MY WORLD OF TRUTH

Perhaps it’s similar to the way an architect or builder approaches a new building; looking for details that explain how people adapt structures to a location’s weather, landscape and culture. Sailors and fisherman build our vessels to suit a place, and we have a language all our own.

In Indonesia, where the ocean has long been the highway between the more than 17,000 islands, boats offer a myriad of clues about the seas and the people. The dugouts are obvious – they’re limited by the size of trees and never travel far from home. Long, narrow-hulled fishing boats are perfect for launching from a beach, and cut through the swell nicely.

But it’s the big schooners, called phinisi in Indonesian, that tell the most intriguing story. Like most of the boats we’d seen, much of the construction is traditional: hand-carved beams; wooden dowels instead of nails; and seams caulked with cotton. But the twist is that these two-masted ships borrowed both design details (originally part cargo ship, part warship) and the source of their name from Dutch pinnaces, vessels that first found their way to the Banda Sea in the spring of 1599.

The Dutch, along with the Portuguese, English and Spanish, had been in a ferocious race to find the elusive Spice Islands and gain control of the spice trade. There were fortunes to be made in cloves and nutmeg, and everyone was eager to knock out the middleman – the Asian and Arab traders who kept the islands’ location a secret.

When the Dutch finally found the islands, they protected their investment by forming the Dutch East India Company (VOC). With a horrific brutality that included slaying much of the local Bandanese population, they gained control of the plantations of evergreen nutmeg trees; the spice they produced not only flavoured food but was thought to cure illness including the bubonic plague.

At the time, nutmeg only grew in the Banda Islands. A combination of the region’s isolation and the finicky nature of the nutmeg tree kept the price astronomical. Nutmeg will only grow in specific conditions: fertile, well-drained soil in a tropical climate that gets lots of rain. Even then the trees only fruit after seven to nine years, and the labour-intensive process of harvesting requires workers to handpick each fruit and remove the outer covering, before carefully peeling off the mace (a delicate, saffron-coloured spice), drying the seed and cracking off the hard shell.

With the local population subdued and enslaved as workers, the VOC monopoly of the spice trade was now hampered by just one thing. In 1616, the English had managed to gain control of a Banda Island called Run; a speck of island less than 2 miles long and just more than half a mile wide. It was here the English claimed their first colony and formed the English East India Company, and in doing so launched the British Empire.

The English East India Company was only able to defend Run against the Dutch for four years – but they didn’t give up their claim. In 1664, in retaliation, four English frigates were sent across the Atlantic Ocean to seize a Dutch holding called New Amsterdam. The seat of the colonial Dutch government at southern tip of Manhattan Island had a population of 2,000 people, but they quickly capitulated. In 1677, the two countries came to an agreement; both had refused to give up their claims on each other’s islands, so they made a trade. The Dutch gained control of Run and the English got New Amsterdam – a new colony they renamed New York.

These days, the Bandanese have regained control of their 11 islands and their nutmeg. Not many signs of the Dutch or English remain, other than the ruins from the VOC’s forts, the architectural style of the homes and the shape of the phinisi schooners that carry liveaboard divers around the islands. Ships like these were once Indonesia’s main form of transportation, carrying spices and cargo. Later they gained notoriety when the crews turned to piracy, using their skills to plunder European ships. These days, many of the traditional phinisi are outfitted with comfortable cabins and offer multiday voyages throughout Indonesia.

We came across our first phinisi schooner when it sailed into our isolated bay off Alor Island. Anchored beside us, it looked like it had travelled out of the region’s turbulent past – except for the passengers gearing up for a dive. Not long after the schooner’s guests dove into the water, we followed.

Swimming along a steep drop off, I admired the colour and diversity of the hard coral. Then a school of jacks caught my eye. Soon I was enthralled, in turn, by a turtle, Napoleon wrasse and a black tipped shark. I spent a while staring down a lobster before coming across the kind of traditional bamboo fish trap that wouldn’t have been out of place in an archaeological museum. When we surfaced to a view of fishermen in dugout canoes bobbing alongside the ancient-looking schooner, I thought it was our boat that had sailed through time.

That evening, as I watched the schooner bobbing in the swell at the base of a jungle-covered volcano, I wondered briefly what the world would have looked like if the English hadn’t traded Run for New York. But as the stars grew impossibly bright in the sky, I realised that perhaps it didn’t matter – in that moment, the world was as it should be.