The Spice
Islands

On Gebe, farther north, people were using Golo Cave about 35,000–36,000 years ago. They left worked shell and stone; later deposits contain bone tools and shell adzes with ground cutting edges. At Uattamdi on Kayoa, pottery with a red coating and shell ornaments appeared roughly 3,000–3,300 years ago. Over the following millennium came metal objects, glass beads and burials in jars.

The pots on Ai changed as the settlement grew older. Early ones had thin walls and long rims that turned outwards, a useful shape for storing liquids. Later pots had thicker walls, coarser material mixed into the clay and shorter rims suited to cooking. A red coating covered many of the early pots, becoming less common later. Some pieces also had geometric patterns cut or pressed into them.

Fish remains were plentiful in the earliest PA1 layers, with very little mammal bone. Several centuries later, domesticated pigs had become much more important; archaeologists also found a few dog bones. Among the pots were small chert flakes and scrapers, and pieces of obsidian. Tests could not match the obsidian to the known sources used for comparison, leaving its place of origin unidentified.

People largely left the open settlement around 2,300 years ago. The excavation team had not found another Bandanese site that filled the whole gap that followed. Living permanently on these small islands took more planning for food and stored water than an occasional fishing visit. The researchers suggested that earlier visitors may have sailed from Seram, the nearest large island, using their knowledge of the sea to make repeated crossings.

Food was one way Lape traced the spread of religion. In the settlement where people continued eating pork, leaders did not carry the Muslim title imam used in other villages. He compared 21 sites across three islands, using old maps and descriptions of village alliances alongside the excavations. Some villages shown on those maps were abandoned under Dutch occupation, so he could connect material in the ground with named communities.

Rijali, an imam from Hitu, wrote the Hikayat Tanah Hitu during his exile in Makassar between 1647 and 1653. He tells of islanders finding unfamiliar sailors in a boat and taking them to Jamilu, one of Hitu's leaders. They welcomed the visitors, traded and exchanged gifts of cloth. Later, drunken newcomers caused trouble in the market, and Hitu's leaders moved them elsewhere. Rijali wrote in Malay using Jawi, a script based on Arabic.

Five small volcanic islands off Halmahera were at the heart of clove growing: Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian and Bacan. The sultans of Ternate and Tidore built trading links and political alliances across the surrounding seas. In 1607, the VOC built a fort on Ternate to help its sultan resist Spanish forces arriving from the Philippines. In return for military support, the company claimed the right to buy all the cloves grown in his territories.

The trade reached east into New Guinea. Bird-of-paradise skins passed through Raja Ampat on their way west towards Tidore. People from Waigeo carried sago and pearl shell to Salawati and Tidore, while coastal traders dealt with hunters inland. On Ambon, Rumphius obtained plumes said to come from Sergile, around present-day Sorong. Cloth and metal tools went east in exchange. These routes joined the Malukan ports where spices were traded.

Shichizō, a 24-year-old from Hirado in Japan, appeared on the walls of Ambon's castle in 1623. His presence set off a series of interrogations. Dutch officials accused English merchants and Japanese mercenaries of plotting to seize the fort. The men had come through rival trading and military networks; Japanese soldiers were serving in VOC garrisons far from home. Interrogators forced confessions using water torture. They bound a prisoner's arms to a door frame, tied cloth over his face and poured water over his head until he could not breathe. The advocate-fiscal, Isaaq de Bruyn, led the proceedings. Their legality was challenged almost at once. Dutch law allowed torture under prescribed rules; the dispute was whether officials had followed those rules and whether the confessions proved the accusations.

The executions took place on 9 March 1623. News reached Europe the following year, and six English survivors returned in June 1624. Their testimony helped fuel a war of pamphlets. English and Dutch publications accused the other side of treason or judicial murder. The argument continued for decades, reaching people who knew Ambon only through what they read.

Rumphius went blind in 1670. Four years later, his wife and youngest daughter were killed in an earthquake while watching Chinese New Year celebrations. In 1687, a fire destroyed his house, drawings and many manuscripts. He carried on with assistants. A ship taking the first six books of his Herbal to Europe later sank, but a copy made in Batavia survived. The Curiosity Cabinet appeared after his death, in 1705; the Herbal followed between 1741 and 1750. A biohistorical expedition returned in 1990 to collect at places linked to his descriptions. Its station lists pair beaches, bays and village shores with the collections made there.

War had begun in 1665. By summer 1667, much of the English fleet lay idle in the Medway, and London was still recovering from plague and fire. Dutch ships attacked the anchorage near Chatham, burned warships and towed away the Royal Charles. Peace talks were already under way. The raid strengthened the Dutch position and helped bring negotiations to a swift end when they resumed.

New Netherland's trade followed the Hudson, Delaware and Connecticut rivers. The Dutch West India Company sent settlers and traded with Indigenous communities for furs. Farms grew alongside the ports. Wealthy patrons received large estates, taking rent and a share of their tenants' crops. Land, trade and who held authority were already sources of conflict before the colony passed into English hands.

Marcus Doornick's 1667 news sheet told the story of the conflict through ten illustrated scenes. Its final celebration shows crowds beside a canal, with fireworks overhead.

A bronze medal made that year brings peace and naval victory together. On one side, Peace sits on captured weapons, holding an olive branch and a cornucopia beside the shields of European states. On the other, English ships burn near Chatham. The inscription names Michiel de Ruyter. The diplomatic settlement and the destruction of the fleet both appear on this small object, which could fit in a hand.

Another war broke out in 1672. Nine years after Stuyvesant's surrender, a Dutch fleet took New York back and renamed it New Orange. It stayed Dutch for only a year before another peace returned it to English rule. Through these changes of flag, Dutch families, language and institutions continued in the former colony as it became part of a different empire.

Fort Nassau's story began in 1609, when Admiral Pieter Verhoeff arrived with a heavily armed fleet and demanded permission to build. The orang kaya delayed their answer, but he sent men ashore and began work without consent. The islanders then invited him to negotiate and ambushed and killed him and his companions. His fleet attacked coastal settlements and boats in retaliation. An agreement was finally reached that August. By then, the fort was standing, with a permanent Dutch garrison on the land Verhoeff had entered without permission.

Fort Belgica occupied the high ground above Nassau and the harbour. Both forts appear in a painting made in Johannes Vingboons's workshop around 1662–1663. The VOC ordered it for the company's rooms in Amsterdam as part of a series showing its Asian posts. Neira's houses, shoreline and defences hung alongside views of other company settlements, some thousands of kilometres away.

The new planters needed people who knew the trees. Bandanese workers had the skills to tend and harvest them, and some deportees were brought back for that knowledge. Historians disagree about how much farming changed after the conquest. Older studies emphasised the creation of intensive plantations. S. J. Miske's work in the archives finds that much of the earlier cultivation continued, with little evidence of higher yields in the early years. Tall shade trees stayed in the groves. Planters struggled to find enough workers and food while meeting the company's demands.

On Banda Besar, Amy Jordan studied what plantation households left behind at three estates: Ordatang, Groot Waling and Komber. Pottery, animal bones and starch grains gave clues to their meals. People used imported dishes and found food through local resources and trade with other islands. What they ate varied from one estate to another and changed over time. Ordatang stood on a ridge along an old caldera, away from the beach, and was abandoned when Jordan excavated it. Many plantation buildings had been dismantled for materials or reused in later buildings.

Getting a seed to grow after a long voyage was difficult. Nutmeg seeds quickly lost their ability to germinate, leaving little time to get them into the ground. Very few plants survived the early French shipments in the 1750s. In Pondicherry, a reward had already been offered for 25 living nutmeg plants. Buyers needed seeds or plants that would survive the journey and grow on arrival. The dried spice shipped to kitchens and pharmacies could not reliably start a new grove.

Poivre advised planting young trees beside bananas, which would protect them from wind and sun. His advice drew on observations made in Ambon and Banda, Rumphius's botanical work and Provost's collecting voyages. Identifying the imported plants took more work. Specimens were sent to Paris in glass containers filled with alcohol. Their labels carried Malay names, and French naturalists had to work out how those names fitted the classifications they used.

The name nutmeg was also used for other aromatic seeds. Monodora myristica, an African tree, supplied seeds called Jamaica nutmeg or calabash nutmeg. They reached the Caribbean with the slave trade. The pichurim nut, another substitute, came from a tree native to the Americas and reached Portugal in the eighteenth century. Plants with similar scents could end up with similar names in trade, even when they were unrelated. Botanical specimens helped separate these substitutes from the trees the colonial gardens were trying to grow.

After the Seven Years War, France considered sending spice plants to Guiana. Instructions to send nutmeg followed in 1771. In 1802, two specimens travelled from Cayenne to St Vincent, another link in a chain of gardens relying on one another's surviving plants. A specimen Julius von Rohr collected in Cayenne in 1784 later entered the British Museum herbarium. It carried male flowers from a cultivated tree about five years old.

Sjahrir kept in touch with Maria Duchâteau in the Netherlands by letter. He spent his Banda years apart from her, growing flowers, making friends and following political events. The letters later became Out of Exile. Both men ordered books from Batavia and Europe and wrote articles for publication. They read German philosophy, French literature and European politics, continuing their studies while the colonial authorities kept them far from the political organisations they had helped to lead.

Hatta liked a strict routine and expected his pupils to work carefully. Sjahrir spent more time playing and talking with children, using their interests as a way into a lesson. The families around them knew their different habits well. To Des, they were Uncle Hatta and Uncle Rir. They became part of family life in Banda, even as the authorities kept them out of national politics.

At Iwa Kusumasumantri's house, they met Bahlawan, a Bandanese Arab teacher. He taught Arabic history to Hatta, Sjahrir, Iwa and Tjipto; Iwa also studied the Qur'an and Islamic history with him. Learning in exile included these conversations with people who already lived in Banda. Hatta began each day by bathing and praying, followed by coffee and reading before breakfast. Sjahrir's less formal religious habits gave the two men something to tease each other about. They worked together despite their very different daily routines.

Decades later, Suharto's government sent political prisoners to Buru, west of Ambon. Pramoedya Ananta Toer spent ten years there. Prisoners cleared land, cut roads and built their own barracks. During his imprisonment, he composed the novels that became the Buru Quartet. This Earth of Mankind was published in 1980, after his release, and was banned in Indonesia the following year. Child of All Nations, Footsteps and Glass House followed, each facing censorship. Pramoedya continued publishing with Joesoef Isak and Hasyim Rachmat, two men who had also been prisoners.

Before the eruption, earthquakes became more frequent. In Neira, about two kilometres east of the summit, people felt them every few minutes between 8 and 10 May. The eruption began at 6.30 in the morning. Columns of ash and gas rose three to five kilometres above the vents. On that first day, explosions came from opposite sides of the volcano, more than a kilometre apart.

At about 11.30, the eruption column on the south side bent towards western Lontar. Ash and rock fragments swept across the island’s western end in a blast that lasted less than a minute. Activity later moved towards Banda Api’s summit. Lava kept moving on the north side for several days, while the explosions grew weaker. By 18 May, all the craters were quiet.

The cooled andesite lava gave corals a firm, uneven surface to settle on. Tomascik, van Woesik and Mah compared it with an older limestone reef and loose volcanic deposits off the southwest coast. They suggested that crevices protected young corals from predators, and that larvae arrived from nearby and more distant reefs. Loose deposits shifted, making it harder for corals to attach and grow.

On some evenings in Banda, corals release bundles of eggs and sperm into the sea. Researchers watching between 2016 and 2019 found spawning peaks in April and October–November. Releases commonly came five to seven days after the full moon, two to three hours after sunset, on a falling tide. The team watched directly and used traps to catch floating eggs. Rising water temperature and the moon also helped set the timing.

The egg traps were made from household funnels and plastic bottles. Divers placed an inverted funnel over a coral colony, with a bottle above to catch bundles as they floated up. A little air kept the bottle upright, and nylon ties held it to the coral or nearby rock. The traps could catch a spawning release when no divers were present. Eggs collected the next morning went for DNA analysis to help identify which corals had spawned.