The Moluccas of eastern Indonesia were once the only source of cloves, nutmeg and mace. Their history includes wealthy sultanates, European rivalry, the 1621 Banda massacre and the Run–Manhattan settlement.
Overview¶
"The Spice Islands" usually means the Moluccas (Maluku), an archipelago in eastern Indonesia between Sulawesi and New Guinea. Until the late 18th century two of the most valuable spices in the world grew nowhere else: cloves, native to a few small volcanic islands off the west coast of Halmahera in the north, and nutmeg and its sister spice mace, native only to the Banda Islands, a cluster of tiny islands in the south with a combined land area of under 200 square kilometres.
Before the Europeans¶
Cloves and nutmeg were being traded out of the Moluccas long before Europeans arrived. Malay, Javanese and Chinese merchants carried them west to ports such as Malacca, where they joined the Indian Ocean trade. The clove islands were dominated by the rival sultanates of Ternate and Tidore, which had adopted Islam by the late 15th century and grew powerful on the trade. The Bandanese, by contrast, were governed by councils of leading men (orang kaya) and traded independently, buying rice, cloth and other goods in exchange for nutmeg and mace.
The European scramble¶
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1512 | Portuguese ships under António de Abreu reach the Banda Islands |
| 1522 | Portuguese build a fort on Ternate; the Spanish Victoria returns to Spain with cloves |
| 1575 | Ternate expels the Portuguese after the murder of Sultan Hairun |
| 1599 | Dutch ships return to Amsterdam from the Moluccas with huge cargoes of spice |
| 1605 | The Dutch take Ambon from the Portuguese |
| 1609 | Dutch admiral Verhoeven and dozens of his men killed on Banda Neira |
| 1616 | Nathaniel Courthope of the English East India Company lands on Run |
| 1620 | Courthope killed; Run falls to the Dutch soon after |
| 1621 | VOC conquest of the Banda Islands under Jan Pieterszoon Coen |
| 1623 | Amboyna massacre: English and other traders executed by the VOC on Ambon |
| 1667 | Treaty of Breda confirms Dutch possession of Run and English possession of New Amsterdam |
| 1770 | French plants of clove and nutmeg established on Mauritius |
| 1810 | British occupy the Bandas during the Napoleonic Wars and export nutmeg seedlings |
The conquest of Banda, 1621¶
The Dutch wanted a monopoly on nutmeg and mace. The Bandanese, who traded with anyone, signed agreements under pressure and then continued to sell to English and Asian merchants. In 1621 Jan Pieterszoon Coen, governor-general of the VOC, led a force to subjugate the islands. What followed was one of the most brutal episodes of the colonial spice trade. Dozens of orang kaya were executed, many Bandanese were killed, died of starvation or disease, or fled to other islands, and several hundred were deported as slaves to Batavia (Jakarta). Estimates vary, but a population usually put at around 15,000 was reduced to perhaps a thousand remaining on the islands.
The VOC then divided the nutmeg groves into plots (perken) run by Dutch settlers called perkeniers, worked by enslaved people brought from across the region. This system lasted into the 19th century.
Clove "extirpation"¶
To control clove supply, the VOC concentrated cultivation on Ambon and nearby islands and, from the mid-17th century, sent annual armed fleets of rowed war canoes (hongi) to destroy clove trees growing elsewhere, including in Ternate's territories. Local rulers were compensated with payments but communities lost their livelihoods, and the policy provoked repeated resistance.
Run and Manhattan¶
Run, one of the smallest Banda islands, was England's foothold. Nathaniel Courthope held it against a Dutch blockade from 1616 until he was killed in 1620. During the Second Anglo-Dutch War, English forces captured New Amsterdam in 1664 and renamed it New York. The Treaty of Breda (1667) settled the war on the basis that each side kept what it held: the Dutch kept Run and the English kept New Amsterdam.
📌 A simplification
The treaty is often described as a straight "swap" of Run for Manhattan. It was really a general settlement under which each side kept its conquests, and Suriname went to the Dutch at the same time. The outcome is not in dispute, but neither side saw it as a one-for-one trade.
Breaking the monopoly¶
The French administrator Pierre Poivre, intendant of Mauritius (then Île de France), organised expeditions that smuggled clove and nutmeg seedlings out of the Moluccas; plants were established on Mauritius from 1770 and later spread to Réunion, the Seychelles and, for cloves, Zanzibar and Pemba. When the British occupied the Bandas during the Napoleonic Wars, they sent nutmeg plants to Penang, Sri Lanka and elsewhere; Grenada, now a major nutmeg producer, planted it in the 1840s. By the mid-19th century the islands' monopoly was gone. Zanzibar's clove plantations, developed under the Omani sultanate, were worked by enslaved Africans until abolition in 1897.
The islands today¶
The Moluccas are part of Indonesia, which remains one of the largest producers of both cloves and nutmeg. Much of the Indonesian clove crop goes into kretek, clove cigarettes. The Banda Islands are a small, quiet place, with the remains of Dutch forts and perkenier houses, and nutmeg trees still shaded by tall kenari (canarium) trees as in the colonial period. See also the Dutch East India Company and the spice trade.