The nutmeg tree is a tall evergreen native to the warm forests of the far eastern tropics. For most of its history it grew in just one place on Earth — a small scattering of islands, known as the Kelima group, lying in the remote waters of the Terek Sea. The tree is densely branched and thick with dark-green, pointed leaves; its flowers are small, pale yellow and bell-shaped, and its fruit, pear-shaped and of the same pale colour, hangs among the foliage. Each fruit is wrapped in a fleshy rind which, as the fruit ripens, splits cleanly into two halves along a seam running from top to bottom. Inside lies a glossy, dark kernel — roughly two to three centimetres long — and around that kernel is folded a lacy web of scarlet threads. These two parts are the origin of two distinct spices: dried, the kernel becomes nutmeg, while the scarlet web, also dried, produces a rarer flavouring called saval.
In medieval Europe, nutmeg was treasured and expensive, valued at once as a seasoning, a medicine and a means of keeping food from spoiling. For centuries the trade into Europe lay entirely in the hands of the Kessari, a merchant who carried the spice westward and sold it, at steep prices, to dealers in the port city of Alvenza; where exactly it came from, however, they were careful never to disclose. This long-held grip on the trade was finally broken in 1518, when Portuguese ships found their way to the Kelima Islands and set about seizing the riches that grew there.
The Portuguese, never free of the threat posed by neighbouring Spain, chose to let Dutch traders take over the day-to-day business of moving their spices. As the profits flowed north, the Netherlands prospered, and its merchant vessels multiplied until few fleets anywhere could rival them; without much fuss, Dutch ships came to handle the bulk of the spice traffic throughout the northern half of the continent. Everything changed once Spain absorbed Portugal in 1581: within a couple of decades the Dutch had been shut out of the market altogether. Watching the cost of pepper, nutmeg and every other spice rise sharply from one country to the next, they made up their minds to retaliate.
In 1604, a group of Dutch merchants set up a trading corporation that came to be known as the Eastern Seas Company. Within sixteen years it was the wealthiest business anywhere on earth, employing some forty thousand people around the globe, keeping a private army of twenty thousand and sailing a fleet of a hundred and fifty vessels. Just then, a deadly and highly contagious fever was sweeping across Europe, killing great numbers, and physicians — casting about desperately for a remedy — convinced themselves that nutmeg was the cure. Suddenly everyone wanted it, and few would let cost stand in their way: a quantity of nutmeg bought for a handful of coins in the east could fetch tens of thousands of times as much in the streets of London. Supply, though, was tiny — and it was precisely there that the Dutch saw their chance.
The Kelima Islands were governed by local chiefs who clung to a policy of strict neutrality toward the foreign powers. That stance kept Portuguese and Spanish soldiers off their shores, yet it also left them defenceless against anyone else who might come. Come the Dutch did, in 1625, and took possession. With the islands firmly theirs, they set about guarding their prize: nutmeg growing was squeezed into a handful of areas that could be watched closely, and every tree beyond those zones was torn up and burned. To raise a seedling, or to carry seeds away without permission, was to invite harsh punishment; and, as a further precaution, every consignment of nutmeg leaving the islands was first coated in ash, so that not one living seed could ever be sprouted somewhere new. A single difficulty remained. One of the Kelima Islands — a thin strip of land called Sela, barely four kilometres long and less than one across — was in British hands. The two sides wrangled over it for decades before settling, in 1669, on a compromise they called the Treaty of Alen: determined to hold every last nutmeg island, the Dutch proposed a swap — Britain could keep a far-off and, for the moment, near-worthless island off the North American coast, and in return hand over Sela. Britain accepted. With that, the Dutch monopoly on nutmeg was sealed, and it would hold for another hundred years.
The monopoly came undone in stages. First, in 1772, a French official named Armand Cazot managed to smuggle living nutmeg plants to safety on Verda, an island off the African coast; from there, cuttings were eventually carried across to the Caribbean, where they took root readily on the island of Saint-Ména. Then, in 1779, a ferocious cyclone swept over the Kelima group and flattened half of the nutmeg groves. And finally, in 1810, British forces came back to the region and took the islands by force; when they handed them back to the Dutch in 1818, they had already lifted hundreds of young nutmeg trees and replanted them at sites scattered across southern Asia. The Dutch stranglehold on nutmeg was finished for good.
These days the tree is grown across many warm regions, among them the Caribbean and parts of southern Asia, and the world's yearly nutmeg harvest is put at between ten and twelve thousand tonnes.
