Nathaniel's nutmeg

by Giles Milton

  Dutton was astonished by this change of heart and vowed to sail to the Banda Islands without further ado. He hoped to be able to induce the local governor to let him settle the island and, if not, entertained the possibility of taking the place by force. But in this too he was to be disappointed. His arrival at Neira was greeted with anger by the Dutch governor who gave an 'obstinate denial to surrender the island' and added that any attempt on Run would be met with gunshot and cannon fire.

  Dutton was not surprised; he had long suspected that the English were being duped and that the Dutch Company 'never really intended to deliver the island which, after many years' detention by them, has been the most profitable blood in the veins of their trade'. His two options were to return to Batavia to plead with the Dutch authorities or to storm the island. Although the records of his mission have been lost, he appears to have chosen the latter option until discovering that his subordinate, John Hunter, adamantly refused to take part in such a plan. Having lost the confidence of his crew there was little Dutton could do but write to the directors in London informing them of the sorry state of affairs. His letter elicited from the directors a stern reprimand for Hunter, finding that his cowardly behaviour compared unfavourably with Courthope's heroic defence of the island some forty years previously. 'Wee cannot but conclude,' they wrote, 'that if our Agent [Hunter] had byn posessed with the head and heart of a man, hee would ... have done something worthie the name of an Englishman, and not have retorned back soe dishonourably, to our greate losse in perticulaer and to the generall shame of the nation.' Despairing of ever recovering their beloved island, the directors once again resorted to adding up their losses that stemmed from the debacle which they now computed to be 'above four millions'.

  After all the fuss and bluster it is ironic that when Run did at long last slip back into English hands, it passed unnoticed in both London and Amsterdam. On 23 March 1665, two English vessels pulled into the island's little harbour, made contact with the handful of Dutch traders, and demanded Run's surrender. An agreement was struck, the Dutch packed up their belongings, and after an interval of two days they sailed to Neira and left the English to unload their supplies. 'Concerning all this,' records a memo, 'the Company have no certain knowledge because their letters were lost in the Royal Oak.'

  Run's liberation was to prove short-lived. No sooner had word of a new outbreak of hostilities between England and Holland reached the East Indies than the Dutch promptly despatched a vessel to Run and recaptured the island. To dissuade the English from ever again attempting a landing, 'great waste and spoliation [was] committed on the island'. The nutmeg groves were once again chopped down and the vegetation burned to its roots. Run had become a barren and inhospitable rock.

  Although the high-handed tactics of the Dutch failed to stir the temperate King Charles II, they incensed his brother, the impetuous James, Duke of York. He was stung into action by the news trickling back from the East Indies and, as head of the powerful Royal African Company, was determined to avenge the wrongs. 'The trade of the world is too little for us two,' he declared imperiously, 'therefore one must lie down.' Already in 1663, James had com­missioned four vessels to sail down the African coastline and seize the Dutch trading post of Cape Corso on the Gold Coast. Flushed with success, he now ordered his vessels to cross the Atlantic and seize the Dutch-held territory of New Netherland. This brazen act of aggression was justified as being in response to the 'inhuman proceedings' at Amboyna four decades previously. "Tis high time to put them out of a capacitie of doeing the same mischeife here,' declared the royal commission.

  In choosing to attack Manhattan, James had picked an easy target. The island's principal defence, Fort Amsterdam, was a decrepit bulwark whose walls were in an advanced state of decay. The barracks and church were built of wood and vulnerable to fire while the outer walls were lined with wooden houses. The town's governor, Peter Stuyvesant, was also hampered by a lack of weapons. The fort's twenty-four guns were rusting and useless and the available powder was old and damp. 'If I begin [to shoot] in the forenoon,' said the chief gunner, 'twill all be consumed by the afternoon.'

  The English had the added advantage of their fleet looking considerably more impressive than it was. As Stuyvesant surveyed the Hudson from Fort Amsterdam he could see four ships carrying a total of a hundred guns. But only one, the Guinea, was a ship of war. The others were rotting trading vessels that had been hastily converted before sailing from Portsmouth. The number of men on board had also been grossly exaggerated. Stuyvesant had been told that the ships were carrying a crew of eight hundred. In fact, there were less than half that number.

  The governor was nevertheless undeterred and vowed to go down fighting. But the confidence of his men had been drained by stories of the war-like English soldiers and none in New Amsterdam had a stomach for the fight. When the English offered an honourable surrender, Stuyvesant was reluctantly forced to agree. On Monday, 8 September 1664, he signed away the Dutch rights to Manhattan and, two hours later, his small band of troops left their fort 'with their arms, drums beating, and colours flying'.

  When he heard the news of the town's capitulation, King Charles II was delighted. 'You will have heard of our taking New Amsterdam,' he wrote to his sister in France. "Tis a place of great importance ... we have got the better of it and 'tis now called New York.' The Dutch did not share the king's enthusiasm and protested in the strongest terms, arguing that the English had seized the island without 'even a shadow of right in the world.' King Charles shrugged off the protests; after all, the Dutch had behaved with equal aggression when they had seized Run, an island to which they had even less claim than Manhattan.

  With no resolution in sight, the two countries once again tumbled into war, fighting it out on the high seas for more than two years with neither side gaining the upper hand. The English had small consolation when they captured two richly laden East India ships — lucrative prizes which were filled with nutmeg, mace and other precious commodities. So valuable was their cargo that Samuel Pepys made a special journey down the Thames Estuary to view the prize. 'The greatest wealth lie in confusion that a man can see in the world,' he wrote. 'Pepper scattered through every chink, you trod upon it; and in cloves and nutmegs I walked above the knees; whole rooms full. And silk in bales, and boxes of copper plate, one of which I saw opened ... as noble a sight as ever I saw in my life.'

  With the war dragging on inconclusively it was agreed, in March 1667, that both sides should meet at Breda to discuss their grievances. The English demands were predictable: compensation for Dutch outrages and the immediate return of Run. The Dutch grievances were equally well rehearsed: compensation for English piracy and the return of New Amsterdam. Although the English negotiating team were given considerable flexibility in their handling of the talks, on the question of Run they were allowed no leeway. They were to 'represent to the ambassadors that the detaining of Pulo Run is one of the greatest foundations of the vast profits and strength of the Dutch in the Indies, but extremely prejudicial to the English nation.' To this they were met with a familiar cry: 'New Netherland must be restored'. As the talks faltered and broke down, the peace commissioners stepped in and proposed the only remaining solution: that in return for the Dutch keeping Run, the English should be allowed to retain Manhattan.

  Still the English hesitated, fearful of signing away their richest asset. They deliberated for days but were unable to reach a decision and wrote to London asking for advice. On the morning of 18 April 1667 there arrived a letter with one simple instruction: 'we acquiesce.' A deal had at last been struck.

  The resultant treaty, the Treaty of Breda, was a work of exquisite diplomacy, tactfully naming neither of the islands that had caused so much bloodshed. But the exchange, which included the whole of the New Netherlands, was there for all to see, enshrined in article three. 'Both parties shall keep and possess hereafter, with plenary right of sovereignty, propriety, and possession, all such lands, islands, cities, f
orts, places, and colonies ... [as] they have by force of arms, or any other way whatsoever, gotten and detained from the other party.'

  As the ink dried on the treaty, few can have realised that they were signing one of the most significant documents in history. In exchanging a tiny island in the East Indies for a much larger one on America's eastern seaboard, England and Holland had sealed the destiny of New York. Until 1667, Manhattan had been a small trading centre with a population of less than one thousand. Now, the island was set to enter a new and ever more prosperous period in its history — a period that would see it rise and rise until the name New York was fabled around the globe. By the time of the War of Independence, the city had become the largest city in North America and was the natural choice to be the country's new capital.

  That a deal should have been struck between England and Holland was due, in no small part, to the courage of a simple trader, Nathaniel Courthope, whose defiance and heroism forty-seven years earlier had sparked an unstoppable train of events. His bravado in defending Run, his stand against an army hundreds of times more powerful than his own, and his devotion to his country's flag became the rallying cry for the East India Company. Yet Courthope's motivation was simple: patriotism, duty, and an unswerving belief that what he was doing was right. He always knew that he would die for his ideals; indeed he looked 'daily and hourly' for his final end. When given a final opportunity to surrender the sovereignty of Run he had countered with an emphatic refusal: 'I could not,' he replied, 'unlesse I should turne traitor unto my King and Countrey.' For Courthope, a trader, there were some things too precious to be bought and sold.

  Almost four centuries after his death, Courthope finds himself on the margins of history, forgotten by English and Americans alike. No statue of him graces the streets of Manhattan; no plaque commemorates his achievements in Westminster Abbey. Yet the stand he made on Run was to reshape history on the other side of the world, and although his death robbed England of her nutmeg, it gave her the biggest of apples.

  Epilogue

  A

  t around midnight on 9 August 1810, a small party of Englishmen could be seen loading weapons into a tiny boat moored off Great Banda. They carried no torches or lanterns and were working in total silence for their mission was one of great secrecy. Led by an irrepressibly energetic commander by the name of Captain Cole, their task was to storm the Dutch castle on Neira and force the governor to surrender. They were then to take control of the rest of the archipelago.

  The Dutch knew nothing of the English presence in the Banda Islands for Captain Cole had kept his men out of sight until long after dark. Suspecting neither treachery nor attack, the garrison of Fort Belgica were all asleep and even the night watches, bored with pacing the battlements, had retired inside. Undetected by anyone, Cole and his men drew up their boat on Neira's rocky foreshore, seized the battery and redoubt without a fight, and began scaling the stone-lined walls of Fort Belgica. By the time the Dutch alarm had been sounded, the English were in virtual control of the fort and there was only the briefest of skirmishes before the Dutch troops surrendered. Cole then directed the bastion's formidable firepower onto Fort Nassau, the island's other castle, and blasted shot after shot at its battlements until they crumbled to dust. Here, too, the Dutch capitulated and without the loss of a single man, Cole found himself in effective control of the Banda Islands.

  The English commander justified his action on the grounds that Napoleon might use the 'spiceries' as the base for a campaign against India. Such a threat was always remote, but Cole's forces remained in the Bandas until 1817 when they abruptly pulled out, explaining to a bewildered population that a Holland deprived of the Indies would make for a very weak ally in Europe.

  Although Cole's action serves as little more than a footnote in the history of the Bandas, it did have one significant and devastating effect on their future. Before they left, the English uprooted hundreds of nutmeg seedlings along with several tons of the unique soil and transplanted them to Ceylon, Pinang, Bencoolen and Singapore. Within a few decades, these thriving new plantations were far outstripping the production on the Bandas.

  The decline of the archipelago had, in fact, set in many years earlier. Although the islands had for a time reaped fabulous dividends, the Dutch settlers proved hopelessly indolent and corrupt and allowed their poorly managed estates to go to ruin. Even more damaging was the volcano, Gunung Api, which was entering one of the most violent and unpredictable phases in its history with no fewer than five major eruptions during the seventeenth century, all followed by devastating earthquakes and tidal waves. In 1629, Neira town was virtually swept out to sea; whilst the winter of 1691 ushered in five years of misery as the volcano belched sulphur and lava in the direction of the governor's residence. Nature was scarcely less destructive in the eighteenth century. In 1778, the twin forces of an eruption and earthquake, followed by a hurricane and an immense tidal wave, all but wrecked the Banda Islands' nutmeg groves. One out of every two trees was felled and production of nutmeg plummeted to a fraction of its former levels.

  Although descendants of the early Dutch settlers doggedly clung to their land, the overseas English plantations had sounded the death knell for the Banda Islands. As demand for nutmeg in Europe steadily fell, even the great Dutch East India Company found itself lurching from one financial crisis to another and when auditors examined the accounts in the 1790s they found the Company to be a staggering twelve million guilders in the red. Soon afterwards, the monopoly was lost and the Company slipped quietly into the history books.

  Despite the decline, few of the older residents were inclined to return to Holland - a country that most had never even visited — preferring instead to enjoy the substantial inherited fortunes that many still possessed. The end of the nineteenth century saw the islands enter a twilight golden age as vast sums of money were squandered on grandiose waterfront mansions, all of them filled with the choicest antiques and crystals, marble and glass. Each evening the burghers of Banda would dress in their finery and stroll up and down the promenade to the rousing music of a military brass band, and when the Dutch governor-general arrived in the winter of 1860 he was welcomed with such extravagance and excess that he could almost have been fooled into believing that the islands were as rich as they had ever been. His triumphant procession through Neira town was led by a troupe of musicians, dancers and players, all dressed in costume, and the main (and only) street was gaily decked with flags, flowers and bunting.

  No less diverting than His Excellency's official visit was the regular arrival of one or another of the local steam packets, bringing naturalists and wealthy Europeans in search of the exotic and unusual. All were delighted with what they found in this tropical archipelago, as testified in their numerous journals and diaries. 'A sail of two nights and a day [from Amboyna],' wrote the naturalist Henry Forbes, 'brought us to Banda. Coming on deck, before breakfast, we found ourselves slowly steaming in through a narrow winding entrance between thickly foliaged cliffs ... it was the most lovely spot we had yet visited. Fronting us as the steamer warped itself to the jetty lay the town as a cluster of white houses ... [and] from an elevated plateau, a battlement fort overlooked us, the scarlet of its Dutch ensign floating in the wind.'

  Although the frivolity and heady excess of fin-de-siecle Banda provided the illusion of prosperity, many of the younger generation soon tired of the stagnant social life and lack of prospects and bought themselves one-way tickets to Holland, leaving the islands to their fate. With Dutch expenditure on the Bandas far outweighing revenue, they became an increasingly costly drain on resources and it was not long before the governor himself was withdrawn and the archipelago returned to an obscure provincial backwater seldom visited by Dutch officials. There were a few brief moments that reminded the world of the existence of these islands. In the 1930s, two prominent anti-colonialists, Mohammed Hatti, later vice- president of Indonesia, and Sutan Sjahrir, who served as prime minister, spent six yea
rs in exile on Neira Island; whilst in 1944 the Japanese bombed and then occupied the archipelago. Although they found the islands of little interest except as a rendezvous for shipping, their occupation did have one malign consequence: with few supplies reaching the islands, the locals were forced to cut down many of their remaining nutmeg trees and turn the land over to vegetable cultivation.

  The end of the war brought tragedy to the Bandas. An American bomber raiding Japanese bases in the region appeared in the skies above Neira in the spring of 1945 intent on destroying the shipping anchored in the harbour. But one stray bomb scored a direct hit on the town of Neira, exploding directly above a wedding party and killing more than a hundred guests.

  Today, the Banda Islands have once again retreated into obscurity — an archipelago so small and insignificant that it rarely features on a map of the region. Scarcely more accessible than in the days of Nathaniel Courthope, it requires patience and a good deal of luck to reach the islands. In the summer of 1997, the antiquated fourteen- seat Cessna plane that used to fly between Amboyna and Neira was flipped over by the monsoon winds and dashed to pieces on the airstrip. Now, the only way to reach the Bandas is on the KM Rinjani ferry, an eight-hour journey through the choppy waters which separate Neira from Amboyna.