The Banda Islands had been soaked in blood long before Cole arrived. In 1621, the Dutch East India Company's governor Jan Pieterszoon Coen orchestrated the massacre of the Bandanese people, reducing a population of roughly 15,000 to perhaps a thousand survivors. The goal was absolute monopoly. The Dutch replaced the murdered islanders with enslaved laborers and Company-linked settlers, turning the archipelago into a nutmeg plantation under armed guard. They built Fort Nassau at the harbor, then raised Fort Belgica on the hill above it -- a pentagon of stone and cannon designed by Vauban's principles, with five circular towers and five angled bastions commanding every approach. By 1810, when Napoleon's conquest of the Netherlands made Dutch colonial possessions fair game, the Bandas bristled with ten additional batteries, 700 regular Dutch troops, and 800 native militia. The tiny islands had become a fortress.

Cole's plan was audacious and simple: approach after dark, land troops in small boats, and take the forts before dawn. Almost nothing went right. The Dutch were alert. As the flotilla of small boats crept past the island of Rosensgan, a battery opened fire, muzzle flashes splitting the tropical darkness. Then the weather turned. Wind and current scattered the boats across the black water. When the surviving craft finally neared shore, they ground to a halt on a coral reef, a hundred yards out and directly opposite a Dutch battery of ten 18-pounder guns. The men had no choice but to leap into the sea, wade through chest-deep water under fire, and claw their way to a sandy cove. An hour and a half of chaos in the dark, and somehow the landing force made it ashore.

Captain Edward Tucker led the shore party inland at first light, landing at the village of Sasa, screened from the fort by a spur of land. His men scrambled up a jungle-covered hill and hauled a field gun to the summit. But between them and Fort Belgica lay dense tropical forest with no clear path. Tucker ordered a night march. The column pushed through undergrowth in near-total darkness until they hit a roadblock. Detouring along a stream, they stumbled into a Dutch detachment and a sharp firefight erupted at close range. The darkness that had concealed the roadblock also saved lives: casualties were three killed and fourteen wounded. By morning the British controlled the high ground, and the Dutch garrison, realizing their position was untenable, surrendered. Captain Charles Foote was installed as Lieutenant-Governor of the Banda Islands.

The Banda campaign was part of a broader seven-month sweep. The British had already taken Ambon in February 1810, and after Banda Neira fell they seized Ternate and every remaining Dutch outpost in the Moluccas by month's end. Cole's action proved a rehearsal for the larger invasion of Java in 1811. But the most consequential act was quieter than any battle. The East India Company had been cultivating nutmeg in Penang since the 1790s. By 1805, those gardens held 5,100 nutmeg trees and 15,000 clove trees. After the British occupation, the numbers jumped to 13,000 nutmeg trees and 20,000 clove trees. These seedlings were transplanted to Grenada, Zanzibar, and other colonies, shattering the geographic monopoly that had made the Bandas worth fighting for in the first place.

The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 handed the islands back to the Netherlands. The Bandas remained part of the Dutch East Indies until Indonesia's independence in 1945. But the monopoly was broken forever. Grenada eventually became one of the world's largest nutmeg producers, its flag bearing the fruit as a national symbol. The Banda Islands, once the most contested real estate in the Eastern Hemisphere, settled into quiet obscurity. Today Fort Belgica still stands on its hilltop, its pentagonal walls intact, overlooking a harbor where nutmeg trees still grow in the volcanic soil. In 2015, the fort was placed on UNESCO's World Heritage Tentative List. The cannons are silent, the batteries overgrown, but the stone remembers what nutmeg was once worth.