by Jack Turner
Nutmeg, the second spice of the Moluccas, was guarded with a similar ruthlessness. The ethos was summarised by Jan Pieterszoon Coen, an early and particularly brutal governor-general: little profit would come from being ‘virtuous and good’; it was better ‘to ride the natives with a sharp spur’. And this the Dutch certainly did. By the 1620s the VOC had worked to death or expelled practically the entire indigenous population of the Bandas. The company imported slaves to work the plantations; Javanese convicts and Japanese mercenaries were called in to mop up any local resistance, which was in any case more imagined than real. The headmen of the islands were tortured and duly confessed to all sorts of lurid conspiracies. From the battlements of their forts Dutch artillery looked over the world’s entire supply of nutmegs. To be doubly sure, after harvest all nutmegs were treated with lime so that none could be sown elsewhere.
Having themselves stolen the spices from the Bandanese, and having seen off their European rivals with bloody efficiency, Dutch paranoia was understandable. They had much to lose, and much to gain. Through the seventeenth century the mark-up on cloves and nutmeg between purchase and final sale was in the order of 2,000 per cent, profits that brought yet more lustre to the Dutch Golden Age and paid for many a burgher’s elegant house and fittings. To keep the price artificially high, the Dutch regularly staged spiced bonfires that unconsciously evoked the spiced holocausts of pagan antiquity. In the single year of 1735 1,250,000 pounds of nutmeg were burned in Amsterdam alone. One witness saw a bonfire of nutmeg so great that the oil flowed out and wet the spectators’ feet. An onlooker was hanged for taking a handful of nuts from the flames.
It was to pilfer Company spices on a grander scale that Poivre had sailed to the Moluccas. The stakes were as high as they had ever been for earlier spice voyagers: success meant fame and a fortune; failure, certain death.
The latter prospect seems not to have troubled Poivre unduly. He was the sort of figure who belonged entirely in the eighteenth century, his life a Candide-like succession of adventures and narrow scrapes, including several tangles with the Royal Navy, stints in prison, a flirtation with the priesthood, brushes with the ecclesiastical authorities, flashes of entrepreneurial bravado and polymathy, spiked throughout with intense personal vanity, much of it played out in the swashbuckling surrounds of the Indian Ocean. He arrived off Meyo by a convoluted route. Born in Lyon on 23 August 1719, he was educated by the missionaries of St Joseph before continuing his education with the Missions Ætrangères in Paris. It was under the auspices of this thoroughly internationalist institution that he developed an interest in natural science and an ambition to see Asia. At the age of twenty, while he was still a novice, the missionaries sent him east, where he spent two eventful years in China, and another two in Cochinchina (modern Vietnam). Here he had the opportunity to study Asian plants, and had his first serious run-in with the authorities. At some stage his superiors began to have grave doubts about his vocation, sensing that his deepest instincts were not so much spiritual as commercial. A meeting at Canton with the Irish adventurer and entrepreneur Jack O’Freill set Poivre thinking of more worldly opportunities in the East. His interest in the cloth wilted. His superiors, sensing his disaffection, decided he should return to France. The superior at Canton believed he was an opportunist who had joined the order merely to see the world on a free ticket. And so in 1745 Poivre embarked on the Dauphin with his career under a cloud, headed for home and an uncertain future.
The voyage did not go as planned. As the Dauphin passed through the Bangka Straits, off the east coast of Sumatra, it had the extreme misfortune to run into the Deptford, an English man-of-war commanded by a veteran privateer with the suitably briny name of Captain Barnett. It was an unequal contest, and after a brief and bloody combat the Dauphin was taken. Poivre was hit in the wrist by a musket shot, taken prisoner and thrown below decks. His ruined right hand quickly turned gangrenous. Twenty-four hours later he found himself stretched out on what passed for an operating table, the blood-smattered surgeon of the Deptford standing over him, matter-of-factly informing him that his lower right arm was now bobbing on the waves, dinner for a hungry seagull.
More than any other moment, this gory incident shaped Poivre’s subsequent destiny. Short on rations, the English were anxious to rid themselves of any extra mouths, so he and the other captives were dropped at the Dutch town of Batavia, modern Jakarta, to await the arrival of a more friendly ship. Poivre’s enforced four-month sojourn in the capital of the Dutch empire in the East marked the nadir of his fortunes. It was clear that his missionary career was at an end – having only one arm, he would be unable to consecrate the host. He did however have time on his hands (or hand) to reflect on alternative careers and give free rein to his fertile imagination. He began making plans for a brighter future.
The commercial vitality of Batavia soon set Poivre thinking. This mosquito-infested, unhealthy but vibrant town was both the epicentre of Dutch trade with Europe and the hub of the still more lucrative trade of the archipelago and Asia. Ships came and went from Japan, China, Siam, Bengal, Malabar, Ceylon and Sumatra. In an atmosphere of mingled squalor and opulence, merchants of all nationalities provided plenty of stimulation for Poivre’s convalescence. In particular, he was struck by the prosperity of the Dutch spice merchants. He spoke with several Dutch traders who, confident in the Company’s secure hold on the Moluccas, willingly shared information with the innocuous-looking invalid. Others painted a picture of lax safety measures, of smuggling and evasion that went on under the noses of the authorities, of clandestine spice plants that grew beyond the reach of the Dutch patrols. It struck Poivre that the Company had, so to speak, left the house unlocked.
And so an idea took root in his fertile imagination. He would steal spice plants from under the noses of the Dutch and transplant them in French colonies in the tropics, thereby shattering the VOC’s monopoly. (Although he was perhaps unaware of the precedent, in contemplating the transplantation of spice plants he partook of a tradition that stretched back to Hatshepsut’s expedition to Punt more than three thousand years earlier.) By acquiring spices he would bring a potentially vast source of income to France, her colonies and not least himself, in the process delivering a devastating blow to Dutch power in the Indies. He allowed himself to imagine that if all went as planned this would be the single greatest piece of industrial espionage of all time. In Poivre’s own words: ‘I then realised that the possession of spice which is the basis of Dutch power in the Indies was grounded on the ignorance and cowardice of the other trading nations of Europe. One had only to know this and be daring enough to share with them this never-failing source of wealth which they possess in one corner of the globe.’
It was to this end that Poivre found himself, several years of plotting and planning later, standing on the deck of his listing ship, peering through a telescope at the clove groves of Meyo. In the end he would succeed – after a fashion – but not this time. The winds were in the wrong quarter and his ship in such a poor state that he was unable to make a landing. Like Moses in the wilderness, he was forced to gaze at the promised spice groves tantalisingly out of reach. In his report on the mission he blamed the ship and, by implication, the tepid support of his patrons, the authorities of the Compagnie des Indes: ‘Nothing will console me for having been a stone’s throw from this island, so fertile in cloves, and yet having been unable to set foot on land, recover these precious fruits, and carry off the much-desired plants which could have made the Compagnie’s fortune … Why did I not have anything for an expedition of this nature besides the worst vessel that has ever put to sea?’
There was no option but to look elsewhere. With the monsoon gathering and the condition of his vessel rapidly deteriorating, he charted an erratic course around the Spice Islands, north to the territory of the modern Philippines, and south to Timor, scouring the islands in vain for the precious spice plants. Time after time promising openings came to nothing. At one point he hoisted th
e Dutch flag to prevent capture by a passing Dutch vessel. Finally he managed to obtain a few second-rate nutmeg plants from the Portuguese possession of Timor, which he succeeded in getting back to the other side of the Indian Ocean, to the French colony of Île de France (Mauritius).
It was, not for the last time, a false dawn. His seeming success rapidly unravelled, as the plants failed to thrive. Relations on the island turned sour, and Poivre turned peevish. He saw factional infighting, the tricks and jealousies of enemies both real and imagined.
A rival botanist declared the nutmeg plants to be false; given that Poivre had obtained them from Timor, where relatives but not the real thing are documented, he was probably correct. In due course Poivre claimed a jealous rival had killed the precious seedlings with boiling water or ‘some mercurial drug’. The authorities were uninterested at best, at worst actively hostile to the entrepreneurial, one-armed gadfly, forever demanding money and ships to pursue his spiced schemes. No one seemed to care. It looked, for a time, as if Poivre’s plans had come to nothing.
And so, in 1756, he headed back to Europe, his career again under a cloud. Once more, the English attacked and captured the ship he was travelling in, resulting in a stint in an Irish jail. After seven months in Cork he returned to France. His plans and plants may have failed to thrive, but he did at least have time to write his memoirs, the grandly tided Voyages d’un Philosophe.
It was Poivre’s efforts with the pen that belatedly revived his project of purloining spices, deliverance coming in the form of an appreciative reader who also happened to be a minister in the government of Louis XV. Troubled by the parlous finances of France’s colonial possessions in the Indian Ocean, he was impressed by Poivre’s ideas, and offered the mercurial entrepreneur the intendance of the islands. Perhaps Poivre’s scheme was the answer to the endless flow of subsidies to France’s costly colonies. Poivre headed back east in 1767. Now at last he could rise above the petty rivalries that beset colonial affairs; he could also employ others to take the risks. He settled on two reliable Indian Ocean hands, Evrard de Trémignon and le sieur d’Etcheverry, whom he placed in charge of two swift corvettes, the Vigilant and the Étoile du Matin. They sailed for the Moluccas in January 1770.
His deputies enjoyed better fortune than Poivre had the first time around. Shortly after making a clandestine landfall on Ceram, just to the north of the Dutch headquarters on Ambon, Etcheverry met a lone Dutchman mending his boat on the beach. Over a drink the Dutchman soon divined the intention behind his visitor’s questions but, fortunately for Etcheverry, he was so thoroughly disenchanted with island life that he was willing to tell all. He directed the French to the island of Gueby, where the inhabitants kept illicit clove and nutmeg plants hidden deep in the jungle.
Bidding a grateful farewell, but nagged by the suspicion that he might be double-crossed, Etcheverry duly made straight for Gueby. After some initial confusion – at first the islanders mistook the French for a Dutch raiding party – the locals were more than happy to help; anything to harm the Dutch. Though their plants had recently been detected and burned by a Dutch patrol, they directed the French to a nearby island. Here Poivre’s men carried off thousands of fresh young nutmeg seedlings suitable for propagation.
There was, however, still no sign of any cloves. Despite the assurances of the village headman, who had promised to bring some seedlings from a neighbouring island, the French were getting jittery. After a further eight nerve-racking days, with the monsoon building on the horizon and the risk of a Dutch patrol ever-present, they resolved to sail with just half their mission accomplished, only to have their departure delayed by adverse winds. It was a fortunate development, for as they waited for the wind to shift a small flotilla of islanders arrived with hundreds of young clove seedlings.
Their task achieved, the French promptly set sail for île de France. Their last serious obstacle came in the form of a Dutch coastal patrol, which they fooled by pretending to be lost travellers. After an uneventful voyage west across the Indian Ocean, they made a triumphant return on 25 June, their holds crammed with no fewer than 20,000 nutmegs and three hundred clove seedlings. Their haul was planted in the Jardin du Roi on île de France, where, after a few years in which the majority of the seedlings died, a core group of plants successfully acclimatised. The first crop of cloves was produced in 1776, and nutmeg two years after. Each occasion was marked with great ceremony, ‘as the Romans were wont to celebrate their triumphs with the trees of the countries they had conquered’, in the words of a Parisian pamphlet. A ceremonial consignment of the first Creole spices was dispatched to the king. Poivre foresaw more plantations in France’s other tropical possessions, the Seychelles, Cayenne and Haiti. The contemporary Abbé Raynal compared his feat to Jason’s theft of the golden fleece.
Yet despite all the accolades, Poivre’s plants were never quite the success they promised to be; his adventures, ultimately, packed more panache than punch. Though their descendants can still be seen today, Poivre’s core group of stolen spice plants on Île de France apparently never produced a profitable crop, plagued by official indifference and the local monkeys. On the eve of the Revolution, France was still importing some nine thousand pounds of cloves per annum, the entire proceeds of which went into Dutch pockets. Perhaps the most bitter defeat came in 1778. It was now nearly a decade since Poivre had transplanted a few of his beloved spice plants to the new colony of Mahé, in the Seychelles, where they were kept and nurtured in conditions of the utmost secrecy. But all came to naught when a warship flying the Union Jack appeared in the harbour, whereupon the gardeners torched all the spice plants so as to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. They turned out to have been a little too apprehensive, for the ship was nothing more threatening than a misdirected slaver – and a French one at that. Its crew had hoisted the Union Jack under the mistaken impression that Mahé was a British possession.
In the longer run, however, Poivre’s over-anxious gardeners had good reason to fear the Royal Navy. During the Napoleonic Wars the Moluccas were twice occupied by British forces, from 1796 to 1802, and again from 1810 to 1816. Industrious officers had time to spare in which to transplant the spices to British possessions around Penang and Singapore where, with the encouragement of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, plantations were laid out with full state subsidy and support. In 1843 the nutmeg was introduced to the Caribbean island of Grenada by Captain John Bell, ‘because he liked his punch’. Poivre’s efforts only paid dividends when he was long in the grave, although France derived no profit therefrom. Around 1818 descendants of Poivre’s stolen cloves were transplanted from Mauritius to Madagascar, Pemba and Zanzibar, where they did spectacularly well. Nearly two hundred years later, the flow of spices across the Indian Ocean has been reversed, with Indonesia now a net importer of cloves.
And yet if Poivre was ultimately more flamboyant than effective, he remains something of an iconic figure in the waning of the spice trade. For however belated or mixed the fruition of his efforts, they nevertheless encapsulate some of the deeper trends already underway, trends that account for the rapid fading of spices’ ancient attraction. Proliferation meant that spices were on the road to becoming commonplace.
Poivre, as we have seen, was far from alone in dreaming of spreading spices around the globe. By a royal order of 1678, the Portuguese, robbed of their Asian possessions by the Dutch, had tried to send cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and pepper to Brazil, efforts that continued through the eighteenth century. In the sixteenth century the Spanish had attempted the same in their Central American possessions, though only ginger and cinnamon seem to have done well at this early stage. There was an early attempt, two hundred years before Pierre Poivre, to filch the clove. The other spices had started their steady diffusion much earlier. Pepper is generally believed to have moved east from its native Malabar to Sumatra and through the archipelago as early as the first centuries of the Christian era, accelerating rapidly thereafter. At this time cassia alr
eady grew through much of south-west China, Assam and South-East Asia.
One of the last spices to set off around the world was the cinnamon of Ceylon. After the fall of the island to the Dutch in the 1630s, the VOC maintained the high price of the spice with a combination of monopoly and blockade, in its essentials the same system as applied to the clove and nutmeg, with a similar pattern of hopeless local revolts and pitiless Dutch reprisals. In June 1760 visitors to Amsterdam witnessed the conflagration of some sixteen million French livres’ worth of cinnamon. The fire, which burned for two days outside Amsterdam’s Admiralty House, gave off a fragrant cloud that passed over all of Holland. The system came to an abrupt end in 1795, thanks once more to the guns of the Royal Navy. Ceylon became a crown colony, the monopoly system was abandoned, and the plants transplanted to other tropical possessions.
The hermetic isolation of the spices had been shattered; the ancient combination of rarity and value was now a thing of the past. And as the means of supply was transformed so too demand was changing. Even as Poivre drifted around the Moluccas, spices were being overtaken by newer and more profitable goods such as tea, silver, rubber and textiles. When the British arrived the VOC was already tottering and bankrupt. Spices were no longer the money-spinner they once had been.
This was a process, arguably, that had its beginnings in the earliest days of Europe’s eastern rush to the spices. The apex of the spice age was the beginning of the end of their attraction. It was, admittedly, an end that took several hundred years to play itself out, but thanks to the very success of the Portuguese and Spanish discoverers, the English and above all the Dutch East India companies that came after, spices were on the way to becoming affordable and familiar. Market manipulation slowed but could not halt the trend. Although the spice lands remained prizes to be fought over (or to be robbed), their ancient glamour and mystery were long gone. Now they were studied, mapped, horse-traded, their products reduced to commodities. Mandeville and Marco Polo made way for tales of surviving and making it big in the perilous, profitable East; of extracting a fortune among the grafters and mosquitoes, the drink and dissolution of Batavia or Colombo.
