The Spice
Islands

I’d like to begin with something very ordinary: a cooking pot. About 3,500 years ago, someone on Pulau Ai was using nutmeg to prepare food. Tiny traces survived on pottery buried in the ground, where archaeologists also found residues of sago and purple yam. People were bringing these ingredients into their homes and preparing meals with them thousands of years before Europeans sailed here to buy Banda’s spices.

Making a home on Ai required people to solve a practical problem. There was fish in the surrounding sea, but the island had no permanent rivers to supply drinking water. Some of the earliest pots had thin walls and shapes suited to holding liquids, which would have helped people keep water available. Later pottery was thicker and better suited to cooking. Alongside it were fish bones, stone tools and holes where wooden posts had stood, suggesting that people were building houses as they adapted to life on the island.

Fish dominated the earliest food remains, while domestic pigs became more important over the following centuries. Ai had no native land mammals, so the pigs had to be brought from elsewhere. Along with the pots and house posts, their bones show how much people were bringing into these island settlements. Earlier visitors had come to the reefs to fish for thousands of years; the later inhabitants were also transporting animals across the sea and keeping them on land.

Those crossings had always been necessary. Banda was never connected to the Asian or Australian mainland, even when sea levels were lower, so everyone who first reached these islands arrived by water. Fishing, settlement and the movement of animals all depended on journeys between shores. The early settlement on Ai was eventually abandoned, and many centuries separate it from the towns that later grew around the spice trade. By then, voyages to Banda were bringing goods from much farther away.

Pottery made in China reached Banda, and by the fourteenth century the islands appeared in both Chinese and Javanese writings. A ceramic bowl could travel through several ports and several merchants’ hands before reaching a household here. Nutmeg moved through the same wider trading world in the other direction. Trade gave island communities access to things they could not make themselves, while buyers far away could obtain a spice from islands they might never visit. The harbours where these exchanges took place brought people with different languages and customs into contact.

People and beliefs moved through these connections too. Islam became established in Banda gradually, with neighbouring settlements following different practices. In one settlement, the absence of pig remains from around the thirteenth century suggests a Muslim community; nearby, people continued eating pork much later. Burned human remains at another site suggest that cremation was practised there. Communities close enough to know one another could differ in their food, religious observances and treatment of the dead, while still belonging to the same trading world.

By the time European ships arrived, Banda had growers tending its trees, merchants buying its produce and local leaders negotiating with visitors. Its settlements had their own beliefs and alliances, and their inhabitants had long experience of dealing with the world beyond their shores. Anyone arriving to buy nutmeg would have to find a place within those relationships and persuade the people who owned the crop to sell it.

When you see a whole nutmeg fruit, it takes a moment to connect it with the spice we use in cooking. The fruit has a rounded, yellowish outer skin, and when it ripens it splits open to reveal a bright red, lacy covering around a dark shell. That red covering is mace. Inside the shell is the kernel that becomes nutmeg. Both spices begin here, in a fruit that has to be grown, gathered and carefully taken apart before a merchant has anything ready to carry away.

For a grower, the work begins years before that fruit appears. A nutmeg tree raised from seed takes several years to flower, and its sex generally becomes clear only then. Most trees are either male or female, and a grove needs both for pollination and fruit production. A healthy young tree may therefore grow for years without its owner knowing whether it will eventually bear fruit. Establishing a grove involves keeping enough male trees to pollinate the females that produce the harvest.

Once a female tree has flowered and been pollinated, its fruit develops over several months. Nutmeg grows in a warm, humid climate, with enough moisture to sustain the tree but soil that drains well. Beneath the glossy evergreen leaves, the fruit matures until its outer skin begins to open, exposing the red mace inside. That split gives the harvester a visible sign that it is ripe, although it is still a long way from being ready for the kitchen or a merchant’s storeroom.

In Banda, a long harvesting pole fitted with a blade and a small basket allows a picker to reach fruit high in the branches. Once gathered, the fleshy outer part is removed and the soft mace is peeled away from the shell. There is useful food in the flesh as well: nutmeg fruit can be made into preserves. The spice harvest is now divided into the delicate mace, ready to be laid out to dry, and the nutmeg kernel, still protected by its hard shell.

Mace loses its vivid red colour as it dries, turning towards orange or yellow. The nutmeg remains inside its shell while moisture slowly leaves the kernel, a process that takes weeks. As it shrinks, the kernel becomes loose enough to rattle when the shell is shaken. Drying needs care throughout: moisture left in the crop, or rain reaching it during processing, can lead to mould. A fruit successfully brought down from the tree can still be lost before it is ready for sale.

Only after drying can the shell be cracked and the nutmeg kernels sorted. The harvest has now become something that can be stored, packed and sent across the sea. By the time a merchant is choosing a cargo, years have gone into establishing the trees, months into growing the fruit and weeks into preparing the spices. Much of that work becomes invisible once the produce is packed, but the quality of what the merchant buys depends on how it has been done.

Long before Portuguese vessels reached Banda, nutmeg was known in China and the Arab world, where it was used in food and medicine. Dried and packed, it could pass between merchants and ports on its way to those distant buyers. For the people at either end, the same spice belonged to very different surroundings: a household preparing food or medicine far away, and a grower in Banda whose next harvest was already developing on the trees. Trade connected the two, and made access to these groves valuable to merchants from across the seas.

In December 1616, the English merchant Nathaniel Courthope reached Rhun with two ships, the Swan and the Defence. The agreement he made with Bandanese leaders included an unusual gift: a branch of nutmeg would be sent each year to King James I. The islanders wanted English protection for their people, property and religion, and help recovering neighbouring Ai from the Dutch. In return, they offered their allegiance and exclusive sales of their spices to English buyers. For Courthope, this gave England a claim in the heart of the nutmeg islands; for his allies, it brought the promise of help against an immediate enemy.

Delivering that help proved much harder than promising it. Courthope remained on Rhun while messages from English commanders encouraged him to hold out, but the reinforcements he needed failed to arrive. By 1620, his allies had lost people and resources waiting for support. That October, a Dutch vessel intercepted his boat as he returned from Banda Besar. He was shot in the chest and went overboard, never to be seen again. England’s claim to Rhun survived him and continued to trouble its relations with the Dutch for decades.

Diplomats kept returning to the island’s disputed status. In 1654, the Treaty of Westminster allowed the English to settle there, but the VOC continued obstructing them into the early 1660s. A European agreement offered little security when the company controlling nearby waters resisted it. With the outbreak of another Anglo-Dutch war, Dutch forces destroyed Rhun’s nutmeg trees and expelled the English merchants. The crop that had attracted rival buyers was being destroyed to prevent a competitor from obtaining it.

Across the world, the English were already taking territory from the Dutch. In 1664, warships arrived off New Amsterdam, the settlement at the southern end of Manhattan, and its governor, Peter Stuyvesant, surrendered. The colony of New Netherland extended far beyond the island: its trade followed river routes inland, where Dutch merchants had built a business buying furs from Indigenous communities. Farms and settlements had grown around that trade. England therefore gained an established colony, with land, inhabitants and commercial connections, several years before the negotiators met at Breda.

By the summer of 1667, both sides were fighting a war whose consequences reached across several oceans. London was recovering from plague and the Great Fire, while much of the English fleet lay idle in the Medway. Dutch ships entered the river, burned English warships and towed away the Royal Charles. Peace talks had already begun, but the raid put greater pressure on Charles II to reach a settlement. The delegates gathered in the great hall of Breda Castle had to decide which conquests would be reversed and which would be accepted.

The peace signed on 31 July 1667 left England holding New Netherland, including Manhattan, while the Dutch retained Suriname and Rhun. This is the connection behind the familiar story of Rhun being exchanged for Manhattan, although the agreement settled a much wider struggle and recognised possessions already taken by force. For the Dutch, keeping Rhun strengthened their hold over the nutmeg islands; England retained its foothold on the North American coast. The English claim that had outlived Courthope was finally relinquished, and Rhun’s place in the Dutch empire was confirmed at a negotiating table far from Banda.

Outside Fort Nassau on 8 May 1621, 44 Bandanese community leaders were put to death. They were orang kaya from Lontor, across the water from Neira, and had survived interrogation before the new governor, Martinus Sonck, convicted them of treason. Japanese soldiers in VOC service carried out the executions. An eyewitness heard one prisoner ask in Dutch whether there was no mercy before the executioner cut off his head. On Lontor, Bandanese were starved in hilltop strongholds and hunted by Dutch patrols when the forts fell.

Under Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the VOC conquered Banda through killing, enslavement and expulsion. The destruction of Bandanese society was part of a policy discussed within the company for years. In 1615, its directors had already backed killing and expelling Bandanese leaders and replacing the population. Their aim was to secure the nutmeg trade by taking control of the people who produced it. Families were driven from their homes, and survivors faced deportation or enslavement. Historians increasingly recognise the campaign as genocide.

The land was divided into perken, plots leased to private planters called perkeniers. They could sell their produce only to the VOC, at prices fixed by the company. Enslaved workers supplied by the VOC cultivated the groves and prepared the harvest. They included Bandanese survivors and people brought from the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. The new owners still needed Bandanese knowledge of the trees. Some people deported to Batavia were therefore brought back to Banda, where they were forced to work in the groves they had known before the conquest.

Fish bones and broken cooking vessels give us a glimpse of daily life on those estates. At three plantations on Banda Besar, archaeologist Amy Jordan found the remains of fish eaten by their inhabitants, imported dishes and earthenware pots, including pottery from the Ambon–Lease region. Traces of plant foods had survived on the ceramics too. People living on the plantations obtained food and household goods through connections with other islands. Those exchanges continued alongside the spice trade, supplying meals and the vessels in which to prepare them.

The planters also had houses in Neira, where imported dishes and clay pipes were much more common than on the estates Jordan studied. The objects left on the plantations were closer to those found in village households, suggesting that owners often spent their time in town. Their comfort there depended on work being done across the water. In the groves, people raised the crop that paid the owners, while finding the food and supplies needed to sustain their own households. Plantation life continued well beyond the moments when nutmeg was weighed and sold.

Bandanese life also continued beyond these islands. Communities on Kei Besar trace their origins to people who left Banda around the time of the conquest. In Banda Eli and Banda Elat, descendants speak their own Bandanese language, tur wandan, and pass on accounts of their ancestors' journeys. Women sing onotani, songs of travel that tell of departures, landings and the founding of new communities. They also speak of missing family. The journeys that brought people to Kei remain part of how those families know their place there and their connection to Banda.

On 7 December 1778, governors, officials and other guests gathered in the royal garden on Mauritius to watch Jean-Nicolas Céré harvest a nutmeg. Its tree had grown from a nut planted eight years earlier. The ceremony was reported in the island's newspaper, and Céré asked for the nut to be sent to Paris for presentation to Louis XVI. A fruit picked in a colonial garden had become evidence that France could grow a valuable spice previously obtained through Dutch-controlled trade.

Getting the plants to Mauritius had taken years of negotiation and repeated attempts. Pierre Poivre, the French administrator known as the intendant, sponsored secret collecting expeditions while the island was still called Isle de France. The later voyages were led by navy officer Jean Mathieu Simon Provost. French ships could not simply arrive in Dutch territory and collect what they wanted. Malay intermediaries and Maluku islanders helped them obtain plants through connections reaching across the many islands of the eastern archipelago. Successful shipments reached Mauritius in 1770 and 1772, following more than two decades of effort.

Keeping the plants alive was another difficulty. Nutmeg seeds quickly lose their ability to germinate, so a long voyage could leave a collector with nothing that would grow. Of Poivre's early shipments in 1753 and 1755, only two plants survived. The French had already offered a reward in Pondicherry for anyone who could supply 25 living nutmeg plants. A merchant could buy dried spice, but a government hoping to establish its own groves needed living material. That requirement made the condition of each plant on arrival as important as obtaining it in Maluku.

On Mauritius, much of the work fell to gardeners and enslaved cultivators. One was Charles Rama, an enslaved Bengali who became head gardener in Poivre's private garden and knew how to cultivate nutmeg. Instructions also drew on experience from Ambon and Banda and on Rumphius's botanical work. Growers had to adapt that advice to different soil, rain and winds. Poivre recommended sheltering young spice plants among bananas. Written directions could still be misunderstood: some settlers confused a developing root with a stem and planted sprouting nuts upside down, killing them.

Nutmeg was already travelling west before the celebrated Mauritius harvest. France had considered growing spices in Guiana after the Seven Years War, and instructions to send nutmeg went out in 1771. A shipment from Mauritius reached Cayenne on 3 February 1773 after 64 days at sea. There the imported trees could be grown and used to supply further gardens. The movement into the Caribbean took longer. In 1802, during the Peace of Amiens, two young nutmeg trees were smuggled from Cayenne to St Vincent, where another colonial garden was trying to establish the crop.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a new grove no longer had to begin with a voyage to Maluku. Seedlings could come from Mauritius or Cayenne, where introduced trees were supplying further transfers. What French officials had spent decades trying to obtain could now be raised in their own gardens and sent elsewhere. Behind that change were the islanders who supplied the first plants, the crews who carried them and the gardeners who brought them through to fruit. Their work had made cultivation possible across an ocean from Banda.

Before Mohammad Hatta was sent into exile, he was allowed to leave prison long enough to pack his books into sixteen chests. He had been arrested in 1934 for nationalist activity, and was being sent to Boven Digul in New Guinea. Among the possessions he took were the books he would continue to read and use in his teaching. They travelled into confinement with him, although he could not choose when he would be allowed to return home.

Hatta and another nationalist, Sutan Sjahrir, arrived on Neira aboard the Fomalhaut on 11 February 1936. They had been transferred from Digul, and a crowd gathered to meet them. Dr Tjipto Mangunkusumo, an older nationalist already living in exile on the island, took them into his home until they found somewhere of their own. They were still detainees, but here they could move among the island's families, receive visitors and continue their correspondence. Both eventually established separate households in the town.

An afternoon school brought children to the back veranda of Hatta's house. There were wooden tables, chairs and a blackboard, and pupils included children who had little opportunity to continue their schooling elsewhere. Hatta taught the older ones, Sjahrir the younger. Reading, writing, arithmetic and languages filled the lessons; learning Dutch could open the way to further education. As we pass through Neira, those domestic spaces belong to this history too: children came to a neighbour's house to learn from men the colonial government had removed from political life.

Their pupils encountered two quite different teachers. Hatta kept a disciplined routine, beginning his day with bathing, prayer, coffee and reading, and expected children to take their work seriously. Sjahrir was more at home playing and talking with the younger ones and getting to know their parents. The school fitted into these everyday relationships. To the children, the exiles became familiar adults whose habits they knew, while lessons brought reading and discussion into the life of families around them.

Books continued to arrive from Batavia and Europe, and both men prepared articles for publication. Their reading reached from German philosophy and French literature to the politics unfolding beyond the Netherlands Indies. Sjahrir also wrote to Maria Duchâteau, who remained in the Netherlands. Much of that correspondence was written in Banda and later appeared in English as Out of Exile. The distance between them runs through letters that also turn to politics, culture and events he continued to follow from the island.

One of the children was Des Alwi, who became Sjahrir's pupil and part of his household. Des later remembered the loneliness of a man separated from his wife and political friends, and the companionship that grew between him and the children. He knew the two men as Uncle Hatta and Uncle Rir, names that stayed with him when he later wrote about his Banda childhood.

Their departure came suddenly in 1942, as Japanese forces advanced into the Netherlands Indies and the Dutch ordered them back to Java. During the occupation, Hatta worked publicly alongside Sukarno, while Sjahrir organised underground. After independence, they became Indonesia's first vice-president and first prime minister respectively. The two houses remain on Neira, where their years of exile had also been years spent teaching children, writing and becoming part of island households.

On Neira, about two kilometres from Banda Api’s summit, people were feeling earthquakes every few minutes. It was May 1988, and the shocks had been becoming more frequent before the eruption. The Indonesian Volcanological Survey had an observation post on Neira, equipped with a seismometer and a radio. The volcano itself was home to about 1,800 people. At 6.30 on the morning of 9 May, Banda Api began to erupt.

Ash and gas rose three to five kilometres above the volcano from openings on its northern and southern flanks. Lava ran towards the coast in several places. At Batu Angus, on the northern side, it had reached the sea by 11 that morning; another flow entered the water at Pasir Besar to the northwest. Between the northern openings, the ground sank and craters joined together. By the end of that first day, the eruption had changed both the mountainside and the shore below it.

Getting people away meant taking them across the sea. Three people died during the eruption and evacuation; two were killed in a boat accident. By late May, more than 7,000 residents of Gunung Api, Neira and Lontar had been evacuated to Ambon. Explosions and lava production had subsided by the middle of May, but people could not immediately go home. On 13 June, the survey recommended a return to Neira and Lontar. Banda Api’s residents remained displaced, staying on Ambon, Seram and Lontar.

Five years after the eruption, researchers surveyed coral growing on a sheltered lava flow. They found 124 species, with living coral covering an average of 61.6 per cent of the area surveyed. Table-shaped Acropora colonies were prominent, some already more than 90 centimetres across. This particular flow supported more coral, and a greater variety, than the nearby older limestone reef that the lava had missed.

For coral to grow there, the cooled rock first had to receive living settlers. Many reef-building corals release eggs and sperm into the water, where fertilisation produces tiny larvae. Currents carry them away from their parents until they settle on a suitable surface. A larva then becomes a polyp: a small animal with a mouth and tentacles. As polyps multiply, they build the hard calcium carbonate skeleton beneath the living tissue. Microscopic algae living inside many reef-building corals help supply the energy for this growth through photosynthesis, while the polyps also catch food from the water.

The shape and firmness of the new seabed helped explain what followed. Researchers compared the lava with both the older reef and loose volcanic deposits elsewhere around the island. They proposed that the solid, uneven lava offered a stable place for young corals to attach, with spaces that could shelter them from predators. Nearby reefs offered an existing source of larvae. Loose deposits that shifted beneath a new settler were less suitable.

Decades later, researchers returned to the lava-flow reef to watch corals reproduce. Between 2016 and 2019, they observed spawning peaks in April and October–November, mainly five to seven days after the full moon, two to three hours after sunset. To collect eggs while divers were away, they placed inverted household funnels over colonies and attached plastic bottles above them. Returning the next morning, they could retrieve eggs released during the night. A reef that had begun with larvae arriving from elsewhere was now releasing eggs of its own into the surrounding sea.