In 1667, the Dutch and the English signed a treaty to end a war and exchanged territories. The English gave up a small, heavily defended island in the Indonesian archipelago. The Dutch gave up a patch of land on the eastern coast of North America they called New Amsterdam. The English renamed it New York. The Dutch believed they had made the better deal. The island they received was called Run, and it was the last remaining source of nutmeg outside their control.
That calculation, a tiny island of nutmeg trees for the future financial capital of the world, tells you everything about what nutmeg was worth in the seventeenth century. A single pound of nutmeg purchased in the Banda Islands could be sold in Europe for sixty times its cost. The markup was not unusual for spices. What was unusual about nutmeg was that it grew nowhere else on earth. The Banda Islands, a cluster of ten volcanic islands in what is now eastern Indonesia, contained the only nutmeg trees in existence. Whoever controlled the islands controlled the supply. Whoever controlled the supply controlled the price. The Dutch intended to control both, permanently, and they were prepared to do whatever it took.
What Nutmeg Was Worth
To understand what happened on the Banda Islands, you have to understand first why Europeans were willing to sail eighteen thousand kilometres, spend years at sea, and die in extraordinary numbers to get their hands on a seed. Nutmeg was not merely a flavoring in the seventeenth century. It was a pharmaceutical, a preservative, a status symbol, and what many Europeans sincerely believed was a cure for the plague. In a continent periodically devastated by bubonic plague, that last quality alone made it worth almost anything.
The Bandanese had traded nutmeg for centuries before Europeans arrived. Arab and Malay merchants had been buying it from the islands and carrying it westward through complex networks of intermediaries, each adding their margin, until the nutmeg that left the archipelago for almost nothing arrived in Europe having passed through perhaps a dozen hands. The final consumer in London or Amsterdam paid for all of those margins. The Bandanese saw almost none of the profit. They were the source. They were not the beneficiaries.
Nutmeg grew in only one place on earth: ten small volcanic islands in eastern Indonesia. Europeans believed it could cure the plague. A pound bought on the islands for almost nothing sold in Europe for sixty times its cost. That arithmetic produced a century of violence.
John Keay’s account of the spice trade in The Spice Route: A History traces how this concentration of value in a single remote location created pressure for control that existing trading networks could not contain. Once Europeans understood that the intermediaries between them and the source could be eliminated, the question was only which European power would eliminate them first and by what methods.
What Happened in 1621
The Portuguese arrived in the Banda Islands in 1512. The Spanish followed. The English established a trading post on the island of Run in 1603. The Dutch, through the VOC (the Dutch East India Company, the world’s first publicly traded corporation and, for a period, the most powerful commercial entity on earth), arrived determined not to share. What followed in 1621 was not a trade dispute. It was a genocide.
Jan Pieterszoon Coen was the Governor-General of the VOC when the Dutch launched their campaign to take full control of the Banda Islands. Coen understood the problem clearly: the Bandanese had been trading nutmeg with whoever they chose, including the English, and had no interest in giving the Dutch an exclusive arrangement. Coen’s solution was to remove the Bandanese from the equation entirely.
Before 1621, the population of the Banda Islands was estimated at fifteen thousand people. After Coen’s campaign, fewer than one thousand remained. The rest had been killed, enslaved, or had fled into the ocean and drowned.
Giles Milton’s research for Nathaniel’s Nutmeg reconstructs the campaign in detail that is hard to read. Coen used Dutch soldiers and Japanese mercenaries, ronin hired out to the VOC, to systematically destroy Bandanese villages, kill the population, and drive survivors into the forests, where most died of starvation. The entire operation took approximately three months. Its purpose was not military in any conventional sense. It was agricultural preparation: the clearing of land for a plantation system that would be worked by enslaved people imported from elsewhere in the Dutch colonial network.
What the Islands Became
The VOC divided the Banda Islands into sixty-eight plantations, called perken. These were granted to Dutch settlers and VOC soldiers. The nutmeg trees on each plantation were tended by enslaved laborers. The system was extractive in the most literal sense: the soil was worked, the trees were harvested, the product was shipped, and the human beings who made it possible had no stake in any part of the process.
The economics worked precisely as intended. With the Bandanese removed and the islands under total VOC control, the Dutch set the price of nutmeg in European markets without competition. For decades they maintained that monopoly with a thoroughness that extended to cutting down nutmeg trees on any territory they did not control and hunting and destroying any seedlings that might be transplanted elsewhere. Moving the tree was punishable by death. The plant itself was contraband.
Jack Turner’s account in Spice: The History of a Temptation captures the almost surreal intensity of the European obsession with spices during this period. Nutmeg in particular occupied a category of value that is difficult to translate into contemporary terms. It was simultaneously a luxury, a medicine, a currency, and a geopolitical objective. The violence required to secure it was not considered disproportionate by the people ordering it. It was considered necessary.
The VOC maintained its nutmeg monopoly for nearly two centuries by making the movement of a seedling a capital offense. When French botanists finally smuggled trees out of the Banda Islands in the late eighteenth century and planted them in Mauritius, it was the beginning of the end of a system built on fifteen thousand deaths.
What We Eat and What We Forget
Nutmeg today sits in the back of most spice cabinets, used sparingly in baked goods, occasionally in bechamel, sometimes in mulled wine. It costs almost nothing. It is available everywhere. The monopoly that the Dutch killed fifteen thousand people to create lasted until the late eighteenth century, when French botanical expeditions successfully transplanted nutmeg seedlings from the Banda Islands to Mauritius and then to Zanzibar and Grenada. The Banda Islands still produce the world’s finest nutmeg. They are no longer its only source.
What is not gone is the appetite for nutmeg itself: the flavor that drove a commercial company to commit violence on a scale that, in any other context, would be called mass killing without qualification. We add it to food without thinking about where it came from, which is one of the genuine gifts of abundance. The supply chain becomes invisible. The nutmeg in your kitchen passed through a history that a small volcanic island in Indonesia still carries in its landscape and in the near-total absence of the people who originally called it home.
The price of a pound of nutmeg today is roughly twelve dollars. In 1621, it was worth approximately sixty times that in Amsterdam, once every intermediary between the Banda Islands and the European market had taken their cut. Coen did the arithmetic. The islands were worth the violence. He was not wrong about the mathematics. He was wrong about everything else.
Every dish has a past. I am just following it back to the beginning.
Jean Louis
Sources
- Banda Islands, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Dutch East India Company (VOC), Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The tiny island swapped for Manhattan, BBC Travel
- Peace of Breda (1667), Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The Spice Route: A History, John Keay, UC Press
