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Priceless Spices
The Dutch and the Spice Trade

Nutmeg

Nutmeg
in Pierre Sonnerat (1749–1814)
Voyage à la Nouvelle Guinée
Paris: Chez Ruault, 1776
National Library of Australia

For centuries, Europeans considered spices the equal of gold. They used the valuable seasonings to relieve the symptoms of rheumatism, gout and colic. They added nutmeg to flavour food and drink, and used cloves to preserve food. Cloves were also said to cure earache and pepper to suppress colds. Nutmeg pomanders were thought to cure plague and a spoonful before bedtime to increase sexual desire. Women kept spices in lockets around their necks to freshen their breath.

The problem was that the much sought-after spices grew in very few known places, that were far remote and required great investment to reach. The islands of present-day Indonesia were chief among those places.

The archipelago boasted two main spice centres: the Moluccas (known today as the Maluku Islands), and Java and Sumatra. The Moluccas consisted of about 1000 islands, only a few of which produced clove and nutmeg, while Java and Sumatra were sources of the highly prized pepper.

By the time the Dutch arrived in the late 1500s, the region's spice trade already had a long history. As early as the first century AD, it is thought that Indonesian sailors in outrigger canoes carried spices across the Indian Ocean to the island of Madagascar, off the coast of east Africa.

By the Middle Ages, long caravans carrying an assortment of goods, including spices, silks, furs, lacquer, jade and bronze, were making their way along the famed Silk Road, in reality a series of separate trails linking China and western Europe. In the 1200s, when sea transport was beginning to replace the overland route, the Moluccas had become a significant trading centre, dealing mainly in cloves, nutmeg and mace.

Bird's eye view of the city of Bantam

View of the city of Bantam
Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum Amsterdam /
Netherlands Maritime Museum Amsterdam
www.scheepvaartmuseum.nl

From the 1200s to the 1500s, after the Mongols and Turks had thrown the traditional land routes into disarray, Venice monopolised the European spice trade. Nutmeg, cloves, pepper and cinnamon were carted across Asia to Constantinople, where they were bought by Venetian merchants who sold them at vastly inflated prices. Then in the early 1500s, having pioneered a sea route to the Indonesian archipelago around the southern tip of Africa, Portuguese ships touched many of the spice islands, establishing outposts from which they could trade and resupply their fleets. After Spain annexed Portugal in 1580, the Dutch, at the time Portugal's main spice distributor in Europe, were closed out of the lucrative market. Faced with rising prices, the Dutch decided to control the spice market at its very source.

Travelling in the wake of Portuguese spice traders, Dutch sailors arrived in Bantam (now Banten) in 1596 to establish a foothold in the booming market. On 1 January 1602, five ships of the VOC's Moluccan fleet broke a Portuguese blockade of eight galleons and 22 galleys in the Bay of Bantam.

It was a watershed in the history of the spice trade: the century-long Iberian dominance of the trade was effectively over.

Map of the castle and town of Batavia

Map of the castle and town of Batavia in 1667
Six inserts along the lower edge show maps of Batavia in chronological order, tracking the growth of the city. In the top right is the monogram of the VOC.
Tropenmuseum / KIT (Royal Tropical Institute)

For the next two centuries, spice would be the VOC's most substantial commodity, and Batavia its most important trading port. From the city of Batavia (now present-day Jakarta), the company began to trade with countries throughout Asia, such as Persia, India, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Malacca (on the south-west coast of the Malay Peninsula), China and Japan.

It traded tin from Malacca, textiles from India, silver and copper from Japan, porcelain from China, sandalwood from Timor, and elephants from Ceylon (the animals were sold to monarchs in India).

Port of Mallaca

Malacca in the eighteenth century
Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum Amsterdam /
Netherlands Maritime Museum Amsterdam
www.scheepvaartmuseum.nl

In the mid-1600s, the VOC also began trading in humanity. Several years after Jan van Riebeeck had established a VOC supply base at Table Bay, on the Cape of Good Hope, the company began importing slaves from west Africa to meet its labour needs. On the Banda Islands, the company also used slave labour to cultivate nutmeg.

The VOC controlled the spice trade by seizing the sources of production in the Banda Islands and in the Moluccas, ruled at the time by independent kings and chieftains.

They offered to protect individual rulers in exchange for guarantees they would sell their spice crops only to the Dutch. Over time, the VOC cemented its foothold by establishing fortifications throughout the region, such as the massive fort on the clove island of Amboina (now Ambon). But newer competitors threatened. During the 1600s, the VOC vied for control of the pepper trade with the British East India Company, which had arrived in Java just six years after the Dutch.