Moluccas. This island group,
for ages the coveted prize of European nations, exercised an
irresistible attraction on Arabia and Persia. Various expeditions were
organised, and in the ninth century Arab sages discovered the healing
virtues of nutmeg and mace, as anodynes, embrocations, and condiments.
A record remains of a certain Ibn Amram, an Arabian physician, whose
uncontrolled passion for the _nux moschata_ overthrew his reason. The
story, continually quoted as a warning to subsequent explorers of the
Spice Islands, has apparently kept his memory green, for no previous
details of his career have come down to us. Eastern spices were
favourite medicines in Persia during the tenth century, and fifty years
later the _karoun aromatikon_ was added to the Pharmacopeia of Europe.
In A.D. 1400, Genoa and Barcelona became the principal spice markets,
though the attention of Northern Europe had been directed to the
Moluccas by those voyages of Marco Polo which, especially in lands of
fog and snow, fired popular imagination with myriad visions of realised
romance. Camoens, in the Lusiad, chanted the praises of the _verde noz_
in those poetic groves, which he regarded as a new garden of
Hesperides, when the magic lure of an untravelled distance, and the
dreamful wonder of an untracked horizon, wove their spells over the
mind of an awakening world. Powers of observation and comparison were
still untrained and untried; superstition was rife, and a necromantic
origin was frequently ascribed to the unfamiliar products of the mystic
East. Portugal, in the zenith of her maritime power, became the first
European trader in the Southern Seas, and in A.D. 1511 Albuquerque
reached the Moluccas, but was quickly followed by the Spaniards under
their great Emperor Charles V. Incessant war continued for the
possession of "the gold-bearing trees," until Spain and Portugal,
united by a common danger, combined their forces to exclude the
northern nations from any share in the coveted spoil. The rage for
spices spread throughout Europe, and kindled a fire of international
animosity which lasted for centuries. In A.D. 1595 the unwieldy Dutch
ships started on a perilous voyage round the Cape, to trace the unknown
path to the mysterious Moluccas, described as "odorous with trees of
notemuge, sending of their fragrance across the sea on the softe breath
of the south winde," and Holland, at the climax of her power,
eventually secured the monopoly of spi