Run Island — The Nutmeg Island Traded for Manhattan (1667)
What happened
Run (Pulau Run) is a minute island at the western edge of the Banda group — a place you could walk across in an afternoon — and in the early seventeenth century it was coveted because it grew nutmeg. The English established a foothold there: the EIC agent Nathaniel Courthope held Run against Dutch siege from 1616 until he was killed in 1620, and on the strength of that episode England maintained a claim to the island for decades. The matter was settled by the Treaty of Breda in 1667, which ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Under the treaty the Dutch kept Run (and Suriname, which they had taken), while the English kept New Netherland — including the town of New Amsterdam on the island of Manhattan, which they had seized in 1664 and renamed New York.
The food connection
Run mattered for one reason: nutmeg. It is the smallness of the thing fought over that makes the entry resonate. The popular shorthand — endlessly repeated, including in Giles Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg — is that "the English traded a nutmeg island for Manhattan."
Intellectual honesty / the correction. That shorthand needs a caveat. The Treaty of Breda was not a literal one-for-one barter in which negotiators set a nutmeg island on one pan of a scale and Manhattan on the other. It was a peace settlement based largely on the principle of uti possidetis — each side kept what it currently held. The Dutch held Run; the English held New York; the treaty confirmed both. So "traded for" overstates the deliberateness of the exchange. But the underlying point is entirely true and historically meaningful: at the time, a tiny nutmeg-bearing island was regarded as a possession worth holding onto and contesting alongside a North American port — and to many contemporaries the spice island looked the more obviously valuable of the two. The Dutch did not feel they had been cheated. The valuation that looks absurd today looked perfectly reasonable in 1667. That inversion is the whole lesson.
The human cost
The direct cost here is small in numbers — Courthope and the men of the Run garrison — but the entry sits atop the Banda genocide (FW-ST-05), of which Run was a part. The island for which Englishmen died was one of the islands whose people the Dutch had largely destroyed a generation earlier.
Political & economic context
Nutmeg's monopoly value made Run seem worth a war; the spice premium distorted the perceived worth of territory across the globe. The long view inverted that judgment about as completely as any judgment in history has ever been inverted.
Historical legacy
It stands as one of history's great ironies and a staple of popular spice-history storytelling: the obscure speck of Run, fought and died over for its nutmeg, versus Manhattan, which became the financial capital of the world. The story endures because it makes the abstract value of spice suddenly, vividly concrete.
Food culture legacy
Run is the perfect emblem of the arc this whole document traces — the journey of nutmeg from a substance worth an island and a war to a jar in every kitchen, dusted into eggnog without a second thought. The fall of nutmeg from priceless to commonplace is the fall of the entire spice-empire economy in miniature.
Reference notes
Cross-link to FW-ST-05 (Banda genocide — Run is a Banda island), FW-ST-04 (VOC), Spices of the World (nutmeg). Related cuisines: Indonesian, American (the New York connection). A strong candidate for a reader-facing "did you know" surface, paired with the genocide content advisory so the irony is never decoupled from its human cost.
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