181 Moluccas Beyond Ambon Island, there is a line of five other islands called the Moluccas, where all the cloves grow. They belong to Mouros and gentiles; their kings are Mouros. The first is called Pachel; the second [Makian, the third], Moti; the fourth; Tidore, and the fifth Ternate, where there is a Mouros king called Sultan Binaracola, who was the Sultan of allfive, now all the other four have rebelled against him and are independent. The forests on these islands are all full of trees that look like bay-trees and have leaves like the arbutus-berry tree. Cloves grow on them in pinecones with a flower like the orange or honeysuckle flower. It has a very green bud, then turns white, and when it is ripe it turns a very pale red, then the locals pick it by hand and put it to dry in the sun which turns it black. When it is not sunny, they dry it in smoke-houses and once dry they spray it with a little salt-water, so that it does not go off and lose its properties; they gather so much of it on these five islands, that they cannot get it all away, not counting the large amount not harvested and which is lost in the wild; if they do not harvest a tree for three years, then it becomes wild and the fruit it gives thereafter is worthless. Every year, lots of ships from Malacca and Java come here to load it, in exchange for copper; quicksilver; vermillion; Cambay cloths; cumin; some silver; porcelain; metal bells from Java the size of large washing-bowls; they hang them up by their rims and these bells have aflax through their middle and they hit them with an object to make them chime. Kings and respectable people value them highly and [have] both big and small ones as treasure to show their wealth and status. They make music with them and with metal and tin cymbals and a small copper coin from China like a ceitil with a hole in the middle. And they [give] so many cloves for these goods, that for one bell [or] a large bowl made of porcelains, they give twenty or thirty quintals of cloves; and they give twenty bahares of cloves for one bell and similarly for many other things; thus one makes a huge profit between Malacca and this place.
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