The nutmeg island worth more than Manhattan

In 1667, at the end of a war fought partly over spice, England and the Dutch Republic sat down to carve up what each side had captured. England came away with a swampy Dutch colony on the American coast, New Netherland, soon renamed New York. The Dutch kept a volcanic island three miles long that barely shows up on a map of Indonesia. Its only asset was Nutmeg, and in the 1600s, that was the better deal. For a few centuries, spices were worth more than land, and pound for pound, sometimes worth more than gold. Empires were built, wars were fought, and a people were nearly erased, over control of a few plants that grew naturally in only a handful of square miles on Earth.

What pepper cost Rome

The obsession did not start with the Dutch. By the first century, Black pepper was arriving in Rome from the Malabar Coast of India in such quantity, and at such expense, that the historian Pliny the Elder complained it was draining the empire's silver. He was not exaggerating for effect. When the Visigoth king Alaric surrounded Rome in 408 CE and named his price for not sacking the city, the ransom he demanded included gold, silver, silk, and three thousand pounds of pepper. A spice was worth naming in the same breath as the gold that bought a capital its life.

Pepper's value sank so deep into European habit that it outlived the empire. A peppercorn rent is still the term in English contract law for a token payment that keeps a lease legally valid without costing the tenant anything real, a fossil of the era when a few corns of pepper were themselves a kind of currency.

Venice's toll booth

For most of the Middle Ages, a sack of pepper or Cinnamon travelling from Asia to a European kitchen passed through Arab, Persian, and Indian traders, then Mamluk Egypt, then Venice, which controlled the last leg into Europe and taxed every stage it touched. Venice became one of the richest cities on Earth largely by being the toll booth at the end of the spice road, not by growing or making anything itself. By the time a spice reached a merchant in London or Bruges, it had changed hands a dozen times and cost a small fortune, none of which had gone to whoever actually grew it.

Sailing around the middleman

Break the monopoly and you break the price. That was the logic behind the age of European sea exploration, whatever else got said about it. In 1492, a Genoese captain sailing for Spain tried to reach the spice markets of Asia by heading west instead of east, and ran into an entire pair of continents nobody in Europe knew was there. Christopher Columbus never found his spice route. Six years later, the Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama found his, sailing around the southern tip of Africa to reach Calicut on India's Malabar Coast, the source of pepper, and cutting out every middleman between the coast and the ship's hold. Portugal spent the next century as the richest small country in Europe for it.

One island chain, three fortunes

Portugal's edge did not last. By 1602 the Dutch had formed the United East India Company, the VOC, built to seize the spice trade by force where trade alone would not do it. Geography handed them an almost absurd opportunity: nearly the world's entire supply of Nutmeg and Mace, which are actually the same fruit (nutmeg is the seed, mace the lacy red membrane wrapped around it), grew on a tiny cluster of volcanic islands called the Bandas, and nearly the world's Clove grew a short sail away in the Maluku Islands. Control a few square miles of Indonesian coastline and you controlled three of the most valuable commodities on Earth.

The VOC controlled it by force. In 1621 the company's governor general, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, enforced a total monopoly on the Bandas by killing, enslaving, or expelling nearly the entire native population, some fifteen thousand people, and replacing them with a plantation system worked by enslaved and indentured labor brought in from elsewhere. It is one of the ugliest chapters in the history of any spice, and it is the reason nutmeg could be rationed and priced like a luxury for the rest of the century. A monopoly on a plant turned out to be enforceable the same way a monopoly on anything else is: by controlling who was allowed to live where it grew.

The trade that put a price on Run

This is the world that made the Run deal make sense. By the 1660s, Run was the last of the Banda Islands still outside Dutch control, held by the English, who used it to needle the Dutch nutmeg monopoly from a single toehold. The Dutch wanted it back badly enough to fight over it. When England and the Dutch Republic ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War with the Treaty of Breda in 1667, they settled on a simple principle: each side kept whatever it currently held. The Dutch held Run. The English held New Netherland, captured a few years earlier, Manhattan included. So that is what each side kept.

Nobody at that table thought they were giving up a future global city for a nutmeg patch. They thought they were giving up a marginal fur-trading outpost to secure a monopoly on one of the most valuable commodities in the world. For about a century, that was a reasonable trade. Then European naturalists smuggled nutmeg seedlings out of the Bandas, plantations sprang up elsewhere, and the monopoly that made Run worth fighting over quietly stopped existing.

How the monopoly broke

The Dutch monopoly on nutmeg and clove did not survive contact with a French administrator named Pierre Poivre, whose surname is simply French for pepper. Working from the island of Mauritius through the 1750s and 1760s, Poivre organized repeated expeditions to steal nutmeg and clove seedlings out of Dutch-controlled waters and get them growing on French territory instead. It took several failed attempts, but by the 1770s he had it working. From there, nutmeg and clove trees spread over the following decades to other territories under French and British control, reaching Zanzibar for cloves and, eventually, Grenada for nutmeg. Grenada, still nicknamed the Isle of Spice, took to it so completely that a nutmeg appears on the country's flag today. Once nutmeg grew in more than one place, the Dutch could no longer control the supply, and the price did what prices do when a monopoly ends. It fell, and it never went back up.

The myth about rotten meat

One story about spices refuses to die: that medieval cooks smothered meat in pepper and clove to hide the taste of spoilage. It does not hold up. Spices were, as everything above should make clear, wildly expensive, often costing more per pound than the meat itself. The households that could afford Clove and Black pepper were exactly the households that could afford fresh meat and proper storage, and had no reason to eat spoiled food in the first place. Medieval and Renaissance cooks used spices for the same reasons we still do, because they tasted good and signaled wealth at the table, plus one reason we do not: in the medical thinking of the time, they were believed to balance the body's humors. Nobody was paying gold prices to disguise a bad dinner.

The short version

• 1st century CE: Rome pays fortunes for black pepper from India, and in 408 CE Alaric ransoms the city partly in pepper.
• Middle Ages: Venice grows rich as the last toll booth on the overland spice road from Asia.
• 1492 and 1498: Columbus sails west looking for a spice route and finds the Americas instead; da Gama sails around Africa and finds the real one.
• 1602 to 1621: the Dutch VOC seizes the Banda Islands by force to monopolize nutmeg and mace.
• 1667: the Treaty of Breda lets England keep Manhattan and the Dutch keep the nutmeg island of Run.
• 1770s: Pierre Poivre smuggles nutmeg and clove seedlings out of Dutch waters, breaking the monopoly for good.

Almost everything in this story now sits in a spice jar for a few dollars: Nutmeg and Mace from the same fruit, Clove from the Malukus, Black pepper and the Long pepper Rome often prized even more highly, Cinnamon from Ceylon and the Cassia that gets sold in its place, Star anise from the trade routes east, Vanilla from a Mexican orchid that took its own long journey to becoming cheap. None of it is rationed, smuggled, or fought over anymore. Worth remembering, next time a recipe calls for a pinch of something: the pinch used to be the point.