Nutmeg was originally restricted to the Maluku Islands in what is today Indonesia. To Europeans, these were the Spice Islands, home also of cloves. Nutmeg trees actually produce two spices, the nut (nutmeg) and the red aril or seed covering of the nut (mace). The nuts in particular could travel well and were highly prized in China, India, and Europe for more than a millennia before the Dutch monopolized the Spice Islands in the early seventeenth century.
The Dutch wanted control of nutmeg trees so badly they committed genocide on the native peoples in 1621 to get it. But they couldn’t hold on to exclusive rights to the region’s lucrative products. Everyone wanted their share of the spice action. Nutmeg and clove trees would, by hook or by crook, be transplanted elsewhere—to the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, tropical America, and the Caribbean.
Barbados became known as Nutmeg Island to the British. For the French, it was supposed to be the Isle de France. Located in the Indian Ocean more than a thousand miles off the east coast of Africa, Isle de France became a testing ground for acclimatizing nutmeg to a new habitat. Today, Isle de France is the Republic of Mauritius; it was a Dutch colony from 1599 to 1715, French from 1715 to 1810, and then British from 1810 to 1968, the year of independence.
Historian Dorit Brixius explores the French effort to turn the colony into France’s own Spice Island.
Defeat in the Seven Years War curtailed France’s presence in the Atlantic world, so they turned East for their colonial dreams. Remote Mauritius had no indigenous people; its human population and botanical legacy came about through Indo-Pacific networks, becoming what Brixius calls “a laboratory where these elements native to Europe, the African mainland, Madagascar and Asia were tested.”
Brixius terms the results creolization, a hybridization of people and knowledge. “Europeans who migrated to the island by choice, settlers born there and slaves present through forced migration” worked to hybridize horticultural knowledge and cultivation techniques borrowed from the Maluku Islands. It was those islanders who essentially smuggled out the plant from under the eyes of the Dutch.
“Cultivation on Isle de France produced a creolization of expertise that originated from the local populations of the plants’ native islands,” Brixius writes, “and was then reconfigured through the horticultural knowledge of colonists, settlers, laborers and slaves living on the colonial island.”
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By 1772, the nutmeg arrived in “sufficient quantities for experimentation” on the Isle de France. But it turned out that there was more than one kind of nutmeg tree. In fact, the Myristica genus is made up of more than 100 species. Debates about what was the “true”—for spice purposes—nutmeg, Myristica fragrans, roiled around the globe, with savants in France, who had never seen any of the trees, trying to distinguish members of the genus by the seeds alone.
“European knowledge was only one type of knowledge and had significant limitations even as it borrowed from other systems,” writes Brixius.
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There was another sense in which even the true nutmeg was not a single tree. On the Isle de France, it was discovered that many of the trees did not produce fruit. These trees turned out to be males. Nutmegs are dioecious, meaning that the plants are separately male and female. Only female nutmeg trees produced fruit, which surrounds the all-important nut. But you can’t just have a population of female trees, because you need male trees for pollination. (The vast majority of plants are monoecious or hermaphrodite, having both male pollen-producing and female pollen-receptive flowers on the same plant.) As it happens, the “discovery of plant sexuality was only slowly accepted in France.”
“The sex of a seed cannot be determined by visual examination, and it is impossible to tell if a plant is female or male until the plant actually blooms,” writes Brixius. Cultivation by seed was therefore no guarantee of producing large numbers of female trees. Grafting, splicing known female trees to other rootstocks, was pioneered on Isle de France by a slave only known as Hilaire. The English invasion of the Isle de France in 1810, a far theater of the Napoleonic Wars, put an end to French botanical experiments on the island. France is, however, the primary importer of Mauritian nutmeg today.
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