The clove tree is found outside the Moluccas and Amboina, Haruka, Saparua, and Naesalaut in the following places: Guiana, Zanzibar, Pemba, Java, Sumatra, Reunion, and West Indies islands.
There are five varieties of cloves as follows:
1. The ordinary cultivated clove.
2. The female clove with pale stem, which natives call poleng.
3. The keriak or leory cloves.
4. The royal clove (which is very scarce).
5. The wild clove.
The first three are about equally valuable as spices, the female being considered best for distillation of essential oil, while the wild clove has very little aromatic flavor and no value but for adulteration.
The royal clove is a curious monstrosity, which formerly had a great reputation as the Caryophyllum regium, by reason of its rarity, and the curious observations which are made respecting it. It is a very small clove and is distinguished by an abnormal number of sepals and by large bracts at the base of the tubes of the calyx. The corolla and internal organs are imperfectly developed. In commerce the cloves are known and named from the places of growth and are graded in value in the order named—Penang ([Fig. 3]), Bencoolen ([Fig. 4]), Amboina ([Fig. 2]), Zanzibar ([Fig. 1]). They do not exhibit any very decided structural difference, but it takes 4,500 Penang cloves to weigh one pound and 5,000 Zanzibar for same weight. There also enters into commerce as a secondary product clove stalks and mother’s cloves, the latter being the dried ripe fruit. Cloves were one of the principal Oriental spices, being the basis of a rich trade from an early part of the Christian era, and the spice was well known to the ancients and certainly formed an article of commerce, during the Middle Ages, when Alleppo was the grand mart of Eastern trade.
The Portuguese discovered cloves growing abundantly on the Molucca Islands about the year 1600 and they held possession of the principal clove trade for nearly a century. Previous to this time, cloves were brought to Europe from ports in the Mediterranean, where they had been brought by Arabians, Persians, and Egyptians.