nutmeg

The Banda Islands, Maluku, Indonesia; the tree is native to Maluku, and by the end of the sixteenth century nutmeg and mace could be found only in Banda, as Malay traders put it to Tomé Pires: God made Timor for sandalwood, Banda for nutmeg and Maluku for cloves

Chinese, Arab, Indian and Malay traders sailed to Maluku for it, and Javanese traders brought rice and Indian textiles to Banda for nutmeg and mace, and Islam with them; the Portuguese arrived in 1512, a century after Moorish traders, and were never allowed a trading post or a fort; the Dutch East India Company conquered the islands between 1609 and 1621 and worked them as plantations with enslaved labour; at Breda in 1667 England kept New Netherland and gave up its claim to Run; the tree reached St Vincent by 1802, probably from Kew, and Grenada from Banda seed in 1843

On Banda nutmeg is a whole fruit before it is a seed for export: cooks sour their fish broth, ikan kuah pala, with the flesh around the seed, and the Portuguese who arrived in 1512 found the Bandanese grilling fish and venison on skewers scattered with nutmeg. To hold the trade alone, the Dutch East India Company was advised that the surest way to the nutmeg monopoly was to destroy the troublesome population and resettle the islands with colonists served by slaves, and in October 1620 Jan Pieterszoon Coen wrote that Banda had to be reconquered and peopled by others. What Banda's own historians name the genocide of 1621 began on Lonthoir in March: on 8 May the orang kaya, the islands' leaders, forty-four by Loth's count and forty by Des Alwi's, were executed outside Fort Nassau by Japanese mercenaries and their heads set on bamboo poles; of some 15,000 Bandanese about 1,000 remained, 789 were shipped to Batavia as slaves, and the few who escaped went by boat at night to Kei, Seram Laut, Kisar and Gorom. The emptied land was divided into plantations for Dutch planters and worked by enslaved people brought from across the archipelago, India and China, and the surviving Bandanese were enslaved and made to teach the newcomers how to grow nutmeg and mace; by 1681 about a hundred of them were left. On Run, the island the English had held, the company cut down every nutmeg tree so the island would be worthless, and at Breda in 1667 England kept New Netherland, Manhattan with it, and gave up its claim to Run. Grenada, which planted the tree from Banda seed in 1843, carries a nutmeg on the flag it adopted at independence in 1974, for its reputation as the Isle of Spice. The descendants of those who fled to Kei are still there: in Banda Eli and Banda Elat the Wandan carry clan names taken from the villages they lost, Lonthor and Selamon among them, and keep their history in onotan, verses of the ancestors handed down rather than written; in 2023 Basar Almudin Latar, raja of Banda Eli, said that they have become part of Kei and will not forget the land of Banda. Their flight can be read only in colonial sources, and the other half of this spice's biography is the one the Wandan keep in song.