Until the nineteenth century, nutmeg grew commercially in exactly one place on Earth: the Banda Islands, ten specks of volcanic soil in the far east of the Indonesian archipelago. In European markets nutmeg sold at markups measured in tens of thousands of per cent — it was medicine, status, and (hopefully) plague-protection in one — and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was founded, in large part, to own trades like that outright.
The Bandanese — prosperous, seafaring, governed by councils of orang kaya (“rich men”) — had traded nutmeg to all comers for centuries: Javanese, Malays, Chinese, Arabs, then Portuguese, English, Dutch. They signed the exclusive contracts the VOC pressed on them, read them as diplomatic courtesies rather than eternal servitude, and kept selling to the English, who had toeholds on the islets of Ai and Run. The VOC read the contracts literally, and read breach as rebellion. A 1609 ambush that killed a Dutch admiral and some forty men on Banda Neira supplied the standing casus belli.
Coen
Jan Pieterszoon Coen — the VOC’s governor-general, founder of Batavia, author of the maxim that trade in Asia must be conducted “under the protection of our own weapons” — arrived in the Bandas in early 1621 with the company’s answer: a fleet, over 1,600 soldiers, and Japanese mercenaries. Great Banda was stormed; resistance was hunted through the interior; and the conquest proceeded to its administrative conclusion. Forty-four orang kaya, accused of conspiracy after interrogation under torture, were beheaded and quartered by the Japanese executioners inside a bamboo enclosure — an episode even VOC officers recorded with disgust.
For the population, the outcome was near-total. Of an estimated 15,000 Bandanese, thousands were killed or driven into the mountains to starve; shiploads were deported to Batavia as slaves; hundreds escaped by sea to neighbouring islands, where small exile communities preserved Bandanese identity. Within a few years perhaps a thousand remained on the islands. The VOC then rebuilt the population to spec: the nutmeg groves were parcelled into plantation lots (perken) run by Dutch perkeniers and worked by enslaved people imported from across Asia — an engineered monopoly colony where the islanders had been.
Run and Manhattan
The monopoly was completed by treaty. England’s claim to tiny Run — nutmeg’s last loose end — was extinguished in the Treaty of Breda (1667), under which the Dutch kept Run and England kept another small island it had recently seized: Manhattan. The swap was a settling of holdings rather than a straight trade, but the ledger’s irony stands — at the time, Run was arguably the better asset.
The VOC’s nutmeg fortress held until the Napoleonic era, when the British occupied the Bandas and shipped nutmeg seedlings to Ceylon and Penang, ending the monopoly botanically. Coen, long a Dutch national hero with statues and streets, has been re-examined without affection; on Banda Neira, descendants of survivors and slaves alike still harvest nutmeg under the walls of Fort Belgica. In 2021, four centuries on, the Dutch king’s government marked the anniversary with acknowledgments of the “violence of the VOC” — the massacre having outlived every institution that profited from it.