Happy Times

For a very long time the Bandanese people had it extremely good. There was no raja or king or whatever to tell them what to do. Only Orang Kaya, vil­lage eld­ers, but they were…, well, old! So Life was great! They were in the unique pos­i­tion, that their little group of islands was the only place in the world, where nut­meg and mace grew nat­ur­ally. They traded with Arabs, Chinese and Malay, made a good liv­ing off it and, because grow­ing nut­meg does not actu­ally involve much phys­ical work, spend their time fish­ing or hanging out in the shade on the beach with friends.

First Encounter Of A Smelly Kind

Now, the Bandanese had known for quite some time that a lot of their pro­duce ended up on the other side of the world with people with unin­tel­li­gible names in strange coun­tries and were there­fore delighted when they finally got a chance to meet some of them in 1512. Those guys, Por­tuguese as it turned out, filled up their ships with spices and then left Banda mostly to them­selves for the rest of the cen­tury, con­cen­trat­ing mainly on the north­ern clove islands of Maluku. Not that the Bandanese were really heart­broken over that fact, since those new­comers always insisted on wear­ing heavy long clothes at all times, while hav­ing an aver­sion to reg­u­lar baths at the same time.

Second Encounter Of A Smelly Kind

In 1599 every­body in the Banda archipelago knew that some­thing fishy was going to hap­pen or appear, when Gunung Api, the little but volat­ile 666m high vol­cano, star­ted rum­bling again after a long time of inactiv­ity. And sure enough, not long after another group of pale sweaty guys turned up, this time from the Neth­er­lands. The Dutch then did not waste any time estab­lish­ing trad­ing posts, buy­ing as much over prized spices as their ships could hold and then set sail for Europe leav­ing behind a few sail­ors to look after their interests. Now when the Por­tuguese found out that the Dutch had arrived they were less than happy and for the next few years those nations tried their best to kick each other in the crotch.

The Sneaky English

In all that con­fu­sion the Eng­lish, under the com­mand of one Cap­tain James Lan­caster, thought this was a rather splen­did time to sneak in and open up a trad­ing post on outly­ing Pulau Run and an out­post on Pulau Ay in 1602, with the full inten­tion of ser­i­ously piss­ing off the Dutch and maybe mak­ing some money trad­ing with a bit of spice on the side. When the Dutch came back a short while later, they were indeed, and not sur­pris­ingly, well pissed off, which the Eng­lish found quite amus­ing. The Dutch, try­ing to be clever, then retali­ated by hand­ing the Bandanese a con­tract giv­ing them exclus­ive trad­ing rights within the whole archipelago. The Bandanese obvi­ously thought those crazy dutch guys were tak­ing the piss, con­sid­er­ing that they only wanted spice but brought noth­ing use­ful to trade with them. But because dutch Admiral Her­mans­zoon seemed quite agit­ated about the whole con­tract thing the Bandanese did not want to have him hav­ing a heart attack on their con­science, some of the Orang Kaya signed that fate­ful con­tract on May 23, 1602 just to get poor Her­mans­zo­ons blood pres­sure down.

The Naïve Dutch

The dutch fleet then departed,leaving behind a small force, which mys­ter­i­ously van­ished over the fol­low­ing years, but more likely just enjoyed the island life too much to return home. So when dutch Admiral van der Hagen arrived in Banda in 1605 he found the Eng­lish still there, trad­ing hap­pily and unmo­les­ted with the loc­als. He then decided to renew Her­mans­zo­ons con­tract, because of it’s incis­ive and obvi­ous suc­cess. For whatever bizarre reason he even thought he had come to an under­stand­ing with Cap­tain Col­thurst, that the Eng­lish would honor the dutch claim to a trad­ing mono­poly in Banda. Think­ing he had everything sor­ted out in the best interests for the Dutch East India Com­pany he left hap­pily, look­ing for­ward to smash a mutiny in Ambon.

Status Quo

But cheeky the Eng­lish actu­ally and quite obvi­ously to every­body else never had any inten­tion to leave, so the Dutch were once more sur­prised and annoyed to see their rivals again in 1609 when the next dutch fleet arrived. Naïve dutch Admiral Ver­ho­even, max­imo lider of this exped­i­tion, then star­ted to build a fort on Neira, so the Bandanese under­stood how ser­i­ous this was,managed to get some vil­lage eld­ers to sign a new and even more drastic con­tract, which imme­di­ately got viol­ated at every avail­able oppor­tun­ity, and then got him­self killed when he stu­pidly ran into a bandanese ambush, hav­ing them pissed off once too many. The Dutch retali­ated with a few pun­it­ive mis­sions, but even­tu­ally every­body calmed down a little bit and everything went back to the status quo. The Dutch pre­ten­ded to have everything under con­trol, the Bandanese went along with it while sup­ply­ing nut­meg and mace to the Eng­lish and the Eng­lish couldn’t help but be mildly amused over a nice cup of tea.

The Eng­lish Con­fu­sion Strategy

In 1615 the dutch gov­ernor gen­eral, Gen­eral Ger­ald Reijnst, decided he’s had enough of the whole charade and sent 900 sol­diers to little Pulau Ay to evict the Eng­lish and pun­ish the island pop­u­la­tion for help­ing them. What should have been straight­for­ward ended quite badly. Reijnst was quite depressed. Noth­ing seemed to go smooth around here. Appar­ently the islanders had been sup­plied and trained by the Eng­lish, so the Dutch retreated with around 200 cas­u­al­ties. But when next the Dutch tried to invade Ay a year later the eng­lish Cap­tain Samual Castleton with­drew his ships and his sup­port after hav­ing had a jolly good chat and a cup of tea with his dutch coun­ter­part, Admiral t’Lam on board his ship. As it so happened t’Lam had once helped Castleton out of a tight spot with a por­tuguese ship and so Castleton, ever the eng­lish gen­tle­man that he ima­gined he was, repaid this debt by leav­ing the pop­u­la­tion of Pulau Ay to their cata­strophic fate.

Jan Pieters­zoon Coen

The Dutch didn’t quite know what to make of that and found the whole situ­ation ter­ribly con­fus­ing and quite unset­tling, espe­cially as the Eng­lish con­tin­ued with their eccent­ric and unpre­dict­able beha­vior, for example by build­ing a tiny fort­ress on Neil­aka, a use­less scrap of rock with no fresh water, but beau­ti­ful beaches for a little bit of R&R, off Pulau Run and fly­ing Eng­lish col­ors whenever and wherever the Dutch turned up. Pre­sum­ably this game could have gone on for a very long time. For the Eng­lish it was prob­ably a way to relieve the bore­dom of quite out of the way Pulau Run and they obvi­ously enjoyed tak­ing the piss out of the Dutch, which in turn just hoped the Eng­lish would just leave peace­fully once they had seen sense. This, of course, had never happened before, so the whole exer­cise was com­pletely futile. Then a new player entered the game, one Jan Pieters­zoon Coen, gov­ernor gen­eral of the Dutch East India Com­pany (V.O.C.) and a brute, who thought he had it all figuered out in his manic head of his. Later on, but still too late for a lot of people, he even­tu­ally got the repu­ta­tion he deserved.

The Con­fused English

In the course of just one year this psy­cho­path man­aged not only to get rid of the Eng­lish, but to sub­due the Bandanese on dutch-held ter­rit­ory as well by sys­tem­at­ic­ally killing or deport­ing 94% of the local pop­u­la­tion. The eng­lish strategy of con­fu­sion had in the long run not only worked on the Dutch, but on them­selves as well, that they gave up Pulau Run in 1621 without a fight. Later none of the Eng­lish could pin­point what had exactly happened, mut­ter­ing some­thing about a grand mas­ter plan, which quite obvi­ously had never exis­ted, and if it had nobody could remem­ber the exact details. The Eng­lish were in effect shut out of Banda. In 1667 with the Treaty of Breda the Eng­lish relin­quished their claim to Banda in exchange for a small little island in north­east Amer­ica with the name of Man­hat­ten. Not a bad swap as it turned out.

Now What?

Coen, feel­ing a bit too con­fid­ent and cocky at first, soon real­ized, that, although he now con­trolled all of the nut­meg islands, those islands were vir­tu­ally and utterly empty and totally unpro­duct­ive. This threw him into a bit of depres­sion until he came up with the equally, as it turned out, unpro­duct­ive idea of giv­ing par­cels of land with slave work­ers to all the unwanted and not strictly intel­li­gent people of the V.O.C. in the area. This solved the pro­ductiv­ity prob­lem and enabled him to har­ress those new landown­ers, called Perk­en­iers, with his strict and harsh con­di­tions. Pro­duc­tion soon sur­passed what it had been when the Bandanese were in con­trol, but the prob­lems stayed the same. The Perk­en­iers couldn’t care less about the sup­posed V.O.C. mono­poly and traded and smuggled spices whenever they could and the newly brought in slaves did their best to uphold the bandanese tra­di­tion of resistance.

The Mas­ter Plan Returns

So things stayed more or less the same for quite some time, but since every­body, except the slaves, made money, every­body, except the slaves, was happy. Most of the time any­ways. Gunung Api was very act­ive in the 17^th cen­tury, killing many people through erup­tions, pois­on­ous gas and the inev­it­able out­break of dis­eases after­wards. Then dur­ing a fate­ful hour early on April 2, 1778 there occured sim­ul­tain­ously an erup­tion, an earth­quake, a tidal wave and a hur­ricane, effect­ively redu­cing spice pro­duc­tion to noth­ing for the next dozen years.And if that wasn’t enough, on Feb­ru­ary 7, 1796 while Napo­leon tried to con­quer Europe, the Eng­lish sud­denly remembered parts of their long for­got­ten mas­ter plan and arrived with a loud ‘In your face!’ and ‘How about NO you cracy dutch bas­tard!’ on Banda tak­ing the whole archipelago without a fight.

Twice Actu­ally…

Now, that the Eng­lish had suc­cess­fully com­pleted the last bit of their plan they developed a beha­viour very sim­ilar to that of the Dutch, mean­ing that the Eng­lish didn’t have a clue about what was going on and that the Perk­en­iers could do whatever they wanted, not that they came up with much except ruin­ing them­selves. They seemed to have been a rather dumb lot. In 1803 con­trol of Banda was handed back to the Neth­er­lands, only to be seized again in 1810 for the next 7 years. The one clever thing the Eng­lish did, though, was to take nut­meg sap­lings and intro­duce them to some of their colon­ies. Soon there­after Banda lost it’s mono­poly on nut­meg and mace (ofi­cially the mono­poly ended in 1864).

The End (Kind Of…)

By 1824 Banda was in a bad state. Most build­ings were either badly dam­aged or out­right des­troyed by nat­ural dis­asters and the local dutch gar­ris­son tried to drown their sor­row with huge amounts of arrak. The Dutch, bless them, tried to make an effort, though. Slavery was even­tu­ally abol­ished and paid labour was intro­duced and by 1860 Banda was pro­du­cing more nut­meg and mace than ever before, which obvi­ously must have had some­thing to do with their vastly effect­ive man­age­ment style and not with pay­ing people. The Dutch, get­ting a bit tired of the con­stant bick­er­ing and annoy­ing com­plaints of the Perk­en­iers, even­tu­ally moved the admin­is­tra­tion to Ambon, though. This, coupled with the now read­ily avail­able nut­meg from other parts of the world and the res­ult­ing price drop on the world mar­kets, meant, that Banda slowly lost it’s impot­ance. Over time, helped along by the world depres­sion in the 1930s and the japan­ese occu­pa­tion dur­ing WW II, when many nut­meg trees were cut down to provide room to grow cas­sava and pota­toes, Banda rever­ted back to being just the little tran­quil group of trop­ical para­dise islands in the middle of nowhere that it is now.

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There obvi­ously is a lot more to Banda’s long and often sad and viol­ent his­tory, than what I have writ­ten here. If you want to know more, then I sug­gest you read ‘Indone­sian Banda’ by Wil­liam A. Hanna, upon which most of this post is based.