Blood and Spices: A journey around Molluku Province in Indonesia Wild East

By Mark Aldred

Between Sulawesi Irian Jaya and Australia's Northern Territory lie the Molluccas, once one of the most fiercely contested parts of the world. A history of this strange archipelago of is literally one of blood and spices:- The spices being nutmeg and cloves and the blood being that of the Portuguese, Dutch, British Japanese Americans Australians who died trying to invade or hold it and the millions of local people who were caught in the crossfire or slaughtered for their natural treasures. More recently it has been the scene of bloodshed between Christians and Muslims. (See Epilogue) This is a memoir of a trip to these Islands in happier times and a prayer that one day they see happy times again.

With and ocean of history sloshing around in my head I left Bali for Sulawesi early one morning one the first of a series of hops around this bizarre archipelago.

The second hop leg was the flight to Ternate the fabled kingdom of cloves. I spent this inside a tinny Spanish designed Indonesian built aircraft called a Casa 212. Its engine sounded like a mosquito on steroid as its twin props rent the air.

The landing was savage. The pilot drew the short landing strip. This meant decelerating from 150 knots to zero in about 100 metres. As I climbed shakily out of the cockpit frangipanis and gunpowder melded into a strange waft. The gunpowder smell came from the volcanic soil , which emits this smell after rain, and the frangipani smell came from the frangipani trees which surrounded the airport building like small white and pink clouds atop gnarled green sticks.

The history of Ternate has always centred on the flower of a small tree, the clove. This flower, which goes black, when dried had several wonderful properties. It smelled nice tasted good, stopped meat from going off and dulled toothaches. So, as one would expect in an ancient world where cooking was taken seriously, refrigeration unknown, toothaches common and dentistry performed with blunt instruments, bits of string and no injections., cloves were worth more than their weight in gold.

Not surprisingly, the Sultans of Ternate grew wealthy with the clove trade as Arab, Chinese and Indian traders arrived with boat loads of silk, pottery and gold and left with holds full of this sweet smelling, health promoting toothache remedy which also contributed rather nicely to the flavour of one curry as well as stopping it going off .

In the 16th century European powers arrived and plunged Ternate and its neighbouring islands into three centuries of bloodshed. The Portuguese, the Spanish and finally the Dutch East India Company fell slavering onto Ternate and struggled to establish a monopoly on cloves. In doing so they employed tortures bribery crop destruction and executions on a scale which makes today's Cocaine cartels seem like a bunch of boy scouts. Eventually clove trees were smuggled out by the British and plantations were established in the West Indies making a monopoly impossible to maintain.

Today Indonesia is still the world's largest producer of cloves as well as its largest importer. Cloves are burnt by the tonne as Indonesians happily chainsmoke Gudang Garams lung bursting sickly sweet cloves flavoured cigarettes sold on every street corner. Like the fumes the relics of the clove wars remain. Dutch and Portuguese forts dot the landscape, the most famous being fort Satan Lucia where you can stand at dusk and listen to the call to prayer float up from the mosques below along with the smell of cloves salt and village life.

The next hop had me in Casa 212 again, buzzing over volcanoes great steaming jungles and huge lakes to land at Galela on the Island of Halmahera where the musty smell of the jungle climbed into the cabin to greet me. The taxi from the airport had me zipping past beautiful little villages each one smelling of drying cloves and coconuts. It was hard to believe that this island had seen some of the fiercest bombing of the pacific war when General Macarthur had taken the island of Morotai to the north, had the US army engineers build an airfield in three days then had the USAF stroll down to Japanese base at Kao and bomb it senseless.

Near Kao I found huge Japanese cemetery and a Japanese ship which had become stranded while attempting to escape the bombing. Having accumulated some sand and enough bird droppings to support a few trees this strange metallic island had become a popular mooring spot for the local fishermen.

Next day I took a trip to Morotai by powered outrigger. I checked out the American airforce cemetery which was noticeably smaller than the Japanese one. I went into the jungle looking for war relics but all I managed to find was the wreck of a jeep with a huge rainforest tree growing through it. I had a bit better luck underwater after renting some diving equipment for a local Chinese merchant. About 50 metres down on a sandy slope I found an American truck. I had been dumped at the end of the war in accordance with the contract between the US military and the Ford motor company which stipulated that on no account were war surplus vehicles to be allowed to flood a post war market. Sadly the visibility was too poor take decent photos so I swam around this monument to a throw way society one last time then headed for the surface. Leaving Morotai that day I passed a half-sunken American ship. I looked like a rusty whale in the sunset surfacing for air and the image jagged in my mind during the relaxing trip back to Halmahera. And the flight back to Ternate

Back in Ternate I spent the day mooching around the Old Sultan's place which looked suspiciously like an English country mansion rather than the splendid Arabian style place where Sir Francis Drake had been entertained. This I discovered was because it had been designed by an English architect commissioned by the Sultan in the later 19th century.

Next day at the airport, I joined some forlorn looking parrots waiting to be shipped down to Ambon and thence to Jakarta in wooden boxes with tiny air holes. Their claws and beaks peeked out as the scrambled for fresh air. This bird trade was supposedly forbidden but here they were, in full view, waiting to be shipped out on a government owned airline to Ambon a city once known as the Queen of the East.

Ambon was once the Dutch capitol of the Molluccas. After a brief spell under British rule, the Ambonese were unwilling to return to Dutch fold and staged a couple of rebellions. The most famous of these was led by Patimura, an Ambonese who had served with the British as a Sergeant Major. He was eventually betrayed and handed over to the Dutch for execution. His last words to the Dutch were 'salamat tinggal tuan tuan' have a pleasant stay here gentlemen.

They didn't. Ambon continued to revolt and in 1941 the Japanese invaded sweeping aside the Dutch and the tiny Australian Gull Force. Gull force survivors were joined by Indian and British troops captured further north and incarcerated in the Gull force barracks. Many of these men were beheaded by the Japanese and therefore never identified . The site is now an Australian run war cemetery. Thanks to allied bombing raid aimed at dislodging the Japanese most of Ambon's splendid buildings were destroyed and replaced with brutal looking post war architecture.

From Ambon I headed south to Kei with its rich Melanesian culture, its strange caves with as yet undeciphered writing and its white sand beaches. From there I headed to Tanimbar, formerly one of the Molluccas richest islands. In their glory days Tanimbar's fierce warriors has sold slaves to the Arabs and Malays in exchange for gold which was beaten into Adat (magic and custom ) Jewellery. Sadly most of the best pieces have been sold off to buy motorbikes and other consumer items but a few lovely pieces still remained as do the beautiful Ikat weavings.

One of the great sights of Tanimbar is the Kapal Batu (stone boat) built by the Dongson, the ancestors of present day Polynesians. Sailing from Vietnam down through Micronesia and the Philippines, the Dongson would settle or invade an Island, overpopulate it then start fighting amongst themselves. The vanquished would then start building boats for themselves for a long sea journey in search of more Islands. The victors, who got to stay behind, would build a stone boat monument facing in the direction in which the vanquished group had gone.

Tanimbar's stone boat is situated in a tiny remote village called Sangliadol and reaching it is an epic trek involving 27 km by dirt road , 10km by sea, 1km of walking over reef flats, 100metres up stairs cut into the rocks and a vista to the Kapala Adat (chief of magic and custom).

For a small fee the Kapala Adat poured a libation of Sopi (sago palm brandy) to appease the gods and intoned a prayer to God. Allah, Jesus Mary, a string of ancestral gods and a name that sounded suspiciously like Suharto. Clearly the Tanimbar people didn't believe in taking chances. There is a saying Tanimbar that Jesus forgives but the ancestral gods don't. This sounded entirely sensible to me and during the return voyage in an overloaded boat with water lapping at the bows I prayed to Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed and Elvis while fingering my picture of Chairman Mao (the mainland Chinese equivalent of a St Christopher medal)

Back at the hotel we watched traditional dance in which Ronnie Fordatkosu , local airline agent brandished a spear in a way guaranteed to deter complaints about lost luggage. Later we all got pleasantly drunk on Sopi and I discovered why it was so popular with the ancestral gods. Drunk over ice with a twist of lime it had a pleasant herby taste and a capacity for serious brain damage. I noticed this the next day en route to the Banda Islands, home of nutmeg.

If any thing the Bandanese had had it even worse than the people of Ternate. A Dutch governor Jan Pieterzoon Coen had massacred most of the two million local inhabitants and transported the rest. He imported convicts and indentured labour from India, Sulawesi, Java and Melanesia to do the work and set up disreputable Dutchmen as perkineers (plantation owners). Coen then enforced a nutmeg monopoly with fleets of Kora Kora (war canoes) loaded with Japanese mercenaries under the command of Dutch officers. These fleets destroyed any plantations not under the control of the Dutch East India Company.

At its height, the value of the nutmeg trade was so great that the tiny Island of Run in and its plantations were swapped for the Island of Manhattan in the 1627 Anglo-Dutch treaty of Brede.

The diving in the Banda group was spectacular but not cheap since it was a monopoly. To be allowed to dive at all, one had to stay in one of the two pricey hotels the Laguna and the Molana. These were owned by the same man who owned the Diving facilities. Despite all this, the diving was superb, sheer coral wall where turtles and large pelagic fish abounded and large Imperial Angelfish and lionfish abounded.

After a few days on the main island, Neira I headed out to another called Pulau Ay . The local Arak was superb, the Lobster cheap and the nutmeg groves were beautiful under the huge kanari nut trees which sheltered them. An afternoon of iced Arak with a twist of lime while watching the local volcano was also beautiful and made it hard to leave but there was still one more island for me to visit, Seram or 'Mother Island' as it is known by the Ambonese.

Seram figures prominently in the Ambonese traditions but sadly the Mother Island is being slowly raped by logging and transmigration. The latter is a policy of bringing landless peasants from Java and settling them down to destroy the fragile soils of eastern Indonesia with high populations and inappropriate farming techniques. The world Bank funds this obscenity and its attendant land clearing which. This means that Indonesian logging companies get the logs at an artificially log cost. For their part, most of the transmigrants get sick of marginal farming and head home disillusioned.

Approaching Seram by sea you can see the pall of smoke and the trail of clear-felled land which marks the advance of logging. . The township of Masohi where I landed looked like a post-nuclear lumberjack convention, mud, tin shed bars, concrete blockhouses and naked earth everywhere. The buildings were new but the place looked like it had no business being there.

The native people of Seram where the Nalu, a Melanesian people who were once been feared warriors and magicians. The Nalu I visited had been moved from their inland village and resettled where coastal diseases, genetic swamping and cultural pollution from the neighbouring and more populous transmigrants where gradually destroying their identity. Looking at the exotic Melanesian face of the old chief and at the distinctly Indo-Malaysian faces of his grandchildren I found myself praying that somewhere in the interior of Seram at least one tribe of Nalu could survive untouched until this madness had passed.

Back in Ambon I spent a night playing with my notes and drinking with the locals before the next day's flight back to Bali. As I looked out the aircraft window the ocean was moody and so was I. The plane's air outlets were frosted and dripped tired droplets of icy water, which exploded on my face as I drew one final parallel to the people of the Molluccas. ' God Knows when they'd been serviced last'

Epilogue

When the corrupt thugs of Suharto's regime finally decided their boss was due for retirement they wheeled in Habbibi. This proved a distaster for the people of Ambon. He replaced the governor a local Christian Ambonese with a Muslim Buginese and destroyed a balance which even Suharto had been kind enough to keep. Under this balance the Ambonese Christians had the Governorship and the civil service jobs and the Buginese had had the trade sector. This relationship had been kept firm by the age old relationship of "Adat" where Christian and Muslim communities exchanged sacred rites and objects in a tradition which predated both Christianity and Islam. This relationship was so good that Christian villages would help the Muslim Adat partner build Mosques and vice versa.

Whether Habbibi's actions where merely stupid or criminally homicidal is a matter for debate but the result was clear. The new governor sacked Ambonese from government jobs and hired Buginese in a wave of cronyism which would have make even Suharto blanch. Deprived of their traditional employment base and with no chance of competing with the entrenched Buginese in business the Ambonese were left out to starve. This created religious hatred which had not existed before and started a bloodbath which continues to this day and will perhaps see the end of the Ambonese people since the Indonesian army seems content to let Muslims slaughter at will while shooting unruly Christians on sight.