Dutch Conquest of the Banda Islands (1621): The Nutmeg Massacre

The Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands in 1621 was a military campaign in which the Dutch East India Company (VOC), led by Jan Pieterszoon Coen, seized the only place in the world where nutmeg and mace then grew. In a few months most of the Bandanese people were killed, starved, enslaved or forced to flee, and the islands were turned into plantations worked by enslaved labourers. It is one of the most destructive episodes of early European colonialism in Asia.

The nutmeg islands

The Banda Islands are a cluster of small volcanic islands in the Banda Sea, in the east of today’s Indonesia. The main islands are Lonthor (also called Banda Besar), Neira, the volcano Gunung Api, and the outer islands of Ai and Run. Together they cover only a few dozen square kilometres.

For centuries these islands were the sole source of nutmeg and its red outer covering, mace. Bandanese traders sold them to Javanese, Malay, Chinese, Indian and Arab merchants, and the spices reached Europe through Venice and the Middle East at enormous prices. The islands were governed not by a king but by councils of leading men, the orang kaya (“rich men”), who ran the trade.

The Portuguese reached Banda in 1512, the year after their capture of Malacca, but never built a fort there. Dutch ships arrived in 1599, and English traders soon followed.

Background: contracts and resistance

After the founding of the VOC in 1602, the Dutch pressed the orang kaya to sign contracts granting the Company the exclusive right to buy nutmeg and mace. Several agreements were signed, but the Bandanese understood them differently and continued to sell to anyone who paid better, especially the English.

In 1609 a Dutch fleet under Admiral Pieter Verhoeff landed on Neira to build a fort. During negotiations Verhoeff and several dozen of his men were ambushed and killed. The Dutch completed Fort Nassau on Neira, and in 1611 built the larger Fort Belgica on the hill above it. A young merchant named Jan Pieterszoon Coen witnessed the 1609 events.

Rivalry with England sharpened the conflict. The English East India Company had posts on Ai and Run, and from 1616 the English merchant Nathaniel Courthope held Run against the Dutch for more than four years until he was killed in 1620. The Dutch took Ai in 1616 after heavy fighting.

Coen’s campaign of 1621

Coen was appointed governor-general of the VOC in Asia in 1617, took office in 1619 and founded Batavia on Java that year. He argued to the Company’s directors that a monopoly could only be secured by taking the islands outright. In early 1621 he sailed from Batavia with a fleet of about a dozen ships and roughly 2,000 men, including VOC soldiers, sailors, enslaved people and a contingent of Japanese mercenaries.

The fleet reached Banda in late February 1621 and landed on Lonthor, the largest and most populous island. After fighting for the hill fortifications, the Dutch forced the orang kaya to submit. Coen then accused them of plotting against the Company.

On 8 May 1621, 44 orang kaya who had been held prisoner were executed inside Fort Nassau on Neira. Dutch accounts record that Japanese mercenaries carried out the killings, beheading and quartering the men.

Depopulation of the islands

The executions were followed by the destruction of Bandanese society. Villages were burned, and many people fled to the mountains of Lonthor, where large numbers died of hunger and disease; according to some accounts, others threw themselves from cliffs rather than surrender. Others escaped by boat to the Kei Islands, Seram and other nearby islands.

Several hundred captives, commonly put at around 800, were shipped to Batavia as slaves. Some Bandanese specialists were kept on the islands to teach the new owners how to cultivate nutmeg trees. Estimates vary, but the population of roughly 13,000–15,000 people before 1621 seems to have fallen to around 1,000 who remained on the islands.

The VOC’s directors in the Netherlands, the Heeren XVII, accepted the result, though some expressed unease at the methods used. Coen himself was later reappointed governor-general and died in Batavia in 1629.

Key people

• Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587–1629): born in Hoorn, he rose from junior merchant to governor-general and was the driving force behind both Batavia and the Banda campaign. He believed trade in Asia could not be maintained without war.
• The orang kaya: the merchant elders who governed Banda’s villages. Their names are mostly lost, because Dutch records treated them as a group rather than as individuals.
• Nathaniel Courthope (died 1620): the English East India Company merchant whose long defence of Run made the island a symbol of English claims in the Spice Islands.
• Pieter Verhoeff (died 1609): the Dutch admiral whose killing on Neira hardened Dutch attitudes towards the Bandanese for the next decade.
• The Japanese mercenaries: soldiers recruited by the VOC in Japan, who served in its Asian campaigns until the Tokugawa shogunate banned their recruitment later in 1621.

The perkenier system

With the original inhabitants gone, the VOC divided the nutmeg land into 68 plots called perken. Each was granted to a Dutch settler, a perkenier, who had to sell the entire harvest to the Company at a fixed low price. The labour came from enslaved people brought from across the Indonesian archipelago, India and elsewhere, alongside convicts and contract workers.

The system gave the VOC a near-total monopoly on nutmeg and mace for well over a century. The Company limited production, destroyed surplus and patrolled the seas against smuggling to keep European prices high.

Consequences and legacy

The monopoly ended only in the early 19th century. During the British occupations of the islands in the Napoleonic Wars, nutmeg seedlings were taken to Ceylon, Penang, Grenada and other colonies, and the spice was soon grown in many places. The Treaty of Breda in 1667 had already confirmed Dutch possession of Run, while England kept New Amsterdam in North America; the story is often told as a swap of Run for Manhattan, which simplifies a broader settlement in which each side kept what it held.

The descendants of Bandanese refugees still live in the Kei Islands, where the village of Banda Eli preserves a form of the original Banda language. The present population of the Banda Islands descends largely from the enslaved workers and migrants who were brought in after 1621.

In the Netherlands, Coen’s reputation has been debated since the 19th century. His statue in his home town of Hoorn has been the subject of public protest and discussion, and the Banda conquest is now widely described by historians as a massacre and an early example of colonial depopulation.

Timeline

• 1512: Portuguese ships under António de Abreu reach the Banda Islands.
• 1599: The first Dutch ships arrive and begin buying nutmeg and mace.
• 1609, May: Admiral Pieter Verhoeff and dozens of his men are killed on Neira; the Dutch build Fort Nassau.
• 1611: The VOC builds Fort Belgica on Neira.
• 1616: The Dutch capture Ai; Nathaniel Courthope begins the English defence of Run.
• 1619, May: Coen captures Jayakarta and founds Batavia on Java.
• 1621, February: Coen’s fleet arrives and lands on Lonthor.
• 1621, 8 May: 44 orang kaya are executed at Fort Nassau.
• 1667: The Treaty of Breda leaves Run in Dutch hands.

Why it matters

The conquest of Banda showed how far a chartered trading company would go to control a single commodity. It destroyed an entire island society, created one of the earliest European plantation economies in Asia and set a pattern of monopoly and coercion that shaped Dutch rule in Indonesia for two centuries.