IV 



CLOVES 161 



sent to London in 1797. Some time later it was 

 introduced into St. Kitts and St. Vincent, and samples 

 of the spice were sent to England in 1880. 



Meanwhile an Arab from Zanzibar had conveyed 

 plants to his country from Mauritius, and laid the 

 foundations of the important and extensive cultivations 

 in Zanzibar and Pemba, which are carried on to this 

 day. 



On the founding of Penang by Captain Light in 

 1786, the East India Company took steps to break the 

 Dutch monopoly of spices by sending Christopher 

 Smith, their botanist, to the Moluccas to obtain plants 

 of cloves and nutmegs, as described under the account of 

 the introduction of the latter plant. Captain Light 

 had already obtained clove plants from Mauritius, but 

 in 1798 only a few, less than half a dozen, were alive, 

 and these appear to have been of Smith's first sending, 

 Light's original plants having previously died. In 188Q 

 Smith sent 15,000 clove plants, and by 1802 there were 

 6,250 cloves in good condition in the East India 

 Company's spice garden. 



There were also several European plantations of some 

 size. The trees, however, seem to have been mostly 

 young, and when the Penang spice gardens were sold in 

 1805, there were only twenty-three bearing clove trees. 



The cultivation went on somewhat 'slowly till 1821, 

 when it rapidly advanced, over 50,000 trees being 

 added between that date and 1836. 



The cloves of Penang have always been the most 

 highly valued, and have maintained their reputation 

 for superiority from the commencement of the cultiva- 

 tion to the present day. 



The plantations now, however, have almost entirely 

 passed from the hands of the Europeans into those of 

 the Chinese, as did the nutmegs. 



In Singapore, Sir Stamford Raffles, shortly after the 

 foundation of the settlement, introduced cloves with 

 nutmegs into the island, but the island does not seem as 

 suitable a locality, and the trees suffer much from 



M 



