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The Portuguese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banda_Islands In August 1511 on
behalf of the king of Portugal, Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Malacca,
which at the time was the hub of Asian trade. In November of that year,
after having secured Malacca and learning of the Bandas' location,
Albuquerque sent an expedition of three ships led by his good friend
António de Abreu to find them. Malay pilots, either recruited or
forcibly conscripted, guided them via Java, the Lesser Sundas and Ambon
to Banda, arriving in early 1512.The first Europeans to reach the Bandas,
the expedition remained in Banda for about one month, purchasing and
filling their ships with Banda's nutmeg and mace, and with cloves in
which Banda had a thriving entrepôt trade.D'Abreu sailed through Ambon
while his second in command Francisco Serrão went ahead towards Maluku
islands, was shipwrecked and ended up in Ternate. Distracted by
hostilities else where in the archipelago, such as Ambon and Ternate,
the Portuguese did not return until 1529; a Portuguese trader Captain
Garcia landed troops in the Bandas. Five of the Banda islands were
within gunshot of each other and he realised that a fort on the main
island Neira would give him full control of the group. The Bandanese
were however hostile to such a plan and their warlike antics were both
costly and tiresome to Garcia whose men were attacked when they
attempted to build a fort. From then on, the Portuguese were infrequent
visitors to the islands preferring to buy their nutmeg from traders in
Malacca.Unlike other eastern Indonesian islands, such as Ambon, Solor,
Ternate and Morotai, the Bandanese displayed no enthusiasm for
Christianity or the Europeans who brought it in the sixteenth century,
and no serious attempt was made to Christianise the Bandanese.[4]
Maintaining their independence, the Bandanese never allowed the
Portuguese to build a fort or a permanent post in the islands.
Ironically though, it was this lack of ports which brought the Dutch to
trade at Banda instead of the clove islands of Ternate and Tidore.
The Dutch followed the Portuguese to Banda but were to have a much
more dominating and lasting presence. Dutch-Bandanese relations were
mutually resentful from the outset, with Holland’s first merchants
complaining of Bandanese reneging on agreed deliveries and price, and
cheating on quantity and quality. For the Bandanese, on the other hand,
although they welcomed another competitor purchaser for their spices,
the items of trade offered by the Dutch—heavy woollens, and damasks,
unwanted manufactured goods, for example—were usually unsuitable in
comparison to traditional trade products. The Javanese, Arab and Indian,
and Portuguese traders for example brought indispensable items along
steel knives, copper, medicines and prized Chinese porcelain.
As much as the Dutch disliked dealing with the Bandanese, the trade
was a highly profitable one with spices selling for 300 times the
purchase price in Banda. This amply justified the expense and risk in
shipping them to Europe. It is even likely that the resulting boom
helped finance an artistic renaissance in Holland supporting the likes
of Rembrandt van Rijn. The allure of such profits saw an increasing
number of Dutch expeditions; it was soon seen that competition from each
would eat into all their profits. Thus the competitors united to form
the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) (the ‘Dutch East Indies
Company).
Until the early seventeenth century the Bandas were ruled by a group
of leading citizens, the orang kaya (literally 'rich men'), each of
these was a head of district. At the time nutmeg was one of the "fine
spices" kept expensive in Europe by disciplined manipulation of the
market, but a desirable commodity for Dutch traders in the ports of
India as well; economic historian Fernand Braudel notes that India
consumed twice as much as Europe . A number of Banda’s orang kaya were
persuaded (or deceived) by the Dutch to sign a treaty granting the Dutch
a monopoly on spice purchases. Even though the Bandanese had little
understanding of the significance of the treaty known as 'The Eternal
Compact', or that not all Bandanese leaders had signed, it would later
be used to justify Dutch troops being brought in to defend their
monopoly.
The Bandanese soon grew tired of the Dutch actions; the low prices,
the useless trade items, and the enforcement of Dutch sole rights to the
purchase of the coveted spices. The end of the line for the Bandanese
came in 1609 when the Dutch reinforced Fort Nassau on Bandanaira Island.
The orang kaya called a meeting with the Dutch admiral and forty of his
highest-ranking men and ambushed and killed them all.
While Portuguese and Spanish activity in the region had weakened, the
English had built fortified trading posts on tiny Ai and Run islands,
ten to twenty kilometres from the main Banda Islands. With the British
paying higher prices, they were significantly undermining Dutch aims for
a monopoly, and as Dutch-British tensions increased, the Dutch built, in
1611, the larger and more strategic Fort Belgica, above Fort Nassau. In
1615, the Dutch invaded Ai with 900 men and the British retreated to Run
where they regrouped. That same night, the British launched a surprise
counter-attack on Ai retaking the island and killing 200 Dutchmen. A
year later, a much stronger Dutch force attacked Ai which itself was
initially hampered by cannonade fire, but after a month of siege the
defenders ran out of ammunition and were slaughtered. The Dutch
strengthened the fort renaming it 'Fort Revenge'. European control of
the Bandas was still contested up until 1667 when, under the Treaty of
Breda (1667), the British traded the small island of Run for Manhattan,
giving the Dutch full control of the Banda archipelago.
On August 9th, 1810. The British captured the Islands and accepted
their surrender from the Dutch after engaging the Fortifications in
action by Captain C. Cole, with the British warships of HMS Caroline
thirty-six guns, HMS Piedmontaise, thirty-eight guns, Captain Foote and
the HMS Barracouta, eighteen guns. Captain Kenah, having on board about
one hundred men of the Madras European Regiment after sailing from
Madras with supplies for Amboyna, recently captured by the British.
Newly-appointed VOC governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen set about
enforcing Dutch monopoly over the Banda’s spice trade. In 1621
well-armed soldiers were landed on Bandaneira Island and within a few
days they had also occupied neighbouring and larger Lontar. The orang
kaya were forced at gunpoint to sign an unfeasibly arduous treaty, one
that was in fact impossible to keep, thus providing Coen an excuse to
use superior Dutch force against the Bandanese.The Dutch quickly noted a
number of alleged violations of the new treaty, in response to which
Coen launched a punitive massacre. Japanese mercenaries were hired to
deal with the orang kaya, forty of whom were beheaded with their heads
impaled and displayed on bamboo spears.
The population of the Banda Islands prior to Dutch conquest is
generally estimated to have been around 13-15,000 people, some of whom
were Malay and Javanese traders, as well as Chinese and Arabs. The
actual numbers of Bandanese who were killed, forcibly expelled or fled
the islands in 1621 remain uncertain. But readings of historical sources
suggest around one thousand Bandanese likely survived in the islands,
and were spread throughout the nutmeg groves as forced labourers . The
Dutch subsequently re-settled the islands with imported slaves, convicts
and indentured labourers (to work the nutmeg plantations), as well as
immigrants from elsewhere in Indonesia. Most survivors fled as refugees
to the islands of their trading partners, in particular Keffing and Guli
Guli in the Seram Laut chain and Kei Besar. Shipments of surviving
Bandanese were also sent to Batavia (Jakarta) to work as slaves in
developing the city and its fortress. Some 530 of these individuals were
later returned to the islands because of their much-needed expertise in
nutmeg cultivation (something sorely lacking among newly-arrived Dutch
settlers) .
Whereas up until this point the Dutch presence had been simply as
traders, that was sometimes treaty-based, the Banda conquest marked the
start of the first overt colonial rule in Indonesia albeit under the
auspices of the VOC.
Having decimated the islands' population, Coen divided the productive
land of approximately half a million nutmeg trees into sixty-eight
1.2-hectare perken. These land parcels were then handed to Dutch
planters known as perkeniers of which 34 were on Lontar, 31 on Ai and 3
on Neira. With few Bandanese left to work them, slaves from elsewhere
were brought in. Now enjoying control of the nutmeg production the VOC
paid the perkeniers 1/122nd of the Dutch market price for nutmeg,
however, the perkeniers still profited immensely building substantial
villas with opulent imported European decorations.
The outlying island of Run was harder for the VOC to control and they
exterminated all nutmeg trees there. The production and export of nutmeg
was a VOC monopoly for almost two hundred years. Fort Belgica, one of
many forts built by the Dutch East India Company, is one of the largest
remaining European forts in Indonesia.
Religious violence between Christians and Muslims, spilling over from
intercommunal conflict in Ambon affected the islands in the late 1990s.
The disturbance and resulting deaths damaged the previously prosperous
tourism industry. |
