Banda Sea

But the story doesn't end there.

To uncover the next chapter, I need to travel 100 miles across the Banda Sea to the seat of Dutch power in the 17th century, the island of Ambon.

Despite their stranglehold on the region and the trade, the Dutch were obsessed with the idea that someone, somewhere, was plotting to oust them.

These crumbling walls are all that remain of the once mighty Dutch fort, where many of the Dutch bigwigs hold up, protected by heavily armed soldiers.

And anyway, so there are these two islands which were sultanates.

And then way down south in the southern Malaccas, very close in fact to Australia, there's this tiny, tiny archipelago called the Banda Archipelago in the middle of the Banda Sea.

Also another incredibly beautiful, you know, set of islands over there.

But these islands too had their tree of life, this incredible tree, which was the nutmeg tree, which produces both nutmeg and mace.