cacao and other spices, but even then it was reserved for nobility or special occasions. It was this treasured beverage that emperor Moctezuma Xocoyotzin offered Hernán Cortés and his band of Spaniards when they arrived in his capital city of Tenochtitlan in 1519. During the early decades of conquest, the Spaniards took dozens of fruits, vegetables and other crops – including vanilla – across the Atlantic to show off and cultivate back home. Historians call this movement of foods and goods the Columbian Exchange. "Vanilla and cacao have always travelled together," said orchid expert Adam Karrenmans, a professor at the University of Costa Rica and director of Lankester Botanical Garden, a leading orchid research centre based in Costa Rica. Europeans took a fancy to the creamy beverage, and the drink spread, entering France from Spain in the early 1600s after the marriage between Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, daughter of the Spanish king. Once across the Atlantic, vanilla soon took its own path. Near the end of her reign, in 1602, Queen Elizabeth's physician started adding the spice to the monarch's plates, as she believed it was a powerful aphrodisiac, writes Rosa Abreu-Junkel in Vanilla: A Global History. Across the Channel, the powerful Madame de Pompadour added vanilla to her diet when she tried to lure back her lover, King Louis XV of France, around 1750. Vanilla had by now entered the global spice trade that was redrawing boundaries and shifting economies all over the world, with the European colonial powers scrambling to secure pods. Everyone wanted the spice – chefs were experimenting with desserts, manufacturers produced new perfumes and aristocrats just wanted to show off – but the global production of vanilla was bottlenecked in the same strip of coastal land in the Americas where it had thrived for centuries.