106 SPICES 



Venice the whole city felt it greatly and remained stupe- 

 fied, and the wisest held it the worst news that had ever 

 arrived.' 



The Spaniards tried to wrest this trade from the Portu- 

 guese, but though the heroic Magellan sailed round the south 

 of South America and westwards across the Pacific to the 

 Philippines (where he was killed), and though his successor l 

 sailed on to the Moluccas, ' where they traded on very advan- 

 tageous terms with the natives, filling their holds with the 

 spices and nutmegs for which they had journeyed so far ', and 

 finally returned home to Seville, elated with the wonders they 

 had seen, yet the Portuguese still held their own, and it was 

 not until the Dutch ousted them in 1521 that they finally 

 lost their pre-eminence. 



From that time onwards, however, the Dutch had this 

 profitable trade in their hands, and they built Batavia to be 

 a collecting centre for their goods, and prospered exceedingly. 

 They took the most elaborate precautions to prevent other 

 nations from sharing in their advantages. Thus, for instance, 

 it was a crime, punishable by death, to grow cinnamon trees 

 on private lands in Ceylon ; and in certain islands of the 

 Moluccas the clove and nutmeg trees were ruthlessly destroyed 

 in order that Amboyna and Banda might have a monopoly of 

 them. 



Side by side with this selfish jealousy was the most utter 

 ignorance on the part of the Home Government as to the 

 nature of the commodities in which they traded, and an 

 amusing story is told 2 of how the authorities in Amsterdam, 

 unaware of the fact that both nutmegs and mace were produced 

 by the same tree, once dispatched orders to their Colonial 

 Governor, requesting him to reduce the number of nutmegs 

 but to increase the number of mace-trees. 



1 On the coat-of-arms, granted him on his return by Charles V, were 

 two cinnamon sticks, three nutmegs, and twelve cloves ; also two Malay 

 kings each holding in his left hand a spice branch (J. Jacobs, Story of 

 Geographical Discovery). 



2 See A Handbook of Tropical Gardening, by H. F. Macmillan. 



