As I write this, I am sitting at my desk at home in Brooklyn. Just across the river lies the center of New York City: the island of Manhattan. An island whose fate was changed three hundred and fifty-seven years ago, when it was traded for another island — eleven thousand two hundred and sixty-three miles away.
When the Dutch formally handed off Manhattan to the British, for the tiny Indonesian island of Pulau Rhun, New Amsterdam became New York. Dutch colonial rule ended, and reign by the British crown began.
Likely, you have never heard of Pulau Rhun. And so you might be thinking that the Dutch really got the short end of the stick in this deal. I mean, Manhattan is New York City! One of the greatest cities in the world! (As a native New Yorker I am not at all biased). But in the 17th century, Pulau Rhun had something Manhattan did not, a spice so valuable that it was literally worth its weight in gold: nutmeg.
As we’ve learned, foods that are affordable and widely available today, were not always so. Nutmeg falls into this category. From ancient times, into the early modern period, spices from the East were incredibly expensive. They were like the Birkin bag or Rolls-Royce of their day. Cinnamon, cloves, mace, black pepper and nutmeg did not yet grow anywhere outside the Asian continent. And so they had to travel enormous distances to make their way to markets in the Near East, Europe and North Africa, where spice traders sold them for enormous sums.
Beginning in ancient times, spices made their way to distant foreign markets along the Silk Road; a series of land and sea routes that stretched 7,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean, all the way to ports in the Mediterranean. And in a time before modern maps, the origins of these spices held mystery – but also a sort of magical and otherworldly quality.
By the 12th century, knights in Britain were sprinkling black pepper on their roast meat. Queens in France were spicing their wine with ginger, cloves, and cinnamon. The cuisines of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East all utilized these mystical spices that altered the flavor of their food and drink in powerful ways.
As we know, it was the Europeans who first decided to set off in search of the land of spices starting in the late 15th century. The historian Henry Hobhouse once put it pretty succinctly when he wrote, “The starting point for European expansion had nothing to do with the rise of any religion or the rise of capitalism – but it has a great deal to do with pepper.” If the Europeans could gain direct access to where spices grew, surely that would mean cheaper spices (you know, cutting out all those pesky middle men).
But it took the Europeans a few years to find the East (turns out sailing West just lands you in the Americas). By 1499 the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama and his crew found the sea route to India – and the rest, as they say, is history. (Though it should be noted that Europeans had traveled to the East by land prior to this date – but they were small in numbers and often folks back home didn’t believe the tales they had to tell upon their return. Just look at how Marco Polo was mocked by his fellow Venetians when he returned from his 24 years in Asia).
But by the 17th century the landscape of the world had changed. The British and the Dutch vied for global domination, through their “trade” and “joint-stock” companies, the British East India Company and the Dutch West India Company (arguably the subjugation of human beings by corporations begins here). One corner of the globe that saw particularly violent competition for power was in the Banda Sea in Indonesia.
Here lay the Banda Islands, part of the larger Maluku Island chain, also known as the Spice Islands – where nutmeg, mace and cloves originate. Though the British still held a few islands here, by the later 17th century, the Dutch largely controlled the area. Of course, this was only after they committed a genocide against the spice islanders – 90% of the population was killed, enslaved, or deported during the conquest. In 1667, after years of fighting, the Treaty of Breda was signed. The British gave up Pulau Rhun, and in return the Dutch gave up Manhattan.
The island of Pulau Rhun is two miles long. It lies 1,600 miles east from Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. There is no airport on the island. To access it, you must first fly to the Maluku Islands, from there take a ferry to another island called Banda Neira, and then take another smaller boat to Pulau Rhun. Two thousand people currently live on this tiny island and make their living from fishing – and still to this day — farming nutmeg. The nutmeg grows on trees in the island's forests, which cover the spit of land in a thick green blanket, dropping off before the white sand shorelines.
In February of this year a few journalists from The New York Times made the adventurous trek to Pulau Rhun. As they interviewed locals, they showed them pictures of Manhattan, the island for which theirs was traded so many centuries ago. A local man named Burhan Lohor gazed upon the picture of the towering buildings, the glass and the concrete of Gotham, and said, “Manhattan can have all the skyscrapers, but I am proud to come from Rhun because we have nature — the sea and the forest.”
I suppose the island of Manhattan once held treasures of the natural world too. Woods, springs, rivers, marshes and fields. But the European search for spices ended up writing a very different kind of story for the natural world of Manhattan. This is not to say that had New York remained under Dutch rule, the trajectory of this city’s history would be drastically different. But perhaps it might have been.
The truth is — we live in this story as it was written. And it’s a story that began with spice.
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As usual, so interesting! Culinary curiosity: if I have to point out a Bolognese spice, this one will be nutmeg. In fact, this spice is present in many typical dishes such as traditional meat stock, tortellini filling, ricotta tortelloni filling, béchamel sauce, and many more.
So interesting—thank you!