Banda Neira sits at the center of the Banda Islands, a small island just 3.3 kilometers long and 1.3 kilometers wide, with Mount Papenberg rising to 250 meters as its modest high point. To the west, barely a hundred meters across a narrow strait, the volcanic cone of Banda Api looms. To the south and east, the crescent of Banda Besar curves along the rim of a submerged caldera seven kilometers across. The town of Banda Neira, on the island's southern shore, is the largest settlement in the archipelago with around 7,000 inhabitants. For centuries it served as the commercial and administrative hub of a trade that mattered more than gold. Nutmeg grew almost exclusively in the Bandas, and European merchants would sail for months to reach these islands, driven by a spice that sold for markups of several thousand percent.

The Portuguese were first. In 1512, a year after Afonso de Albuquerque conquered Malacca, Portuguese ships reached the Bandas. But they did not stay long, and when Captain Garcia returned in 1529 to build a fort on Banda Neira, the Bandanese drove him away. The Dutch arrived in 1599 with offers of friendship and trade. A decade later, the Orang Kaya -- the local merchant-rulers -- killed thirty Dutch traders who had been pushing too hard for exclusive trading rights. The VOC's response was to build Fort Belgica in 1611, a pentagonal stone fortress that still stands today, designed to intimidate both the Bandanese and the English, who had established their own presence on the nearby island of Run. Fort Nassau, older and lower on the waterfront, completed the Dutch stranglehold. Between these two fortifications, the VOC controlled access to the most valuable crop on Earth.

In 1621, Jan Pieterszoon Coen arrived at Banda Neira and launched the campaign that would secure the Dutch monopoly through annihilation. The Banda Massacre devastated the indigenous population across the island group. The VOC then rebuilt the workforce from scratch, bringing enslaved people from across Indonesia, India, and coastal China to work the nutmeg plantations under Dutch perkeniers. The brutality of the system was measured in demographic collapse: by 1681, only about one hundred native Bandanese remained alive, and two hundred enslaved people had to be imported annually to sustain a labor force of four thousand. Not many perkenier families survived into modern times, though the plantation owned by Pongky Van de Broeke -- a descendant of Paulus van den Broeke, brother of the explorer Pieter van den Broecke -- still exists and welcomes visitors. It is a strange thing, to tour a plantation whose wealth was built on the near-total destruction of a people.

The Dutch monopoly finally broke when the British transplanted nutmeg seedlings to Penang and Grenada after seizing the Spice Islands during the Napoleonic Wars in 1810. The economic decline that followed turned Banda Neira from a prize into a prison -- an ideal place to exile Indonesian independence activists far from the political centers of Java. Hatta and Sjahrir used their years of exile to read, write, and organize the intellectual foundations of what would become the Indonesian republic. The Dutch held the Bandas until 1949, by which time the men they had banished to this remote island had already helped reshape the nation. Then, in 1988, Banda Api erupted catastrophically. A fissure tore across the neighboring volcanic island, sending an eruption column sixteen kilometers into the atmosphere. Lava flows reached the sea from three new craters. Five thousand of Banda Neira's roughly six thousand residents were evacuated to Ambon, two hundred kilometers away, along with all 1,800 inhabitants of Banda Api. Three people died. When the danger passed, most of Api's former residents chose to resettle on Banda Neira rather than return to the volcano.

Today Banda Neira moves at a pace that makes the rest of Indonesia feel frantic. The town's Dutch colonial buildings age gracefully along its single main street. Fort Belgica, restored but rarely crowded, offers views across the caldera to Banda Api and Banda Besar. The waters surrounding the islands are among the clearest in Indonesia, drawing divers to coral walls that drop into deep blue. Hatta's exile house is preserved as a modest museum. The island appears on the reverse of Indonesia's 1,000-rupiah banknote, a small acknowledgment of the enormous role this tiny place played in both colonial and national history. Getting here still requires effort -- a flight to Ambon followed by a ferry or a small plane to Bandaneira Airport -- and that difficulty is part of what preserves its character. Banda Neira has been a prize, a prison, and a refuge. In its current quiet incarnation, it is all three at once.