This is the fourth in a series of six e-mails on spices. Before reading this e-mail, I recommend that you read the e-mail of 9 Oct 2015, which provides useful background.
The Geographic Setting
The nutmeg tree is indigenous to the Banda Islands. The total area of these islands is a minuscule 69 square miles. (For comparison, recall that Paul Revere sought to alert every Middlesex village and farm; the area of Middlesex County is 847 square miles.) The ten islands in this group are a remnant of a single volcano; in contrast, each of the clove islands, e.g., Ternate and Tidore, is a separate volcano (e-mail of 22 Oct 2015). Keep in mind that volcanic soil is unusually fertile.These islands are in the Banda Sea about a hundred miles south of the island of Ceram. Put another way, they are roughly halfway between New Guinea and Sulawesi (Celebes). In the first map below the Banda Islands are marked by the red dagger. (Ceram is the island just above the red dagger.) You can't see the Banda Islands on this map since they are so small. The second map covers the same area but gives a physical view; you can see that the Bandas are on a volcanic ridge that is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire. In the third map the inset gives another view of the location of these islands, and the main map shows the individual islands. Note the scale; it's about ten miles from Neira to Run. These really are flyspeck islands in the middle of nowhere. The significance of these seemingly inconsequential islands is that when the Europeans arrived they were covered with nutmeg trees. In fact, until the 19th century nutmeg and mace came solely and exclusively from the Banda Islands. Neira, though not the biggest island, was the center of the nutmeg trade [Milton, p. 110] since it has the only significant stretch of flat land on these mountainous islands (see pictures at the end of Part 3).
(Continued in Part 2)
