With nutmeg, died the Bandanese

The horror of the story of the Bandanese lies, in no small part, in the fact that the narrative of their elimination from their land revolves around a tree, a species of incomparable value, gifted to the islanders by the region's volcanic ecology.

Yet, what can be said about the role of the nutmeg tree in this story? It is certainly true that the history of the archipelago cannot be narrated without reference to the tree— but it cannot for that reason be said that the tree authored or decided the fate of the Bandanese. There were, after all, other islands in the region where, in similar circumstances, people were able to avoid extermination. That was the case, for example, with another Malukan archipelago, a few hundred kilometers to the north of the Bandas. This cluster of islands, of which the best known is Ternate, also possessed an enormously valuable botanical species— the tree that produces cloves, a spice that was just as valuable as nutmeg and mace. As with the nutmeg, the clove tree brought immense wealth, as well as great suffering, on the people of the Ternate; yet they somehow managed to escape the fate that befell the Bandanese.

How and why was this so? Was it because Ternate and its sister island, Tidore, were both sultanates, each the seat of its own empire, with vastly larger populations than the Banda Islands? Or was it just chance and happenstance, merely a matter of chains of events that unfolded differently? Or did the specific character of the clove tree, and the volcanoes that nurtured them, also play a part in this story?

These questions bring us to the limits of a certain way of telling stories about the past. The empirical, documentary methods of historical scholarship— the methods that allowed me to construct a timeline of what happened in the Bandas in 1621— depend critically on language, literacy, and writing. The evidence for those methods comes primarily from written records. In the stories they tell, entities that lack language figure only as backdrops against which human dramas are enacted. Nutmegs, cloves, and volcanoes may figure in these stories, but they cannot themselves be actors in the stories that historians tell; nor can they tell stories of their own.

For Malukans, on the other hand, as for many others who live in seismic zones, volcanoes are makers of history as well as tellers of stories. Indeed the oldest living story told by humans comes from a volcano: Budj Bim, in Australia's Victoria State. For the Gunditjmara, the Indigenous people of the region, who developed the world's earliest aquaculture system, the volcano is a founding ancestor. Their creation myth tells of four giant beings coming to the southeastern shores of the continent. Three of them dispersed to other parts of the land, but one stayed in place, crouching, and his body became the volcano, Budj Bim, and his teeth became the lava that erupted out of it.

"There is little doubt," writes Heather Builth, an archaeologist, "that local Aboriginal groups had been witness to volcanic activity. . . In 1870 the Portland Guardian published a Gunditjmara local oral history that revealed witness of volcanic activity and the associated tsunami that was said to have drowned most of the people."

Scientists have determined that Budj Bim last erupted about 30,000 years ago, so this would be the event witnessed by the ancestors of the Gunditjmara. That would make this the oldest story to be passed down to modern times, superseding Indigenous Australian myths about sea level rise, which are thought to reflect events that occurred 7,000 years ago. Those were once believed to be humanity's oldest extant stories; the story of Budj Bim, if the dating is correct, would be many times older. Yet, even from that distant past, the magic of the volcano has continued to touch upon the lives of the Gunditjmara: the story of Budj Bim, passed down over thousands of generations, played a major part in this community's reclamation of some of their ancestral lands in 2007.

Nowhere is the living lore of volcanoes more extensive than across the islands of Indonesia, with their multitudes of soaring cones and smoking craters. In this archipelago a volcano is almost always "a spiritual as well as a geothermal entity— a vengeful and angry geospirit." For scientists and disaster experts these stories are something of a nuisance. "Javanese people often share a deeply devout relationship with volcanoes," writes a team of Earth scientists, in barely concealed disapproval. "In Java, volcanoes are considered connected to human society to achieve a universal harmony between society, nature, and the cosmos. . . Although most Javanese people are aware of scientific explanations for natural phenomena, they usually prefer to draw on explanations that relate natural events to their social world."

The Indonesian reverence for volcanoes is a matter of frustration also for Islamic and Christian fundamentalists, who regard such beliefs with abhorrence. Yet volcanoes continue to be intricately knit into the lives of Indonesians, not just culturally and spiritually, but also politically. Before elections, for instance, it often happened that Javanese politicians would visit the spiritual guardian of Mount Merapi, on the slopes of that dangerously active volcano.

Maluku's volcanoes are especially rich in stories, and none more so than the great volcano of Ternate, Mount Gamalama. In The Original Dream, a contemporary novel by Nukila Amal, who is herself from Ternate, Mount Gamalama speaks to a shaman who climbs up to the crater and stands with "her two feet flat on the ground, hair blowing in the wind. Her eyes were near black, near umber, near earth. They closed tight, sensing the arrival of something. Something rose silently from the earth beneath her feet. An utterance, a near whisper, entered her body through the soles of her feet, rising louder and more tumultuously, then came screaming out of her through the crown of her head. . . . She slumped to the ground, her tears spilled. Eyes moist, she felt the earth. Little by little, her fingers gathered up the earth around her feet, until her hands were full. She clutched the handfuls of earth, cupped them in her lap, and shed tears on them. Blessing. Or curse."

Towering above the Banda Islands, Gunung Api too was believed to have the gift of producing omens and portents. That was why there was much misgiving on the islands when the volcano erupted, after a long period of dormancy, on the very day when a Dutch ship came to the archipelago for the first time, in 1599. People recalled a prophecy made by a Muslim mystic, shortly before, that a group of White men, from a place far away, would come to invade the islands one day.

To this day the descendants of those who escaped the Banda massacre use a word for "history," fokorndan, that comes from fokor, which means "mountain"— or rather "Banda Mountain," that is to say Gunung Api.

(Excerpted with permission from Amitav Ghosh's The Nutmeg's Curse; published by Penguin Allen Lane)