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8 stories set here.

The Coroner’s Report July 25, 2026 · Banda Islands, Maluku, Indonesia

The Banda Massacre of 1621, When the Dutch East India Company Emptied the Nutmeg Islands

In 1621 Jan Pieterszoon Coen led a VOC force against the Banda Islands — then the world's only source of nutmeg — to enforce a monopoly the islanders kept breaking. Of a population of some 15,000, most were killed, starved, enslaved, or deported; 44 leaders were executed by Japanese mercenaries. The islands were repopulated as slave-worked plantations. One of them was later traded for Manhattan.

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The Cabinet June 27, 2026 · Ternate, Maluku

The 35-Year-Old British Specimen Collector Who Independently Discovered Natural Selection While Lying in a Fever in the Spice Islands in February 1858

Alfred Russel Wallace, a self-funded specimen-collecting naturalist, was lying in a malarial fever on the island of Ternate in the eastern Dutch East Indies in February 1858 when he worked out the theory of natural selection. He wrote it up in two days and posted the manuscript to Charles Darwin. Darwin had been refining the same theory privately for twenty years. The two papers were read together at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858.

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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Pulau Lebar, west Sumatra

The Largest Flower in the World Smells Like Rotting Meat and Is Named After Stamford Raffles

In May 1818, an expedition led by [Stamford Raffles](/articles/stamford-raffles-singapore) and the surgeon-botanist Joseph Arnold found a 1-metre red flower in the Sumatran rainforest. It weighed about 7 kilograms, smelled of carrion, and had no leaves, stem, or roots. Arnold caught a fever and died on the trip back. The flower was named for both of them.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Borobudur, Central Java

The Largest Buddhist Monument in the World Was Buried for a Millennium and Rediscovered by Stamford Raffles

Borobudur is a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple complex in central Java with about 2,672 narrative relief panels and 504 Buddha statues. It was abandoned in the 14th century, progressively buried by jungle and volcanic ash, and rediscovered in 1814 on orders of the British lieutenant-governor Sir Stamford Raffles.

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