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Nutmeg sold for more than gold
A tree that wouldn't travel
Cloves grew all over the spice islands of Maluku, but nutmeg occurred on just 10 islands of Banda. Its seeds fail to germinate unless they are planted within a week, which made them hard to carry by sea, and the volcanic soil it evolved in left young trees fragile. The Banda islanders held that nutmeg was a gift of the gods that human hands could not cultivate. They gathered the seeds from wild groves whose locations they kept secret.
A global luxury
The spice still traveled around the world. It reached Constantinople in the sixth century and instantly became a mark of luxury, and Chaucer names it as a flavoring for English ale in the Canterbury Tales. At times it sold on the far side of the world for more than an equivalent weight of gold.
The rich men of Banda
The rulers of the Banda Islands became known across the region as the orang kaya, the rich men, and the entire trade passed through the ports of Majapahit. When a Dutch fleet under Jacob van Neck reached Maluku in 1598 and bypassed the Javanese merchants who had long dominated the trade, its cargo of cloves, nutmeg, and mace returned a profit of around 400%.
How can one fruit yield two spices?
The nutmeg tree's fruit splits open when ripe to reveal a seed wrapped in a lacy red covering. The seed is nutmeg, and the red covering, called an aril, is dried to become mace. The two taste related but distinct, with mace milder and more delicate. A nutmeg tree takes around seven to nine years to begin bearing fruit.
Why did Europeans prize nutmeg so highly?
Medieval Europeans valued nutmeg as a flavoring, a medicine, and a perfume ingredient, and almost none knew where it grew. It reached them through a long chain of Javanese, Indian, Arab, and Venetian traders, each adding a markup. The distance and the secrecy kept the price high. Europe's merchants had no direct access to the Banda Islands until the early 1500s.
How did nutmeg finally spread beyond Banda?
In the late 1700s the French botanist Pierre Poivre had nutmeg seedlings smuggled out of the islands to Mauritius. British forces occupying Banda in the early 1800s also moved trees to other colonies, including Penang and Bencoolen. Grenada, in the Caribbean, planted nutmeg in 1843 and later became a major producer.
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