Nutmeg and mace were the most valuable because of their extreme rarity.* Both came from a tree, Myristica fragrans, which was found on the lower slopes of just nine small volcanic islands rising sheer from the Banda Sea, amid a mass of other islands—none with quite the right soils and microclimates to support the nutmeg tree—between Borneo and New Guinea in what is now Indonesia. Cloves, the dried flowerbuds of a type of myrtle tree, grew on six similarly selective islands some two hundred miles to the north in the same chain, known to geography as the Moluccas but to history as the Spice
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