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 1880 
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 Pafiles, 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 
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