Was Manhattan traded for nutmeg?

It's hard to believe that anyone would trade the thriving island of Manhattan for a spice, but history is full of surprises. Find out why -- and how -- the Dutch traded Manhattan for nutmeg in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor candas Keener, joined by staff writer Jane Hey.
They're Candice hate Jane. You know, this morning, I knew
that we were going to be talking about a certain

(00:22):
spice today, So when I went to get pick up
my morning coffee, I found a nutmeg shaker and was
very liberal and shaking the spice into my coffee because
nutmeg is it's such a fun spice. It's sort of
nuttie and sort of like woody tasting, and it's very savory. Yeah, definitely.
I mean, I especially like a Christmas time for my

(00:43):
Christmas egg, one of my favorite drinks. Yeah. But as
much as you love nutmeg, would you ever trade the
island of Manhattan for nutmeg? Knowing what it is now?
I don't think I would, but I don't think that
such a slow coming. So what we're talking about is
this sort of a quirky piece of history in which

(01:04):
people used to say that the Island of Manhattan was
traded for like twenty four dollars or a couple of
strands of beads or something like that. And that's sort
of fictional to begin with, but it has a longer
and more interesting story than that. And if you think
that the American Indians who resided around Manhattan were conned
into giving up this very valuable piece of land, then

(01:26):
we have excellent news for you guys. They were not.
If anyone was taken advantage of it was the Dutch.
And this also ties into our nutmeg discussion. Um and
going back to give you some context about nutmeg, uh,
the Europeans loved them their own their nutmeg, and uh
back at least in the fourteenth century, we did a
We did a podcast a while ago on the on

(01:47):
the Black Death, and during that time at least Europeans
actually loved their nutmeg. They actually wore it around their
necks in a little packet to protect themselves from the play,
which is pretty interesting. I actually read that it sounds
it sounds like superstition, but I read that it actually
might have helped in repelling the fleas that possibly spread

(02:10):
the plague. And nutmeg, if you've never seen a whole
one before, it's about an inch long. It's like a
little nut shaped spice, and the inside of the kernels
where nutmeg comes from, nutmeg proper. But the outside coating
on the kernel is where we get the spice called mace,
and it grows on a tree. And um, it was

(02:30):
considered very, very valuable, not just for medicinal reasons that
Jane mentioned, but also because it could be used as
a hallucinogen and an aphrodisiac. And in the sixteenth century
some monks were known to reduce it to an oil
and rub it on their genitals. So go knock yourselves out.
But um, today we use small quantities of nutmeg to

(02:51):
help quell gas and nausea, but in really really large
doses nothing you could ever get from cooking with nutmeg.
Don't worry, um, it can still cause hallucination as well
as some symptoms that are similar to an epileptic seizure. Sarah,
if you eat enough of it it will do that
to you. Yes, I'd recommend getting yourself a nice little
nutmeg mill and and grinding it into your nutmeg in

(03:13):
your morning coffee and so just ingesting at hall So anyway,
all of this to say, nutmeg was a really hot commodity. Yeah,
And the Europeans were used to getting their nutmeg through
um land routes. Actually with nutmeg itself was indigenous two
islands in the East Indies, and so obviously and obviously
the climate of Europe was not very hospitable to nutmeg.

(03:36):
They couldn't grow it themselves, and so they relied on
these trade routes. But um, about the fifteenth century, uh,
the Ottoman Empire actually took over Constantinople, and in so
doing they actually shut down these land routes, cutting off
the axis for Europeans to um continue doing their trade.
And that's why when you hear about Christopher Columbus trying

(03:58):
to find a new trade aide route to the East,
it was such a big deal. They had no way
of getting there by their usual directions. They had to
find an entirely new way. And we know that Columbus
dumbled upon America supposedly, but someone who had markedly more
success was Vasco da Gama, and he actually went around
the Cape of Good Hope, and by doing so and

(04:19):
successfully getting to trade in the East, he put Portugal
at the top of the list when it came to
trading in the sixteenth century. Yeah, but like Canada said,
Columbus ran into America in the west. So you have
these Europeans who were more interested in the East and
their spices, but they're also pretty intrigued by what the
West has to offer and they want to find out

(04:39):
what's there, which is why um in about sixteen o
nine the Dutch hired explorer Henry Hudson to actually go
to North America, and what they really were after was
a northwest passage to try to find an access to
the East Indies. That's really what they were all about.
But he didn't find that. Obviously, there's no exact northwest
passage that would allow them to do that, and what

(05:00):
he did find were um pretty interesting places like Manhattan,
the Island and Long Island and the river that was
later known as the Hudson River from its discoverer. So
by this time the Dutch had formed their own West
India Company and they took the land that Hudson had
discovered and all the surrounding properties, the water, the island,

(05:22):
and they essentially dubbed it New Netherland. And this was
a great place to engage in the fur trade, and
so it became very attractive to them. And around sixty six,
the director of the Dutch West India Company, Peter Minuitt
bought the island from the American Indians, like I was
alluding to earlier. And Um, what's funny about this purchase

(05:45):
is that the American Indians didn't really conceive of Manhattan
as their island. It was a place where they occasionally
went to hunt, game and to fish, but it certainly
wasn't a place where they had, uh, permanent dwellings or
even timber very dwellings. And when they wandered over occasionally,
that's when they encountered the Dutch. And we think that
perhaps Henry Hudson encountered them at one point in time

(06:08):
and and the spirit of sharing and you know, uh
good sportsmanship offered them some liquor he had brought over.
And that's why the American Indian term or the island
of Manhattan is a word that translates to place where
we got drunk, Yeah, which is pretty interesting. It just
goes to show that they didn't really consider it their own.
You know, they didn't even live there, you know. Um,

(06:29):
but the Dutch didn't really know that. They just assumed
that the Indians considered considered it their own. And so
in this consideration they tried to do the right thing
by actually giving them commodities in exchange for the land. Yeah,
and historians like to note that um at least, compared
to maybe Spanish conquistadors who just sort of took the

(06:50):
land when they wanted it without any concern for the natives,
the Dutch at least tried to show a sign of
good faith by trying to purchase uh, the island of Manhattan.
Formal so, while the fur trade is flourishing in Manhattan,
we have the spice trade flourishing with the East India companies,
and nutmeg by this time has attained a six thousand

(07:11):
percent markup. It is incredibly valuable, and a group of
islands near Indonesia, the Banda Islands, became so much more
attractive to traders at this time. In Portugal actually annexed
the islands in fifteen twelve, but the Dutch did not
like this. Yeah. So, actually the Dutch came into the
Banda Islands in about sixteen o two and formally like

(07:33):
ousted the Portuguese. And at the time the Bandonese, the
local population, they were pretty happy to see the Dutch
because they the Portuguese. You know, we're known as as
harsh colonizers. Little did they know, however, that the Dutch
would end up being much harsher as colonizers in general.
And when they took over, the Dutch immediately made a
treaty with the Bandanese people, the village chiefs in particular,

(07:57):
and so they tried to get the Bandonese to to
only deal their nutmeg through the Dutch, so that the
Dutch could have monopoly. And unfortunately, this is a problem
that has persisted throughout history, the idea of someone coming
into a land that does not belong to them and
brokering a deal in a foreign language, with foreign terms,
and maybe sometimes even with the culture that doesn't have

(08:20):
a formal system of writing, and getting them to sign
a piece of paper, And in the case of the Bandanese,
this is sort of what happened. They didn't fully understand
the terms of the Dutch contract, and nutmeg was valuable
to them as a bartering tool for neighboring islands from
which they got different types of garments and textiles and food.

(08:41):
So they needed nutmeg for their own sustenance. It wasn't
just a mercenary matters them. It was a matter of
survival and when the Dutch got word of them being
the non exclusive recipient of their nutmex supply, they got
really upset. So you know, you can't really say the
Bandonese broke their contract if if the possibility is there

(09:03):
that they didn't understand it and they relied on on
the bordering to survive and so. But the Dutch obviously
didn't understand it or didn't care why they were breaking
the contract. They responded with violence. Most of the time
these were like isolated skirmishes, a series of attacks, but
at points there are situations where the Dutch just came
in and sweeping violent massacres of the local population of

(09:27):
the Bandonese. And uh it was so sweeping that um
they actually ended up killing I think most of the
Bandonese population, so much so that the Dutch had to
import their own farmers to be to grow the nutmeg.
And meanwhile, at this time Britain has gotten a hold
on a neighboring island where natmeg also grew, and they

(09:47):
were using not their advantage to try to destroy the
Dutch monopoly on nutmeg. And um, the Dutch traders were
so adamant about being the only ones to dabble and
the trading of the spice that they actual like dip
nutmeg and lime to prevent anyone else who purchased it
from planting at and sprouting their nutmeg trees. So, like

(10:07):
you said, the British had this island named Run, and
this was the missing piece in their in their banda
island um monopoly. And there was this one Dutch commander
who's known for being especially ruthless. His name, I believe
is Yon Peterson Cohen. He if he had his way,
he would have just gone into the island of Run
and just expelled the British violently. But unfortunately for him,

(10:30):
the Dutch in the English back in Europe had recently
signed a cooperation agreement in UH in sixteen nineteen, so
he couldn't just go in and kill the British and UH. Instead,
he decided to do a more handed, underhanded trick, and
he snuck on the island of Run when the British
left it briefly, and he actually burned down all of
the nutmeg trees on that island in a fit of rage.

(10:53):
And you know, it's funny, Jane, because the joke really
was on the Dutch, because as we know, UH dyeing
a seed and planting it is not the only way
to grow your own crops. Birds and animals do a
lot of work for us when it comes to pollination,
and so many birds who ate the fruit from the
nutmeg tree and flew to different islands actually scattered the

(11:15):
seed around. The natmeg was growing in different parts of
the islands at this time, so there was no way
the Dutch could control the spice unless they controlled the bird.
Understood that, I guess not, probably not. There were two
ticked off about their spice. So um, the Dutch are
pretty upset about this. They've lost their monopoly. They've essentially
burned this great supply of nutmeg to the ground. And

(11:38):
what's more, you can imagine that relations with the British
aren't exactly at a peak at this moment. Yeah, the
British and the Dutch actually engaged in a few wars.
During these wars, obviously they would extend to the colonizing
that was going on in the East and West, and
so a British fleet actually took over Manhattan forcibly in
sixteen sixty four in the in the second the Anglo War,

(12:00):
I believe, and a few years later in sixteen sixty six,
the on the other side of the world, the Dutch
forcibly took over the island of Run and so um,
you have all these lands in different hands, just going
back and forth. And finally, in the Treaty of Brita
in sixteen sixty seven, they this was the treaty that
it ended the war and the Dutch were able to
relinquish their claim on Manhattan in exchange for control of Run.

(12:25):
So long story shorts, they have it. Essentially, Manhattan was
traded for a spice for NatMag Yeah. And another interesting
side note to this is that um, even though the
Dutch at this point got control of Run much later,
and I think the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century,
the British actually came back to the Banda Islands and

(12:47):
took some num make with them. This time it wasn't
dipped inlime like the Dutch used to do, and they
were able to replant it, and they went to different
islands in the West Indies actually and were able to
plant in different places, including Grenada, which is where it's
really popular now. So next time you're drinking a cup
of eggnog and you sprinkle on this very significant spice.

(13:08):
Remind yourself that it was the cause of many deaths
and much to violence and a very interesting trade. Back. Down,
down or enjoy your Christmas eggnog please, not that you'll
be enjoying it the summertime, but just think about it
when the holidays roll around. It's pretty cool story, it is,
And we have weird and quirky stories like this every
day that we post on our new blog. Yeah, but

(13:30):
Candice and I blog every day on SOFFI miss and
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(13:52):
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