The Honourable Company. John Keay

stood out in favour of his exotic windfall and of his Bandanese subjects.

      Even Oliver Cromwell was to have a soft spot for Run, and at his instigation arrangements would be made for re-establishing a permanent colony there. Solid Presbyterian settlers were recruited; goats, hens, hoes, and psalters were piled aboard the good ship London; and it was only at the very last minute that renewed hostilities with the Dutch led to the ship being redirected to St Helena in the south Atlantic. More important, though, it was with Run in mind that the Protector issued the Company with a new charter which included the authority to hold, fortify and settle overseas territories. Thanks to the orang kaya of Run, first St Helena, soon after Bombay, then Calcutta, Bengal, India, and the East would come under British sway.

      But there Run’s celebrity would end. Ironically it was in the same year that the East India Company took over Bombay that Charles II relinquished his rights to Run. Sixty years of Dutch pressure had finally paid off. By the treaty of Breda the British Crown would cede all rights in the Bandas, receiving by way of compensation a place on the north American seaboard called New Amsterdam together with its own spiceless island of Manhattan. It may have seemed like a good swop but the little nutmeg of Run had arguably more relevance to future empire than did the Big Apple.

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      Of those first Elizabethan Englishmen who in 1603 trooped, sea weary and surf soaked, on to Run’s scorching sands we know only from the protest registered by a Dutch admiral who happened to be on the Banda island of Neira at the time. The Dutch had reached the Bandas two years earlier and, but for their sensational success there and elsewhere in the East Indies, it must be doubtful whether London’s merchants would ever have entered the ‘spice race’ or subscribed to an East India Company. But then the Dutch were only emulating the Portuguese who had been trading with the Indies for nearly a century; and although it was the Portuguese who had discovered the sea route round the Cape of Good Hope, even they had not invented the spice trade.

      Since at least Roman times the traffic in exotic condiments from east to west had sustained the most extensive and profitable trading network the world had yet seen. The buds of the dainty clove tree, the berries of the ivy-like pepper vine, and of course the kernel and membrane of the nutmeg had been ideal cargoes. Dried, husked and bagged, they were light in weight, high in value, and easily broken into loads. Shipped to the Asian mainland in junks, prabus and dhows, they were repacked as camel and donkey loads for the long overland journey to the Levant, and then reshipped across the Mediterranean to the European markets.

      In the process their value appreciated phenomenally. What were basic culinary ingredients in south Asia had become exotic luxuries by the time they reached the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. They were the precious metals of the vegetable kingdom and their pungency seemed to enhance their rarity by conferring a whiff of distinction on every household that could afford them. In brines and marinades nutmeg proved a vital preservative; in stews and ragouts pepper masked the smell of ill-cured meat and improved its flavour; and the clove, as well as its culinary uses, was credited with amazing medicinal properties. Like later tea, coffee, and even tobacco, it was as expensive health foods that spices gradually entered everyday diet. As the supply increased, the merchants’ profit margins would fall, but in the sixteenth century it was still calculated that if only one sixth of a cargo reached its destination its owner would still be in profit.

      Control of this lucrative trade rested traditionally with the Chinese and Malays in the East, with the Indians and Arabs in its middle reaches, and with the Levantines and Venetians in the West. But around the year 1500 other interested parties had appeared on the scene. It was to reroute the spice trade to the greater advantage of Christendom and their own considerable profit that European seafarers from Spain and Portugal first ventured on to the world’s oceans. Improvements in marine design, in navigational instruments, cartography and gunnery soon gave the newcomers an edge over their Asian rivals. They could sail further, faster, and for longer. They had less need to hug the coastline and, since the spice-producing islands lay on the opposite side of the world, they had a choice of sailing east or west.

      But what their charts failed to show was that other lands lay in the way. Hence the search for the Spice Islands threw up the discovery of America, of the Pacific archipelagos, of sub-Saharan Africa, and of the Indian and south-east Asian coastlines. Knowledge of, and eventually dominion over these ‘new worlds’ would follow. Yet such incidental discoveries could not immediately deflect the European parvenus from their main objective. Trade, not conquest or colonization, was the priority. In 1511, only twenty-three years after first rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the Portuguese had reached Java; and in 1543, twenty-three years after discovering the Magellan strait near Cape Horn, a Spanish fleet from Mexico had laid claim to the islands soon christened the Philippines. Somewhere in the gap remaining between these two global pincer movements lay the Spice Islands.

      The perversity of nature in lavishing her most valued products on islands so small and impossibly remote prompted wonder and fable. To what Milton called the ‘islands of spicerie’ an air of mystery clung. When Christopher Columbus had cast about for a sponsor for his projected voyage over the western horizon, he made much of the idea that if he did not find the spice-rich Indies he had a good chance of finding the lost continent of Atlantis. Neither was a geographical certainty; both owed much to the imagination.

      Even today, with better and more comprehensive maps, it is hard to put a finger on the exact spot. ‘Spice Islands’ was as much a description as a proper name, and mostly it was reserved for islands which had no other claim on the map-maker’s attention. Thus somewhere as important as Sri Lanka, although always the main producer of cinnamon bark, did not qualify and neither did the main pepper-producing areas of Sumatra and of India’s Malabar coast.

      The real spice islands were less obvious and more mysterious, and lay much further to the east between Sulawesi (Celebes), New Guinea, and the Philippines. This, the Moluccan triangle, is also the epicentre of Indonesia’s volcanic ‘Ring of Fire’. On average there is an eruption every five years and deposits of volcanic soil are as crucial to the location of spice groves as the humid sea-breezes. In seventeenth-century drawings Tidore and Ternate, the main clove-producing islands, figure as smoking volcanoes rising sheer from the ocean, the only vegetation being a fringe of coconut palms at their base. Horticulturally they look most unpromising. Yet this is in fact a fairly accurate depiction. The cones rise a mile into the sky and only the narrowest of margins between the encircling ocean and the funnel of fire is available for clove gardens. Likewise the Banda Islands are dominated by the great central volcano of Gunung Api which periodically showers the nutmeg groves with rich volcanic dust. If the production of spices required such an elemental setting, it was no wonder they were a rarity.

      The first spice race, won by the Portuguese, was confirmed by the terms of a Papal bull which drew a sort of international date-line between the advancing fleets of Spain and Portugal. With a chain of heavily fortified bases stretching from Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to Goa in India, then Malacca near the modern Singapore, and finally Ambon in the central Moluccas, the Portuguese made good their claim to control of the entire spice route. Barring occasional interference from the Spanish in the Philippines, they enjoyed as near a monopoly of the oceanic spice trade as they cared to enforce for most of the sixteenth century.

      Other European rivals simply failed to materialize. As yet the Dutch were still enduring the birth pangs of nationhood; and the English, who with the loss of Calais and the break with Rome were at last looking away from Europe, were nevertheless looking in the wrong direction. Observing how, although the Portuguese sailed into the sunrise and the Spanish into the sunset, both had successfully found a path to the Spice Islands, Englishmen had concluded that they too could expect to discover their own corridor to the East. The fact that that same Papal bull gave the Iberian powers a monopoly over their respective routes which might be enforced by any available means was also good reason for Tudor seafarers to find their own route. Like their Spanish and Portuguese rivals, the English were familiar with the latest advances in marine technology and were dimly aware that being located on the European periphery should no longer be a disadvantage. In what was to be the age of the Atlantic powers, the English were not behindhand; only five years after Columbus, John Cabot