Roger Crowley

There's a kind of notional line through the middle of this archipelago called the Wallace line, where species from Oceania, from the

Pacific Ocean meat species from the Malay Peninsula.

And the extraordinary kind of weird, freaky evolutionary products of this were that in the Banda Sea, which is a sea in the middle of this huge array of islands, there were just three tiny islands in the world where nutmeg grew.

And a bit further north,

a group called the Malakas in what are now the Philippines, where cloves grew.

And these were the only places in the world.

It is quite extraordinary.

It's an evolutionary freak.

You're exactly right.

I mean, they introduce a level of violence into procedures almost immediately.

And there are no unified states, effectively.

The random evolutionary scattering relates to peoples as well.

Islands five miles apart from each other could not speak to each other in the Moluccas because they spoke different languages.

So it's a completely extraordinary situation.

No, they weren't.

I mean, Columbus comes back with something that declares that he's very close to the Spice Islands, but he's not.

The Portuguese get to the Spice Islands first.

They send a man called Fernando Soural.

So Rao, we don't know how we know this, writes back to his chum, for now Magalhaes, otherwise known as Magellan in Portuguese, and says, you ought to come out here.

You can live like a Raja out here.