The Dutch could not hope to control the spice trade forever , but by these methods they succeeded for the next eighty years. They were eventually circumvented by an amiable-looking and enterprising Frenchman with one arm, a keen agriculturalist and amateur botanist,whose great ambition in life had become to make the French possessions in the western Indian Ocean into a second,and rival,Indies. For one so interested in spices,his name,suitably enough,was M.Pierre Poivre.