In this episode, we're going to be talking about a delicious little spice that
gives your eggnog in your pumpkin pie that little extra kick. In fact,
it's one of the five spices that make up the now ultra famous Pumpkin Spice
flavor that you just can't get away from each fall season. But while it's
a fairly commonplace these days to find it on almost any grocery store shelf,
how it got to end up there is a crazy and twisted tale of greed,
deception, and even murder. These are the bizarre but true stories from
history that in some way involved food. I'm Nick Charlie Key, and this
is the fantastic history of food. Another week's sponsor is Full Sigmatic. It's
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we're going to be diving into the history of nutmeg. Now, nutmeg
is the seed of the moristica tree, which is native to the Banda Islands,
a group of small islands in the Moluccas also known as the Spice Islands
in Indonesia. Not from the dawn of time, the Banda Islands were the
only place in the world where nutmeg trees grew, and for centuries the people
of the Banda Islands had a complete monopoly on the spice, not yet realizing,
however, the gold mine that they were sitting on. The earliest evidence
of the use of nutmeg comes in the form of a three thousand, five
hundred year old piece of pottery found on the island of Pulau Aye, one
of the Bandanese islands in eastern Indonesia. The Banda Islands themselves consist of eleven
small volcanic islands. Now, the spice trade in the Middle East was already
in full swing more than four thousand years ago, with Chinese, Arab and
Malay traders bringing spices to Europe mostly by camel along the Old Silk Road were
spices including nutmeg, peppercorn, clove, and cinnamon were highly prized by the
European aristocracy as a seasoning, but in a pre modern world without refrigeration,
these same spices were also used to disguise the foul taste of rancid food.
In some instances, these spices were also believed to hold medicinal properties that could
cure any number of ailments. By the sixth century, a d nutmeg was
being sparsely cultivated on the subcontinent, spreading first to India and then, thanks
to the Arab traders, found itself further west into Constantinople. By the thirteenth
century, those very same Arab traders, desperate to cash in on this miracle
spice, without interference, had managed to pinpoint the origin of their prize nutmeg
all the way back to the Indonesian Islands. In what history can only prove
was an incredibly smart move, these Arab traders decided not to boast about their
discovery, choosing instead to keep the location a secret from their rival European traders.
Because of this, hundreds of expeditions were sent out in search of the
magical Spice Islands that promised so much in the way of flavor and wealth.
In fact, Christopher Columbus was trying to find a route to the Spice Islands
himself when he accidentally landed in the Americas instead. Now before long, however,
it really was only a matter of time the Banda Islands would become the
scene of one of the earliest European conflicts away from European soil. Now,
an island nearby to the Banda Islands named Malacca was growing, thriving, and
getting richer by the day. The news of the success of this island had
reached the Portuguese, who had an already established presence in Indian ports. The
Portuguese, under King Manuel the First, sent a representative named Diogo Lopez de
Sequiera to establish contact with the Sultanate on Malacca. At first, Seqierra was
well received by Sultan Mahmud Shah, but the Tamil Muslim community, who had
already had an established presence in Malacca, convinced the Sultan to eliminate the Portuguese
based on their treatment of the Muslims of Goa. This was in reference to
an attack just one year prior in which a Portuguese captain named Afonso de Albuquerque
had ruthsly overrun the Muslim forces there, with some captured prisoners being publicly mutilated
in the town square. Reacting to this report, Sultan Mahmud then ordered several
men from the Portuguese delegation to be captured and killed, but some of them
managed to escape with their ships. Thus, in April fifteen eleven, that
very same captain, Afonso de Albuquerque, who had committed those atrocities in Goa,
now arrived in Malacca with his armada and a very pointed objective. If
they were only to take Malacca out of the hands of the so called MUAs
while then Cairo and Mecha would be entirely ruined and Venice, a powerful trade
rival, would also be able to obtain no spices except from what her merchants
might buy from Portugal. The Portuguese launched their first attack on the twenty fifth
of July fifteen eleven, but this was met with failure. Albuquerque then launched
another attack on the fifteenth of August fifteen eleven. It proved successful, as
Malacca was captured on that day. Doubling down on the disrespect, the Portuguese
then constructed a fortress called Alfamosa, using rocks and stones taken from Muslim graves,
mosques and other religious buildings. Several churches and convents, a bishop's palace,
and administrative buildings such as the governor's palace were then also built. So
that's all good and well, but it's worth noting why this conquest of Malacca
was so vital and how it plays into the bigger narrative of our story.
You see, while Malacca itself was not one of the spice islands, it
was at that time the very epicenter of Asian trade. Everything seemed to flow
through Malacca, and whoever controlled it controlled the spice trade. Now that Malacca
was secure, the Portuguese set about in earnest trying to learn the location of
the fabled Spice Islands. With locals hesitant to talk, Albuquerque sent up three
different expeditions to figure it out once and for all. In order to make
sure they got to where they were going to. They couldn't rely on their
own pilots to navigate the thousands of islands in the region, and so forcibly
conscripted Malaysian sailors to guide them to the Spice Islands. Within a few months,
inevitably, they discovered what it was they were searching for the Banda Islands
on that first expedition, also claiming the title of being the very first Europeans
to even set foot on the Banda Island. They stayed for just over a
month, getting a lay of the land, making maps, and filling their
ships holds with as much nutmeg and mace as they possibly could. But the
Portuguese, despite their control of Malacca, did not have a strong enough force
in the region to take full control of the trade, and so had to
settle for being a mere participant in an already thriving industry, with nothing more
than an un steady foothold into what was considered to be the most lucrative trade
route in the world. Now it would be wrong at this point to believe
that the Bandanese were a simple tribal folk unaware of the world at large.
In fact, they were expert traders who had intentionally and knowingly cornered the market
for what was widely known to be one of the world's foremost commodities. After
the Europeans first arrival, they repelled and harassedes intruders for over a century.
When the Dutch East India Company, however, arrived in the sixteen hundreds,
they initially tried to ingratiate themselves with the locals, as the Dutch first encounter
of the native Bandanese people with their surprisingly complex society and history of agriculture.
The Dutch began simply enough by just establishing a trading post on Bandon Nira,
and from there slowly set about establishing their control over the nutmeg trade as well
as the people themselves. The Dutch used a variety of tactics to establish their
control, including building forts, introducing new crops and livestock, and using force
to subdue any local resistance. The Dutch slowly then began to impose heavier and
heavier taxes on the local populations and forced the Bandanese to work on Dutch owned
plantations, leading to widespread resentment and resistance, and one of the most outrageous
things the Dutch did was to sign a treaty with the local leader in which
they promised to protect the Banda Islands from their enemies in exchange for a monopoly
on the nutmeg trade. But instead of protecting the islanders, the Dutch turned
on them. They burned their villagers, killed their leaders, and enslaved the
survivors. They even went so far as to cut down all the nutmeg trees
on the other islands so that the Bandanese would be completely dependent on them for
spice. And even after this brutal an openly genocidal campaign nearly wiped out the
Bandanese, with estimates showing the Bandanese people's dwindling from their peak at almost fifteen
thousand to just one thousand. When the Dutch were done with them, they
still did not vanish from history, rather slipping to the peripheries of Dutch control
to run new trading operations and organize a bit of their very own nutmegs smuggling.
This episode is presented by Chemists in the Kitchen by lab X a YouTube
video series spotlighting the power of chemistry and how science and food can bring people
together. In each episode, real scientists walk you through things like making your
own pickles, the chemistry behind ceviche, or the formula for perfect homemade pretzels,
and so much more. Essentially, it's a love letter to science,
cooking, and individuality with some great tips on how you can apply real scientific
principles to your everyday cooking. On top of that, it's just a lot
of fun. Season two is airing right now, and you can catch up
with every episode for free on YouTube by searching Chemists in the Kitchen or by
simply going to YouTube dot com slash lab x nas. Again, that's YouTube
dot com slash lab x nas. From their own records, it seems that
sometime in the early centuries of the second millennium, the Bandanese began actively cultivating
their own variety of nutmeg, either due to the quality of their products the
Bandanese nutmeg is now the standard for flavor and potency, or simply clever economic
maneuvering. They quickly became the key port for the nutmeg trade frequented by Chinese,
Malay, Javanese, and then by the fifteenth century. The Persian merchants,
whose accounts inspired European dreams of the Spice Islands. Now after the Dutch
aggression towards them. With the Dutch believing they had subdued them, the Bandanese
decided they would now in fact strike deals with English force in direct opposition to
the Dutch and as a way to counteract some of the danger that the Dutch
forces posed, with fresh conviction and belief behind the Bandanese people. Because of
this, local officials pulled off a truly memorable switcheroo. When a Dutch official
showed up in sixteen o nine with one thousand soldiers and Japanese mercenaries at his
back, I rated local tribal leaders for supposedly breaking their monopoly deals. The
Bandanese tricked him into leaving most of his weapons and troops on a beach and
then walking inland to meet with him. Once they had the Dutch official alone,
with only a small ceremonial force accompanying him, they massacred him and his
soldiers in order to send a message to the Dutch leadership as a whole.
This Bandanese European conflict finally boiled over. In sixteen twenty one, jan Peizoon
Cohen, the man in charge of the Dutch East India Company operations in the
region, decided to test out his theory that the nutmeg trade would be easier
to control if the Dutch could simply clear out the Bandanese and replace them with
company linked set He found a pretext to attack band Basar, the largest island
and a hotbed of resistance, with one thousand and six hundred Dutch troops,
eighty Japanese mercenaries, and some regional slaves. Now, despite fierce resistance,
they swarmed the island, cut deals with local defectors, and managed to take
the island within days. His troops then scourged the islands, burning the villagers
and enslaving almost eight hundred people, who were mostly sent back to Batavia,
a trade center on Java. Many Bandanese, now too proud to give themselves
up, reportedly jumped off cliffs rather than surrender. The Dutch then divided the
Banda Islands into sixty eight plantations, but a large number of the ever enterprising
Banders hid in the jungles and waited until Cohen had left with his forces before
building canoes and paddling to other nearby islands to re establish their own trade network.
In what would be the first steps in the downfall of this trade monopoly,
in the late eighteenth century, a French explorer named Pierre Poivre managed to
covertly smuggle nutmeg tree seeds out of the Banda Islands under penalty of death and
bring them to the island of Mauritius. From there, the seeds were taken
to other tropical locations such as Granada and Penang, and nutmeg trees were planted
widely. Suddenly, the monopoly or nutmeg was broken and the spice became more
widely available. But there is one piece of Bandanese history that still sticks out
like a sore thumb, and one that is a great place for us to
end our story today. In the middle of all these conflicts, when the
English had wrestled control of islands from the Dutch and the Dutch desperately wanted them
back again, the two parties came together to see if they could come to
some sort of an accord, a trade agreement, if you will. The
Dutch were desperate to once again control the Banda Islands, which at the time
were the center of the economic world. The Dutch had also poured so many
resources into this area that they would do almost anything to get it back again.
So the English, perhaps realizing that they wouldn't be able to hold onto
the land forever, struck a deal with the Dutch. They would hand over
control of the banded islands back to the Dutch in return for a small,
barely one square mile speck of land that at this point was still somewhat swampy.
And if you're thinking at this point that this sounds like a terrible deal,
well you'd be right. And also you'd be wrong, because perhaps the
English had more foresight than any of us. That little swampy speck of land
that they've traded for happened to be none other than Manhattan. This show is
made entirely by me, Nick Charlie Key, with our theme music having been
made by the Enigma that is, the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. If you'd like
to support the show, the simplest way to do that is over on our
Patreon account. There's just one option, so for just two bucks a month,
you'll help me keep producing the show and in return, you'll get your
name forever etched onto our supporters Wall of Fame over on our website, and
then maybe listen out for your name in an upcoming episode. So until next
time, bau petito Yeah,