The Gold of the Bandas: The History of the Nutmeg - Horst H. Geerken - E-Book

The Gold of the Bandas: The History of the Nutmeg E-Book

Horst H. Geerken

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Beschreibung

For a long time, the Banda Islands were the only place on earth where the nutmeg would grow. The spice was transported along the arduous Silk Road to Europe, growing ever dearer as it travelled, and when the nutmeg was also touted as a panacea against the plague it became for a while more valuable than gold. Some of the European powers began a race to find the Spice Islands. They wanted a share in the lucrative trade. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to reach the Spice Islands, followed by the Spanish and the English. The last to arrive were the Dutch, and their arrival triggered conquest, wars and ruthless murder. While the Portuguese, Spanish and English simply wanted to trade with the Bandanese, the Dutch aimed to take possession of the islands. Out of sheer avarice they committed the first genocide in modern history there. Today the Bandas are inhabited almost entirely by the descendants of the slaves brought to the islands by the Dutch. The book contains many exciting and largely unknown stories about this tiny archipelago, for example, that one of the islands was once exchanged for Manhattan, or that properties on the island of Banda Neira were once the most expensive real estate in the world. This fascinating book documents the history of the Banda Islands and the colonisation of Indonesia. It describes world-shattering events and shows how a little nut altered the course of world history.

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Contents

Thanks

Translator’s Foreword

Prologue

How spices came to Europe

The Banda Islands

The first explorers and the quest for the Spice Islands

The English wished to trade, the Dutch to conquer and possess

The Dutch Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon van Coen and the Banda Massacre

Perkeniers

Germans in the service of the VOC on the Bandas

The island of Run exchanged for Manhattan

The nutmeg and Pierre Poivre

Fort Belgica and the English

The Abrolhos Islands and the

Batavia

The Banda Islands in the turmoil of the 20th Century and a Bandanese called Des Alwi

Gunung Api

My journey to the Banda Islands

The Cilu Bintang Estate

The Banda Islands today

The island of Banda Besar

A trip to Pulau Ai and Pulau Run

The island of Ambon and the Amboyna Massacre

Georg Eberhard Rumpf, known as Rumphius

Recipes

Back to Bali

Epilogue

Appendices

Article by Gunter Haug in the Stuttgarter Zeitung 31st of January 2019

A Description of the Banda Islands, by Albert S. Bickmore, M.A.

Pastor Cornelis J. Böhn’s Lecture on Rumphius in Bahasa Indonesia

Entries in the 1875 Encyclopaedia Britannica and 1888 Pierer’s Konversationslexikon

Entry in the 1889 Pierer’s Konversationslexikon

Bibliography

Archives consulted

Index of names

Subject Index

Thanks

My thanks first of all to Abba Rizal Bahalwan, the proprietor of the Cilu Bintang Estate and chairman of the Banda Neira Foundation, an organisation devoted to conserving the history of the Banda Islands. He is an inexhaustible source of information about this little archipelago in the Banda Sea and its painful history. I was pampered for three weeks in his hotel and Abba was always there with help and advice. He lent me picture material and other documentary material to help in my investigations.

My thanks to countless people, from simple fishermen, officials, market women, teachers and children on all the Banda Islands to the minister at the church in Banda Neira, who are too many to name individually. I had long conversations with many of them. Each of them had a different story about their family history: pieces of a puzzle which eventually came together to form a whole.

My special thanks also to Pastor Cornelis J. Böhm MSC of Ambon, an expert on Rumphius’ history. He is the last Dutch minister living in the Moluccas. He has provided me with documents about Georg Eberhard Rumpf, also called Rumphius, which have found their place in this book.

Extra thanks to Michaela Mattern and Barbara Bode for proofreading and many helpful suggestions and to Arthur Bartl for the layout of the book.

Thanks, too, to my translator, Bill McCann, for working on languages from Middle High German to Portuguese and Dutch as well as early modern and contemporary German.

Then I would like to thank my brother Hartmut, who frequently managed to contribute new information about the subject of the book from his collection of antique encyclopaedias.

Thanks, too, to Margareta Krapf-Mlosch, who gave me a useful lead in finding a title for the book.

Thanks to Professor Meinolf Schumacher of the University of Bielefeld, who produced one of the translations from Middle High German used in the German version of the book, and to Cornelia Biegler-König and Marieke Weiß for making the introduction.

Last but not least I am very grateful to my friend Torsten, who was always ready to help me with computer problems.

I am also grateful to the staff of all the archives listed in Chapter 26. They were always ready to grant me access to old documents.

Horst H. Geerken, April 2021

Translator’s Foreword

Little did I think, when I first started translating Horst’s work over ten years ago, that I would still be at it over ten years and five books later. And here is the sixth. As always with Horst’s books, new and fascinating challenges arose, this time mainly with early modern documents in a variety of languages, with botanical terminology, numismatics, and with Dutch. It was also a delight to encounter an old friend, Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose work I loved as an undergraduate, and which has formed a major part of my teaching and research over more than forty years. And I am grateful to Horst for giving me new insights into the book’s cultural background. The extract printed in Chapter 10 comes towards the end of the romance of Parzival, and in the past I simply looked at the list of spices found there as a touch of exotic colour. Now the significance of spices for medieval society has come into much sharper focus.

Some details of presentation to help the reader:

Italics are used for foreign words and phrases, the titles of books, the names of ships and, most frequently, for quotations.

Square brackets [ ] are used for the translation of words and phrases that are given in the original language in the text, for author’s notes, and for interpolations by the translator.

In the original German edition, many of the footnotes explain English terms that might not be familiar to a German reader. I have done the reverse with terms as diverse as Maultaschen and pudding (which means something completely different in German). Any errors in this respect are entirely my responsibility.

Bill McCann, Advent 2020

1. Prologue

Stefan Zweig begins his biography of the early explorer Ferdinand Magellan1 with the words: ‘In the beginning was the spice’. As he explicitly points out, this applies not only to Magellan, but also to all the early explorers, like Christopher Columbus, Bartolomeu Dias2 and Vasco da Gama, who all set sail into uncharted waters in a frenzied hunt for precious spices, which in those days were more profitable than gold or silver.

This, of course, brought fakes into the picture. The ‘forgers’ produced nutmeg made of flour, clay, dyes and nutmeg powder, using cheap wormeaten nutmegs, a ploy that constantly deceived their unsuspecting customers. Even experts sometimes fell for the deception. In 1860 a whole cargo of fake nutmeg arrived in England from Canton in China. The ‘nuts’ were all made of wood.3 The holes that had been made in rejects by insects and worms were often filled with fat, flour and chalk – the nuts were then sold as top-class quality.

Powdered nutmeg is adulterated even now: they don’t just grind wormeaten rejects and poor-quality nuts with very little aroma – the powder is often cut with cheap turmeric.

Today is Boxing Day 2018. I’m sitting on the terrace outside my room on the Cilu Bintang Estate on the island of Banda Neira4, one of the Banda Islands in the southern Moluccas in modern Indonesia. This was once one of the Spice Islands the Europeans were so madly keen to find. They form the most distant and at the same time the most fascinating group of islands in the Indonesian Archipelago. In front of me are the ruins of the old Dutch Fort Nassau and behind them, separated from us only by a narrow strip of water, the conical shape of the mighty volcano Gunung Api5, the fire mountain, thrusts skywards like a pyramid from the deep azure blue waters of the Banda Sea. This volcano has in the past brought many a disaster on the Bandas. If I direct my gaze to the right of Gunung Api, I can see the massive second fort on the island, the restored Fort Belgica6 on its hill.

Exceptionally, the sea is not azure blue today, because it’s been raining all day. It’s the rainy season, the western monsoon. The hotel employees – all Muslims – have done their very best to conjure up a Christmas tree out of a native cedar decked with paper stars. This, together with the gloomy weather, makes for a degree of Christmas spirit even this close to the Equator. Apart from me the only other guests are a nice married couple from Stuttgart, Gunter and Karin. We get on very well. Three Swabians on these forgotten islands at once, we certainly have to drink to that! Gunter Haug is a bestselling author7 and journalist, and has written an article about me and the Bandas in the Stuttgarter Zeitung.8

In recent days I have managed to collect a great deal of information about the Banda Islands, and a rainy day like today is a good opportunity to start on a new book – this one about the Banda Islands and the nutmeg. Boat trips to the other islands would be impossible today because of the heavy swell. I’ve been at my base on the Cilu Bintang Estate a good two weeks now. From here on Banda Neira I’ve made day trips to the other blissfully solitary islands in weather that has been mostly fabulous. I collected information and conducted lots of interviews. Now I need to get my notes down on paper. Abba, the proprietor here, has set up a little corner with a bright light in my spacious room for me to write in, and has provided me with books from his library.

But who is aware of the Banda Islands these days, eleven tiny islands, over 2,500 kilometres and two time zones to the east of the capital Jakarta, so tiny that they are shown on hardly any maps? Only six of them are inhabited, with a total population of about 14,000. I have never yet met an Indonesian who knows these forgotten islands and where they are located, even though Banda Neira with Fort Belgica and the Gunung Api volcano appear on the Indonesian 1,000 rupiah banknote.

It was all too much even for the post office in Ubud on Bali when I tried to hand in a parcel of some of my books for Abba in Banda Neira, even though there is a post office with a postcode in Banda Neira. The little Banda Archipelago is even less known abroad. Even in Indonesian terms they are at the end of the world. And yet 350 years ago they made world history. At that time they were – as we will see – on everyone’s lips! A little nut, the nutmeg, once changed the world.

Ill. 1-1, My room in the Cilu Bintang Estate

Ill. 1-2, My ‘writing corner’

Ill. 1-3 View of the Gunung Api volcano from the terrace of my room in the Cilu Bintang Estate

Ill. 1-4 There was even a degree of Christmas spirit

Ill. 1-5, 1,000 rupiah banknote9 with Fort Belgica in Banda Neira and the Gunung Api volcano

These days we can buy spices of all kinds for a couple of euros in the supermarket. But who of us is aware that several hundred years ago a number of European states embarked on a race to find the Spice Islands? Spices were the reason for wars, conquests and ruthless murder. Does anyone know that for a long time the Banda Islands were the only place on earth where nutmeg10 grew and that nutmeg was worth more than gold; that out of pure greed the Dutch perpetrated the first genocide in modern history; that the only inhabitants of the Bandas are now the descendants of the slaves shipped there by the Dutch and Arabian merchants; that one of the islands, Pulau Run, was once exchanged for Manhattan in America, or that the Bandas were once the most expensive real estate in the world? There are many more stories about these little islands, all of them world-shaking events! As I said, a little nut changed the world, and there are exciting tales to be told!

Because of the precious nutmeg, things rarely happened on the Bandas without some kind of violence. The soil of the islands is drenched in blood, blood which stains the hands of the ruthless Dutch colonial power. They would use any means to establish and enforce their power with the thunder of the cannon. The inhabitants were mistreated and enslaved. But there have been very few reports of this, as the Dutch to this very day have known very well how to sweep their past atrocities under the carpet. Here on the islands, however, these shameful deeds have not been forgotten. Every schoolchild is taught about the massacres committed by the Dutch. In every conversation I had here I was first asked what my nationality was. When I said that I was German, their expressions brightened. The Dutch are always treated with a degree of scepticism here.

Even in more recent times, in the 1930s, the Banda Islands had a role to play. It was to these remote, forgotten islands that the Dutch exiled influential Indonesian nationalists who advocated Indonesian independence.

The view of the volcano from my terrace in the Cilu Bintang Estate is stunning. I have seen this view in my dreams from my earliest childhood, but it is only now that I can be sure that it was this actual view that fascinated me as a child. When she was young, my mother spent several long periods staying with our relatives who lived in the Keizergracht in Amsterdam, and even learned to speak Dutch. She must have been fascinated by the Dutch East Indies, because every time she returned home – as she later told me – she brought books about the Dutch colony with her. These books filled a large proportion of the bookshelves in our home in Stuttgart. Until our home was destroyed in the Second World War, some of these books lay on a little table in what we called the study. As a little boy – I hadn’t started school and couldn’t read yet – I would leaf through those books and marvel at all the exotic pictures. One thing I found particularly impressive was old drawings of a fire-spewing volcano rising vertically out of the sea beside a narrow strait next to an island. I would browse through the books almost every day, always looking at that picture, which is why that landscape is etched in my memory even today.

And then, when my geography teacher in my first years at the secondary school in Schwäbisch Gmünd made the Malay Archipelago the focus of his teaching, that island world with its nutmeg cast its spell over me. I kept discovering interesting information which made my desire to visit the Banda Islands and write the history of the unassuming nutmeg ever more intense.

It is interesting to note that in all the old Dutch illustrations Gunung Api is active, spewing fire and ashes. An old tradition says that every time the Dutch fleet sailed into Banda there was a major eruption. Was this how the volcano showed that it was angry and disapproved of the actions of the Dutch and the way they ruled the islands? Because the Dutch would resort to any means to maintain their power and to enforce their monopoly.

Ill. 1-6, The Gunung Api Volcano, separated from the island Banda Neira (with Fort Belgica) by only a small strip of water.11

Ill. 1-7, 1820 map showing Banda Neira, Gunung Api and Banda Besar

Ill. 1-8, The narrow strait between the Gunung Api volcano (left) and the main island Banda Neira12

Ill. 1-9, A 1724 etching of Banda Neira with Fort Belgica on its hill together with the Gunung Api Volcano

Ill. 1-10, Sailing ships at anchor in the narrow strait between the Gunung Api Volcano and the island of Banda Neira.13

Ill. 1-11, Banda Neira with the Gunung Api volcano

Now I’m sitting here, looking at the beautiful landscape, and I’m certain that the illustrations in the book I looked at as a child must have been of the Banda Islands. The landscape and the pictures in my memory are exactly the same. Were my Dutch relatives somehow connected with the Banda Islands? Had someone from the family worked here? Is this why my mother kept bringing books about this region from Holland? Was this the reason I had always felt drawn here? Unfortunately, I can no longer ask my mother about this, and our relations in Holland are all dead. I don’t even know the name of our Dutch family. I only know that my mother’s aunt, a Mannhardt by birth, lived in Amsterdam with her Dutch husband. If I had known more, I could have researched further here on the islands, as there were several Dutch families who lorded it over the Bandas until the Japanese occupation in the Second World War: families like the Decmaars, Van den Broeckes14, Koks or Baadillas.

I do at least know that one of my maternal ancestors, Johann Wilhelm Mannhardt15, married the daughter of a Dutch merchant who had business in the Netherlands East Indies: she was called Anna van der Smissen16. Her father, born around 1730, was persecuted in Holland because of his Mennonite beliefs. He fled to Germany and founded a lucrative trading business in Hamburg. Since he mainly traded in spices, I suspect that there was a link between van der Smissen and the Banda Islands. But I have so far found no trace of the name Smissen on the Bandas, not even on gravestones. I wish it were still possible to ask my mother. Why do we wait until we’re older to search for our roots?

As a recent DNA test showed to my great surprise, one per cent of my DNA derives from the Malay Archipelago – modern Indonesia. So it is hardly surprising that my eyes are slightly slanted and Asian-looking, which is why when I was young my school friends and later at university my fellow students gave me the nickname Genghis Khan, and I am almost certain that this one per cent comes from the Banda Islands. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to prove that.

20 years ago, I failed in my first attempt to reach the Banda Islands, because of the unreliability of the transport connections, which in those days were even more unreliable than they are today. My long-term partner Annette and I spent more than two weeks in Ambon waiting for a chance to get to the Bandas. But unfortunately we had to return to Germany without any success.

Since the history of the Bandas is so interesting and varied, and also so terrible, I will concentrate in this book on this little group of eleven tiny islands. It provides quite enough material! The other spice islands, like Tidore or Ternate, where cloves are grown, have equally interesting histories, but to describe them as well would be beyond the scope of this book.

This is the history of the nutmeg! In centuries past the nutmeg was always of great significance, not only for the conserving and seasoning of dishes, but also and especially in medicine and as an aphrodisiac. And the only place in the world the nutmeg grew was here, on the tiny Banda Islands.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands has 12 provinces, two of which are Noord and Zuid Holland. From 1588 to 1795 the region was called the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. After its conquest by French troops in 1795 what is today the Netherlands became the Batavian Republic. Since the Holland region made by far the greatest contribution to the colonising of the Netherlands East Indies and to the Dutch economy, as well as being the most influential, I will from now on – for the sake of simplicity – use the term Holland to refer to the whole Dutch kingdom.

The situation in Great Britain is much the same. England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are separate countries. England is only the southern part of the larger island. In 1707 the Kingdom of Great Britain was created out of England, Wales and Scotland, and in 1800 Ireland was added, after which the union was known as the United Kingdom. Following on the Irish independence struggle, the island of Ireland was divided into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in 1921. Since then17 England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have formed the political unit known as the United Kingdom.

Since the expeditions to Southeast Asia mainly sailed from England and many of the most important personalities involved came from that part of the country I will once more for simplicity refer to England rather than Great Britain or the United Kingdom.

1 Stefan Zweig, Magellan: Der Mann und seine Tat [Magellan: the man and his achievements]

2 Also Diaz

3 Elsner, Die Praxis des Chemikers [Practical Chemistry], 1895, S. 496

4 Also Bandanaira

5 Also Banda Api

6 The word Belgica goes back to the ‘17 Provinces of the Burgundian Netherlands’, which once encompassed Belgium and Luxemburg as well as the modern Netherlands.

7www.gunter-haug.de

8 See Chapter 25, Appendix I

9 The reverse of the banknote shows the Indonesian freedom fighter Tjut Meutia (aka Cut Nyak Meutia/Meuthia). She was arrested by the Dutch and executed in 1906. Today she is honoured as a national heroine.

10 Nutmeg is called pala in Bahasa Indonesia and jebug garum in Balinese; the Latin term is myristica fragrans.

11 Engraving from 1655

12 Lithograph based on a painting by Josias Cornelis Rappard, 1883-1889, Wikimedia Commons

13 Etching from Atlas pittoresque, 1699, Pl. 114

14 Pieter Van den Broecke (1585-1640), proprietor of nutmeg plantations on Pulau Ai and Banda Besar.

15 1760-1831

16 1771-1843

17 The situation in 2020, though this may change due to complications following Brexit.

2. How spices came to Europe

Spices have always possessed a magic of their own. Babylonian cuneiform tablets list more than 30 recipes including spices like coriander or caraway. Even in those days people wanted to have fine, tasty food. Hildegard von Bingen18 also frequently mentions nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon in her medical recipes. In the Middle Ages the fragrance of nutmeg and mace19 – like all the spices from the Moluccas – exuded its own special magic. For most of us, the scent of nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon still conjures up the oriental tales of the Thousand and One Nights and Sinbad the Sailor.

In France, a grocer’s shop is still called an épicerie [spice shop]. In my younger days grocers’ shops in Germany were called Kolonialwarenladen [colonial stores] and they always had a wonderful smell of oriental spices. But why were they still called Kolonialwarenladen as late as the 1960s? By then Germany had long ceased to have any colonies! The sago packaging had the Bismarck Archipelago as its country of origin and a colour picture of two dusky natives hollowing out a tree trunk. As a child, I was really impressed: there were places where you could even eat tree trunks! Today the island of Ceram in the Moluccas is one of the main regions where sago palms are cultivated.

Nutmeg and mace were not just used to spice up the rather monotonous cuisine of the time, but also in preserving food and as medication for digestive problems, colds and other illnesses. A whole cornucopia of diseases were treated with nutmeg in those days.

In ancient Rome cinnamon was a popular perfume, and as late as the 18th century wealthy women in Germany wore a silver pomander containing nutmeg and cloves around their necks if they wished to have a child and also as a protection against unpleasant smells and infectious diseases. Those who could afford the rare luxury of this spice also took it as an aphrodisiac: it was supposed to increase sexual pleasure. Young newly-weds were given a drink made of cream, wine, egg yolk, nutmeg, cinnamon and sugar to ensure a successful wedding night.

The nutmeg was the rarest of all spices. When London doctors recommended nutmeg, apart from its other medicinal uses, as the only remedy for the plague that was rife at the time, demand for it rocketed out of all proportion. The plague, which came to Europe from central Asia along the Silk Road, claimed over 30 per cent of the population of Europe as its victims between 1346 and 1353! Since nutmeg has a proven anti-bacterial effect, it may well have alleviated some of the suffering, but its effect on the plague was obviously nil. Because of the long and difficult trade route it was not possible to replenish supplies quickly, and so nutmeg became ever rarer and more expensive in Europe. At its high point nutmeg was worth more than its weight in gold! In Germany at the time the market price of two nutmegs was a full-grown cow.

Spice merchants from Arabia, China and eastern Asia managed to preserve the secret of the geographical location of the Spice Islands for centuries, thus maintaining their monopoly. No European had ever seen the mysterious islands, or even knew where to find them, as the Indian Ocean was as yet unexplored. They only knew that nutmeg came from far away in the east and took a very long time to reach Europe.

Fantastic tales were made up about the Spice Islands, and lies were spread to put off undesirable competition. There were terrible sea monsters where the nutmeg grew, horrendous beasts who would sink any ship, there were cannibals and headhunters who collected their victims’ heads, and perilous reefs which no ship could survive. None of the Arabian or Malay sea captains who travelled the route to the Spice Islands wanted to reveal the source of their precious cargo. They spread the tale of the Pausengi tree20. It was said to spring directly from the depths of the ocean. The Garuda – a gryphon-like beast, half human, half bird – lived in its branches. A whirlpool around the base of the tree would drag any ship under – only a handful of sailors survived the whirlpool by hanging on to the Garuda’s feathers.

It was the Arabians in particular who deliberately spread these gruesome rumours to deter Western explorers from travelling in the region, and thus the place the nutmeg originated from remained a mystery for ages.

But how did the spices get to Europe? There were several routes by which spices and other goods from Asia reached Europe. From very early on in the ancient world, spices were very appealing because they were always connected with the erotic. For centuries spices travelled west through the Chinese deserts and Arabia. Here they found many willing customers just panting for the next consignment. Archaeologists excavating in Syria found evidence that cloves were used there as a spice before 1700 B.C.21 Early evidence from China also shows that cloves were already being used around 300 B.C. to treat toothache and bad breath. The antibiotic properties of the clove were even said to be efficacious against athlete’s foot.

It is only later that we find any mention of the nutmeg. Although Ptolemy mentions Malaya and Java as early as the middle of the second century, the first person to mention the nutmeg in his writings is Aaron of Alexandria, who wrote a Syrian compendium of medicine (The Pandects) in the 7th century: est nux muskata et affertur ab India [nutmeg is brought from India].

The first western writer to mention the nutmeg – in 1078 – was Symeon Seth. This Jewish-Byzantine doctor from Antioch combined Greek medicine with what was known about the medical traditions of Arabia, Persia and India. Among many others he wrote a book entitled Syntagma de alimentorum facultatibus [On the properties of foods] in which he mentions nutmeg several times.22 After the 11th century there are an increasing number of mentions of the nutmeg.

However, the trade in spices must have begun about 4000 years ago – and it must have been a long-distance trade, since there is indisputable proof that at the time these spices can only have come from the Spice Islands in what is today Indonesia. It was only on the Banda Islands that nutmeg could be cultivated. And it was only on the Northern Molucca Islands – Ternate and Tidore – that the clove grew. It was the beginning of what is now so frequently called globalisation. But is it really so new? I don’t think that there has ever been a world without globalisation.

The spices had a long way to travel before they reached Europe. The most important routes then met in Constantinople, which in the 4th century was an important Western commercial metropolis. It was presumably around then that spices from the Moluccas first reached the West. The Persian scholar and poet Ibn Sina (Avicenna) mentions the Nut from Banda around the year 1000.

Marco Polo’s account of his travels23 led to increased interest in spices. His account of the Indonesian archipelago, here particularly Java, written around 1290, tells us: It is a very rich island, producing pepper, nutmegs, spikenard, galingale, cubebs, and cloves and all the precious spices that can be found in the world. It is visited by great numbers of ships and merchants who buy a great range of merchandise, reaping handsome profits and rich returns. The quantity of treasure in the island is beyond all computation.24

Ill. 2-1, There were several routes by which spices came to Europe

Ill. 2-2 Nutmeg by Christobal Acosta, 157825

In the 13th century large quantities of nutmeg were imported into Germany, as is shown by a decree issued by the Archbishop of Cologne in 1259, stating that merchants could not sell more than 10 pounds to any one customer.26 Cologne acquired the nutmeg from Venetian merchants, as by now the centre of trade had moved westwards from Constantinople to Venice, which then monopolised trade in the Western Mediterranean for centuries.

In 1459, using Marco Polo’s descriptions and information from other travellers, Fra Mauro, a monk from the monastery of San Michele in Venice, was commissioned by King Alfonso V of Portugal to produce a map of the world. It was almost two metres in diameter and showed cities and coastlines in East Asia. From Venice spices, silk and other goods from the Orient were sold on to the rest of Europe. The Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the building beside the Canal Grande next to the Rialto Bridge, where the German merchants lived, bought and sold, can still be seen in Venice. Many German merchant houses and bankers, like the Fuggers in Augsburg, participated in this trade. For a long time the Fuggers actually had a monopoly of the spice trade in Germany. They also financed Portuguese and Spanish expeditions and furnished them with the gold and silver they needed for the spice trade.

Ill. 2-3, Mappa mundi by Fra Mauro, Venice 145927

Merchants and money changers from all over the world gathered in Venice. At least twice a year the Venetian fleet, protected by warships, sailed to Constantinople and ancient Antioch (in modern Turkey) to buy spices and other goods that had been transported there along the Silk Roads.

Arabian merchants and mariners from the Malay Archipelago used the Trade Winds and the Pacific Ocean currents to sail along the coasts from the Spice Islands to East Africa. They sailed to the Spice Islands with the North-East Monsoon from October to April, and then back again from June to September with the South-West Monsoon.

Ill. 2-4, The Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice28

Recent DNA tests have shown that the population of Madagascar has the closest match to people from Kalimantan29 in Indonesia. There must, therefore, have been very active long-term exchange between the two areas. It was the stars that guided the Arabians safely through the desert and across the seas. We have the Arab world to thank for the survival of much of the lore of antiquity: they rescued and translated the documents of the most famous library of the ancient world in Alexandria.

On the lowest level of the 8th-century Borobudur Temple near Yogyakarta on the island of Java you can see several relief carvings in stone which depict the merchant ships of the period.

In 2003 a replica of this ship set sail from the Moluccas: the Indonesian President of the time, Megawati Sukarnoputri30 launched it under the name Samudra Raksa, Defender of the Oceans. In just 26 days the ship, crewed by 15 men and women, reached the Seychelles using only sail power. After another 15 days it was in Madagascar. This therefore proved that ships of the period could reach East Africa from the Spice Islands following the ‘Cinnamon Route’.

Ill. 2-5, Stone relief of a merchant vessel in the Borobudur Temple.

In November 1980 the Sultan of Oman sent a replica of an ancient Arabian merchant ship to sea on the North-East Monsoon wind. After seven months the ship reached China. Another proof that trade between Arabian merchants and the Far East was possible from a very early period.

I have also seen murals dating back to 1493 B.C. in the temple of Queen Hatshepsut in southern Egypt: they show ships that were being unloaded after returning from a trading voyage. According to the inscription, the cargo included cinnamon and two other spices.31

In the early 1980s, when I visited the Ajanta rock caves in southern India, I also saw a rock drawing of a ship laden with spices. It was one of the ancient merchant ships that used to sail to India from Sumatra and Java.

The lingua franca along the long coastline from the Spice Islands to East Africa was Coastal Malay32, a very much simplified form of Malay with little or no grammar. In Hadhramaut in southern Yemen in particular, the language has been in widespread use for generations because of their close contact with Java. When I was travelling out to Indonesia in 1963, I had the opportunity to visit the western part of Hadhramaut. I was astonished to discover that I was able to use the smattering of Bahasa Indonesia which I had learned before leaving Germany.

What we today call the Silk Road was actually a network of partly parallel caravan routes linking East Asia with the Mediterranean. Ferdinand von Richthofen, a geologist and geographer, was the first to name these trade routes through almost impassable deserts the Silk Road in a work published in 1877. He travelled to China in 1860 with a delegation of the Prussian Government to negotiate a trade agreement. He visited many Chinese provinces and only returned to Germany twelve years later.

Of course, it wasn’t only silk that travelled to Europe along these routes; spices were also an important commodity. The best-known routes began in Xian – where in 1974 the famous 2000-year-old tomb containing the 8000 more than life-size terracotta soldiers was found. Here the spices were loaded on the caravans for their journey to the West. Some of the routes linked Xian with Constantinople solely overland, while others increasingly began to use the seaways. The caravanserai in Kashgar – in what is now the far west of China – was an important entrepot, as several of the routes connected there. Everything could be found in the market, and it was a good place for men and beasts to recover before setting out on the next stage of their journey.

Marco Polo also visited Kashgar. He described the oasis as a beautiful garden with plentiful fruit and vegetables. When I visited Kashgar in 1998, the Sunday market was still the most important market for miles around, just as it was in the old days.33

In Polo’s time, a supplementary route went from the nodal point in Kashgar through the Hunza and Indus Valleys34 to the Indian Ocean. Here it joined the Spice Route from the Spice Islands and continued, either directly over the Red Sea or through the desert to the Mediterranean. It was an occasionally hair-raising route, which at many places in the Hunza Valley could only be managed by using porters to carry the goods on narrow paths along the sheer cliffs over vertiginous heights. Today this has been replaced by the Karakorum Highway, financed by China, which is still under construction. It is intended to be a supplementary route for the New Silk Road.

Ill. 2-6, Spice market in Kashgar, 1998

Kublai Khan, the ‘King of Kings’35, took over a large part of the spice trade of the Malay Archipelago from the Arabs over the course of time. The Chinese had significantly bigger ships with a crew of 200, which could carry a cargo of 120 tonnes. In 1293 the first Chinese fleet sailed to Sumatra and through the Malacca Strait. When the Monsoon began, they sailed on to the Malabar coast in western India and then on to the Yemen. From here their wares were taken to Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast.

Ill. 2-7, Hair-raising tracks in the Hunza Valley36

The Cinnamon Route went directly over the Indian Ocean to East Africa, from where the route then headed north and joined up with the Spice Route just before the Red Sea. In the 14th and 15th centuries the Spice Route mostly followed the Nile downstream to Alexandria, and the goods were then shipped to Venice or Constantinople. When Alexandria drastically increased its customs charges, the route via Bagdad and Syria was mostly chosen instead.

This was an important trade route: it led through the Syrian Desert to Antioch, which is 30 kilometres from the sea and is the crossroads for several trade routes. As a result, the city experienced a boom, becoming next to Constantinople one of the most important cities in the eastern Mediterranean. It also had an important role to play in the history of Christianity: according to legend, the Apostle Paul is said to have preached in a rock church in the north-east of the city.

The Spanish and Portuguese were envious of the constantly increasing influence of the Venetians, and wished to find the Spice Islands for themselves. By 1444 the Portuguese had already discovered Madeira and the Azores in the Atlantic. The Canary Islands also wished to unite with Portugal, but the Pope granted them to the Spanish.

As the Turks advanced westwards in 1529 and again in 1683, the old trade routes fell into disuse and the western maritime powers now set out to search for the legendary Spice Islands.

Today, 350 years later, the Silk Road is once more on everyone’s lips. But now we are talking about a ‘New Silk Road’ from China to Europe. And it is no longer spices that will be carried along it, but mass-produced products from the Middle Kingdom. It is a major Chinese foreign policy project, meant to orientate the global order more strongly towards China. China wants to expend hundreds of billions of dollars on conquering the world!

Ill. 2-8, The ancient rock church in Antioch37

18 1098-1179

19 Mace is the reddish aril (covering) of the nutmeg. It is often erroneously said to be the flower of the nutmeg. It has an aromatic taste like that of the nutmeg, but is rather milder.

20 Rumphius (Chapter 20) also wrote about this mysterious tree

21 Source: International Institute for Mesopotamian Studies

22 Hermes Othniel, Simeon Seth, 2013

23 Probably 1254-1324

24 Marco Polo, The Travels, trs. Ronald Latham, Harmondsworth, 1958, p. 251.

25 Wikipedia, Public Domain

26 Ennen, Geschichte der Stadt Köln (1863), II, S. 315

27 Wikipedia, Public Domain

28 Wikimedia Commons

29 Formerly Borneo

30 A daughter of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno

31 Incense

32 Sometimes also called Kitchen Malay

33 See Horst H. Geerken, The Karakorum Highway and the Hunza Valley 1998, ISBN 978-3-7448-1279-5

34 ibid.

35 As he called himself

36 Photograph by the author, 1998

37 Photograph by the author, 1957

3. The Banda Islands

The Banda Islands were blessed, not only by the ancient myths that made them the centre of the world, but also because they were immensely rich. The islands were covered in nutmeg forests right up to the mountain tops; they were – and still are – surrounded by exceedingly rich fishing grounds which throng with tuna, mackerel, parrot fish, turtles and countless other marine creatures. But the most immediate things that strike the eye are the frequent earthquakes and tidal waves, and the eruptions of the Gunung Api volcano.

The 16th-century Portuguese historian de Barros was probably the first to describe the Banda Islands in his famous work Del Asia. He enthuses:

The Island of Banda is like a garden of nutmeg trees, and since they blossom at the same time as a multitude of pleasant-smelling herbs and flowers, the air at that season is filled with scents which are incomparably delightful. When the nutmeg fruits begin to ripen, hosts of parrots and other birds with the most varied plumage and song flock to eat them and delight the eyes and ears of mankind. In the middle of the island there is a mountain which is rather steep, but when you climb it, you find yourself on a plateau which is no less charming than the region at the foot of the mountain.38

In 1545, the Italian physician Antonius Musa Brassavola reported – based on Portuguese sources – that the Portuguese in their galleons could smell the scent of the islands on the air long before they move into view.

In the second half of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, the German naturalist, botanist and zoologist Georg Eberhard Rumpf, known as Rumphius, identified over 500 different species of fish in the waters of the Banda Sea, as well as even more plants.39

It was here, and only here, that the nutmeg so desired by the whole world was able to grow and flourish. And they were also able to harvest the bark of the kayu manis tree, cinnamon, which was also in great demand. There was no need for the roughly 15,000 original inhabitants of the Banda Islands to go without: they were well-off. They had everything in profusion! Whatever could not be grown on the islands, like rice and vegetables, was imported from Java or Ambon and exchanged for spices. Fabrics came from India or Arabia.

The first evidence of human habitation on the Bandas dates from 8,000 years ago: they lived under a rock overhang on the island of Ai. The first written mention of the islands40 was by the Portuguese apothecary Tomé Pires, who lived in Malaccca on the Malay Peninsula from 1512 to 1515 and visited the Bandas several times. He estimated that there were only about 3,000 inhabitants at the time. In 1516 he opened the first European embassy in China as ambassador.

The Bandas are just a small cluster of tiny volcanic islands in the middle of the Banda Sea – which has a maximum depth of 7,440 metres – only 4 degrees south of the Equator. They are so small that they are only to be found on specialised maps, and they form only part of the Moluccan Spice Islands. The Molucca province is an area in modern Indonesia, which is half as big as Europe. Far to the north, roughly 1,000 kilometres from the Bandas, are the other Spice Islands of Ternate, Tidore and Makian. The closest island, Amboyna41, lies 200 km north of the Bandas. The only place where cloves were originally grown was these last four islands, but nutmeg only grew on the Bandas. This is presumably due to the unique microclimate caused by the deep Banda Sea and the quality of the volcanic soil, which was only found here, resulting from the regular eruptions of Gunung Api42. The little island of Run was particularly generously endowed: it was thickly covered like a park with nutmeg trees from the coast to the mountain peaks. Today nutmeg is also grown in other places in the world, such as Madagascar, South America and the Caribbean.

Ill. 3-1, The position of the Moluccas in Indonesia Northern Molluccas - Banda Islands - Southern Moluccas

Ill. 3-2, The Moluccan Spice Islands. The islands of Ternate, Tidore, Makian and Ambon produce cloves, the Banda Islands nutmeg and mace.

Ill. 3-3, The Banda Islands43

The Kenari nut tree also grew solely on the Bandas. It is only in the shade of these trees – which grow up to 40 metres tall – that the 20-metre nutmeg trees flourish. The Kenari is a very fatty nut, similar to the almond. Today Kenari trees have also become native to Papua44. The nuts have been used in Bandanese cuisine from time immemorial.

Today the Banda Islands have about 14,000 inhabitants. The inhabited islands are:

The main island, Banda Neira. It is about 3 kilometres long and 1.3 kilometres at its widest point

Directly next to this, separated only by a 100-metre strait

45

, lies the volcanic island of Pulau

46

Gunung Api. Only a few dozen people live there on the coast opposite Banda Neira

Pulau Ai

47

The biggest island (12 kilometres long, maximum width 3 kilometres) is Pulau Banda Besar

48

Pulau Hatta

49

, ringed with white beaches, where only about 50 people live

Pulau Run

50

, which was exchanged for Manhattan in 1667 and

Pulau Sjahrir

51

: until the end of the 19

th

century this was a leper colony.

Tiny uninhabited islands are

Pulau Nailakka: this tiny island is almost linked to Pulau Run at low tide. But in the history of the Bandas it played an important role because it was occupied by the English for a while

Pulau Kapal

Pulau Karaka and

Pulau Manuk.

Around 1500 there were still four kings on the Bandas. At the beginning of the 16th century, they lost their power and were replaced by the Assembly of the Orang Kaya. However, the former kings and their descendants still had a place of honour in the Assemblies. The Orang Kaya were the ‘rich, old or influential gentlemen’ in every village. As a result, each village was a small republic. There were mostly about 44 of them, a ‘Council of Elders’ who exercised sovereignty and dispensed justice. They also organised the nutmeg trade. They were a merchant oligarchy within Bandanese society, an upper class who liked to display themselves under silken parasols held by their servants. An important sign of their high culture was indubitably the fact that they worked together for defence against external enemies.

The nutmeg and mace trade was not the only business on the Bandas; the Bandanese were also influential middle men in the trade in cloves from Ternate und Tidore, as well as the plumage of birds of paradise from the Aru Islands and New Guinea. In return, they acquired rice from Java, or cloth. Trade with the Arabs, Malays and Chinese flourished and always ran smoothly. Until the first Dutch ships arrived, the Bandas were ruled by the Orang Kaya. When the Dutch entered the race for the nutmeg the lives of the Bandanese changed dramatically.

Ill. 3-4, Orang Kayas, Detail from a picture in the Banda Neira Museum

Ill. 3-5, Orang Kaya, Painting in Banda Neira Museum

It is interesting to see what early encyclopaedias wrote about the Banda Islands. For example, the 1875 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica has an extensive entry about the Bandas in Volume III pages 309/310:

Ill. 3-6, The Banda Islands in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1875

In the German Pierers Konversations-Lexikon of 1889 there is also an entry about the Bandas in Volume II, page 378 though it is not as detailed as the Britannica item:

Ill. 3-7, The Banda Islands in Pierers Konversations-Lexikon, 188952

Although there is still detailed information about the Banda Islands in the 1965 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Vol. 3, p. 78) the 1953 German Großer Brockhaus devotes a meagre four lines to them.

Ill. 3-8, The Banda Islands in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1965

38 Translated from Soltau’s version in Geschichte und Entdeckung der Portugiesen im Orient, 1415-1539

39 See Chapter 20

40 In his book Suma Oriental

41 I will follow contemp. custom and use the name Ambon for this island from now on.

42 Also known as Banda Api (Fire of the Bandas)

43 ©Abba, Cilu Bintang Estate

44 New Guinea

45 Previously called Strait of the Sun, Zonnegat in Dutch

47 Aka Pulau Ay

48 Also known during Dutch colonial times as Pulau Lonthoir (also Lontar and Lonthor)

49 Pulau Rozengain (also Rosengain) in the colonial period, changed to Pulau Hatta in 1955

50 Aka Rhun

51 Aka Pulau Sjahrir. Pulau Pisang during the Dutch colonial period. The name was changed to Pulau Sjahrir in 1955

52 Translation see Appendix V

4. The first explorers and the quest for the Spice Islands

The urge to explore the as yet unknown world of the Orient sprang from the desire for spices and the immense wealth to be made from trading in them. The spices that had long been familiar, like pepper and vanilla, played a lesser role in this; it was nutmeg and cloves that promised the greatest profit, and all that was known about them was that they came from far away, from the unknown lands of the Orient.

In the quest for spices the four most important explorers of the 15th and 16th centuries, Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Bartolomeu Dias53 and Ferdinand Magellan, sailed off in their ships into as yet unknown oceans, and an as yet unknown world. Since Spain was occupied with the Reconquista of those parts of its territory occupied by Arabian Muslims until 1492, the Portuguese were able to get a head start in their conquest of the seas. Portugal, the most south-westerly country in Europe, was interested in finding a route to the Spice Islands in an easterly direction, while Spain aimed towards the west. By 1419 Portugal had occupied Madeira and by 1431 the Azores. To prevent conflict between them, the 1479 treaty of Alcáçova laid down that the Canary Islands should fall to Spain, leaving the rest of the Atlantic and all the areas south of the Canaries to the Portuguese.

When Christopher Columbus returned from his first westward voyage in 1493, he had discovered not Asia, but a whole series of still unknown islands in the Caribbean. Nor did he bring any spices back with him, but gold and silver stolen from the Incas. Spain now wished to establish its rights over the newly discovered lands. In 1494 Pope Alexander VI drew a line from pole to pole, which was to divide the Spanish and Portuguese possessions. This line at roughly 38° west ran about 320 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands.

The Portuguese were less than happy with this division, and the Portuguese King, Fernando of Aragon, protested to the Spanish queen, Isabella of Castille. Tough negotiations followed in the small northern Spanish town of Tordesillas on the banks of the River Duero. Tordesillas looks just like any other town in the region, with a market, an old town and a few old churches, but in 1494 the decisions that were reached changed the world.

On the 7th of June 1494 the Treaty of Tordesillas was concluded: the dividing line was shifted west to 46° west, and so was now about 1185 miles west of the Cape Verde Islands. The world was now divided between the two great Catholic sea powers, Spain and Portugal. The inhabitants of the areas concerned were not involved in the negotiations, and their land was distributed without their consent. South America had not yet been discovered.

Ill. 4-1, Division of the world according to the Treaty of Tordesillas54 and Saragossa between Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th Century

As we will see, the Portuguese were very fortunate that the line was moved westward. Prince Henry of Portugal, the fourth son of King John I, founded a school of navigation in Sagres in southern Portugal. He became known as Henry the Navigator, even though he himself never took part in any voyages of discovery. He was a patron of sea travel, and initiated a programme for the development of a sea route to the east, into the unexplored oceans around Africa. With the help of foreign astronomers and Arabian navigators, new navigational instruments were developed, such as the astrolabe, the sextant, the quadrant and the compass. Now the angle of altitude of the sun could be measured more accurately when calculating latitude.

Ill. 4-2, First page of the Treaty of Tordesillas55

The Portuguese now sailed south along the African coast. In 1482 they opened their first trading post on the Gold Coast56 and built the Fort São Jorge da Mina57. It was human gold that the Portuguese found there, thousands of black slaves who were taken to work on the cane plantations in Madeira or sold. After several bloody attacks, with many casualties, the Fort fell to the Dutch in 1637; they then sold it to the British in 1872.

Under Portuguese, and later Dutch, rule the fort was the most important point of departure for the later transatlantic slave trade. The slaves, mostly from the African interior, were first held in the Fort before being taken through the infamous ‘Door Of No Return’ to the ships that would carry them to Brazil and other Portuguese and Dutch colonies. The Dutch ‘cargoes’ went to the territories they had conquered in Surinam, the Antilles and other colonies. The slave trade was officially forbidden in 1814, but unofficially it continued for several decades longer. Between 1560 and 1866, over ten million human beings from Africa were enslaved and transported by England, France, Portugal and Holland. Dutch estimates put their share of the trade at 5%. The Dutch government was one of the last to free the slaves in its colonies in 1863.

Ill. 4-3, Monument to Henry the Navigator in Lisbon58

But in the beginning Brazil hadn’t even been discovered. Starting from Fort St George, the Portuguese wanted to find a route to India following the coast. In 1487, Bartolomeu Dias became the first Portuguese to round the Cape of Good Hope. After his return, his records came into the hands of the German cartographer Henricus Martellus Germanus, who prepared a new map on the basis of this information. This is the first map to show East Africa and the Indian Ocean, and to show the Cape of Good Hope. It is, however, greatly distorted because of errors in reckoning longitude. Nevertheless, it served as an inspiration and model for subsequent world maps, such as the German world map of Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, or the first globe59 produced by Martin von Buchheim in 1492. On the basis of information from Amerigo Vespucci, America was first shown as a new continent on Waldseemüller’s map, but in very distorted form, as the west coast of America was as yet unknown.

After Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, Vasco da Gama decided to venture further. He left Lisbon on the 8th of July 1497 with four ships.60

Ill. 4-4, Henricus Martellus Germanus’ world map, 149061

He first sailed down the familiar route to the Cape and then worked his way north up the east coast of Africa, taking advantage of several opportunities to stock up on provisions for his journey into the unknown. For the Portuguese, the Indian Ocean was a new, unexplored sea. In the port of Malindi62 Vasco da Gama was fortunate enough to meet an Arabian captain who had already crossed the Indian Ocean several times. To his great surprise the captain had a detailed chart of the ocean. With the strong south-westerly winds of the summer monsoon they were blown to India in just four weeks. Ten months after leaving Lisbon, Vasco da Gama became the first European to reach the west coast of India on the 18th of May 1498.

In Calicut63, they first sent a degredado ashore. This was the normal tactic employed to find out if the natives they met were friendly or hostile. A degredado was normally a converted Jew or a criminal whose life was worth very little in their eyes. In the meanwhile the rest of the crew remained in safety aboard ship. He returned unscathed: he had met two Tunisian merchants with whom he had been able to speak Catalan, and informed Vasco da Gama that Calicut was the most important trading centre for spices on India at the time. Merchants from the East brought their cargoes here from the Spice Islands. The Malabar Coast was also the centre for pepper64, which was grown there. For this reason, the coast was also called the Pepper Coast.

Ill. 4-5, Calicut in 157265

I’ve been to Calicut several times. Nothing has changed even today where growing pepper and the spice trade are concerned. In December in particular, when the peppercorns are harvested, you can see peppercorns laid out on cloths to dry in every available free space. But little remains of the old Calicut due to the vicissitudes of time and many wars.

Archaeological excavations have revealed many Greek and Roman coins, some of them dating back to 123 B.C., so there must have been active trade with the west here for centuries.

Vasco da Gama’s negotiations with the Zamorin, the King of Calicut, didn’t go as planned. Da Gama expected that he could trade here with worthless glass beads and other trinkets, as he had done on the west coast of Africa. He was surprised to see that the cultured Indians and Arabs would only sell their goods for gold and silver. Merchants from Arabia, China and the Malay Archipelago ridiculed the worthless gifts da Gama presented to the King. This led to a somewhat tense atmosphere between the two of them.

Vasco da Gama was nevertheless still able to load some of his ships with valuable spices before leaving Calicut on the 5th of October 1498. The first of his ships made land in Lisbon on the 10th of July 1499. He himself didn’t reach Lisbon until the 9th of September that year, as he had been caring for his mortally ill brother Paolo on the Azores. Of the 170 men who set sail in 1497, only 50 returned to Lisbon alive; most of the rest had died of scurvy, even in the early stages of the voyage. Vasco da Gama noted that they had been given oranges to eat by the natives in East Africa, after which the sick were quickly healed. But it was many decades before the problem was understood.

Of the four ships of the original fleet, only two returned to Lisbon. Still, even though Vasco da Gama returned to Portugal with a relatively small cargo of spices, the profit was several times more than the cost of the expedition.