The Spice Worth a War

Nutmeg is the aromatic seed-kernel of Myristica fragrans, an evergreen tree native to the Banda Islands of the Moluccas in what is now Indonesia; the same seed yields a second spice, mace, from the scarlet lacy aril that wraps it. For centuries the Banda Islands were the world's only source, and control of them was fought over savagely: the Dutch East India Company seized a brutal monopoly in the seventeenth century, and by the Treaty of Breda the Dutch kept the nutmeg island of Run in exchange for ceding to England a far-off island called Manhattan. Few spices have so directly shaped the map.

Nutmeg's value made it, like cloves, part of the plague pomander tradition: during outbreaks such as London's Great Plague of 1665, nutmeg was carried in scented balls and pierced fruit in the belief that its strong aroma warded off disease, a folk practice belonging to the wider miasma theory of the period rather than to any real antiseptic property, given here as history and not as a claim about the spice's actual effect on infection. The Banda Islanders themselves were nearly wiped out in the Dutch conquest of the 1620s under Jan Pieterszoon Coen, one of the bleaker episodes of the spice trade, the human cost behind a spice now sold cheaply in any supermarket.