the everyday spice that caused three wars

The Treaty That Traded a Future Metropolis for a Spice Island

The Treaty of Breda, signed on July 31, 1667, ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War and included a clause that puzzles modern observers: the Dutch Republic surrendered New Amsterdam to England in exchange for the island of Run (also called Pulo Run), a volcanic speck in the Banda archipelago measuring just 3 kilometers long and 1 kilometer wide. The British had claimed Run since 1616, when local chiefs granted Nathaniel Courthope and his crew exclusive nutmeg trading rights, but Dutch forces had besieged and effectively controlled it since 1620. The treaty formalized Dutch possession while England gained permanent control of the Hudson River settlement, renaming it New York after the Duke of York. At the signing, Dutch negotiators considered this a triumph—they'd finally eliminated the last British toehold in the Banda Islands, completing their nutmeg monopoly after nearly five decades of violent struggle.

Run's value derived from its nutmeg groves, which in 1667 generated profits that dwarfed any conceivable revenue from a struggling colonial town of roughly 1,500 inhabitants living in wooden houses along muddy streets. Manhattan's primary exports were beaver pelts and timber—valuable, but nothing compared to nutmeg's profit margins. A single sack of nutmeg purchased in the Bandas for a few guilders sold in Amsterdam for 300 times its purchase price, with London prices even higher. The Dutch West India Company, which administered New Amsterdam, had been hemorrhaging money for years, while the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which controlled the spice trade, was the world's richest corporation with a monopoly worth protecting at any cost. The treaty's architects weren't fools trading Manhattan for a pebble—they were businessmen securing a revenue stream that had already made Amsterdam the wealthiest city in Europe.

The Brutal Economics of the Nutmeg Monopoly

Nutmeg and its by-product mace (the red aril surrounding the seed) grew naturally only on six small Banda Islands: Neira, Banda Besar, Ai, Run, Rhun, and Gunung Api. Before European contact, Arab and Javanese traders had maintained relationships with Bandanese chiefs for centuries, purchasing nutmeg through negotiated agreements. When Portuguese traders arrived in 1512, followed by the English in 1603 and Dutch in 1599, the competition intensified into violence. By 1621, VOC Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen had completed the conquest of the Bandas through campaigns that killed an estimated 14,000 of the islands' 15,000 inhabitants—a genocide executed specifically to eliminate local control over nutmeg production. Coen divided the islands into sixty-eight perken (plantation parcels), distributing them to Dutch colonists while importing enslaved laborers from Java, Sulawesi, and other Indonesian islands to work the groves under armed supervision.

The medical theories driving nutmeg demand were elaborate and completely unfounded. Seventeenth-century physicians prescribed nutmeg to prevent plague, attributing its supposed protective powers to the Doctrine of Signatures—the belief that God designed plants to resemble the ailments they cured, with nutmeg's brain-like interior indicating its use for mental disorders. London pharmacists sold nutmeg as an ingredient in theriac, a supposed cure-all containing up to 64 ingredients, while street vendors hawked nutmeg-laced sachets as plague preventatives during the 1665 Great Plague that killed 100,000. Wealthy Europeans carried personal nutmeg graters made of silver or ivory, grating fresh nutmeg into wine, ale, and food at every meal. This wasn't mere flavor preference—nutmeg was medicine, status symbol, and preservation agent combined, making it worth more per pound than gold in London markets during the 1660s.

The Unlikely English Holdout and His Fatal Stand

Nathaniel Courthope landed on Run in December 1616 with two ships, the Swan and the Defence, and a crew of 38 men. The local orang kaya (headmen) had invited the English as a counterweight to Dutch aggression, signing a treaty granting England exclusive trading rights in exchange for protection. Courthope fortified his position, building defensive works and maintaining his garrison despite a Dutch blockade that began in 1617 and lasted four years. His men survived on fish, local provisions, and supplies smuggled through the blockade by Bandanese allies who resented Dutch domination. In October 1620, while sailing between Run and neighboring Nailaka island at night to gather supplies, Courthope's boat was intercepted by Dutch forces; he was killed in the brief engagement, shot through the chest. His men held Run for another three years until malnutrition and disease forced surrender in 1623, but England never relinquished its legal claim to the island.

The Run garrison's resistance became a propaganda tool in England, with Courthope celebrated as a martyr who died defending English commercial interests against Dutch tyranny. The English East India Company petitioned Parliament repeatedly between 1623 and 1667, demanding compensation for the "illegal" Dutch occupation of Run and calculating lost profits at hundreds of thousands of pounds. These claims strengthened England's negotiating position at Breda, where diplomats framed the Run settlement as restitution for decades of Dutch aggression rather than a simple territorial exchange. The Dutch, exhausted by expensive military campaigns and eager to formalize their monopoly, agreed to cede New Amsterdam—which they'd already lost to English forces in 1664 during undeclared hostilities—in exchange for undisputed possession of Run and the final elimination of English competition in the Banda Islands.

How a Smuggled Seedling Destroyed an Empire's Fortune

The VOC's nutmeg monopoly collapsed in 1770 when Pierre Poivre, a French botanist and colonial administrator, successfully smuggled nutmeg seedlings from the Banda Islands to Mauritius, breaking the centuries-old geographic monopoly. Poivre had attempted the theft twice before, in 1750 and 1753, with both expeditions intercepted by VOC patrols. His third attempt succeeded by bribing a Bandanese plantation worker to collect seeds during the harvest season, when VOC supervision was laxest. Within twenty years, French colonies in Mauritius, Réunion, and later Zanzibar were producing commercial quantities of nutmeg. The British followed suit in the 1790s, establishing nutmeg plantations in Penang, Singapore, and eventually Grenada, which became the world's second-largest producer after Indonesia by the 20th century. By 1800, nutmeg prices had fallen to one-twentieth of their 1667 peak, and the Banda Islands faded into economic irrelevance.

Manhattan's trajectory moved in precisely the opposite direction. When the British took formal possession in 1667, New York had 1,500 residents; by 1700, it reached 5,000, and by 1776, it was North America's second-largest city with 25,000 inhabitants. The protected harbor that Dutch administrators had considered a minor asset became the foundation for global commerce. Today, Manhattan's real estate is valued at approximately $1.74 trillion, while Run remains home to fewer than 2,000 people living in villages without regular electricity, dependent on small-scale fishing and subsistence farming. The Banda Islands receive roughly 3,000 tourists annually, mostly Indonesian divers and history enthusiasts visiting the ruins of Dutch fortifications. When economists calculate the Treaty of Breda's outcome using modern values, the disparity is almost incomprehensible—but judged by 1667 knowledge and technology, Dutch negotiators made a defensible decision based on established profit centers rather than speculative colonial ventures that might never generate returns.