Description
Though Little Known Today, Banda was once the world's prime supplier of nutmeg and mace, commodities that the Dutch, English and Portuguese struggled mightily to control.
By the Treaty of Breda in 1667 the English abandoned their claim to Banda while the Dutch relinquished the small American island of Manhattan, Whatever we think of Manhattan's fate, there was little pretty in what happened to Banda.
The Dutch governor general Jan Pieterszoon Coen had already massacred large numbers of Bandanese and razed their villages in order to establish the Dutch plantation system -a system that would endure, for all its faults, into the twentieth century.
Ironically, as Willard Hanna so deftly dem onstrates, the Dutch were their own worst enemies. Not only did they make themselves "tediously unpopular" with the Bandanese, the monopoly system they established encouraged their own plantation masters, the perkeniers, to grumble continually and cheat wherever possible. The colonial system eventually declined into economic chaos leaving Banda an obscure outpost of a dwindling empire.
After a brief interlude of glory in the 1930s, when it housed two of Indonesia's revolutionary leaders, Banda has suffered from neglect and continued poverty. Nevertheless, the flawed "jewel Banda" retains much of the romance of centuries passed. Tourists have begun to stop in and these once world famous islands may soon again be a lure for the West
ISBN: BANDAAJOURNEY
