'On that day of Sunday I went ashore to see how the cloves grow. The tree is tall and as thick as a man. Its branches in the center spread out widely; but at the top they grow into a kind of peak. The leaf is like that of a laurel; and the bark of the color of brown tan. The cloves come at the tip of branches; ten or twenty together. These trees almost always bear more of them on one side than on the other; according to the season.

When the cloves sprout; they are white; when ripe; red; and when dried; black. They gather them twice a year; at Christmas and again on the feast of St John the Baptist; because at these two seasons the air is most temperate; but more so at Christmas. And when the year is hotter; and there is less rain; they gather three or four hundred bahar of cloves in each of those islands; and they grow only in the mountains. . . .

Nowhere in the world do good cloves grow except on five mountains of those five islands. . . . We saw almost every day a cloud descend and encircle first one of those mountains and then the other; whereby the cloves become more perfect'.

Magellan's Voyage: A Narrative Account of the First Circumnavigation.