CHAPTEE I 
INTRODUCTION 
The history of the cultivation and use of spices is 
perhaps the most romantic story of any vegetable 
product. From the earliest known eras of civilisation 
spices were eagerly sought in all parts of the world. 
The earliest explorers in their search after gold paid 
almost as much attention to drugs and spices, and it 
was the pursuit of these as much as anything which led 
to the first rounding of the Cape of Good Hope, and 
the colonisation of the East Indies. Later, the greed 
of the Dutch in maintaining the monopoly of the 
Eastern spice-trade led to the founding of the Straits 
Settlement colony, while the pepper gardens of southern 
India, the vanilla, of Mauritius and the Seychelles, the 
cinnamon and cardamoms of Ceylon all played im- 
portant parts in the opening up of these countries to 
Western civilisation and Western trade. 
It must be noticed that the greater part of the 
spices that have been valued by man are derived from 
the Asiatic tropics, while the other quarters of the 
globe have produced comparatively few. Thus we 
have the following distribution. 
From Asia are derived pepper, cardamoms, cinnamon 
(natives of southern India and Ceylon), nutmegs, and 
mace ; cloves, clove -bark, turmeric, ginger, greater 
galangal, from the Malay Archipelago ; cassia-bark and 
lesser galangal from China. Africa gave us grains of 
Paradise, Madagascar Ravensara aromatica, while the 
B 
