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 archaeologist Peter Lape and his colleagues 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.

Those cooks were not the first people to reach Ai. A rock shelter elsewhere on the island contains evidence of visits dating to roughly 5800–5600 BCE, long before the pottery settlement. The early visitors appear to have come for the reefs and their fish, returning across the sea rather than making permanent homes on an island with little fresh water. Banda was never joined to the Asian or Australian mainland by a land bridge, even when sea levels were lower. Whoever first reached its shores had already made an open-water crossing.

Elsewhere in Maluku, people had been making such journeys much earlier. In Golo Cave on Gebe, far to the north of Banda, worked stone and shell survive in deposits about 35,000–36,000 years old. Later inhabitants shaped shell into adzes with ground cutting edges and worked bone into tools. By roughly 3,000–3,300 years ago, people at Uattamdi on Kayoa were using pottery with a red coating and wearing shell ornaments. These were separate island communities, each learning how to use what its shores and forests provided, and bringing new materials and skills from across the water.

Making a home on Ai required people to solve a practical problem. There was fish in the surrounding sea, but 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.

Their meals changed as well. 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 arrive by boat. The pottery was changing too: many early pots had a red coating, and some pieces carried patterns cut or pressed into the clay. Small stone scrapers and flakes lay among the broken vessels. The work of making tools, preparing food and keeping animals was becoming established on land where earlier visitors had stopped to fish.

That early settlement was largely or entirely abandoned around 2,300 years ago. Many centuries separate its households from the towns that later grew around the spice trade. By then, the arrivals included Chinese ceramics as well as the food and tools needed for everyday life. A bowl could pass through several ports and several merchants’ hands before reaching Banda; finding one here does not mean a Chinese ship had carried it all the way. Written references become clearer in the fourteenth century: the Chinese Dade Nanhai zhi names Banda in 1304, and the Javanese poem Desawarnana names it in 1365.

Cargo coming from nearby islands was just as necessary as these distant goods. As more land and labour went into nutmeg, Banda relied increasingly on food brought by sea. East Seram, Seram Laut and Gorom were among the places supplying sago, the starch that formed a staple of island meals. The network also reached Kei and Aru, while rice came from Java and Bali. People arriving with food could buy cloth, metal goods and other imports in Banda. Across these routes, the growers’ harvest helped pay for the supplies their households needed throughout the year.

People and beliefs moved through these connections too. Lape followed the spread of Islam by comparing food remains from 21 sites on three islands with old maps and descriptions of named villages. In one settlement, pig bones were absent from around 1200; in another, only about a kilometre away, people continued eating pork well into the sixteenth century. The contrast mattered because avoiding pork was an important public expression of Muslim identity. When he returned to the written accounts, he found another difference: leaders of the pork-eating settlement lacked the Muslim title imam used elsewhere. Taken together, the evidence points to communities adopting Islam at different times.

Burial customs differed as well. Burned human remains, ash and decorated pottery at one settlement suggest that cremation continued there while Muslim communities were growing nearby. By the time European ships arrived, Banda’s towns already had growers tending trees, merchants negotiating over cargoes and leaders managing their own alliances.

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.

In a grove, the fruit is easier to notice than the flowers that came before it. The small, pale flowers hang beneath glossy leaves, whose undersides are lighter than their upper surfaces. The trees can grow among taller neighbours in partial shade, but they need moisture and soil that drains well. Beneath the ground, feeding roots spread close to the surface, making the trees vulnerable to strong winds.

Once a female tree has flowered and been pollinated, its fruit develops over several months. Beneath the evergreen leaves, the outer skin gradually changes colour and begins to open. That split gives the harvester a visible sign that it is ripe. In Banda, a long pole fitted with a blade and a small basket allows a picker to reach fruit high in the branches and catch it as it comes away from the tree.

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, while the kernel remains inside its shell as moisture slowly leaves it.

Drying the nutmeg takes weeks. As it shrinks, the kernel becomes loose enough to rattle when the shell is shaken. Moisture left in the crop, or rain reaching it during processing, can lead to mould, so 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 kernels sorted. 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.

Long before Portuguese vessels reached Banda, nutmeg was known in China and the Arab world, where it was used in food and medicine. European scholars still repeated mistaken ideas about the living tree. A specimen from the first Dutch expedition to Banda reached the botanist Carolus Clusius in Leiden, allowing him to examine the plant for himself.

Clusius published his description in 1605. The preserved branch allowed him to correct claims that the nutmeg tree produced cloves as its flowers, or that mace itself was the blossom. Beside the text he placed an illustration of the specimen, with a fruit hanging from the end of the shoot.

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. With the outbreak of another Anglo-Dutch war, Dutch forces destroyed Rhun’s nutmeg trees and expelled the English merchants.

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.

The Dutch celebrated the peace alongside the naval victory that had helped secure it. A bronze medal from 1667 places Peace on a pile of captured weapons, with an olive branch in her hand; turn it over and English ships are burning near Chatham. The name of the Dutch commander, Michiel de Ruyter, appears in the lettering.

Even then, the fighting between the two countries was not finished. Another war began in 1672, and the following year a Dutch fleet retook New York and renamed it New Orange. A further peace returned it to English rule in 1674. Dutch families, their language and their institutions remained through those changes of flag.

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.

The fort outside which the men died had already been a source of conflict for twelve years. In 1609, Admiral Pieter Verhoeff arrived with an armed fleet and demanded permission to build on Neira. While the orang kaya delayed their answer, he sent men ashore to begin work. They then invited him to negotiations and ambushed and killed him and his companions. His fleet attacked coastal settlements and boats in retaliation. When an agreement was finally reached that August, Nassau was already standing, with a permanent Dutch garrison on land Verhoeff had entered without permission.

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. Historian S. J. Miske identifies this deliberate destruction of the population 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.

Taking possession of the groves did not give their new owners a reliable harvest. Tall shade trees remained among the nutmeg, and shortages of food and workers troubled the estates. Historians differ on how much the Dutch changed cultivation: Vincent Loth argued that production was reorganised and intensified, while Miske’s later archival study finds considerable continuity and yields that initially stagnated or fell. The company could demand spices at a fixed price, but planters still depended on people who knew how to keep the trees productive.

We can follow some of those households through what they left behind. On Banda Besar, archaeologist Amy Jordan excavated three plantations, including Ordatang, which stood on a ridge along an old caldera, away from the beach. It was abandoned by the time she worked there; elsewhere, old plantation buildings had been taken apart for materials or incorporated into newer homes. Fish bones, cooking pots and imported dishes survived in the ground. Some pottery came from the Ambon–Lease region, and traces of plant foods remained on the ceramics, allowing Jordan to investigate how people obtained and prepared their meals.

The contrast with Neira was striking. Imported dishes and clay pipes were much more common at the town’s elite sites than on the estates Jordan studied, where the objects were closer to those found in village households. This suggested that the owners spent much of their time in town. Across the water, the people working the groves were obtaining food and household goods through their own connections with nearby islands, while continuing to cultivate the crop the planters sold.

From Neira, Fort Belgica overlooked Nassau and the harbour below. Around 1662–1663, both forts appeared in a painting made in Johannes Vingboons’s workshop for the VOC’s rooms in Amsterdam. Its houses, shoreline and defences joined a series of views of company settlements across Asia.

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.

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.

Poivre also needed to convince people in France that his collectors had obtained the right plants. Specimens travelled to Paris in glass containers filled with alcohol, their labels carrying Malay names. There, the naturalists Michel Adanson and Bernard de Jussieu examined the fruits and tried to reconcile those names with the botanical books available to them. The gardeners on Mauritius had living trees in front of them; the men judging the shipment in Paris were working largely from preserved fruits. Names and specimens had crossed the ocean together, but much of the growers’ knowledge had not.

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. The work had continued long after the collecting ships returned: islanders supplied the plants, crews carried them through long voyages, and gardeners raised the surviving trees until they produced fruit.

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. One of those 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.

Hatta and Sjahrir also became students themselves. At the home of their fellow exile Iwa Kusumasumantri, they met Bahlawan, a Bandanese Arab teacher. Hatta, Sjahrir, Iwa and Tjipto studied Arab history with him, while Iwa also learned Arabic, Qur'anic interpretation and Islamic history. The men had arrived with their own books and political ideas, but their conversations now included a teacher whose home was Banda.

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.

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. Their houses remain on Neira, including the back veranda where the children came for their afternoon lessons.

Buru: Pramoedya's years in prison

On Buru, west of Ambon, prisoners had to build the barracks in which they would live. They felled trees, cleared fields and cut roads by hand. By then Indonesia was independent: these men had been sent there by Suharto's government during its repression of the political left. Among them was the writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was imprisoned on Buru from 1969 to 1979. He had been detained after his home was attacked in 1965 and his books and papers burned. Hunger, forced labour and the threat of violence filled the years in which he composed the novels later known as the Buru Quartet.

After his release, Pramoedya worked with two other former prisoners, Joesoef Isak and Hasyim Rachmat, to publish what he had written. This Earth of Mankind appeared in 1980 and was banned the following year. Child of All Nations, Footsteps and Glass House followed, and each was banned too. His prison memoir, The Mute's Soliloquy, grew from letters to his children that he had been unable to send. When it appeared in Indonesian in 1995, the authorities banned that book as well.

In May 1988, people on Neira were feeling earthquakes every few minutes. Across the narrow channel, Banda Api was home to about 1,800 people. Staff at the observation post on Neira monitored the shocks with a seismometer and radio. At 6.30 on the morning of 9 May, the volcano erupted.

Ash columns rose three to five kilometres above the northern and southern flanks, while lava moved towards the shore. By 11 that morning, the flow at Batu Angus had reached the sea; another entered the water at Pasir Besar. Half an hour later, the southern eruption column bent towards western Lontar, spraying ash and rock fragments across its tip in a blast lasting less than a minute. Explosions weakened over the following days, and by 18 May the craters were quiet.

Three people died, two in a boat accident during the evacuation. By late May, more than 7,000 residents of Gunung Api, Neira and Lontar had been evacuated to Ambon. On 13 June, the volcanological survey recommended a return to Neira and Lontar, but Gunung Api’s residents remained displaced on Ambon, Seram and Lontar.

When researchers returned five years later, they found coral growing on a sheltered lava flow beneath the sea. Their survey identified 124 species, with living coral covering an average of 61.6 per cent of the area examined. 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.

Keeping anchors off the reef

Keeping boats above a reef without dropping anchors onto it has become another concern around Banda. In April 2025, crews installed mooring buoys at six sites around Rhun, Manukang and Hatta. Each buoy gives a boat a fixed place to tie up, with its anchoring system positioned away from living coral. Village representatives worked with university staff, conservation workers and fisheries officers on the installation. On Hatta, village leader Sudar Raharusun offered the community’s help with looking after the new moorings.