The Spice Worth Killing For

Until the early 19th century, every nutmeg on Earth came from ten volcanic specks in the Banda Sea. The tree refused to grow anywhere else, and a single nut in London could buy a town house in Holland. The Dutch East India Company decided the math was simple: own the trees, own the price.

The Bandanese had spent a century selling to whoever showed up — Javanese, Arab, Portuguese, English. They signed contracts with the VOC and kept selling to others. In April 1621, Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen arrived with thirteen ships, around 1,600 European soldiers, and 80 Japanese ronin mercenaries.

What followed was not a battle. The Bandanese orang kaya were summoned, tortured, and beheaded by the ronin; their heads were impaled on bamboo and shown to the villages. Of a population estimated at 15,000, fewer than 1,000 remained on the islands when Coen left. The rest were dead, in chains bound for Batavia, or had thrown themselves off the cliffs of Selamon.

The groves stayed. The VOC parcelled them into estates called perkeniers, worked by imported enslaved labor. Margins on a single ship return ran past 300 percent for decades.

The monopoly held until a French agent named Pierre Poivre smuggled seedlings to Mauritius in 1770, and the British, during their occupation of the Bandas in 1810, sent young trees to Penang and Grenada. Today Grenada is the world's second-largest nutmeg exporter and puts the nut on its flag.