Banda Besar is the largest island in the Banda group, curving like a crescent along the southern rim of a submerged caldera seven kilometers in diameter. Inside that caldera sit the smaller islands of Banda Neira and Banda Api, the latter an active volcano whose cone rises 640 meters from the sea. Banda Besar's own ridge reaches 510 meters at its highest point, running the length of the island. The three main settlements -- Lonthoir, Selamon, and Waer -- are strung along the coast beneath that ridge. Two partially ruined Dutch forts remain: Benteng Hollandia at Lonthoir and Benteng Concordia at Waer. They were built not to defend the island from outside invasion but to control the people who lived there.

Before the Europeans came, the Banda Islands were governed by local magnates called the Orang Kaya, and they were wealthy. Nutmeg grew almost exclusively in the Bandas, and the spice commanded extraordinary prices in the markets of Europe, where it was prized as a flavoring, a medicine, and -- erroneously -- a ward against plague. Portuguese merchants reached the islands first in the early sixteenth century, but it was the Dutch who decided that trade alone was insufficient. The VOC wanted a monopoly. When the Bandanese resisted, the Dutch responded with force. In early 1611, Piet Hein led two punitive military expeditions specifically against Lontor. The escalation continued for a decade, culminating in 1621 when Coen arrived with nineteen ships, 1,655 European soldiers, and 286 Asian auxiliaries. What followed was systematic: the destruction of a people to secure the supply of a seasoning.

With the indigenous Bandanese largely eliminated, the VOC faced an immediate problem: the nutmeg groves needed tending. The company repopulated the islands with enslaved people drawn from across the Indonesian archipelago, from India, and from the coast of China. These workers labored under Dutch planters -- the perkeniers -- who ran the plantations as personal fiefdoms. The surviving Bandanese were also enslaved and ordered to teach the newcomers the techniques of nutmeg and mace cultivation. The system was brutal in its accounting: by 1681, the original Bandanese population had been reduced to approximately one hundred people. To keep the plantation workforce stable at four thousand, the VOC imported two hundred enslaved people every year. The nutmeg monopoly that this cruelty sustained would endure until 1810, when British forces during the Napoleonic Wars seized the Spice Islands and smuggled nutmeg seedlings to Penang and Grenada, breaking the Dutch stranglehold with a few carefully transported trees.

Dutch rule persisted in the Bandas until 1949, though by then the economic engine that had driven colonization had long since stalled. Nutmeg from the Caribbean and Southeast Asia undercut Banda prices, and the islands slipped into the obscurity that distance and diminished commerce bring. Today Banda Besar is administered as part of Central Maluku Regency in the Indonesian province of Maluku. The forts at Lonthoir and Waer are slowly crumbling, their walls overtaken by vegetation, their strategic purpose centuries obsolete. The nutmeg groves still produce, tended now by the descendants of the diverse peoples the VOC brought to replace the Bandanese. The cliffs from which people once leapt overlook a sea that is spectacularly clear and teeming with marine life. Banda Besar has become, improbably, a destination for divers and travelers drawn by the coral reefs and the quiet, by the sense of a place where something enormous happened and then the world moved on.