How Did Nutmeg Cause Wars In Indonesia? | The Spice Trail | Absolute History

the world loves spice the exotic ingredients in so many of our favorite dishes have revolutionized the way we eat but the search for these amazing tastes now found in every kitchen cupboard changed the course of history this is a journey to find out how spices shaped our modern world i'm going to be visiting some of their exotic birthplaces and traveling the globe to discover just how these spices made it to our tables [Music] i'll be meeting the people whose lives depend on them and following the trail of the first spice explorers empires built and destroyed immense fortunes made and countless lives lost during one of the most exciting periods of discovery in the history of the western world and all in the name of spice [Music] [Music] [Applause] there are two spices that push the boundaries of exploration further than they had ever been pushed before they redrew the world map and sparked a war of horrifying brutality in one of the remotest corners of the earth these spices were cloves and nutmeg in 16th century europe these spices were treasured as exotic foods and medicine thought to ward off the plague but they were also the ultimate status symbol a kind of medieval bling [Music] [Applause] a small sack of nutmeg like this could buy a grand house in london but the problem back then was finding these spices the only source of nutmeg and cloves was on a tiny cluster of remote islands surrounded by treacherous seas on the other side of the world their mysterious and far-flung location accounted for their astronomical price [Music] i'm heading east to find the home of these spices a mere spec within the archipelago of 17 000 islands we now call indonesia i'm starting on the island of java its capital jakarta was an important hub for those searching for the route to the spice islands even with modern day transport there's no direct reliable way of getting there so i'm going for the more traditional option [Music] bye this boat will follow the trail of the europeans to eastern indonesia and the bandar islands [Music] in the 17th century two european nations entered the spice race with a vengeance the dutch and the english [Music] both nations set up private companies to search for spice both wanted the fame of finding the islands but more importantly the enormous fortune that securing the monopoly on trade in this region would bring these maverick merchants were heavily armed and ready to kill any rivals who stood in their way but they still needed the help of the locals because they were the only ones who knew the exact location of the islands the europeans wanted so badly to find so they would have done the journey with a series of local pilots all asking for enormous amounts of money and who can blame them it is an astonishing skill i think navigation by the stars [Music] which which way this way yes stop it [Music] [Music] okay [Music] in the spring of 1599 it was the dutch that beat the english to this archipelago of ten tiny volcanic islands after a long and treacherous journey they had finally found the land where gold grew on trees it was the search for these very islands and most importantly the trees that grow on them that inspired people to take these crazy journeys and to risk their lives and their fortunes these are the bandar islands and that is gunung api it means fire mountain and it is a volcano and very often crews reported that when they arrived here it was belching fire and smoke and they must have wondered have we really arrived in heaven or is this gonna be hell the eruption of the volcano was not the only thing to greet the dutch on arrival all foreign visitors to these lands would have been welcomed by a flotilla of coracora canoes nowadays teams from neighboring islands race each other in an impressive show of strength and stamina even the friendly display with which they greeted me was well a little intimidating it must have been even more so for those early europeans who would never have seen anything like it before [Music] [Applause] this is bandanera the capital of the bandar islands and it's where the dutch discovered the source of their precious nutmeg a secret closely guarded by arab and asian traders for centuries today these islands produce up to 500 tons of nutmeg a year look at this tree you see this nutmeg many fruits and this you see these flowers and this you see this nutmeg and everything fruits everything there is does not make everywhere you look you must know for nutmeg papa usman is a fifth generation nutmeg farmer who has a large orchard of over 200 trees i can bring you for nutmeg open the trees you can see yeah this you see this nutmeg open the trees so this is the ripe nutmeg yes and can you use this part of the fruit can you use that for anything this fruit for yam aha syrup and nutmeg candy not my candy candy and you can see this the red inside yeah yeah you see right there yeah this red nice that's the mate so that's like the casing that goes around the nutmeg also for cosmetic for cosmetics yeah the mace nice wow okay yeah inside mice not bad that's not like and for nutmeg that is for cooking for medicine and i don't know for what everything that's england 100 years before come to banda for what for nothing it made them a fortune many money many money yeah and you have you have 200 i need money [Laughter] so show me show me how it works usman is an exception to the rule here because he actually owns the land his trees grow on but he has to pay a hefty 30 tax to the government for the privilege you see this opener yeah i think open yeah yes i think ah can i try yes you like try okay but you must stick open if not open i don't like okay okay is this right it's men okay where where yeah you've taken all the other ones you don't see anymore oh hang on i think i've got it dick yeah so pull [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] mine was only little ah very small but yours look at yours yeah they're magnificent here we are yeah it's like a jewel it's like opening a jewel box look at this it's beautiful very slowly how do i take it off here oh like that yeah just peel it off ah okay so that's the base and look at your beautiful bandana nutmeg this is nutmeg you see this black this for mice you see red red and then this is [Applause] nutmeg is a finickity little plant which requires specific conditions to grow and these islands provide all it needs it likes warm humid weather well-drained fertile soil and an annual rainfall of more than 150 centimeters the rich volcanic soil hot sun and frequent downpours here in the banda islands produce what many people still consider to be the highest quality of all the world's nutmeg [Music] once the nutmeg is picked there's a lot of hard work still to be done before it's ready for market during harvest season the women of banda get together to separate the fruit the mace and the nutmeg whilst catching up on all the local gossip and having a bit of a laugh and that just like that do you you can eat like that raw no but i've got this one [Applause] [Music] then i made a discovery the women told me that what i thought was nutmeg was actually the shiny outer casing a third layer hiding the true prize okay so one second what seems to happen then is you've got these layers you've got the outside the mace then you've got the kind of shell and inside the shell sits the nutmeg it's amazing isn't it that this funny little wrinkly thing was worth indescribable amounts of money and made all those mad men sail all the way around the world so it's really interesting because it seems like after the dutch came here and turned everything into nutmeg farms it really has gone back to the old style so all the women here have the pala trees in the mountain that's right yeah so everyone has their trees they go and collect the nutmeg and how many trees do you have 150 trees that's a lot of trees but even 150 trees are not enough to sustain a family which is why most people have other jobs and why we have to work flat out to work so slowly she's going to cut my salary we haven't even discussed my salary mimika married oh am i married this yes man and uh you have baby maybe me no no you thought you have nema five children how do you see it's been a fun noisy morning and an insight for me into the importance of nutmeg to the families of banda today but the story of nutmeg is not all [Music] smiles it's a dark tale with a brutal ending there is evidence of the dutch colonists all around the island and of the dutch east india company known as the voc it was one of the world's first corporate empires and its initials soon became a symbol of fear and hatred for the people of banda [Music] when you wander around here all the colonial architecture is dutch it looks pretty but the dutch legacy is one of horror the most fearsome dutch governor was a man who arrived here in 1607. his name was jan peterson cohen and his reign heralded an era of dutch brutality that started with the mass murder of all the tribal chiefs of this very island in 1621 governor cohen hired japanese mercenaries to execute the island chiefs known as the orang kaya their bodies were impaled on bamboo poles as a warning to anyone who dared oppose him [Music] this was the beginning of his master plan of domination by extermination a form of systematic genocide by the end of the massacre the population was reduced from fifteen thousand to just one thousand people and then governor cohen repopulated the island with slave workers from java [Music] all in the name of nutmeg [Music] it's a story that's still fresh in the minds of the people of banda [Music] some of the massacred chiefs are buried here two of bandar's leaders hamdi and pak doula are on a rare visit to this sacred site [Music] the people of the village want to start preparing the rituals they perform to honor the dead chiefs but first they need to ask permission from the ancestors can you tell me why the people of banda today are so determined to remember the massacre this is our memorial from long long time ago and then we still remember the young peterson kun they killed 44 aurangkaya and thousand people in holland they said young petition is hero they bring a lot of gold but our abundance said he's the bad man this is his terrorists yeah in the village of ratu everyone is getting ready for the performance of a dance called the chakaleli it's a centuries-old ritual to keep the memory of the murdered chiefs alive [Music] after the massacre the dutch restricted the bandanese army numbers to just five these young men represent what was left of their ravaged army every single item of this eclectic costume is connected to the trade in nutmeg the helmets a gift from europe the textiles from indian traders and these gold flowers in their mouths are a symbol of how the bandanese were left without a voice [Music] today the islanders have regained their voice and also some control over their nutmeg these predominantly muslim islands are ruled from jakarta and the government has returned the nutmeg trees to the bandanese people but the islanders are still campaigning to regain full control of their land as well i've come to one of the oldest nutmeg forests on the island some of the trees in this former dutch plantation date back hundreds of years to the time of the dutch masters after the massacre of the tribal chiefs and indeed most of the population of banda governor general cohen set about turning the islands into a giant series of nutmeg farms run by imported slaves and overseen by ruthless dutch masters this glorious wild looking forest was one of those plantations and the reason i can say that with such confidence is this magnificent tree it's a wild almond and the dutch planted these to shade the nutmeg trees there's one there's this huge pigeon that lives on these islands massive thing with dark green wings there we go gorgeous birds and they eat the wild almonds they're also partial to a spot of nutmeg and their droppings scatter the nutmeg seeds all over this forest so it's a very very important spreader of these all-important trees and are responsible for properly planting more trees than any english dutch or bandanese farmers have ever more than 200 years ago european traders smuggled lucrative nutmeg seedlings off the islands they were spread around the world and grown in tropical regions like the caribbean and india [Music] as a result banda lost its monopoly on nutmeg and the price plummeted [Music] today the industry in banda is just enough to keep the locals going and even the children join in by foraging for windfalls [Music] like a nutmeg treasure hunt isn't it no good green i'm learning [Music] how about that one but that's a good one isn't it a good one no maybe no good [Music] no that's a rubbish one no look what i found look ah it's mine it's my look surely do i get the thumbs up for that one look at that one is that good oh and you just dropped me with an almond you can eat that one can you should i try i don't know whether it's just come out of a pigeon's bun though just when i found my perfect nutmeg i get trumped by the perfect almond those pigeons know what they're doing up to now i've been on the main bander islands that were occupied by the dutch but there was one piece of nutmeg real estate the dutch hadn't seized a tiny island taken over by their bitter rivals the english now the english were in this part of the world for the same reason as the dutch to make a fortune from nutmeg they set up a company to rival the voc the english east india company which was to become the engine that launched the british empire [Music] and this was their first target 10 miles west of banda this almost inaccessible spec in the ocean two miles by half a mile wide was to become the first ever english colony the island of roon you have no idea how lucky we are this stretch of sea can be absolutely brutal and you can see it's low tide at the moment because this spit of land is very exposed and there are waves breaking on that reef and reefs around this whole island and it was the ruin of many an english ship the man the company chose to win this island for the crown was an unlikely hero captain nathaniel courthope was a swashbuckling fearless adventurer and also a bit of a thief he'd pulloined 600 pounds from the company been punished for the crime and was ready to redeem himself on the island of roone when captain caught hope arrived in 1616 he was warned to heed the following advice at your arrival at roon show yourself courteous and affable for they are a peevish perverse diffident and perfidious people and apt to take disgust upon small occasions and are being moved more cumbersome than wasps wow i'm looking forward to this welcome [Music] it's so shallow here we're having to watch for the reef you're gonna try go around that way and then hit the beach all sand here by the looks of things so we should be pretty good salama peggy well done welcome to manhattan ah thank you what a welcome today i found the reception to this particular english visitor anything but peevish and diffident court hopes negotiations with the locals in broken english and sign language were to change the course of history by offering them protection against the hated dutch he persuaded them to hand over control of the island to the english crown when news reached king james he was so ecstatic that he changed his title to king of england scotland ireland and rooney yeah very young yeah i feel very honored so england in roone is very farmers very famous and then they can pack with their people in rhode island the pact with the islanders gave england an exclusive export deal with roon court hope set up plantations and filled flotillas of ships with nutmeg which went directly to england all this happened under the noses of the infuriated dutch and they set out on a four-year campaign of ferocious battles to destroy courthold [Music] in the end the dutch tricked captain courthope into an ambush at sea he fought for his life but he was outgunned and outmanned and finally he was shot the story goes that he threw himself overboard and was never seen again the english thorn in the dutch side was finally removed [Music] there's little sign that the english will ever hear and there's these few crumbling rather unloved ruins but there's no monument there's nothing that remembers courthope's brave but futile stand against the dutch but neither is there a memorial to the many islanders who died in a bitter battle between two foreign nations to control the trade of ruins nutmeg [Music] with caught hope out of the way the dutch were now totally in control of the nutmeg trade but the story doesn't end there to uncover the next chapter i need to travel 100 miles across the bander sea to the seat of dutch power in the 17th century the island of ambon despite their stranglehold on the region and the trade the dutch were obsessed with the idea that someone somewhere was plotting to oust them these crumbling walls are all that remain of the once mighty dutch fort where many of the dutch bigwigs holed up protected by heavily armed soldiers a handful of englishmen also lived on the island at the time it numbered just 18 a motley band of merchants and sailors there was a barber and a tailor they were all utterly broke and desperate to leave so they were hardly a threat to anyone yet such was the dutch paranoia that they believed that this little band of bankrupts had a conspiracy to overthrow them so the dutch governor had them thrown in chains horribly tortured for many days until they confessed to a conspiracy none of them had any notion of and in early 1623 every single one of them was beheaded in front of a baying crowd governor general cohen's master plan of domination by extermination was well on track finally to add insult to injury the dutch sent the english the bill for the cost of the blood-stained velvet from the executioner's block after the massacre at the fort it was all out war between the dutch and the english and the locals were stuck in the middle today ambon is a busy seaport where residents enjoy all the trappings of modern life whilst retaining strong links to the island's past at the height of dutch rule any rebellious islanders who dared to resist were tortured and many were executed the memory of this brutality is still an open wound and is remembered by the ambonese today so we were walking through ambon so obviously this is the ancient ritual called beating brooms two teams of men both armed with strips of palm leaves compete against each other oh my god this wasn't quite the um johnny sort of exotic festival i was expecting it looks indescribably brutal but it's actually a show of brotherhood as all the men in the village have come together to test their ability to withstand pain possibly the most disturbing thing i've ever witnessed actually making me feel quite sick so is there the man that has the most he's the strongest stronger he gets the best girlfriend oh [Laughter] [Music] the dutch controlled the nutmeg trade here until the middle of the 17th century but they hadn't bargained on the resilience of the local people and it's that that gave them the patience to buy their time until they could once again take control of their nutmeg [Music] the final chapter in our story of nutmeg is taking me back to england's first colony that tiny island of roon [Music] unlikely though it seems it was from here that a huge shift in global power was about to begin [Music] in 1620 after the death of captain caught hope england lost this nutmeg rich island to holland almost 50 years passed before england's king charles ii took his revenge he sent a fleet across the atlantic in retaliation and took a dutch-held island called new amsterdam two years later the two sides got together to try and establish some sort of peace but it looked impossible the english were demanding roon back the dutch were categorically refusing and it looked like deadlock until one bright spark said look why don't you just hang on to the islands you already have so the english reluctantly said okay we'll keep new amsterdam you the dutch can have room and so that's what they did the english turned their backs on the spice islands renamed new amsterdam new york and a whole new period of colonization began while the english may have focused their attentions on another part of the globe the spice islands remained a highly desirable target for other european powers early spice explorers didn't come all this way just for one spice they also came in search of the other most highly desired spice of the time the equally exotic companion to nutmeg cloves [Music] it was treasured for its flavor and as a wonder drug and even as an aphrodisiac [Music] [Music] [Applause] to find out more about this spice i'm heading 300 miles north and across the equator to the original home of cloves the island of tanate the story of the european quest for this spice starts even earlier than nutmeg but it was fueled by the same ambition to cut out arab and asian middlemen and control the source of the spice itself and the first explorers to this part of indonesia were not the dutch it was the portuguese when they arrived here they found ancient kingdoms at war with one another portuguese had come for clothes and the rival kingdoms wanted weapons it was a perfect match tenate is one of a string of volcanic islands that used to be the only places on earth where you could find cloves each one is ruled by a sultan and rivalry between the main islands tanate and its near-neighbor todore was and remains fierce so when the europeans first arrived the portuguese both sultanates were keen to get them on side because an alliance with these rich well-armed strangers would give them the upper hand [Music] it was the sultan of tanate who won the day and the portuguese trade and gave them the monopoly over cloves for over half a century [Music] the intense nose-tickling aroma of cloves pervades everything these little black twigs are actually the dried flower buds from the clove trees it feels like the entire island is made of cloves in the 16th century tenate was the most prosperous trading port in the whole of indonesia and the sultan was hugely powerful europeans arrived with weapons and luxury trinkets in the hope of winning his favor even today nobody does anything on this island without the permission of the sultan i don't have any cannons or armor or fancy goods to trade but if i'm going to get under the skin of this island i need to request an audience from the sultan in there [Music] when the early european traders arrived protocol demanded they present themselves to the sultan before any negotiations could begin today i've secured an invitation to the palace so that i can do the same crikey i wasn't expecting this so if i was a portuguese or a dutch or an english trader i would be feeling a little overwhelmed by now before i enter the palace it's been suggested nicely but firmly that i change into something more suitable to meet a king and i definitely wasn't expecting this [Music] it's quite difficult to turn in a collar like this i know elvis must have felt like tanate has the longest surviving islamic sultanate in the whole of indonesia sultan madufa is the 48th sultan in a line that extends back over 800 years the sultan has decided to award me one of his highest honors and adopt me as an honorary citizen of tenate but then the queen gives me a sash emblazoned with the word princess not just a citizen i'm now royalty congratulations thank you is with my new title come certain responsibilities i am now an emissary of clothes for tonight to the world should i now be something of it like an ambassador well i shall make sure that i do nothing to bring the good name into disrepute [Music] but i didn't come here to dress in sequence and hobnob with royalty i'm here to see exactly what drew the european explorers to tanate in the first place the sultan gave me an introduction to one of his courtiers vanira yusman whose family have been farming clothes for generations they live at the foot of mount gamalama walking through the woods here is like walking through the exotic section of a supermarket there are papaya trees there are clove trees banana cocoa so the guys come up to their trees on the slopes of the volcano and it was about i would say a good hour and a half steep climb and then their working day begins yeah yeah look at them they're so pretty they're like sort of um of candelabras or something [Music] the aromatic shade of these majestic trees is the perfect place to escape the scorching heat of the day [Music] the flowers must be picked before they blossom it's when the buds are beginning to turn pink that they have the most fragrance [Music] it's amazingly labour intensive valera and i are doing the beginners picking the lower branches but they pick from right up at the top this traditional method of harvesting cloves hasn't changed since the time of the portuguese it involves a complicated matrix of rope work and branch pulling to dislodge the topmost flowers and reach the buds on the farthest away branches back in the village everyone pitches in with the next stage of the clove harvest basically we are stealing the clothes and that's the the sort of local phrase for doing this for separating the clothes from the stalks you kind of pinch the uh the stalks together and then you put them in your hand and snap them back and that breaks all the clothes off the stalk and the cloves go in one pile and the stalks go in another we have a walnut tree at home it had the most fantastic crop of walnuts this year so just before i came to indonesia we picked a whole load and pickled them and one of the things that you use in pickling walnuts is cloves but i just had no idea of the amount of labor involved in getting one little clove it's funny isn't it i mean they've become so ordinary to us and yet when you see it like this and you see that an entire family an entire community's lives rely on the little things that i was sticking in my walnut pickle just makes you appreciate them a little bit more [Music] my everywhere i walk around this island i come across cloves lining the streets drying in the sun this is one sack of cloves i think they weigh about 20 kilos and it took all of us what were there five or six of us just about an hour quite satisfying though okay so this will lie here for three days as well as the buds the clove stalks are in demand and their most prominent use is in one of indonesia's biggest industries the number one use for cloves today is to flavour cigarettes crushed clove stalks are mixed with tobacco to create the hugely popular kratec cigarette [Music] it's such a massive business that multinationals like marlborough are now part of this lucrative trade watching these women work is absolutely dizzying i mean it looks almost like i'm seeing them sort of speed it up 10 times but that's actually the speed that they're working lisa's been working here for 16 years and like all the other women on this factory floor she'll roll about 400 cigarettes in one hour and one little fact i found out is not a single one of these women smoke i sort of want to have a go and i sort of really don't i haven't rolled a cigarette for six years at least any bit more like that ah so push it in like that and then down stop these women have three months of training to be able to do this what am i doing wrong now even with your health it's a disaster and let's try another one okay let's try again come on please work please work aha what do you think inspector [Music] go on fit in the special [Laughter] despite the fact that most of the country's clove crop goes up in smoke indonesia is still one of the largest producers of cloves in the world [Music] and it's now a global trade whose roots go all the way back to the portuguese adventurers who changed it forever when they came here they enjoyed several years of good business dealings with the locals [Music] but then they turned nasty and demanded total domination [Music] it was from this portuguese fort that a series of horrifying events took place and it started when the portuguese kidnapped the sultan so in 1570 they killed him now as you can imagine the islanders were up in arms they rushed to this fort but they couldn't take the portuguese on at war because the portuguese had guns and they didn't so instead the tenacions blocked off all the exits to the fort and the portuguese were under siege for five years finally starvation forced them to surrender it was the end of the portuguese stranglehold here in tanate [Music] in a village near the palace young children are learning a war dance the sultan's head of music is atta hasan ali he is teaching them the soya soya dance um by the late 1500s after the murder of the sultan and their embarrassing forced surrender portuguese influence dwindled the new sultan was only too willing to woo another foreign power to his shores so who stepped into the breach it was the dutch that took over the clove trade from the portuguese the dutch arrived here in may 1599 eager to take over another highly lucrative trade but in a highly unorthodox way cloves also grew on the dutch controlled island of ambon to dominate the market they decided to limit it therefore pushing up the price in europe ambon would keep its cloves but every single tree on tanate would be destroyed [Music] now obviously the sultan wouldn't have let them just cut the trees down so they had to be a little bit sneaky about it they told the people of tanate that the europeans didn't want cloves anymore they wanted whole branches and then they wanted bark and then they wanted the roots so that one by one the clove trees of tanate started to die apart from this one which was a little sapling being kept in the sultan's palace and even today it sort of serves as an arboreal up yours to the colonizers because the dutch aren't here and cloves most certainly are [Music] tenatians believe that every single clove tree on the island descends from this very tree being here during the harvest month i've seen how cloves permeate every aspect of daily life the women of the village are preparing a special thanksgiving meal called salamat anne i've been placed on coconut duty this is the most fantastic tool am i doing this right yeah it's good this is what we needed when we won coconuts on the coconut shy and then had no idea how to get at the things these and of course cloves play a central part in this feast they're mixed with the coconut to create a delicious rice dish [Applause] no one is going to go hungry today let's see if mine worked it looks like the volcano doesn't it looks like the volcano out here like this yeah it's a rice sculpture that's amazing so this one is a symbol of of the people and this is the symbol of the sultan [Music] my time in indonesia is almost over it's been an emotional and sometimes horrifying journey but all along i've been welcomed and given a glimpse into how nutmeg and cloves continue to shape the lives of the people here and i've become a princess i didn't get to keep the outfit though [Music] it's astonishing to think that these tiny islands that barely feature on the map and their spices which are now found on every supermarket shelf have had such a major impact on world history and global trade yet today they remain as remote and exotic as they were half a millennium ago [Music] you

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 687,660

Keywords: Absolute History, Southeast Asia history, cloves cultivation, cloves significance, colonialism, documentary, documentary series, global trade, historical anthropology, historical artifacts, historical chronicles, historical essays, historical impact, historical legends, maritime history, spice empires, spice islands, spice route, spice trade, spice trade routes, spice wars impact

Id: bovUA3haHgk

Length: 58min 28sec (3508 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020