In 1667, two exhausted empires sat down at Breda in the Netherlands to end a war, and made one of history's most lopsided-looking property swaps. England kept the North American port it had seized three years earlier — New Amsterdam, promptly renamed New York. The Dutch kept, among other things, a speck of land in the Banda Sea barely three kilometres long, called Run. Contemporaries did not laugh at the Dutch. If anything, they thought the Dutch had taken the prize. Run grew nutmeg, and in the seventeenth century nutmeg was one of the most valuable substances on earth.
The reason was botanical monopoly. The nutmeg tree, Myristica fragrans — source of both nutmeg (the seed) and mace (its lacy red covering) — grew in exactly one place: the Banda Islands, a tiny volcanic cluster in what is now eastern Indonesia. Europeans prized the spice as a flavouring, a preservative and above all as medicine; during plague outbreaks it was touted as a protective, and demand became frenzied. A sack bought in the Bandas and landed in Europe could return a markup in the tens of thousands of per cent. Whoever controlled a few square miles of tropical forest controlled the entire world supply — a temptation no trading empire could resist. It remains quiz-setters' favourite proof that scarcity, not usefulness, sets a price.
The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, set out to seize it, and the story of how is one of the darkest in colonial history. The Bandanese, who had traded nutmeg freely with Asian and European buyers for centuries, refused to sell exclusively to the Dutch. In 1621 the VOC governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen answered with conquest and massacre: the islands' population, commonly estimated around fifteen thousand, was killed, enslaved or deported until only a remnant survived. The groves were parcelled out to Dutch planters worked by enslaved labour, and to keep prices high the company burned surplus nutmeg and soaked exported seeds in lime so no rival could plant them.
The last English toehold
One island escaped the net. English East India Company traders had reached Run in 1616, and its inhabitants swore allegiance to King James I, making the islet one of England's very first overseas possessions. A young officer named Nathaniel Courthope held Run against Dutch blockade for nearly four years, refusing every offer to withdraw, until he was killed in 1620 and resistance collapsed. England never forgot the claim, and decades of Anglo-Dutch commercial rivalry followed, flaring into outright war three times. The Treaty of Breda settled matters on the principle that each side kept what it held: the Dutch, who had retaken Run, kept it — and formally ceded their claim to Manhattan. It was less a trade than a mutual shrug, but the effect was the same: nutmeg for New York. There is a neat symmetry in the histories of the two islands, both acquired for trifles — the Dutch had bought Manhattan from the Lenape in 1626, under Peter Minuit, for trade goods worth sixty guilders, the deal folk memory rounds to twenty-four dollars.
For a century the Dutch monopoly held and the Bandas made fortunes for Amsterdam, if never for the Bandanese. Then it unravelled, as monopolies do. In the 1770s the French horticulturalist Pierre Poivre — his name literally "Peter Pepper" — organised the smuggling of nutmeg and clove seedlings out of the Dutch islands to Mauritius. British forces occupied the Bandas during the Napoleonic Wars and shipped nutmeg trees to their own colonies, including Penang, Ceylon and, fatefully, Grenada in the Caribbean. Grenada took to the crop so completely that it became known as the Isle of Spice, and an image of a nutmeg sits on its national flag to this day — a Banda Islands souvenir on the far side of the world.
The ledger of the swap makes irresistible reading. Manhattan became the financial capital of the planet, its name a byword for wealth; Run returned to obscurity, its nutmeg now worth pocket change, reachable only by boat and absent from most maps. But hindsight is cheap. In 1667 the Dutch exchanged a muddy river town of a few thousand people for a share of the most profitable commodity monopoly in existence, and every sensible observer approved. The lesson is not that the Dutch were fools; it is that no one, ever, knows which island is Manhattan.
Quiz nuggets
- By the Treaty of Breda (1667), the Dutch kept the nutmeg island of Run while England kept New Amsterdam — renamed New York.
- Nutmeg and mace both come from one tree, Myristica fragrans, which originally grew only in the Banda Islands.
- In 1621 the Dutch under Jan Pieterszoon Coen massacred and deported the Bandanese to seize the nutmeg monopoly.
- Englishman Nathaniel Courthope defended Run against the Dutch for nearly four years until his death in 1620.
- Nutmeg trees transplanted by the British made Grenada the "Isle of Spice" — a nutmeg appears on its flag.