By Diane Selkirk
11 October 2017
[Excerpt from article:]
We sailed out of the Arafura Sea, through the Timor Sea and into the Savu Sea. Soon we’d be in the Flores Sea and then the Banda Sea – home of the Banda, or Spice Islands, a cluster of 11 lush islands in eastern Indonesia. In the early days of sail exploration, these seas were known by Arabic traders as the Seven Seas, those enchanting waters on the other side of the world where spice was in the wind. To sail them meant you had sailed as far from staid, grey Europe as you could. According to the old sea charts, you’d reached the mystical ‘land of dragons’.
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Perhaps it’s similar to the way an architect or builder approaches a new building; looking for details that explain how people adapt structures to a location’s weather, landscape and culture. Sailors and fisherman build our vessels to suit a place, and we have a language all our own.
In Indonesia, where the ocean has long been the highway between the more than 17,000 islands, boats offer a myriad of clues about the seas and the people. The dugouts are obvious – they’re limited by the size of trees and never travel far from home. Long, narrow-hulled fishing boats are perfect for launching from a beach, and cut through the swell nicely.
But it’s the big schooners, called phinisi in Indonesian, that tell the most intriguing story. Like most of the boats we’d seen, much of the construction is traditional: hand-carved beams; wooden dowels instead of nails; and seams caulked with cotton. But the twist is that these two-masted ships borrowed both design details (originally part cargo ship, part warship) and the source of their name from Dutch pinnaces, vessels that first found their way to the Banda Sea in the spring of 1599.
The Dutch, along with the Portuguese, English and Spanish, had been in a ferocious race to find the elusive Spice Islands and gain control of the spice trade. There were fortunes to be made in cloves and nutmeg, and everyone was eager to knock out the middleman – the Asian and Arab traders who kept the islands’ location a secret.
When the Dutch finally found the islands, they protected their investment by forming the Dutch East India Company (VOC). With a horrific brutality that included slaying much of the local Bandanese population, they gained control of the plantations of evergreen nutmeg trees; the spice they produced not only flavoured food but was thought to cure illness including the bubonic plague.
A 350th anniversary celebration
Head to Run Island from 11 October–11 November 2017 to celebrate its exchange with Manhattan Island. The Banda Festival marks the 350th anniversary of the Breda Treaty and the trade that changed the world.
The festival will feature cultural performances as well as a spice and culinary festival, traditional music events, puppet theatre performances and an ancient map exhibition. Rumour has it that the mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, will even make an appearance.
At the time, nutmeg only grew in the Banda Islands. A combination of the region’s isolation and the finicky nature of the nutmeg tree kept the price astronomical. Nutmeg will only grow in specific conditions: fertile, well-drained soil in a tropical climate that gets lots of rain. Even then the trees only fruit after seven to nine years, and the labour-intensive process of harvesting requires workers to handpick each fruit and remove the outer covering, before carefully peeling off the mace (a delicate, saffron-coloured spice), drying the seed and cracking off the hard shell.
With the local population subdued and enslaved as workers, the VOC monopoly of the spice trade was now hampered by just one thing. In 1616, the English had managed to gain control of a Banda Island called Run; a speck of island less than 2 miles long and just more than half a mile wide. It was here the English claimed their first colony and formed the English East India Company, and in doing so launched the British Empire.
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