When the spices accumulated in too large a quantity for the market, they were thrown into the sea or destroyed by fire. Thus M. Beaumare, a French traveller, relates that on June 10, 1760, he beheld near the Admiralty at Amsterdam a blazing pile of cinnamons and cloves, valued at four millions of florins, and an equal quantity was to be burnt the next day. The air was perfumed with their delicious fragrance, the essential oils freed from their confinement distilled over, mixing in one spicy stream, which flowed at the feet of the spectators; but no one was suffered to collect any of this, or, on pain of heavy punishment, to rescue the smallest quantity of the spice from the flames.
Fortunately these distressing scenes—for it is painful to see man, under the impulse of an insatiable greed, thus wilfully destroying the gifts of Nature—belong to the history of the past. The reign of monopoly has ceased even in the remote Moluccas, and their ports are now, at length, thrown open to the commerce of all nations; for the spice trees having been transplanted into countries beyond the control of the Dutch, the ancient system could not possibly be maintained any longer.
The clove tree belongs to the far-spread family of the myrtles; the small lanceolate evergreen leaves resemble those of the laurel, the flowers growing in bunches at the extremity of the branches. When they first appear, which is at the beginning of the rainy season, they are in the form of elongated greenish buds, from the extremity of which the corolla is expanded, which is of a delicate peach-blossom colour. The corolla having fallen off, the calyx turns yellow, and then red; when it is beaten from the tree, and dried in the sun. If the fruit be allowed to remain longer on the tree the calyx or clove gradually swells, the embryo seed enlarges, and the pungent properties of the clove are in great part dissipated.
The whole tree is highly aromatic, and the foot-stalks of the leaves have nearly the same pungent quality as the calyx of the flowers. ‘Clove trees,’ says Sir Stamford Raffles, ‘as an avenue to a residence, are perhaps unrivalled—their noble height, the beauty of their form, the luxuriance of their foliage, and, above all, the spicy fragrance with which they perfume the air, produce, on driving through a long line of them, a degree of exquisite pleasure only to be enjoyed in the clear light atmosphere of the Eastern Archipelago.’
In spite of the endeavours of the Dutch to confine the nutmeg tree to the narrow precincts of Banda, it has likewise extended its range not only over Sumatra, Mauritius, Bourbon, and Ceylon, but even over the western hemisphere. It is of a more majestic growth than the clove, as it attains a height of fifty feet, and the leaves of a fine green on the upper surface, and grey beneath, are more handsome in the outline, and broader in proportion to the length. When the trees are about nine years old, they begin to bear. They are diœcious, having male or barren flowers upon one tree, and female or fertile upon another. The flowers of both are small, white, and bell-shaped; the embryo-fruit appearing at the bottom of the female flowers in the form of a little reddish knob. When ripe, it resembles in appearance and size a small peach, and then the outer rind, which is about half an inch thick, bursts at the side, and discloses a shining black nut, which seems the darker from the contrast of the leafy network of a fine red colour with which it is enveloped. The latter forms the Mace of commerce, and having been laid to dry in the shade for a short time, is packed in bags and pressed together very tightly.
NUTMEG.
The shell of the nut is larger and harder than that of the filbert, and could not, in the state in which it is gathered, be broken without injuring the nut. On that account the nuts are successively dried in the sun and then by fire-heat, till the kernel shrinks so much as to rattle in the shell, which is then easily broken.
Although not so costly as cloves or cinnamon, pepper is of a much greater commercial value, as its consumption is at least a hundred times greater. It grows on a beautiful vine, which, incapable of supporting itself, twines round poles or mango and other trees of straight high stems. As these are stripped of the lower branches, the vine embraces the trunk, covering it with elegant festoons and rich bunches of fruit in the style of the Italian vineyards.
