The Spice Islands — Banda, Ternate and Tidore

The Spice Islands are the small volcanic islands of Maluku in eastern Indonesia: the Banda group in the south, the home of nutmeg Myristica fragrans and its covering of mace, and the cone islands of Ternate and Tidore off the coast of Halmahera in the north, the home of clove Syzygium aromaticum. For centuries these islands were the only places where the two spices grew in quantity, and the whole of the early spice trade between Asia and Europe drew on them.

Each island is the peak of a volcano rising from deep water, and the ash of the volcano is the soil. Nutmeg grows in the Banda Islands under tall canarium trees planted to shade it, and the tree gives two spices, the seed itself and the red lace of mace that wraps it. Clove is the dried flower bud of a tree that thrived on Ternate, Tidore and their neighbours, and the trade that grew around it was in the hands of the sultans of Ternate and Tidore, whose rivalry shaped the politics of the region. Eleanor Ford, in Fire Islands, writes of the eastern islands as a place where the history of spice and the history of the table cannot be separated. The reputation of the islands reached far beyond the archipelago. Tomé Pires, in the Suma Oriental, set down what the Portuguese learned of cloves and nutmeg and where they were gathered, and Antonio Pigafetta recorded cloves at Tidore when the survivors of Magellan's expedition arrived there. Georg Eberhard Rumphius, who lived in Ambon in the seventeenth century, wrote the great natural history of the region's plants, and his work remains a foundation for knowledge of its spices. Alfred Russel Wallace travelled through Maluku in the nineteenth century and described the islands and their peoples. The history of Banda turned on the year 1621. The Dutch East India Company under Jan Pieterszoon Coen conquered the islands, ended the established trade of the Bandanese and brought the nutmeg groves under company control, so that the supply of the spice was held in a few hands. The company later confined clove cultivation to a small number of islands, and the trees that had grown freely across Maluku were cut elsewhere. That control is the settled reason the Spice Islands appear in the history of Europe as an object of competition and conquest. The eastern kitchen that the spices left behind is a lighter one than that of western Indonesia. Fish is the centre of it, grilled, cooked in sour broths or dressed with chilli, lime and fresh herbs, and the staple is often sago made into a starchy paste or baked cakes rather than rice. Nutmeg is used more freely here than elsewhere, and in Banda the fruit itself is preserved or sweetened as well as the seed. The spices that drew the world to these islands are in the local cooking as a seasoning among others, not as the whole of the dish.

At the table of Maluku the spice is part of the meal rather than set apart from it. Nutmeg and clove season soups and sweet preparations alongside fresh fish dressed with chilli and lime, and sago, eaten as a paste or baked, takes the place of rice in much of the east. The tradition of the islands is a cooking of the sea and the grove, with the spices that once moved the world used in quiet proportion.