Word: nutmeg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Long before Portuguese sailors discovered Indonesia in the 16th century, Chinese traders were carrying cloves and nutmeg from the green islands to the Chinese mainland. By the time the first Dutch colonists arrived, the Chinese had built small sugar mills and had the rudimentary commerce of the archipelago well in hand. They stayed on and prospered under the Dutch, and sided with the Dutch against Indonesian independence. After the Dutch lost, the Chinese entrenched themselves better than ever in the first confused years of the new republic...
...special feature is a stretch of bench that might be marked in Braille, "Please touch the flowers." Designed for blind children, it contains cacti without thorns, a patch of herbs including several fragrant geraniums such as the lemon, rose, nutmeg and mint varieties. Within hours of its dedication, the exhibit's leaves had been thoroughly pawed, and many a blind child had pressed scented fingers to nostrils dilating with the joy of discovery...
...Windward Islands (pop. 321,600) produce bay rum on St. Lucia, nutmeg on Grenada (pronounced Gre-nay-da), arrowroot for babies' cookies on St. Vincent, and cocoa on Dominica (pronounced Dom-i-nee-ka,). St. Lucia houses a U.S. missile-tracking station for Cape Canaveral's downrange...
...rafflesia, with a diameter of 3 ft., blooms on Madura. The red-brown soil of Java (pop. 52,000,000), terraced with unbelievable ingenuity, produces two rice crops a year. The warm seas send long rollers crashing on the palm-fringed shores of Ternate, with its burgeoning fields of nutmeg and pepper; Sumba, with its fragrant sandalwood; Borneo, with its vast, barely tapped treasure house...
...also had a recipe: "To comfort ye brains, and for ye palsie, and for ye giddiness of the head. Take a handful of rose flowers, cloves, mace, nutmeg, all in a powder, quilt in a little bag and sprinkle with rose water, mixed with malmsey wine, and lay it in ye nod of ye neck...