SOME stories are simply too improbable to be made up. Here's one: In 1770, the French secretly sent a one-armed amateur botanist named Pierre Poivre -- yes, Peter Pepper -- to the Moluccas, hoping to alter the balance of power by breaking the Dutch stranglehold on a strategic commodity, nutmeg. (Well, two commodities, technically, since mace is made from the membrane that surrounds the flesh inside the fruit of the nutmeg tree.) The plan was almost foiled when some rebellious islanders thought the French might be a Dutch raiding party, but in the end Poivre managed to bring 20,000 nutmeg plants, along with a few hundred clove seedlings, back to Paris to be planted in the Jardin du Roi.
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