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How did the Dutch control the Spice Islands?

By Chelsie Vandaveer

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Cornelius Houtman's voyage to the East Indies suffered several disastrous losses. Yet when the surviving ships returned in 1597 to Texel, an island port of the Netherlands, the ships were loaded with valuable spices and had a treaty with a sultan in Java. The Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) was chartered in 1602. In 1603, the Dutch blockaded, but never captured, the beautiful city of Goa; by 1605, most Portuguese traders were driven from the Spice Islands.

Map of the East Indies, Pub. 1635 in Amsterdam
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Unlike the Portuguese, the VOC wanted complete control, a monopoly, of the spice trade. Islanders, though, were not satisfied with the monies paid by the VOC and carried on a secret trade with English, Arabic, Portuguese, and other traders. Somewhere along the road to wealth, the VOC forgot the cruel lessons learned at the hands of King Philip II of Spain. In 1619, Jan Pieterszoon Coen became governor-general of the VOC in the East Indies.

Coen hired Japanese mercenaries and set out to halt what the VOC considered illegal smuggling. The death penalty was imposed on anyone in possession of nutmeg or cloves without authorization. In 1621, Coen's mercenaries tortured, quartered, and beheaded the allegedly "revolting" islanders. Over the next 15 years, the population of the Banda Islands was reduced from an estimated 15,000 to less than 1,000. Not surprisingly, some of the Dutch were appalled at the atrocities of their employer.

17th Century Dutch Fort, Banda Island, Indonesia
Michele Westmorland
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In 1623, the Dutch took the English colony on the island of Ambon and rid the area of the last non-VOC traders. Still, there were spice trees, nutmegs and cloves, that they could not watch at all times. VOC employees removed all the clove trees belonging to the sultans of Ternate and Tidore. They turned their attention to the other islands. Thousands of clove and nutmeg trees were chopped down.

By 1681, seventy-five percent of all nutmeg trees and better than ninety percent of the natives had been removed from the Bandas. The only spice-bearing trees allowed had to be in tightly controlled plantations run by Dutch owners and worked by Malaysian slaves.

(Compiled from: "In Search of Banda's Refugee Villages", Spice Islands Archaeology Project, Peter Lape, Dept. of Anthropology, Brown University, 1999; "Ambon", Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th Edition, Columbia University Press, 2003; "The Spice Trade" from the Economist, electronic reprinting Cardamom City, India; "Dutch East India Company", 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, electronic reprinting; Arcengel's Dutch East Indies website; and "History of Goa", Cortalim Online, 2003)

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