506 
HISTORY OF MAURITIUS. 
“ The coffee-tree has employed a considerable number of planters: but the 
hurricanes, that have succeeded each other with a fatal rapidity, have prevented, 
for some time, any advantage being derived from these plantations; and the govern¬ 
ment itself had endeavoured to check it, by the duties that have been laid on it at its 
going out of the island, and its entrance in France. 
Three sugar-plantations have been established, and these are sufficient to supply 
the colony. 
“No more than forty thousand weight of cotton has yet been gathered. This 
last commodity is of a good kind, and every thing promises an increase of it. 
The camphire, the aloes, the cocoa-tree, the agallochum, the sago, the carda¬ 
mom, the cinnamon tree, and many other vegetables, peculiar to Asia, have been 
naturalized in the island. 
* 4 Some iron mines had long been discovered, but it has been found necessary 
to abandon them, because they could not support the competition of those in 
Europe. 
“ It is well known that for these two hundred years, the Dutch have been enrich¬ 
ing themselves by the sale of cloves and nutmegs: to secure to themselves the 
exclusive trade of these articles, they have destroyed or enslaved the nations that 
were in possession of those spices; and, lest the price of them should fall, even in 
their own hands, they have rooted up most of the trees, and have frequently burnt 
the fruit of those they had preserved. 
fi This barbarous avidity, which has so often excited the indignation of other 
nations, so strongly exasperated M. Poivre (who had travelled all over Asia as a 
naturalist and a philosopher), that he availed himself of the authority he was in¬ 
trusted with in the Isle of France, and sent men into the least frequented parts of 
the Moluccas, to search for what avarice had for so long a time withholden from the 
rest of the world. The labours of those intrepid and sagacious navigators in whom 
he had confided, were crowned with success. 
On the 27th of June, 1770, they brought to the Isle of France four hundred 
and fifty nutmeg and seventy clove trees, ten thousand nutmegs, either growing, or 
ready to grow, and a chest of cloves, several of which had shot forth. Two 
years after this another importation was made, much more considerable than the 
former. 
