If you owned Manhattan island and were persuaded to trade it, what would you hope to get in return?

[TexasTowelie]

So these are the Banda Islands of modern-day Indonesia. You can see Run all the way over there on the left.

"In the 17th century, nutmeg was considered precious -- it grew only on the Banda Islands in the East Indies and was thought to protect against plague. With the Treaty of Breda, which ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch (who had prevailed militarily) secured a worldwide monopoly on nutmeg by forcing England to give up Run, the most remote of the Banda Islands. But the English did manage to get a little something in return: a lightly inhabited New World island called Manhattan."
-- from "Lessons from the Past", David Goodstein's American Scientist
review of Napoleon's Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History

This came as news to me. I always thought of the English just taking the colony of New Amsterdam away from the Dutch and leaving them crying. (Not so much the people living in New Amsterdam, who were there to make money, mind you, and pretty much went right ahead with their plan once they had a different flag flying over their heads. But I figure the Dutch owners took it personally. Like if you were the Dutch governor general of the little colony, you were out of a job.) Who knew that the English eventually forked over what we today would call "compensation," and not in the form of draft choices. Following the ancient precepts of island-trading (this part I'm just making up), they gave an island for an island (this part, however, I'm not making up).

BEHOLD THE ISLAND OF RUN

It's pronounced, we're told, to rhyme with "dune," and is also known as Rhun and Pulo Run. It's seen here from an approaching boat.


All photos by Muhammad Fadli via National Geographic

Writer Janna Dotschkal explains in "The Spice Trade’s Forgotten Island," an installment in National Geographic's "PROOF: Picture Stories" series, that "there’s just something about an isolated island that captures my imagination." Which apparently mad her a sucker for the Run story.

Run isn't the "important trade lynchpin" it was back in the 17th century, when it supplied nutmeg to a nutmeg-crazy world. (One assumes that back then nutmeg lovers knew that you have to grate the stuff to order off a little nutmeg nut -- that the flavor of the powdered you get in the little cans and bottles pretending to be nutmeg bears no relation to the real stuff.) Nowadays, in fact, Run is way off the beaten travel path. You don't just log onto Travelocity and book a flight there, or even a bracing ferry ride from some convenient destination port. As Janna learned in her e-correspondence with photographer Muhammad Fadli, who we're told "is part of the Arka Project, a photography collective based in Indonesia," it took him "a four-hour flight, an eight-hour voyage on a passenger liner, and a rickety boat ride" to get there, with the goal of "captur{ing} its isolation."

Read more: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2015/06/if-you-owned-manhattan-island-and-were.html

[merrily]

1. Oh,

that Manhattan Island.

When I saw the OP title, I got an entirely different visual.

[MADem]

2. I wonder if the nutmeg tastes different from the nutmeg of Grenada (that's the kind I tend to get).

http://www.grenada-history.org/nutmeg.htm


If I owned Manhattan, I might trade it for .... China...? I don't think the Chinese would take me up on the offer, though!

[marble falls]

3. Never, ever knew about this! Nice Monday morning read. Thanks!

[TexasTowelie]

5. You're welcome.

I stumbled across the article and learned so much from it that I thought it was interesting to share, particularly with the number of people from the NYC on DU.

[marble falls]

7. Well, I can tell you I've rarely had a session on DU I didn't get a bit less stupid. I love...

posts like your's a lot.

[appalachiablue]

4. K & R. Great read, never knew this. People forget how widespread Dutch & Portuguese

trade and influence were for a couple hundred years. New York state had many Dutch families and settlers, the Dutch were in the Caribbean and the Portuguese ruled Brazil. I love nutmeg but never knew it was thought to ward off the plague.

[TexasTowelie]

6. I knew about the Dutch in the Caribbean and New York along with the Portuguese in Brazil,

but wasn't that acquainted with the influence of the Dutch in east Asia and nearby areas. This was only vaguely mentioned in my world history class in high school.

[appalachiablue]

8. The Dutch and Portugese & later the English & French (& US) in their wooden ships were well

over Asia during the colonial period for centuries, in Indonesia, Malaysia and China; places like Java, Sumtra, Borneo, Formosa (Taiwan) Ceylon (Sri Lanka) mainly for the spice trade in cinnamon, tea, coffee, sugarcane and also tropical plants, coconuts, fruit, rubber, gemstones, sandalwood and many other resources they deemed valuable for trade including human. In India, the SW coastal state of Goa on the Arabian sea was settled by Portuguese traders like Vasco da Gama. Portugal and the Netherlands colonized Ceylon before ceding to Britain.

Plenty of the flora and fauna- flowering trees, palms and plants found in the Caribbean and Hawaii now were brought from Asia, like peppers from the New World, esp. Mexico were introduced to Asia and other places. You might know much of this info. Except for the exploitation and domination, the Colonial period did spread many natural species and ideas around the world. In Brazil once it was interesting to hear Portuguese spoken, a first for us.