•228 fEOPICAL SPICES 



spice trade, they declared war against nature itself, allowed the 

 trees to grow only in particular 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 Amboina. Wherever the trees 

 were seen to grow in a wild state, they were unsparingly rooted 

 out, and the remainder of the Moluccas were occupied and sub- 

 jugated for no other reason. 



The natives were treated with unmerciful cruelty, and blood 

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

 an usurious height. When these 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 these aromatics, valued at four millions of florins, and an 

 equal quantity was to be burnt the next day. The air was per- 

 fumed with their delicious fragance, 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 

 sufl'ered to collect any of this, or, on pain of heavy punish- 

 ment, 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 tlie -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. 



Wlien the corolla begins to fade, the calyx turns yellow, and 



