Chapter 6 provides a detailed explanation of the practical and political challenges faced by the projects to introduce nutmeg (and clove) into Mauritius. It is about the experiential and unsettled knowledge mobilised in the French attempts to acclimatise spices. It engages with the material practices associated with transportation and acclimatisation. The chapter explores various examples of highly ambivalent strategies for the transport on ships and cultivation in foreign soil of the spices. All of these were by no means initiated in the metropolis. This chapter is primarily concerned with natural obstacles, or rather how local actors in Mauritius sought to overcome them by employing non-conventional strategies and initiatives. Using the example of grafting, it argues that techniques and methods were developed independently in different parts of the world, and were not ‘transferred’ from Europe to the colonies, or vice versa. The sketchy and uncertain knowledge of the French remained fragmented until at least the 1780s, which led to miscalculations and an eventual failure of the project to establish a spice trade. Exploring the reasons for this failure, the last chapter reinforces calls to understand the decentred, complex, and slow process of plant knowledge in the making.

This chapter has a sociocultural approach to the quest for nutmeg and cloves. It analyses human, cross-cultural encounters in South East Asia, the native countries of numerous spices introduced in Mauritius over the course of the eighteenth century. As this chapter reveals, the French colonial spice project involved actors from different backgrounds for patronage, protection, and assistance. They used a mix of languages, promises, and informal relations mainly in South East Asian islands (the Maluku islands and the Philippines). The purpose of this chapter is to understand the movements of knowledge and people within cross-cultural interactions in the Indo-Pacific through the lens of plant exchange. These cross-cultural connections were essential for this project: Asian merchants and brokers were indispensable for acquiring spice plants and grains from Dutch colonial territory in today’s Indonesia. Insisting on the cross-cultural nature of the acquisition of spice plants, this chapter challenges existing narratives of the cultural components of the French empire.