Clove - History

History

Until modern times, cloves grew only on a few islands in the Maluku Islands (historically called the Spice Islands), including Bacan, Makian, Moti, Ternate, and Tidore. In fact, it is believed that the oldest clove tree in the world, named "Afo," is found on Ternate—the tree being between 350 and 400 years old. Seedlings from this Afo tree were stolen by a Frenchman named Poivre in 1770, transferred to France, and then later to Zanzibar which is today the world's largest producer of cloves.

Until cloves were grown outside of the Maluku Islands, they were traded like oil, with a forced limit on exportation. As the Dutch East India Company consolidated its control of the spice trade in the 17th century they sought to gain a monopoly in cloves as they had in nutmeg. However, "unlike nutmeg and mace, which were limited to the minute Bandas, clove trees grew all over the Moluccas, and the trade in cloves was way beyond the limited policing powers of the corporation." In Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, cloves were worth at least their weight in gold, due to the high price of importing them.

In the 3rd century BC, a Chinese leader in the Han Dynasty required those who addressed them to chew cloves so as to freshen their breath. Cloves were traded by Muslim sailors and merchants during the Middle Ages in the profitable Indian Ocean trade, the Clove trade is also mentioned by Ibn Battuta and even famous One Thousand and One Nights characters such Sinbad the Sailor is known to have bought and sold Cloves. And archeologists found cloves within a ceramic vessel in Syria along with evidence dating the find to within a few years of 1721 BC.