The dark and bloody history of Egg nog and pumpkin pie.

Who would have thought that little jar in your kitchen Cabinet would have held the key to such dramatic historical consequences. Mainly because of the plauge and greed.
In low doses, nutmeg produces no noticeable physiological or neurological response, but in large enough doses nutmeg is a hallucinogen, thanks to a psychoactive chemical called myristicin,a monoamine oxidase inhibitor and psychoactive substance which is related to mescaline and amphetamine.

People have known about the interesting effects of nutmeg for centuries; the 12th century abbess Hildegard of Bingen wrote about it, for one.


"The nutmeg has a greath warmth and a good mixture in its powers. When a human being eats nutmeg it opens his heart, and his sense is pure, and it puts him a good state of mind. Take nutmeg and (in the same amount) cinnamon and some cloves and grind them up. And then, from this powder and some water, make flour - and roll out some little tarts. Eat these often and it will lower the bitterness of your heart and your mind and open your heart and your numbed senses. It will make your spirit happy, purify and cleanse your mind, lower all bad fluids in you, give your blood a good tonic, and make you strong." (Hildegard von Bingen, Physica, I, 21)

NO NO for preggo or puppy

Nutmeg was once considered an abortifacient, but may be safe for culinary use during pregnancy. However, it inhibits prostaglandin production and contains hallucinogens that may affect the fetus if consumed in large quantities. Myristicin poisoning is potentially deadly to some pets and livestock, and may be caused by culinary quantities of nutmeg harmless to humans. For this reason, it is recommended not to feed eggnog to dogs.

The nutmeg tree once grew in only one place in the entire world: The Banda Islands of Indonesia. Nutmeg and mace, produced from the nutmeg tree, was a prized and expensive spice in European medieval cuisine as a flavoring, medicinal, and preservative agent. Aside from adding flavor to food and drinks, its aromatic qualities worked wonders to disguise the stench of decay in poorly preserved meats, always a problem in the days before refrigeration.

By the Middle Ages, wealthy people in Europe knew about nutmeg, and coveted it for its medicinal properties. Europeans believed that nutmeg had the power to ward off viruses like the common cold, In Elizabethan times, they even thought that it could prevent the bubonic plague, they decided nutmeg held the cure. So nutmeg became very popular. Ladies carried nutmeg sachets around their necks to breathe through and avoid the pestilence of the air. Men added nutmeg to their snuff and inhaled it. Everybody wanted it, and many will willing to spare no expense to have it. As a result, the spice was worth more than its weight in gold. Ten pounds of nutmeg cost one English penny at its Asian source, but had a London street value of 2 pounds, 10 shillings -68,000 times its original cost.

As much as they treasured nutmeg, however, people in Europe had no clear idea of where it came from. It entered Europe through the port of Venice, carried there by Arab traders who portaged it from the Indian Ocean across the Arabian Peninsula and into the Mediterranean world... but the ultimate source remained a mystery. For the inhabitants of the Banda Islands, the Indian Ocean trade routes ensured a steady business and allowed them a comfortable living. It was the Arab and Indian traders, however, who got very wealthy from selling the spice all around the rim of the Indian Ocean.

The European explorations of the 15th century were driven by the need to bypass the Arab and Venetian monopoly of the spice trade. Crying, "For Christ and spices," the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama accompanied by Nicolau Coelho and Bartolomeu Dias shocked the Arab world when he sailed around Africa's Cape of Good Hope in 1498 and showed up in the spice markets of India. It marked the beginning of the decline of Arab dominance and the rise of European power.In 1511, a Portuguese force under Afonso de Albuquerque seized the Molucca Islands. By early the next year, the Portuguese had extracted the knowledge from the locals that the Banda Islands were the source of nutmeg and mace, and three Portuguese ships sought out these fabled Spice Islands. 1512 Malay pilots guided the Portuguese via Java, the Lesser Sundas and Ambon to Banda, arriving in early 1512. The first Europeans to reach the Banda Islands, the expedition remained in Banda for about one month, purchasing nutmeg and mace, and cloves in which Banda had a thriving entrepôt trade.

Until the early seventeenth century the Bandas were ruled by a group of leading citizens, the orang kaya (literally 'rich men'or sultans), each of these was a head of district. They insisted on maintaining a neutral trading policy with foreign powers. This allowed them to avoid the presence of Portuguese or Spanish garrisons on their soil, but it also left them unprotected from other invaders.

In 1529 a Portuguese trader Captain Garcia landed troops in the Bandas. Five of the Banda islands were within gunshot of each other and he realised that a fort on the main island Neira would give him full control of the group. The Bandanese were, however, hostile to such a plan, and their warlike antics were both costly and tiresome to Garcia whose men were attacked when they attempted to build a fort. From then on, the Portuguese were infrequent visitors to the islands preferring to buy their nutmeg from traders in Malacca. Unlike other eastern Indonesian islands, such as Ambon, Solor, Ternate and Morotai, the Bandanese displayed no enthusiasm for Christianity or the Europeans who brought it in the sixteenth century, and no serious attempt was made to Christianise the Bandanese. Maintaining their independence, the Bandanese never allowed the Portuguese to build a fort or a permanent post in the islands. Ironically though, it was this lack of ports which brought the Dutch to trade at Banda instead of the clove islands of Ternate and Tidore

As Spain and Portugal fought for control of the spice trade, The Portuguese began subcontracting their spice distribution to Dutch traders. Profits began to flow into Amsterdam, and the Dutch commercial fleet swiftly grew into one of the largest in the world. Then in 1580, Portugal fell under Spanish rule, with which the Dutch Republic was at war,In 1598 the king of Spain embargoed Dutch trade with Portugal. As prices for pepper, nutmeg, and other spices soared across Europe,the Dutch found themselves locked out of the market. But a number of Dutchmen like Jan Huyghen van Linschoten and Cornelis de Houtman had obtained first hand knowledge of the "secret" Portuguese trade routes and practices.

1595 The Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten published his Reys-gheschrift vande navigatien der Portugaloysers in Orienten (Travel Accounts of Portuguese Navigation in the Orient) which was translated into English and German in 1598. It gave access to secret Portuguese information, including the nautical maps which had been well guarded for over a century. The book thus broke the Portuguese monopoly on the sea trade with Asia.

A 1596 Dutch expedition lost half its crew, killed a Javanese prince and lost a ship but returned to Holland with a load of spices, the profit from which encouraged other expeditions.

The first Coorperations

At the time, it was customary for a company to be set up only for the duration of a single voyage, and to be liquidated upon the return of the fleet. Investment in these expeditions was a very high-risk venture, not only because of the usual dangers of piracy, disease and shipwreck, but also because the interplay of inelastic demand and relatively elastic supply of spices could make prices tumble at just the wrong moment, thereby ruining prospects of profitability. To manage such risk the forming of a cartel to control supply would seem logical. The English had been the first to adopt this approach, by bundling their resources into a monopoly enterprise, the English East India Company in 1600, thereby threatening their Dutch competitors with ruin.
Thus in 1602, the Dutch competitors united to form the Dutch East India Company (Dutch: Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC, "United East India Company") when the States-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia. In 1604, a second English East India Company voyage commanded by Sir Henry Middleton reached the islands of Ternate, Tidore, Ambon and Banda; in Banda, they encountered severe VOC hostility, which saw the beginning of Anglo-Dutch competition for access to spices

A major problem in the European trade with Asia at the time was that the Europeans could offer few goods that Asian consumers wanted, except silver and gold. European traders therefore had to pay for spices with the precious metals, and this was in short supply in Europe, except for Spain and Portugal. The Dutch and English had to obtain it by creating a trade surplus with other European countries.

Dutch-Bandanese relations were mutually resentful from the outset, with Holland’s first merchants complaining of Bandanese reneging on agreed deliveries and price, and cheating on quantity and quality. For the Bandanese, on the other hand, although they welcomed another competitor purchaser for their spices, the items of trade offered by the Dutch—heavy woollens, and damasks, unwanted manufactured goods, for example—were usually unsuitable in comparison to traditional trade products. The Japanese, Arab and Indian, and Portuguese traders for example brought indispensable items along with steel knives, copper, medicines and prized Chinese porcelain.
In 1609, the Dutch coerced some Bandanese rulers into signing the Eternal Treaty, granting the Dutch East Indies Company a monopoly on spice trade in the Bandas.
The Bandanese soon grew tired of the Dutch actions; the low prices, the useless trade items, and the enforcement of Dutch sole rights to the purchase of the coveted spices. The end of the line for the Bandanese came in 1609 when the Dutch reinforced Fort Nassau on Bandanaira Island. The orang kaya called a meeting with the Dutch admiral and forty of his highest-ranking men and ambushed and killed them all

In 1621 Japanese mercenaries were hired to deal with the orang kaya forty of whom were beheaded with their heads impaled and displayed on bamboo spears. Once securely in control of the Bandas, the Dutch went to work protecting their new "investment." First they preempted any resistance by the islanders by executing every male over the age of 15. Within 15 years, the brutal regime reduced the Bandanese population from 15,000 to 1000.The Dutch subsequently re-settled the islands with imported slaves, convicts and indentured labourers , as well as immigrants from elsewhere in Indonesia. Most survivors fled as refugees to the islands of their trading partners,Shipments of surviving Bandanese were also sent to Batavia (now Jakarta) to work as slaves in developing the city and its fortress. Some 530 of these individuals were later returned to the islands because of their much-needed expertise in nutmeg cultivation (something sorely lacking among newly arrived Dutch settlers). Next the Dutch concentrated all nutmeg production into a few easily guarded areas, uprooting a destroying any trees outside the plantation zones. Anyone caught growing a nutmeg seedling or carrying seeds without the proper authority was put to death. In addition, all exported nutmeg seeds were drenched with lime to make sure there was no chance a fertile nut would find its way off the islands.

The Dutch had their monopoly ...almost. One of the Banda Islands, called Run, was under control of the British. The little sliver of land was one of England's first colonial outposts, dating to 1603. The Dutch attacked it in force in 1615, but it would take four years for them to finally defeat the combined British-Bandanese resistance.
But the English still didn't give up; they continued to press their claim to the island through two Anglo-Dutch wars. The battles exhausted both sides, leading to a compromise settlement, the Treaty of Breda, in 1667 -and one of history's greatest ironies. Intent on securing their hold over every nutmeg island in Southeast Asia, the Dutch offered a trade: if the British would give them Run, they would in turn give Britain a far-away, much less valuable island that the British had already occupied illegally since 1664. The British agreed. That other island: Manhattan, which is how New Amsterdam became New York.

The Dutch settled down to enjoying their nutmeg monopoly for about a century and a half. However, during the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15), Holland became a part of Napoleon's empire, and was thus an enemy of England. This gave the British an excuse to invade the Dutch East Indies, and try to pry open the Dutch stranglehold on the spice trade.

On August 9, 1810, a British armada attacked the Dutch fort on Bandaneira. After just a few hours of fierce fighting, the Dutch surrendered Fort Nassau, and then the rest of the Bandas. The First Treaty of Paris, which ended this phase of the Napoleonic Wars, restored the Spice Islands to Dutch control in 1814.
It could not restore the nutmeg monopoly, however - that particular cat was out of the bag.