Many people
know that a sprinkling of nutmeg on a cold glass of eggnog is tasty stuff, and
that when nutmeg (and eggnog, for that matter) is ingested in large
quantities, it is known to produce dangerous and mind-altering hallucinations
lasting up to two days. But did you also know that in the 17th Century, from
its home on the tiny island of Pulo Run near Indonesia, nutmeg literally
changed the world?
As the song goes, "Even old New York was once New
Amsterdam/Why they changed it I can't say/People just liked it better that
way". Well "they"
were the British and they changed the city's name in 1667. But given the circumstances, I suspect that the Dutch certainly didn't like
things better that way. Their bad mood
had begun on Christmas Day fifty-one years earlier, when the British claimed
the tiny island of Pulo Run, and its vast quantities of highly-valuable nutmeg,
for Queen and country. The Dutch
objected because they had wanted the
monopoly on the spice trade so they moved in, guns-blazing, and four years (and
much blood) later, voted the British off the island. Cue the first Anglo-Dutch war.
When the war ended in 1654, the Treaty of
Westminster stipulated that Pulo Run should be returned to the British. The Dutch refused, the British fought back,
and the Duke of York and his forces took over the Dutch colonial settlement
then known as New Amsterdam, demanding that the Dutch surrender. With the pressure on, the Dutch freaked out
and burned the nutmeg trees on Pulo Run.
No nutmeg for anybody. Cue the second Anglo-Dutch war.
In 1667 the parties had had enough drama and
bloodshed, and signed the Treaty of Breda that basically enforced the status
quo. England got to keep the island of
Manhattan, and formally changed the city's name to New York, in honor of their
victorious Duke of York. Meanwhile the Dutch
retained their tiny island off the coast of Indonesia and resumed the challenging
job of rehabilitating all those charred nutmeg trees.
