Cloves, Conquest and the Smell of Empire

Cloves are one of those things we have managed to make simultaneously exotic and boring. They have been treasured for centuries for their perfume, their heat, their peculiar little nail-like appearance and their ability to make a kitchen smell as though Christmas has broken in and taken up residence.

They have also had a surprisingly long career in traditional medicine, oral care, incense, perfumery and all the other branches of human activity in which we attempt to persuade plants to do something useful.

For toothache, cloves have been a folk remedy for centuries. And there is some chemistry behind the folklore. Cloves contain eugenol, a compound with analgesic and antiseptic properties that is also used in dentistry. If you have a toothache, this is the uncomplicated approach: put a whole clove in your mouth, close to the painful tooth and gently suck it.

This is considerably less alarming than pouring neat clove essential oil into your mouth, which can irritate tissue and is not something I would recommend as a casual experiment.

If desperation has driven you towards clove oil, dilute it properly. A couple of drops mixed into half a teaspoon of coconut oil and applied sparingly to the painful area with a cotton bud is one traditional approach. Rinse afterwards. And, of course, a clove may temporarily quieten a tooth but it won’t negotiate a peace treaty with an abscess.

A persistent toothache still belongs in the dentist’s chair.

The name itself comes from the Latin clavus, meaning nail, an entirely reasonable description of something that looks as though it was designed by a blacksmith rather than a botanist. The clove tree belongs to the myrtle family, which puts it in respectable company.

But the little thing packs an extraordinary amount of history into its diminutive body.

Cloves have been perfume, medicine, breath freshener, culinary spice and economic weapon. Chinese courtiers were chewing them centuries before the birth of Christ, reportedly to sweeten their breath before speaking to the emperor. Which seems sensible. There are few things more dangerous than approaching an emperor with bad breath.

The Chinese weren’t alone in appreciating them. Cloves travelled through the ancient world and eventually became one of the most coveted commodities on earth. Their value was not merely culinary. They were concentrated wealth: light enough to carry, durable enough to store and sufficiently desirable for people to sail halfway round the world, steal them, monopolise them and, when necessary, kill for them.

Cloves contain a variety of plant compounds, and have acquired a formidable reputation in traditional herbal medicine. They have been used for digestive complaints, oral pain and inflammation, among other things. Some researchers have also investigated clove compounds for antimicrobial and antiparasitic activity, although that is a considerable distance from proving that chewing cloves will cure whatever happens to be troubling you.

That distinction is worth making because the history of herbal medicine is full of things that are interesting, plausible and occasionally useful, followed immediately by someone claiming they cure everything from dandruff to the decline of Western civilisation.

Cloves and Parasite Eggs

Dr Omar Amin, a renowned parasitologist based in Phoenix, has, for many years, drawn attention to the potential activity of cloves against parasite eggs.

Still, there is something pleasing about the little spice. It smells wonderful, tastes powerful and has survived several thousand years of human enthusiasm.

It takes roughly 3,000 dried flower buds to produce a kilogram of cloves. Each one, therefore, represents a tiny unopened flower, harvested, dried and reduced to a concentrated nugget of fragrance.

Think about that the next time you push a few into a Christmas ham.

I have taken to putting a few cloves into my morning coffee. It gives the coffee a faintly exotic warmth and, more importantly, makes breakfast feel as though it has a backstory.

Because if cloves have a birthplace of mythology, it is Ternate.

A Tumultuous History

On the Indonesian island of Ternate stands Afo, the last remaining clove tree from the Dutch spice empire. It has survived storms, earthquakes, neglect and the determined attentions of the Dutch, who spent centuries trying to control the production of the world’s most valuable spices.

Afo is believed to be somewhere between 350 and 400 years old. Once it was said to have reached about 40 metres in height, with a trunk roughly four metres around. Today it is a much-reduced survivor, protected behind a wall.

Not, amusingly, because everyone has always understood its historical importance.

At one point branches were hacked from it for firewood. History, it seems, is not always sufficiently compelling when you are cold.

Yet Afo is more than an old tree. It is a living footnote to one of the nastier episodes in the history of capitalism.

The End of a Monopoly

The islands of Ternate and neighbouring Tidore were once the epicentre of the clove trade. The Dutch East India Company – the VOC – wanted to keep them that way. Its monopoly over cloves, nutmeg and mace was enforced with the sort of enthusiasm that made the phrase “free trade” rather difficult to say with a straight face.

Then along came Pierre Poivre.

Poivre – whose wonderfully appropriate name means “pepper” in French – was a French missionary, botanist and adventurer with an irritating habit of taking things that weren’t supposed to leave the Spice Islands and transporting them elsewhere.

In the 1750s he obtained clove plants and eventually succeeded in establishing them in Mauritius and Zanzibar.

It was botanical smuggling with geopolitical consequences.

The Dutch monopoly began to crumble. Once cloves could be grown elsewhere, the VOC’s carefully constructed grip on the spice trade became considerably less impressive. The great commercial empire that had dominated the region eventually went bankrupt in 1799.

A tree, a few seedlings and a Frenchman with a talent for horticultural mischief had helped prise open the door.

Today Ternate and Tidore are again what they were before Europeans made them rich and strategically important: remote volcanic islands, tucked away in the Moluccas and largely ignored by the tourists who flock to the better-known parts of Indonesia.

Which is rather wonderful.

Standing there, you can look at a clove tree and realise that the object you casually throw into a casserole once had the economic status of gold.

Men sailed thousands of miles for it. Men fought over it. Men died for it. Empires were built around it. And eventually somebody put it in a supermarket jar for £1.79.

That is progress, apparently.

We now sprinkle nutmeg over porridge without giving the matter much thought. We push cloves into an onion for a stew. We add cinnamon and cloves to a Christmas punch and complain if the supermarket has run out.

But those spices came into European kitchens at extraordinary cost.

So the next time you drop a clove into your coffee or mull something alcoholic with cinnamon and cloves, spare a thought for Ternate and Tidore.

Think of the ships, the storms, the merchants, the pirates, the monopolists, the botanists and the men who believed that controlling a handful of tiny dried flower buds was a perfectly sensible reason to conquer half the world.

And if you ever find yourself on Ternate, looking at the battered remains of Afo on the slopes of Mount Gamalama, you may find yourself wondering whether the tree remembers any of it.

It has certainly outlived most of the people who fought over it.

The volcano still rumbles. The islands remain divided by their old rivalries. Ternate and Tidore may no longer command the world’s spice trade, but history has a long memory in places like this.

And somewhere in the bark of an ancient clove tree is the reminder that an apparently insignificant little spice once possessed enough power to make empires behave very badly indeed.