Exactly 500 years ago, one of the most arduous sea voyages in history reached its destination.

On November 8, 1521, two Spanish three-masters, the Trinidad and the Victoria, moored on the east bank of Tidore.

This island together with four others formed the "Moluku Kie Raha", the world of the four mountains.

The archipelago, which today belongs to Indonesia, was known to Europeans as the “Moluccas” or “Spice Islands”, because here - and only here - trees of the species “Syzygium aromaticun” once bore those buds that, in their dried form, were as popular at the time as those at most Nutmegs growing on an island a little further south.

Ulf von Rauchhaupt

Responsible for the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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To get here, the Portuguese Fernando Magellan, who was in Spanish service, had set out on five ships more than two years earlier. Since the route across the Indian Ocean was controlled by the fleet of the King of Portugal, Magellan tried the western route. He looked for and was the first to find the passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But pretty much everything else went wrong. In April 1521 Magellan was killed, and soon afterwards only the Trinidad and Victoria remained of his armada.

They were now able to take 60 tons of carnations on board in Tidore.

Until then, the Portuguese had the monopoly on the spices, and before them the goods came to Europe only via Javanese, Malay, Indian, Arab and Venetian middlemen, and this has probably been done since ancient times.

"In India there is a grain similar to pepper, called caryophyllon," writes Pliny the Elder around AD 70.

“They say it grows where there is Indian lotus.” The ancient Roman was misinformed.

First was the spice, then the flower

Although clove trees also thrive on Ceylon, they do not develop their aromatic buds there. However, the expression used by Pliny literally means "nut leaf", and so it is not entirely clear whether he or his sources really meant cloves here. The word nevertheless became part of "

Eugenia caryophyllata

", an outdated botanical name for the myrtle family. The name of eugenol is derived from it, the essential oil that can make up more than ten percent of their weight in high-quality cloves.

In contrast to pepper, which the Romans imported in large quantities from India, the meaning of the clove for Roman haute cuisine is unclear, even if caryophyllon or cariofilum appear in the recipe book of Apicius. At the latest in the High Middle Ages, however, the product was handled in India, because in 2010 some carnations were found in the remains of an old port city in Sri Lanka, which, according to C14 dating, must have been picked between 900 and 1100 AD. Your German name, however, is probably of a later date. The hobby chef around the world now knows that cloves have nothing to do botanically with the socialist symbolic flowers of the genus “Dianthus”. However, the spice is not named after the flower, but the other way round, the flower is named after that. Because "clove" comes from "nails" and also the English word for the spice,Clove, or the Spanish, clavo, from Latin clavus, nail.

Of the carnations in the holds of the last two ships of the Magellan expedition, however, only the 24 tons on board the Victoria reached home in Spain.

However, due to the favorable easterly winds and the dubious condition of the ship, their captain Juan Sebastián Elcano did not venture back across the Pacific.

So he drove west and unplanned completed the first circumnavigation of the earth.