Seeking Out the Beauty of Indonesia’s Remote Spice Islands

After an hour over an empty sea, our 14-seater descended over scattered reefs, looped around a smoldering volcano and dropped down onto a runway so short that each end overhung the sea. We had arrived in the Banda Islands.

The Bandas are one of several island groups that make up eastern Indonesia’s Moluccas Islands, better known as the Spice Islands. Separated from the main body of the Moluccas, the Bandas, for which the sea around them is named, are so small that their size must be grossly exaggerated for them to show up on any regional map.

Once the world’s main supplier of nutmeg and mace, the Bandas were prizes for which empires contended. There are six inhabited islands and a few other reefs and rocks in the group.

The three main islands nestle in a close embrace: Gunung Api with its volcanic peak usually wrapped in mist, the tall green ridge of Lonthor and, just across a narrow strait, Neira, where we landed.

From the air, they seemed so perfectly situated that each might have been placed there purposefully. “Banda is a lovely little spot,” naturalist Alfred Lord Wallace wrote in 1868. But that was an understatement; more than a mere place, the Bandas are a superb geographic composition.

They have long fascinated the few outsiders aware of their existence. Somerset Maugham set a novel, “The Narrow Corner,” in Banda. When I read it 20 years ago, I promised myself that I would one day visit these islands.

Time and distance had defeated me until recently, when air service to the Bandas was inaugurated. Now, travelers are arriving, but only a trickle. I arrived with a small group of like-minded romantics.

We found the islands’ three vehicles waiting to take us to our hotels. On the recommendation of a friend, we had chosen a small guest house, the Selecta. Once the 19th-Century home of a prominent local family, it is on the main street of Bandaneira, a town of charmingly decayed colonial mansions.

After coffee and cake at the hotel, we set off to explore the town. A distant melody drew us along lanes where bougainvillea climbed ruined walls, and up into the hills behind the town. The music became more insistent.

Drawn irresistibly upward by the beat of drums and the faint tinkling of gongs, we came to a house where a large group of women sat in the yard, busily peeling, chopping and slicing away at heaps of fruits and vegetables.

They were preparing for a wedding feast to be held the following day, and the music was to entertain them. One woman played a set of gongs, while others beat on drums. The beat was very different from that of the dreamy gamelan music of Java and Bali. It was catchy, syncopated, almost a mambo. We tried out a few steps with the ladies and were invited to the party the next day.

The wedding united two prominent families. Half the island’s population seemed ta be there. Sellers of cigarettes and snacks had set up to supply the audience.

While the two sets of parents wore traditional dress--both men in the white skull caps of those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, their wives in sarongs and embroidered blouses--the groom wore a dark suit and tie and the bride was lovely in a many-layered gown of white silk.

This evening, instead of the insidious rhythm of the previous day, there was the thump of electric guitars.

The faces of the wedding guests showed all the influences that have washed over the islands, leaving it with a population of Malay, Chinese, Arab, Papuan, Indian, Dutch and Portuguese descent. The centuries of mixing have had a pleasing result: the young men and women, dressed in their best, were as handsome a group as I have ever seen.

After the guests had eaten, the bridal group paraded around the dance floor, then danced the joged, Indonesia’s all-purpose social dance, a sort of touchless cha-cha. We joined in, then left a while later. The next day we planned to rise early for a trip to the most distant of the islands, Run, which has figured in some fascinating twists of history.

The first Europeans in the islands were the Portuguese. An expedition that included the young Magellan arrived in 1512. The Dutch came in 1599, followed in 1601 by the English, who settled on Run. There they remained until 1621, a constant irritant to the Dutch, whose conquest and pacification of the islands were marked by cruelty that is remembered to this day.

At the museum in Bandaneira, a lurid painting recalls the slaughter of the island’s nobility by Japanese mercenary executioners under the command of Jan Pieterzoon Coen, the bloodiest of all governors-general of the East Indies. Island mothers still use his name to frighten naughty children.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Britain occupied the Indies and took away nutmeg plantings to various parts of their empire. The Bandas then began a long decline and was last touched by history when the main jetty was bombed by the Allies toward the end of the Japanese occupation. When we set out in the early morning for Run, we found the jetty still unrepaired.

The English sojourn on this obscure piece of real estate--officially traded to the Dutch for Manhattan by the treaty of Breda in 1667--intrigued us. We had heard that there were still the remains of an English fort on the island.

Finding such sites can be a problem. Maps are often in conflict, and local guides are less well informed than the well-read tourist. The total number of ruins are far in excess of those shown in various guidebooks. I came armed with accounts dating back to the mid-19th Century, none of which supports another.

As we chugged out through the strait, the early morning mist lifted and we entered a sparkling sea. Our blunt-prowed wooden boat made heavy way through a moderate sea for an hour while Run grew from a smudge on the horizon to an island of verdant hills rising above a ring of surf crashing against a barrier reef.

Our crew let go the anchor, we dropped into the sea and immediately discovered another dimension to the islands’ loveliness. Large corals of many colors sheltered schools of electric-hued fish. Where the reef dropped off to darkness, larger fish swam, groupers and some small sharks.

A strong current and the thought that small sharks might have larger relatives nearby turned us back to the object of our trip. We waded ashore. The jungle came down to the empty beach. It was quite possible to imagine how early European voyagers felt when they arrived on these beautiful and unknown islands. A long walk brought us to the island’s only town, and most of its residents turned out to greet us, posed for a huge group photographs, and advised us how to reach the fort. After climbing steps cut into coral rock, we reached the island’s crest and walked past gardens and groves of nutmeg and cloves, followed by a good part of the crowd from below.

“The fort!” A self-appointed guide proudly gestured ahead. We saw an abandoned warehouse. It had elegant fluted cast iron columns and was obviously 19th Century. Trying not to appear ungrateful, we insisted on looking further. Finally, an old woman emerged from the crowd and gestured for us to follow her.

A few yards away, covered with creepers and grass, were low mounds of crumbled masonry, and a stone rampart built into the side of a cliff, facing the sea. It was exactly where a fort should be.

Unabashed by his earlier error, our “guide” pointed out the “English graveyard.” It was a single stone marker, with some indecipherable relief markings on it.

Back in Bandaneira, no one in our party could remember exactly how we had learned of the fort’s existence. We consulted all our guidebooks but could find no reference to an English fort on Run. Rather, the English built their fort on the nearby atoll of Neijelakka, connected to Run at low tide, and now completely bare.

Further reading led me to conclude that the “gravestone” was actually a Portuguese “call marker” or padrao, which early navigators erected to commemorate their voyages. Thus, the stone is probably 16th Century, predating the English and the Dutch. That is one of the pleasures of the Bandas--you never know quite what you’ll find.

The following day we made the shorter trip across the strait to Lonthor, largest of the Bandas. A stiff climb up a flight of massive stone steps brought us to Fort Hollandia. From its ruined battlements one can look out on most of the archipelago.

We wandered through nutmeg groves and returned in the late afternoon as the mist began to cover the summit of Gunung Api. This peak is visible everywhere in the islands. An eruption in 1986 tore away its side, vaporized vegetation on the slopes and covered them with pumice.

The next morning, after breakfast, I struck out on my own and, by walking across the airfield and along a coastal track to the south, I came across the extensive remains of a plantation and an old graveyard mentioned in none of our guides.

The European settlers lived short lives. Most seem to have died in their early forties; there are many children’s graves. There is a distant poignancy to these old stones. The markers are elaborately carved and substantial, but mossy, vine-covered and forgotten.

From there, I climbed along meandering foot paths into the hills. The Bandas have the charm of a human landscape. It is a place that is intensely cultivated: every tree and bush has an owner. Even areas that look like jungle are carefully managed second growth, where root crops grow beneath nutmeg trees shaded in turn by a canopy of tall, silvery green kenari trees.

I was mystified to see men bearing loads of smoking charcoals in baskets, but high up the steep slope, I found the answer. The kenari trees are used to make dugout boats, They are first felled, then split, the center charred with coals and then hollowed out with adzes.

Above the dugout work site the trail was no more than a slight trace on the steep grassy hill. I had to pull myself up hand over hand. I thought about going back down but had reached a point where it was safer to go up.

When I finally reached level ground at the top of the ridge, I was surprised to see a tin-roofed shelter hidden in the trees. It covered an old Muslim grave strewn with pink blossoms. From it, a trail led back in the direction of town.

There were more blossoms strewn on rocks here and there. Somehow, I think the veneration of high places is something that long antedates the arrival of Islam in these islands.

The way back to town afforded wonderful views but was so steep that it was impossible to stand upright. I was reduced to skiing on one foot while I used the other as a brake. My 1928 guidebook to the Dutch East Indies describes this trail as a pleasant excursion up stone steps with frequent benches for resting. Of these I saw only one remaining stone slab.

Later in the afternoon, we made a last circuit of the town, already familiar after just a few days. It seemed we knew most of the townspeople we passed, and had a nodding acquaintance with the rest.

We climbed the hill from which massive Fort Belgica dominates the town, then descended to the jetty where children played in front of the former governor’s mansion.

It was pleasant to sit there and watch the sun set and the children play, untroubled by history.