200 THE TROPICAL WORLD. 



polised the whole spice trade much more than their predecessors 

 had ever done before. But here also, as in Ceylon, the Portu- 

 guese were soon obliged to yield to a stronger rival ; for the 

 Butch now appeared upon the scene, and by dint of enterprise 

 and courage soon made themselves masters of the Indian 

 Ocean. In 1 605 they drove the Portuguese from Amboyna, and 

 before 1621 had elapsed the whole of the Moluccas were in their 

 possession. Five-and-twenty years later, Ceylon also fell into 

 their hands, and thus they became the sole purveyors of 

 Europe with cinnamon, cloves, and nutmegs. Unfortunately, 

 the scandalous manner in which they misused their power 

 throws a dark shade over their exploits. For the better to 

 secure the monopoly of the spice trade, they declared war 

 against nature itself, allowed the trees to grow only in par- 

 ticular places, and extirpated them everywhere else. Thus the 

 planting of the nutmeg tree was confined to the small islands 

 of Banda, Lonthoir, and Pulo Aij, and that of the clove to 

 Amboyna. Wherever the trees were seen to grow in a wild 

 state they were unsparingly rooted up, and the remainder of 

 the Moluccas were occupied and subjugated for no other reason. 

 The natives were treated with immerciful cruelty, and blood 

 flowed in torrents to keep up the prices of cloves and nutmegs 

 at an usurious height. 



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 



