Soldiers and Spice: Indonesia
Why the Dutch traded Manhattan for a speck of
rock in the South Pacific in 1667
From The New Yorker
August 13, 2001
In 1502, a Bolognese traveller named Ludovico
di Varthema left Venice for the East, returning six years later.
The book that he wrote about his travels, published in Rome in 1510,
and translated into several languages, attracted considerable attention
in Europe, both among readers interested in God--Varthema was the
first European to visit the holy places of Islam--and among those
interested in mammon. Varthema was also the first Westerner to describe
nutmeg trees, which he saw growing in the Bandas, a tiny archipelago
of nine islands about a thousand miles east of Java. The Bandas
were just one small part of the region that used to be called the
Spice Islands (and are now called the Moluccas), but they were the
only islands in the world on which round nutmeg grew.
The crucial role that nutmeg played in early colonial
history is hard to reconcile with the dusty tin of spice most Americans
take out of the rack at the end of the year to garnish their eggnog,
but at one time nutmeg was the most valuable commodity in the world,
after silver and gold. In addition to preserving and flavoring food,
nutmeg was believed to be a soporific, an emetic, a prophylactic
against plague, and a hallucinogen. The great naval powers of Europe--the
Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Spanish--all competed for control
of the trade in nutmeg and mace (the vermillion-colored membrane
that encases the nut), as well as in pepper, cinnamon, and cloves;
the profits from these spices could be used to finance an Eastern
empire. In the early seventeenth century, ten pounds of nutmeg cost
less than an English penny in the Banda Islands, and sold for £2.10
in Europe, a markup of sixty thousand per cent. A house that smelled
of nutmeg smelled like money. (Connecticut, in an early example
of putting its best foot forward, called itself the Nutmeg State,
although no nutmegs have ever grown within two thousand miles of
During the Middle Ages, Chinese, Arab, and Malay
traders brought nutmeg from the Far East to the Persian Gulf, where
camels packed it through Arabia to the Levant, and ships carried
it across the Mediterranean Sea to Venice. After the fall of Constantinople
to the Turks, in 1453, the overland spice road closed, and European
navigators began searching for a sea route to the Spice Islands.
When Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the
Indian Ocean, in 1498, he was looking for the "spiceries." Christopher
Columbus sailed in the other direction, with similar hopes, but
found the New World in his way.
Varthema's account of the "open roses" he had
seen in the Banda Islands was published in time to be read by Afonso
de Albuquerque, the Portuguese admiral who staked the first European
claim in the area by seizing the principal trading port, Malacca,
from the local sultan, Mahmud, in 1511. Afonso quickly dispatched
a crew of explorers in the direction in which he believed the Bandas
lay. When the sailors were within ten miles of the islands, they
claimed they could smell nutmeg on the wind. Upon arriving, the
crew loaded the ships' holds with nutmeg and mace--the golden fruit--carried
the cargo back to Seville, and sold it for a fortune.
Everyone knows the story of the Dutchman
Peter Minuit, who, in 1626, supposedly bought Manhattan from its
Native American inhabitants for twenty-four dollars' worth of beads
and trinkets--the first of the great New York swindles. The Treaty
of Breda, in 1667, under which Holland traded New Amsterdam, as
the Dutch called Manhattan, to the English for Pulau Run, one of
the Bandas, is less familiar. I learned about the exchange from
my tenth-grade history teacher, who turned European diplomacy into
a classroom game: whoever finagled the trade of Manhattan for that
tiny hunk of nutmeg-covered coral rock won first prize. I was reminded
of Run recently by "Nathaniel's Nutmeg," a book by Giles Milton,
which vividly narrates the entanglements between the Dutch and the
British that led up to the treaty. My wife's brother is a political
officer with the United States Embassy in Jakarta, and we had been
talking about visiting Indonesia someday. This spring, four hundred
and ninety-nine years after Varthema's departure, I went to smell
the nutmeg for myself.
We arrived in Jakarta in late April, just ahead
of twenty thousand Muslims, who were coming to the capital to show
their allegiance to the country's embattled President, Abdurrahman
Wahid. A reformer who had become President only nineteen months
earlier, Wahid was in the process of being impeached for incompetence
by the country's national assembly; he had turned out to be a much
better critic of the establishment than a leader of it. The Jakarta
Post carried pictures of demonstrations in East Java, Wahid's
stronghold, where the most fanatic of his supporters, the "suicide
squads," were reported to be in training. One photograph showed
a man being stabbed, another shot--both, apparently, no worse for
the experience, thanks to their "magical powers." It was the beginning
of the endgame for Wahid, a three-month drama that concluded two
weeks ago, with Wahid's dismissal and the elevation of the Vice-President,
Megawati Sukarnoputri, to the Presidency of the republic.
Pulau Run is too small to appear in any of the
world atlases I had consulted back in New York, but, according to
a guidebook, the National Museum in Jakarta owned several large
relief maps of Indonesia, and I thought they might give me a better
idea of where I wanted to go. The three-mile car trip to the museum
lasted more than an hour. The traffic was terrible, and the heat
and the air pollution make walking impossible. Much of the old colonial
city has been torn down; what we could see from the car was mostly
the aftermath of colonialism, slums right next to ostentatious malls
and skyscrapers built with money borrowed primarily from the West
(money that is now contributing to Indonesia's huge debt, which
is roughly equal to its gross national product). Near the museum,
we discovered the reason for the delay: yet another "demo," as the
Indonesians say. This one called on the central government to allow
Aceh, a region in Sumatra where fierce separatist fighting has occurred,
to secede from the union.
The maps were indeed impressive, and they illustrated
the challenge of holding together a nation of such fragmented geography.
Indonesia stretches from the northern tip of Sumatra to the eastern
edge of Irian Jaya, some three thousand miles, about the distance
from London to Baghdad. Seventy per cent of the nation is water.
There are several very big islands (Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and
parts of Irian Jaya and Kalimantan), a half dozen or so medium-sized
ones (including Bali, Lombok, Timor, and Flores), and more than
thirteen thousand small islands, half of which are uninhabited.
Many of the larger islands have their own cultural, and sometimes
ethnic, identity: Java is heavily Muslim, Bali is Hindu, Flores
is Christian. Two hundred and ten million people live in Indonesia,
making it the fourth most populous nation in the world. The only
modern nation with a comparable multitude of people, cultures, languages,
religions, and ethnicities was the Soviet Union, and the U.S.S.R.
achieved unity through invasion and occupation, and sustained it
for only seventy years.
I found the Banda Islands, a few tiny specks in
the midst of the South Pacific Ocean, but I couldn't distinguish
Pulau Run, and I asked the Indonesian woman who was leading our
small group whether she had heard of it.
"It's the island that the English traded to the
Dutch for Manhattan," I said.
"Yes, I have heard that story," she replied, "but
I don't believe it."
"But it's a fact," I protested. "It's history."
"But who were the Dutch and the English to trade
islands that didn't belong to them in the first place?"
True, but if justice alone were the standard
by which Indonesian history was told, large chunks of the past five
hundred years would have to be erased. The Portuguese were the first
European power in Indonesia, occupying the islands from 1511 until
the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the Dutch took over.
Early in the seventeenth century, the English managed to claim and
hold two of the Banda Islands, Ai and Run, two of the earliest colonies
in what would one day be the British Empire. (King James I's full
title was King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway, and
Puloroon.) But, with the Treaty of Breda, the English left their
holdings in the Bandas to the Dutch, and concentrated their regional
interests in the Malay Peninsula. Except for two brief periods of
British occupation at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Dutch
controlled most of the islands that now make up Indonesia until
The British claimed territories, and administered
them like miniature versions of the mother country. The Dutch claimed
commodities--chiefly spices but also coffee, tea, and teak--and
governed in a way that would maximize profits. The Dutch East India
Company (known as the V.O.C.) was the ruling authority, and its
typical approach was to monopolize trade, fix prices, and enslave
or remove the local population. In the Bandas, a ruthless Dutch
governor-general named Jan Pieterszoon Coen killed forty-four of
the orang kayas, or traditional chiefs, in 1621, transported
many of the native Bandanese off the islands, and brought in perkeniers,
or planters, to run the nutmeg plantations.
The Dutch resisted Indonesian independence when
it was declared, in 1945, and fought until 1949 to get their colonies
back. When Holland finally accepted the inevitability of an independent
Indonesia, it proposed that the new nation adopt a federal system--a
United States of Indonesia--in which different regions of the country
would have sovereignty, delegating certain powers to the federal
government. But Sukarno, who became the first President of the independent
nation, abandoned federalism, in part because he didn't trust the
Dutch--to many Indonesians, federalism is merely the old Dutch policy
of divide and rule--and in part because he believed that such a
physically decentralized country required a highly centralized government
to unify it. He divided the nation into provinces, each with its
own governor, but the provinces were limited in their ability to
make laws and levy taxes, and they couldn't police themselves. Even
mineral-rich provinces on the perimeter of the nation, such as Irian
Jaya or Aceh, were required to send all their revenues to the central
government in Jakarta, which then decided how much to give back.
(In 2000, new laws went into effect that allowed resource-rich provinces
to keep a percentage of their production.) This system of government
may have been necessary to unite the new nation, but it also created
one of the biggest political problems in the country today, which
is the provinces' desire for greater autonomy. B. J. Habibie, who
preceded Wahid, set in motion legislation designed to shift power
out of Jakarta and into the provinces, and Wahid continued those
policies. Now Megawati, Sukarno's fifty-four-year-old daughter,
may try to slow that decentralization process, and move Indonesia
closer to the centralized state that her father had in mind.
Sukarno, a famous womanizer, married numerous
times (some scholars say he had as many as nine wives); he left
Megawati's mother, Fatmawati, when Mega was young. He was a charismatic
leader who presented himself as the quintessential Indonesian, the
man in whom all the inconsistencies and contradictions of the country
were blended. His greatest achievement was to make the Sumatrans
and Javanese and Timorese and Balinese proud to call themselves
Indonesians. He created a national ideology (Pancasila) founded
on five common principles that the people of all the islands are
supposed to share: faith in God, civility, unity, representative
government, and social justice. He also helped to promote the national
language, Bahasa Indonesia.
In 1966, Sukarno was replaced by Suharto, the
Army general who became Indonesia's second President. Suharto ruled
not by personality but by military force, using a powerful and privileged
Army to hold the country together, a vast and deeply corrupt system
of patronage to buy the support of the Èlite, and a booming economy
to help salve the consequent loss of regional autonomy and personal
liberty. The boom ended in the Asian Crisis of 1997--the bursting
of the "emerging Asian markets" bubble, which was a favorite source
of foreign investment in the nineties. In May 1998, the Army opened
fire on a group of demonstrators, killing six students, and in the
widespread rioting that followed Suharto resigned. (The former President
is currently being prosecuted for corruption but is too feeble to
stand trial; his notorious son, Tommy Suharto, is on the lam somewhere
in Indonesia, having been sentenced to prison for eighteen months
on corruption charges. Two weeks ago, the judge who sentenced Tommy
After a brief interregnum under Habibie,
a gifted technocrat with little talent for politics, Wahid, who
had been a revered cleric (the "Muslim Pope," as one journalist
called him), became President in 1999, promising to reform the country's
political and economic institutions and bring the leaders of the
Suharto regime to justice. But all the separatist movements and
ethnic conflicts that had been suppressed by force under Suharto
began to rise to the surface. Aceh, Irian Jaya, and Central Kalimantan
have seen the worst fighting; in Kalimantan, the indigenous Dayak
people have been killing immigrants from the overcrowded island
of Madura (and resuming the traditional Dayak practice of taking
their enemies' heads). This instability weakened the currency and
the Indonesian stock market, and contributed to the ouster of Wahid.
Most Indonesians don't want to return to the military rule of Suharto,
but they do want a leader who can unite them, as Sukarno did and
the erratic Wahid did not. They see that potential in their new
President. Megawati has so far demonstrated few, if any, of her
father's leadership qualities (indeed, her political strategy, which
is to let everyone else do the talking, and then act, is more like
that of her father's usurper, Suharto), but by remaining so aloof
she has allowed people to invest her with whatever qualities they
want to believe she possesses. Her father proved, in the end, to
be a better nationalist than a democrat; whether Mega inherited
his megalomania remains to be seen.
In our second week in Jakarta, we went
to a dinner party given by Tamalia Alisjahbana, whose father was
a celebrated Indonesian writer. Tamalia keeps a salon in the capital,
where members of the political, social, and intellectual Èlite meet.
Spice was the theme for this evening--the dinner table was strewn
with nutmeg, cloves, and mace--and Tamalia had invited, as the guest
of honor, a man who, she said, could get me to Pulau Run, if anyone
could: the current orang kaya of the Banda Islands, Des
Dinner parties in Jakarta run on jam karet, or
"rubber time," a schedule that expands to include the accidental
nature of everyday life in this city of eleven million. We arrived
half an hour late--early by Indonesian standards--because we thought
some of the other bule (white faces) might not be on rubber
time. Already there were three Portuguese academics who had been
visiting East Timor, a former colony of Portugal; another Portuguese
expat, from the embassy in Jakarta; and a German Jesuit priest,
the author of a guidebook to Jakarta.
We were sipping the nutmeg-flavored cordials that
Tamalia had provided--the taste was like Coca-Cola without the fizz--when
Des Alwi, a heavyset older man with gray hair, caramel-colored skin,
and a rolling walk came in with his daughter Tanya, "the original
spice girl," as she introduced herself. Des promptly installed himself
in a low chair, watching with a sleepy, shrewd expression as the
rest of us conversed. He was wearing a navy-blue military-style
jacket, with breast pockets and epaulettes, and matching pants.
In the Bandas, Des lives like an English country baronet, except
that the fish are his hounds and the coral is his hunt, and when
he returns from his forays into his watery estate one of his men
kneels at his feet and strips off the master's aqua socks rather
than his riding boots. In Jakarta, where Des spends much of his
time, he is a businessman, wheeling and dealing in the marble hotel
There are seven orang kayas in the Bandas,
each with separate authority on his respective island; Des is the
overall leader. He inherited his position from his mother's father.
(In the Bandas, the chain of succession passes through the females
of one generation to the males of the next, a system begun in the
seventeenth century after the Dutch governors started killing the
sons of the orang kayas.) Like all Bandanese, Des is a mixture of
other ethnicities, in his case Javanese, Sumatran, Moroccan, and
Chinese. His mother's father, Said Baadilla, was known as the Pearl
King of the Aru Sea (he once gave a pearl "as big as a pigeon's
egg," Tamalia told me, to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands) and
was married to a Javanese princess. Baadilla had a fleet of forty
pearl schooners, one of which was captained by the man who became
Des's father. His father's father, Prince Umar of Palembang, a Sumatran,
became the head of the powerful Sultan of Ternate's cavalry in the
Spice Islands. In the nineteen-thirties, mother-of-pearl was replaced
by Bakelite as the preferred material in high-quality buttons, and
this invention, combined with the worldwide Depression, helped drive
Des's maternal grandfather into bankruptcy.
Des's own life is intertwined with many of the
major events in the creation of Indonesia, and is almost as unlikely.
When he was eight, in 1936, he was swimming off the pier in the
harbor at Banda Neira, the most heavily populated of the Banda Islands,
when a Dutch ship pulled up to the dock and two Indonesians in tropical
white suits were escorted off. The Indonesians asked the Dutch captain
if he would help with their luggage, but he answered, "Let the Reds
carry their own bags." Des clambered out of the water, and one of
the men asked him if he knew where to find Dr. Tjipto Mangunkusumo,
a political exile who had been confined to the Bandas. Des said
he believed the man lived on the other side of Neira, but he added
that there was another exile living close by, and he took the men
Later, when the newcomers were settled in a house
in town, they saw Des passing by on his way to school, and called
him in to thank him. Only then did he learn that they were Mohammad
Hatta and Sutan Sjahrir, two of the three founding fathers of the
soon-to-be-independent state. (The third, Sukarno, had been exiled
to another remote island.) The Dutch had sent them to the Bandas,
by this time an isolated backwater; but, as it turned out, the cradle
of Dutch colonial power was to be the cradle of Indonesian nationalism.
Des became a kind of adopted son to Sjahrir, who taught him Dutch
and English. While Des played, Hatta and Sjahrir developed some
of the core principles of Indonesian independence.
In 1942, the Japanese seized Indonesia from the
Dutch. Sjahrir and Hatta went to Jakarta. Many Indonesians initially
welcomed the Japanese, believing that Japan would be more open to
Indonesian independence than Holland had been. Des, now fourteen,
took a boat to Ambon--the capital of the Moluccas--and eventually
got to Jakarta, where he joined Hatta and Sjahrir in their underground
efforts to promote independence. In 1945, he was wounded in the
leg by a mortar while fighting in Surabaya, a city in East Java.
Shortly afterward, Sjahrir arranged for Des to attend school in
London, where he received a degree in radio communications; one
of his classmates was Tunku Abdul Rahman, who later became the first
prime minister of Malaysia. When Des returned, he became a diplomat
for the newly formed Republic of Indonesia, serving as a chargÈ
d'affaires in Switzerland, Germany, the Philippines, and Malaysia,
and acting as Sukarno's diplomatic protocol officer during his European
tour of 1954-55.
In the late nineteen-fifties, Sukarno dissolved
the national assembly and introduced Guided Democracy, a system
of government that he once explained by saying, "O.K., now, my dear
brothers, it is like this, and I hope you agree." Around the same
time, Des, who was now married, with young children, joined a number
of other Indonesians in the Permesta Rebellion, which was, in part,
an attempt to force Sukarno to distance himself from the P.K.I.,
Indonesia's Communist Party. The rebellion failed, and Des left
Indonesia for Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia, where he remained with
his family. In the mid-sixties, Sukarno provoked a disastrous confrontation
with Malaysia, and Des was called back to Indonesia to help mediate
between the two countries. In the years that followed, he used his
political connections to secure the Volvo dealership in Jakarta,
and became adept in the ways of what Indonesians call "KKN"--corruption,
collusion, and nepotism, which was how business was done during
the Suharto era, and, for the most part, still is.
In 1971, he wrote and produced a film, starring
his handicapped son, called "The Grandson," a mixture of his own
life and Nicholas Nickleby's--a poor orphan boy is beset by hardships
until he is discovered to have a rich grandmother living in Banda.
The film was a box-office smash, and Des used the money to convert
his grandfather's former pearl-fishery warehouse in Banda into a
hotel, and began to promote the Banda Islands as a tourist destination,
with considerable success. He also established a factory in Malaysia
to assemble transistor radios. In the early eighties, Des impressed
Suharto with his agricultural ability by introducing a cocoa plant
from Malaysia, which dramatically increased Indonesian cocoa production.
This success led to Suharto's interest in nutmeg, and in 1995 Des
obtained a promise from the Indonesian government to invest two
million dollars to revive nutmeg production in the Bandas. He had
been cultivating nutmeg since 1997, and had come to Tamalia's party
to talk about his progress.
Dinner was served. Des was quiet at first,
except to comment favorably on the tamarind-seed flavoring in the
tuna--a Banda touch. His English is good, but he is partial to idioms,
and needs to pause to remember them. ("Tamalia, the tuna is--how
do you call it?--finger-lickin' good.") But when he had finished
his sagu pudding, a tapioca-like dessert made from palm fibre, he
picked up one of the nutmegs from the table, held it up for all
to see, and shook it. The nutmeg could be heard rattling around
inside the polished outer casing.
"Did you know," Des began, "that nutmeg was the
first global commodity? Long before sneakers, there was nutmeg.
Even today, it is hard to find a flavoring so widely spread throughout
the world. The Chinese use nutmeg as a preservative in sausage.
The Japanese put it in fish curry. In India, it is in the Mogul
dishes. Germans enjoy it in wurst and on sauerkraut. The Dutch sprinkle
it on fish and mashed potatoes and put it inside--what do you call
them?--croquettes. And, of course, nutmeg is the secret ingredient
Was it true that the world's first global commodity
was an agent in Coke, a symbol of twenty-first-century globalism?
Coca-Cola will neither confirm nor deny this. But, according to
Des, Coke is the biggest consumer of nutmeg in the world.
"The proportion of nutmeg to the other ingredients
is eight-tenths of one per cent," Des declared. "The company has
written me two letters, asking for Banda nutmegs." He rattled the
nut again. "So you see, it's like this: the world might be able
to go on without nutmeg, but it isn't the same world with it."
He went on to say that only a fraction of the
world's nutmeg still came from the Bandas, and that the spice was
in danger of disappearing from the islands altogether. "And this
is our heritage. Six thousand of the Bandanese died because of this
nutmeg." Several of the Westerners glanced down at the table. "So
this is what I have decided to do with my life, what remains of
it--to save Banda's nutmeg."
After dinner, we returned to the living room to
watch some video footage Des had shot of his nutmeg plantation in
Banda. He made a peculiar calling sound--Oooo, Oooo--the sound,
I later learned, nutmeg workers use to call each other in the jungle
(it penetrates the heavy foliage), and several of his men hustled
in from outside and set up the VCR. (Fiddling with VCRs is beneath
the dignity of an orang kaya. ) After about half an hour,
someone could be heard snoring in the dark; the Jesuit historian
had fallen asleep.
Tamalia said, "Why don't we fast-forward a bit,
Des?" No response. "Too much nutmeg, Des." Des took umbrage at this
remark. "Tamalia," he said indignantly, "you can never have too
Des promised to take me with him the next
time he went to the Banda Islands, toward the end of May. In the
weeks that followed, this plan became more elaborate, as a Dutch
delegation joined the expedition, led by Holland's ambassador to
Indonesia, Baron Schelto van Heemstra, a stocky, fair-haired man
in his fifties. Last year, Holland helped Indonesia in its efforts
to nominate Banda as a World Heritage site, which would allow it
to receive money provided by a UNESCO-sponsored program. Des hopes
that Banda's application will be approved in 2002.
On the flight to Ambon, where we would spend the
night before leaving for the Bandas, Des was in very good humor.
He talked of holding a ceremony on Pulau Run to cancel the old trade
for New Amsterdam.
"Then I will become King of Manhattan. John, what
do you think, it's a good idea, no? I am eying the United Nations
building." He said he had sent a telegram to Mayor Giuliani, proposing
Pulau Run as Manhattan's sister island, but so far he had received
Ambon is a port city in the middle of the Moluccas,
and was the center of the spice trade for centuries. For the past
two and a half years, the city has been the site of intermittent
fighting between Christians and Muslims. Facts in Indonesia tend
to be debatable, whether they are facts about history or facts about
what happened last night. As best as can be determined, part of
the trouble in Ambon started when Bugi migrants from Sulawesi arrived
in Ambon looking for work. Tensions rose between the Christians
in Ambon and the Buginese, who are predominantly Muslim, and the
spark came in January of 1999, when a Bugi migrant apparently demanded
money at knifepoint from a Christian minibus driver. A quarrel ensued,
machetes were produced, and within two months more than a hundred
and fifty people were dead, and thousands had been left homeless.
Many churches and mosques were burned. Last year, much of Pattimura
University, which had one of the leading marine-science research
centers in the world, was destroyed. Laskar Jihad, Indonesia's homegrown
fundamentalist Islamic movement, has been using the events in Ambon
to recruit followers, sending them out to the Moluccas to fight
Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in
the world, but it is not a Muslim state. Indonesians have always
prided themselves on religious tolerance--Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam,
and Christianity have all flourished in the islands over the centuries,
and each religion has been more or less peacefully absorbed into
the pantheist and mystical practices that remain popular in the
villages, especially on Java. But without censorship and military
rule to sustain the myth of the big, happy Indonesian family, fault
lines are beginning to appear throughout the society. To those who
are pessimistic about Indonesia's future, the religious conflict
in Ambon offers a taste of what the whole nation could be like one
day. Thirty-two years of Suharto's authoritarian rule, which included
the massacre of an estimated half-million alleged Communists in
1965-66--an act of twentieth-century mass murder that is still rarely
discussed in public--created a reservoir of grievances that Indonesians
have only just begun to express.
Ambon had been relatively quiet in the month prior
to my visit, and I thought the Ambassador's presence would provide
extra security. As it turned out, I was wrong.
That night, the Ambassador had organized
a kind of plenary session in a hotel called Amans, in Mardika, a
border area in Ambon between Muslim and Christian neighborhoods.
The Dutch were driven from their hotel in a big tour bus, with an
Army escort. The guests, many of whom had been in the Balkans in
the mid-nineties, consisted of about thirty relief workers from
different aid groups now serving in Ambon. (Des, who was staying
in a hotel in a Muslim part of Ambon, did not attend.) The Ambassador,
a man of very deliberate movements--he speaks slowly, gestures slowly,
and even blinks slowly, in a way that conveys gravitas--began the
evening by welcoming everyone to the dinner, saying that he had
come to Ambon to learn and to help. During dinner, he and his staff
went from table to table, asking the guests for their opinions on
the causes of the violence, but no consensus was reached. Some people
talked about the socio-economic disparities between Christians and
Muslims; others spoke about the Army, which is seen to have a vested
interest in provoking and prolonging the unrest, because this proves
that the provinces can't manage without it.
At around nine-thirty, the Ambassador stood up
and said that we should leave in order to beat the ten-o'clock curfew.
As we were walking to the bus, a bomb went off a few streets away,
the soldiers took cover, and gunfire erupted. Then the lights went
out, both in the hotel and on the street. We retreated to the covered
parking lot behind the hotel, where some racily clad women from
the hotel's karaoke bar joined us. After about ten minutes, the
lights came on again. More bombs exploded. Many of these bombs are
made by children, and most of the casualties are the bomb-makers
Finally, it began to rain hard and the explosions
stopped. We climbed aboard the bus with about half a dozen soldiers
and drove the short distance back to the hotel. Intermittent explosions
and gunfire continued until dawn.
The following morning, the Ambonese went about
their business as though nothing had happened. People headed toward
the market with umbrellas; boys were selling a daily newspaper with
headlines that read "tragedi maluku"--the Moluccan Tragedy; armed
soldiers squatted under the palm trees, smoking clove cigarettes;
and rickshaw drivers cycled slowly past the hotel, looking in vain
Seven people were dead, all Christian. Everyone
was killed during the period when the lights went out--black-clad
assassins with standard Army-issue weapons had broken into homes
close to the hotel we were dining in, killed the occupants, and
set the houses on fire.
The Ambassador's party had intended to fly to
the Bandas in a small military aircraft, but the Army general in
charge of Ambon declared that the situation was too dangerous for
planes to take off. The new plan was to proceed to the islands on
board the Rinjani, one of two big German-built passenger boats that
travel between Surabaya and Irian Jaya, stopping at islands in between.
But how to get the Ambassador safely from his hotel in a Christian
neighborhood to the Muslim-controlled pier where the big ships docked?
At one point, the plan was to take a speedboat from the Christian
part of the harbor and board the liner at sea, but this was scrapped
because the speedboat drivers, who were Christians, couldn't pull
up alongside a Muslim boat.
Around noon, a telephone call came from the assistant
governor of Ambon, who said the Army could no longer guarantee the
Ambassador's safety, and that he should return to Jakarta immediately.
Soldiers were already beginning to take up defensive positions outside
in the street, preparing for the reprisals that were expected that
The news that the Ambassador wouldn't be coming
to Banda after all enraged Des. "It is all political!" he told me
later. "The assistant governor is only jealous because the Dutch
want to go to Banda, where the situation is so much better than
Ambon!" But the Dutch were leaving, and the best Des could do was
"Where are you going?" Indonesians ask
travellers they encounter, not "Where are you from?," as Americans
ask. This is partly in the hope that you will employ their assistance
in getting to wherever you are going, but it's also because people
always seem to be going somewhere else in Indonesia. On the Rinjani
were former refugees returning to Irian Jaya, and new refugees fleeing
the violence in Ambon, taking everything with them--their sewing
tables and their beds, sometimes with invalid parents atop them--crowded
into the steerage berths or sleeping out on the open deck in the
I went out onto the deck. The daylight was fading
quickly, as it does in the Tropics, and land and sea were dissolving
into a single shade of Conradian gray. I tried to picture the map
I had seen in the museum and work out where we were, but the country's
geography is hard to visualize. Land takes on the characteristics
of a people--the building style, the names of roads, the advertising--but
the sea is the same everywhere, and it is a fragile weld. In the
absence of a national landscape, one must rely on the ideals of
nationalism, which one encounters constantly in Indonesia's newspapers,
in the discourse of its politicians, and in the conversations of
ordinary people. But Indonesia's nationalism often seems to be at
odds with its geography (as it was designed to be), and in the long
run the sea may prove to be the more powerful force.
On the boat, I met a man named Alan, who owned
a hotel somewhere near Des's hotel, on the main island of Banda
Neira. He talked gloomily of the troubles in Ambon, and of how they
had destroyed his business. "Now no one comes to my hotel anymore.
We used to have people from all over who came for the diving, but
now all the embassies post notices warning people not to come. And
Banda is not bad! Banda is peaceful! I think if only the travel
guides would come back and see, they would say Banda is O.K., but
they don't come."
The Banda Islands form one district within the
province of the Moluccas. Until January of this year, the provincial
governments had the authority to appoint the bupati, or heads of
the districts, but a recent change in the laws, giving districts
the power to choose their own leaders (partly as a way of countering
the fear that the newly empowered provinces will decide to secede
from Indonesia, as East Timor did two years ago), has disrupted
the old hierarchy, and the relationship between Ambon and the Bandas
reflects that. Flights to the Banda Islands used to go through Ambon,
which gave Ambon a share of the tourist dollars, but because of
the unrest air service has been suspended. The Bandas are trying
to get the routing changed, so that tourists can fly directly from
other provinces. But Ambon hasn't relinquished its authority, even
though that relationship has all but destroyed the islands' tourist
Des plays no official role in these negotiations,
but he is using his political connections to help the Bandas, and
Alan said he admired Des's efforts. "Some people don't like Des,"
he told me, "because they think he is a--what is it?--a bully. But
he always promotes Banda, and that's good for all of us."
I asked Alan what he thought should be done in
Ambon, and he said the Army should take over, as it would have done
under Suharto. "Under Suharto, no problems, yah? Under Wahid, many,
many problems. I think for the poor people Suharto was better."
But what about all the rich friends of Suharto
who pocketed money that was intended to help the poor?
"Yes, but the poor people, they don't care about
the corruption, as long as they are safe and can do their work.
Under Suharto, they were safe. Now they are not safe--and they are
more poor, because they can't work."
The dock at Banda Neira was crowded with
people who had come to greet the Ambassador. When they saw only
me, looking less than ambassadorial in coffee-stained shorts, their
A blue-suited security guard at the gate of the
harbor barked out a ceremonial greeting to Des.
"What did he say?" I asked.
"He said, 'Welcome to your kingdom.' "
Across the quiet water of the harbor, I could
see the dark silhouette of Banda's volcano, a perfect cone shape,
looming. Inland, some spotlights shone on the walls of the old hilltop
fort, Belgica, built in the shape of a pentagon by the Dutch in
1611, a near-copy of which once stood in lower Manhattan. We walked
to Des's hotel, the Maulana, which is right next to the pier. The
few remaining staff brought out cakebread and nutmeg jam, a delectable
quince-like confection, and nutmeg-flavored drinks.
As we ate on the veranda of the Dutch colonial-style
building, Des pointed out pictures of himself with Princess Diana,
Jacques Cousteau, and Mick Jagger, all of whom had been guests of
the Maulana in better times. Since the troubles in Ambon began,
fewer than twenty tourists have stayed at the hotel. Banda has remained
mostly peaceful during that time, although there was a bad period
in the spring of 1999, when a clash between Christians and Muslims
escalated into violence. As in Ambon, houses were set on fire. Des's
hotel became a sanctuary for some two hundred and fifty people who
felt unsafe in their homes. One night, a mob of three hundred gathered
outside, calling on Des to send out the Christians. He put on his
white prayer clothes and black kepi, and went outside to confront
Tamalia Alisjahbana calls Des a "practical romantic."
The idealism that he had learned at the feet of Hatta and Sjahrir
was hard to sustain as an Indonesian businessman, but it returned
as he left his hotel to face the mob.
"What do you want?" he asked the mob.
"We want to kill all the Christians!"
"Over my dead body!"
The Bandanese in the mob were not prepared to
kill an orang kaya; the Ambonese had no such scruples.
"Don't you remember," Des cried, "that in the
Koran Muhammad says it is a sin to harm people who have come to
a place for sanctuary?"
With this appeal, Des managed to hold off the
mob for two nights, until a destroyer came from Ambon and took all
but a few Christians off the islands. For his bravery, Des was awarded
the Mahaputra, the highest civilian honor in Indonesia.
That scene was difficult to imagine on this beautiful
evening; the colonnades and the curving second-story balustrade
conspired to hide conflict in the graceful lines of the colonial
architecture, which had achieved a harmonious marriage of East and
West in art that could never be managed in politics. We finished
our meal, and Des retired to his house on the hill above the hotel,
saying that tomorrow we would visit the nutmeg plantation. I stayed
on the veranda, savoring the feeling of having finally arrived.
For about five minutes, I was as far away from New York as I had
ever been; then some young men appeared from the shadowy street
outside, turned on the TV, found MTV, and sat transfixed before
the Spice Islands of celebrity back home.
The Dutch monopoly on nutmeg lasted about two
hundred and fifty years. But local uprisings, lazy and corrupt perkeniers,
and a variety of natural disasters (on a single day--April 2, 1778--the
Bandas suffered an earthquake, a tidal wave, a volcanic eruption,
and a hurricane) made the monopoly difficult and expensive to maintain.
The British, who occupied the Bandas for a total of about fourteen
years, took seedlings and cultivated them in Grenada; a quarter
of the world's nutmeg now comes from there. Nutmeg's miraculous
health-giving properties were debunked, its popularity as a flavoring
declined in European cuisine, and the advent of refrigeration reduced
demand for the use of the spice as a preservative. By the time the
Japanese invaded the Bandas, in 1942, the nutmeg plantations were
in steep decline, and two attempts by the Indonesian government
to revive them ended in failure.
Des's nutmeg plantation is on the site
of one of the old Dutch perkens, on the nearby island of
Lonthor. We made the trip there in his outboard boat. Lonthor has
a village in the highlands; the rest of the island is covered with
jungle. As we approached it, Des pointed to the bottom of the ocean,
twenty feet down but perfectly clear, where an old Dutch urn rested,
encrusted with coral. Near the shore were the ruins of a Dutch building,
and beside that Des had set up a greenhouse to nurture his seedlings.
Nutmeg is a dioecious tree, which means that some
plants have pistils (the females) and some have stamens (the males).
Since the females give more fruit, it is important to sex the seedlings
early, before replanting, for the greatest possible yield. "What
I have learned," Des said, "is that nutmeg has the same nature as
a human being. From the flower to the fruit takes nine months, as
with humans." He pointed to several two-year-old trees. One was
approximately twice as high as the other. "I will bet a thousand
dollars the tall one is the female. Again, just like human beings.
The girls reach puberty more quickly than the boys."
We headed into the jungle. Very tall tropical
almond trees grow throughout the plantation, providing the nutmeg
trees with necessary shelter from the tropical sun. We passed some
of the plantation workers' houses, made of bamboo and palm thatch,
with wet laundry hanging outside, soaked by a recent downpour. The
workers are paid in nutmeg--half of what they pick, they keep. Nutmeg
has no particular season; the fruit ripens all year long, so its
harvest supplies the islanders with a steady income. With the price
of ground nutmeg currently between nine and ten dollars a pound-growing
demand for nutmeg from Eastern European countries has raised the
price in recent years--people in the islands can subsist on what
they pick. In the absence of a tourist economy, fishing and nutmeg
are the only two industries the Bandas have.
Des pointed to some of the nutmeg trees that were
more than two hundred and fifty years old. They no longer bear fruit.
"We learned that the reason the plantation was dying out," he said,
"is that you can't grow healthy new trees from trees that are more
than sixty years old. You see, in Banda we have green pigeons that
eat the nutmeg seeds. Having a few seeds in their stomachs helps
with their digestion. And when these birds expel the seeds, complete
with its own fertilizer, a new tree grows. But if the nuts come
from trees more than sixty years old, the seedlings are no good.
They are weak and--what do you call it?--scrawny." He pointed to
a couple of unhealthy young trees that had been generated from the
seeds of older trees. "Again, it is just like with human beings.
Old men don't produce the healthiest children."
I asked if the nutmeg plantation could pay for
"No, not yet. In five years, when all the trees
we have planted begin to bear fruit, then maybe we can become a
major supplier in Holland, perhaps establish our own brand--who
wouldn't want a taste of Banda in their food? But now we just sell
what we harvest to the Chinese in Surabaya. The next few years will
be the test of whether we can survive. If tourism to Banda was good,
I could use the money from my hotel to pay for the plantation, but
because of the problems in Ambon I can't do that. And although the
Indonesian government pledged two million dollars to help me get
started, only twenty thousand has ever been paid. We asked the World
Wildlife Fund to help, but so far no funds have been made available."
Deep in the sodden jungle, we came upon some nutmeg
trees that were loaded with the golden fruit. The trees were about
forty feet high, the size of a pear tree, but with short, bushy
branches and glossy, dark--green leaves. The fruit's flesh, yellow
with a faint orange blush, is about the size of a nectarine and
has the downy texture of a peach. When ripe, the fruit splits, and
the bright-red casing of mace shows inside. The workers core this
fruit with a paring knife and leave it lying under the trees; the
mace and the nuts are dried in the sun. The nutmeg itself is a kernel
about the size of a plum pit. Medieval travellers used to carry
whole nutmegs and graters in their pockets, to season their meat
Des cracked a nut for me, and I chipped a piece
off the enclosed nutmeg with my thumbnail and inhaled. It didn't
smell like Christmas anymore. Now it smelled like trouble.
Since the next boat back to Ambon wouldn't
be in port for another week, I had plenty of time to get over to
Pulau Run, which is fourteen miles from Banda Neira. As it turned
out, time was necessary, because we had to wait for the east wind,
which blows from mid-May through October, to slacken enough to permit
us to cross the sea in Des's powerboat. While we waited, Des took
me to see different corners of his kingdom. We followed dolphins,
fed Des's pet sharks, which are kept in large pens in the ocean,
explored the ghostly European quarter of the town, and I climbed
the volcano on the nearby island of Banda Gunung Api, and swam back
to Banda Neira.
The islands had all the elements of paradise,
at least in the sense in which tour operators use the word, but
it was hard not to feel bad for the Bandanese. In the market, the
wood carvings and pearls went unbought, and the festively painted
Ice Cream Shoppe was always empty. In the mornings, Des was full
of enthusiasm for showing me some new aspect of the islands' beauty,
but by late afternoon he seemed tired and depressed, as though the
effort to remain optimistic about the Bandas' prospects exhausted
One evening, Des looked up at the sky and declared
that tomorrow we could make the passage to Pulau Run if we left
early. I got up before dawn and ate my cakebread and nutmeg jam,
listening to the now familiar sounds of the morning: bristles sweeping
wet leaves from the concrete, the drowsy slap of rubber flip-flops
in the kitchen, the crowing cocks, and fishermen singing as they
paddled their dugout canoes out of the harbor.
The water in the harbor was calm, but in the open
sea we encountered four-to-six-foot swells, almost more than the
boat could manage. Run, in the hazy distance, looked forbidding,
its western headlands buttressed with cliffs and covered with jungle.
After about an hour and a half of rough seas, we made the lee of
the island and headed for the village. Landing on the beach, we
tied the boat to a log and walked up some stone steps to the house
of the local camat, or mayor, who produced some chairs and
sweet tea for us.
The village is built along the hillside, and is
traversed by two concrete walkways that are connected by steps at
either end. It has about twelve hundred inhabitants. The island
has no fresh water, no telephones, no cars, a few TVs, and only
occasional electricity. Night life consists of the call to evening
prayers and karaoke.
We went along one walkway, then turned around
and followed the other back. On both sides were blue and white houses
with bright tiled floors. Exotic birds squawked from inside many
of the homes. Along the walkways, families had spread out recently
harvested spices on rattan trays to dry. Mace, nutmeg, cloves, and
coffee were browning in the hot sun. A crowd of boys tagged along
behind me, and astonished cries of "To-reest!" filled the quiet
When we returned, Des sat down in the camat's
house to rest, and I climbed up a slippery cliff and walked through
the jungle until I came to the ruins of a Dutch nutmeg factory.
The rusted iron girders of the two-story structure were all that
remained, with the white sky for a roof, and the vast, empty ocean
showing through the sides. "I have seen the mysterious shores,"
Marlow says of the East in Conrad's story "Youth," where a stealthy
Nemesis lies in wait, pursues, overtakes so many of the conquering
race, who are proud of their wisdom, of their knowledge, of their
strength." By valuing the spice over the islands that produced it,
the Dutch policy contained its own nemesis, because, as the commodity
declined, so did the Dutch East India Company's investment in its
colonies. When the V.O.C. finally closed its books on the Dutch
East Indies, the company was twelve million guilders in debt.
As I stood beside this ruined trade tower, the
breeze brought the sweet-savory, vaguely medicinal smell of nutmeg.
I followed the scent and found a family engaged in harvesting the
fruit in a small clearing in the jungle. A woman and four young
children sat beneath a few trees left over from the Dutch perken,
splitting fruit and collecting the mace-covered seeds in a rattan
basket. An older boy was up in a tree with a long bamboo pole that
had a knife attached to it, slicing fruit from the branches, while
a young man, bare-chested and muscular, loaded the cored seeds into
The children looked startled, but the woman on
the ground pointed at her pile and smiled, pleased with her harvest.
Like so many before me, I felt the desire to trade. I had a Yankees
cap in my bag, a token of my island, which I had brought from home
as a gesture of cultural exchange--but the woman didn't want it.
So I took out some money and filled my pockets with nutmegs to take
back to Manhattan.
Copyright © John Seabrook 2003. All rights
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