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Chapter 1: What drove the Dutch to employ samurai mercenaries in the Banda Islands?
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Anand.
And me, William Durumple. And today's episode, the second in our amazing story of the VOC, the Forgotten East India Company, that we always omit from stories when we talk about the English East India Company. is, I think, one of the most extraordinary and little-known stories in the history of empire, at least little-known in the English-speaking world.
It's about the deathly rivalry between the English and the Dutch and the two East India companies, these two corporations that were empires, these incredibly rich precursors to the great and incredibly powerful corporations of our day. And the story revolves around a spice so valuable that they were willing to torture and kill for it.
And the story culminates in a 17th century deal that changed the fortune of Manhattan forever.
When we say valuable, I mean, I just want to give you an idea of how valuable. Okay. And honestly, this doesn't speak well of the kind of reading that I've been doing. But wait for wait. It's interesting. In the 1600s, nutmeg was more valuable than cocaine is today. Let that sit with you for a second. I did the sums. That's all I did.
Did you experiment?
No, I just wanted to get there very, very quickly. I did the sums. To guide us through this rather extraordinary story, we've got exactly the right man for the job. You know, he's one of the finest narrative historians working in Britain today. Giles Milton is the man. And his book, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, is an absolute rip-roaring read, which, can I tell you, he refers to as Nat's Nuts.
when he's not working which made me laugh so much nuts nuts nathaniel's not meg a fine tome currently being developed for television it is indeed yeah um dear russell crowe has got the rights and um he's doing something with it yeah yeah so i'm not quite sure where we're at with it but i'm told it's uh it's rolling along so coming to your screens in the next couple of years hopefully
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Chapter 2: How did nutmeg become a symbol of power and greed in the spice trade?
They're 600 miles west of Australia.
Kind of nearer to Papua New Guinea than anywhere else, aren't they?
Yeah, that's the nearest place, Papua New Guinea. But even today, they're extremely hard to get to. But in the 1600s, you know, when you're sailing in a wooden ship halfway across the world, they were not only difficult to get to, but extremely dangerous to get to because you're contending...
not only with the elements, with the storms, with monsoons, with reefs, with sunken reefs, but you're also contending with the Portuguese, the Spanish and, of course, the Dutch, none of whom want you to find these islands and kind of break the monopoly that they're trying to carve out on this space.
I mean, difficult to find the islands, but also they're a bugger to grow. I mean, do you want to know some, what do you like a nutmeg tree fact? They take about six to seven to nine years to fruit.
So, you know, it's not the kind of kidnap crop that you could, if you are a colonial, as we've discussed with tea and other things, that you could sort of sneak off and take a cutting and start your own industry. These things have to be, these trees, giles have to be established. They have to be mature.
They do. And they're very, very fussy trees. So they require a particular type of volcanic soil. They require a particular microclimate, which is why they were confined to these islands. And it was extremely difficult, actually, to try and transplant these plants. Just to paint a little picture of the tree, because most people won't have seen one. They're very, very beautiful.
They look rather like a lemon tree. And in fact, the nutmeg fruit is this beautiful lemony golden fruit that hangs off the tree. And it's inside that fruit. You break open the flesh and inside you have this withered little nut, which is a nutmeg, which is entirely surrounded by a very beautiful, bright red, lacy sort of thing, which is mace, which is very similar in taste and flavour, in fact.
Mace and nutmeg come from the same fruit.
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Chapter 3: What led to the brutal competition between the English and Dutch East India Companies?
But next to each other with rival companies, with rival warehouses on either side of a river in Batavia, things begin to get nasty.
Yes, so both the English and the Dutch, they set up what are known as factories, but are not really factories at all. They're like fortified warehouses, which are their headquarters. And they're in Bantam at the time, which is a port just down the coast from Jakarta. And as you say, rivalries are intense there. They're both after the same thing.
And from the very word go, I think the Dutch are far more powerful. They have more ships. They have far more capital behind them. Many more men. And they're much more aggressive in pursuit of the spices that are so yearned for in Europe. And so from this base Bantam in Java, they begin to set sail east, further east to the Moluccas or what are known as the Spice Islands.
Or in the 1600s, they were simply known as the Spiceries. And some of these islands were known for cinnamon and cloves. That's Tanati and Tidore. Others are known exclusively for Nutmeg, and that's the Bounder Islands. And the Dutch really have a big head start on the English. They get to the Bounder Islands, first of all, and the first thing they do is build forts on the islands.
Forts which, I have to say, still exist to this day. These crumbling, vast fortifications. You find brass cannon lying in the sand in these islands, you know. You make it sound a very alluring spot. It's absolutely wonderful. And the point, the kind of key point of the Bander Islands is, as I said, there are six islands and five of them are all quite close together.
And the Dutch realised if they built strategically placed forts, they could control those five islands and therefore have a virtual monopoly on the nutmeg trade. But one island, the sixth island in the Bander Islands, Run Island, was about 10 miles from the main group. And this was the island that the Dutch did not control.
And this island was a real thorn for them because it meant that without them controlling it, if the English controlled it, they would be able to break this monopoly on the nutmeg trade that the Dutch were so desperate to carve out for themselves.
Yeah, I mean, describing it as a Cold War, the Iceman, if you like, the Iceman from the Dutch side. I know you talked about him in the last episode, Willie, but Jan Pietersen Keun.
Jan Keun was the Governor General of the entirety of the Dutch East Indies.
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Chapter 4: How did the English manage to secure Run Island despite Dutch dominance?
In fact, the captain of the ship on which Nathaniel Courtauld sailed, William Keeling, he's one of my favourite characters in this entire story, actually, because he performed... Hamlet. He got all his men dressed up in costumes and everything and performed Hamlet on the mangrove shores of West Africa when they were caught in the doldrums.
Yeah, and he thought, well, this will keep them entertained. So this was, yeah, they had to keep the men entertained. They have to keep boredom at bay. And so Nathaniel Courtauld, when he arrives on Run Island, he's faced with a problem here. Run Island is... it should be pointed out, is a very, very small island.
It's a couple of miles wide, a mile or so long, and they're going to be stuck on this island for a very long time. So Arak, this fiery alcohol, is going to play a very important role in their lives as they struggle to survive on this island.
And he arrives in Run in 1616 with two ships and 38 men, and almost immediately the Dutch turn up on the horizon.
Yes. So the Dutch, as I said, they control the other five islands in the Banda Group, leaving run as this isolated sort of outpost, if you like. The Dutch have dozens of ships in the Banda Islands at time. They have thousands of soldiers. And so this is a classic sort of David versus Goliath struggle that's going to take place. But Nathaniel Courtauld on Run Island has one thing in his favour.
And that is that Run Island, most of Run Island is surrounded by extremely high precipitous cliffs that are almost impossible to scale. And there's only one section of the island where it will be possible for the Dutch to land. And, you know, Nathaniel knows enough about cannon and warfare to know where to strategically place the cannon from his two ships to defend the island.
The Dutch then instigate a complete blockade on Run Island. They try on repeated occasions to try and take the island by force. But Nathaniel's cannon see them off, you know, a few shots over into the sea and the ships have to retreat. And so the siege run will begin and it's going to last for a very long time indeed. And it's really a question of who can hold out longer.
Will it be Nathaniel and his men on the island or will the Dutch be able to take this place by force?
I mean, when you say a very long time, we're talking 1,540 days. I mean, that's just unthinkable. We're going to go to a break soon. But, you know, with conditions getting worse and worse for Courtauld and his men, there is a glimmer of hope at one point, isn't there, Giles? That, you know, the siege that the Dutch have so successfully laid around Ron might be broken with some supplies.
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Chapter 5: What were the consequences of the English and Dutch rivalry in the Banda Islands?
They tied him to a stake, got the horrendous white ants and put them into his wounds. So this, of course, was an age of great brutality. Everyone was brutal. And when I read that, the fact that he recorded it so matter-of-factly in his diary truly shocked me. And when one realises that the Dutch were even more brutal than the English, no one comes out well out of this period of history.
It was remarkably brutal.
I mean, one person though that you can admire, at least for their tenacity, is Nathaniel Courtauld, who's having to hold the line and have his men hold the line with, you know, watching men taken from the Solomon, watching any hope of supply. And he does manage to do this. He's enough of a threat that there is this plan, this ambush plan set up by the Dutch in October 1620 to bump him off.
So tell us how that works.
They get intelligence at one point that Nathaniel Courtauld is intending to leave Run Island and go to one of the other Banda Islands, where he hears there's a lot of unrest amongst the native population. And he thinks this could herald the beginnings of a general uprising against the Dutch. So it's a sort of vitally important moment for him.
And so he takes the risk, really, the very great risk in October 1620. He's been on the island for like four years to try and cross the channel of water to the next island and find out what's taking place. This is to prove an absolutely fatal mistake. He sets off at night with his boy William, as he was called. His boy William is his son or his sort of cabin boy?
It's a sort of cabin boy come slave servant who's helping him. Man servant, really, or boy servant. Williams always have the rough end of things on Empire. It's a very tragic story. So the two of them get into their rowing boat. They're rowing out across the open water and the Dutch have laid an ambush.
It's about two o'clock or three o'clock in the morning where they see dimly glowing in the night, they see Nathaniel Courtauld's lantern and they wait until they're almost upon him and then they open fire. Courtauld immediately fires back. There's a running gun battle takes place on the water, but then Courtauld's gun jams And in disgust, he throws it into the water. And he's caught defenseless.
And of course, what do the Dutch do? He's a sitting duck. They gun him down. And he was last seen falling into the water. Nathaniel Courtauld is never seen again. His corpse is never found. And we, well, he died clearly, but we don't know what happened to his body.
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Chapter 6: How did the Treaty of Breda change the fate of New York and Run Island?
By the time Yankern has finished his genocide, there are fewer than a thousand left on the Bandar Islands. It's an extraordinarily sweeping genocide that really wipes out the native population.
It also becomes sort of a battle plan. It becomes a plan that is repeated again and again. And you can see, you know, always when you see people being wiped out, you see a dehumanization of them. So Cohen, what he says about the Bandonistas, they're indolent people of whom little good can be expected. And now he has a modus operandi. You know, we can get rid of them.
We can import slave labor from Java, from China. They can do the work. And that is probably the thinking that leads to one of the worst massacres of Amboina in 1623. So this is another island, Giles. Tell us about Amboina.
Yeah, for a cheery chap, Giles, you choose your genocide. We've had you first on with Smyrna when the whole population of Smyrna got wiped out. Now we're wiping out various other. We've finished with the Banderites. Take us to Amboina. Yeah.
But Amboina also, it's not a nutmeg island either, is it?
No. Amboina, a little way to the north of the Banda Islands, was another headquarters of the Dutch East India Company in this part of the world. There were a very small number of English traders on the island at the time. When I say small, I mean 10, precisely. And the Dutch want to get rid of them. They see them, for some reason, they see them as a threat. And they...
Capture one of the English allies. There were some Japanese who happened to be allied with the English on Amboina. Japanese are all over the place at this point. The Japanese are all over the place. And under torture, one of the Japanese men says, yes, indeed, the English are going to try and take control of this Dutch fort, which, frankly, is utterly absurd.
The Dutch have got hundreds of troops in this fort on Amboina. They've got tons and tons of weaponry. The English are merchants there. They've got about six guns. In their wildest dreams, they couldn't hope to take control of this place and nor would they want to. However, Jan Kern wants the English wiped out and thus begins what became known as the Massacre of Amboina.
And became very famous at the time. I mean, we've forgotten it today, but it was a kind of horror story in London and was long remembered this, wasn't it?
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Chapter 7: What role did the Dutch East India Company play in the genocide of the Banda Islands?
Who, incidentally, we've met before in the very dodgy action of setting up the Royal Africa Company, which is the big slave trading operation, which the royal family have a monopoly in.
His initials burned into people's chests. D-O-Y, Duke of York. Yes.
Yes. So the Duke of York, fed up that the Dutch haven't handed back run under the terms of the treaty, and also still nursing the grievances or whipping up the grievances from the massacre of Amboina, he sends ships across the Atlantic and seizes the Dutch-held territory of New Amsterdam. He says, "'Tis high time to put the Dutch out of a capacity of doing mischief again."
And so he seizes this island. And over the course of the coming months, there will be peace negotiations between the English and the Dutch.
And he has to talk to, and this is the important personality we need to introduce, tell us, Giles, about Peg Leg Pete.
Peter Stuyvesant, who is the governor of New Amsterdam at the time. The Dutch cannot defend this swampy and rather worthless island on the Atlantic Sea. Who would want it? Who would want it? Who would want it? I mean, you know, they get skins and furs there, but it's not very profitable at all.
But anyway, they come to negotiations at Breda, the town of Breda in Holland, and they discuss what they're going to do. And the ensuing Treaty of Breda decides the following thing. that in return for the Dutch being allowed to keep the island of Ran in the Banda Islands, the English will get to control and keep New Amsterdam, which they decide in honour of James, Duke of York, to name New York.
And that's how it happened, ladies and gentlemen. I love stories like that.
And Charles II says to his brother, "'Tis a place of great importance." He says, "'We've got the better of it, and tis now called New York.'"
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