The Clove Monopoly, the Hongi Voyages, and Amboina (Ambon)
What happened
Cloves (Syzygium aromaticum) were native to an even smaller homeland than nutmeg: a handful of tiny islands in the northern Moluccas — Ternate, Tidore, Moti, Makian, and Bacan — where, by tradition, a clove tree was planted to mark the birth of a child. To monopolize cloves as it had monopolized nutmeg, the VOC adopted a strategy of deliberate, organized destruction. It concentrated authorized clove production on the island of Ambon (Amboina) and set out to eradicate clove trees everywhere else so that no one could grow cloves outside company control.
The enforcement mechanism was the hongi voyage (Dutch hongitochten, "extirpation expeditions"). Fleets of kora-kora war canoes, rowed by conscripted islanders, patrolled the Moluccas — often annually — hunting down and uprooting or burning unauthorized clove trees, and punishing communities that planted or traded them illicitly. It was the systematic destruction of a region's principal livelihood, carried out to keep a spice artificially scarce and its price artificially high.
The Amboina massacre of 1623. Two years after the Banda genocide, in 1623, VOC authorities on Ambon arrested, tortured, and executed about twenty men — roughly ten English East India Company merchants along with several Japanese mercenaries and a Portuguese — on charges of conspiring to seize the Dutch fort. This event must be distinguished clearly from the destruction of the local population: the Amboina massacre was primarily an episode of Anglo-Dutch rivalry, the killing of European (mostly English) commercial competitors, not of Moluccan islanders. We include it here because it occurred within the same clove-monopoly enforcement regime and because it had outsized historical consequences — but it should not be conflated with the far larger and far less remembered violence against the Moluccan peoples themselves.
The food connection
Clove monopoly through supply destruction — an early and brutal instance of the monopolist's logic that it can be more profitable to destroy production than to allow it. By burning the clove forests of islands it did not control, the VOC made scarcity by force.
The human cost
The diffuse, sustained cost fell on the Moluccan islanders: the destruction of clove groves that were the foundation of their economy and culture, the conscription of their labor and boats for the hongi raids that destroyed their neighbors' trees, and violence against those who resisted or traded outside the monopoly. The once-powerful sultanates of Ternate and Tidore were reduced to dependence. The concentrated, well-documented killing of the period — the Amboina executions of 1623 — claimed about twenty lives, almost all of them European competitors; the larger toll on the islanders themselves is, characteristically, both greater and far less recorded.
Political & economic context
The VOC bent the northern Moluccan sultanates into monopoly agreements and institutionalized the hongi system as routine administration. The strategy succeeded commercially for generations, concentrating the world's clove supply under company control.
Historical legacy
The Amboina massacre became one of the most durable pieces of anti-Dutch propaganda in English history, invoked for generations to inflame English opinion (John Dryden wrote a lurid revenge play, Amboyna, in 1673), and it contributed to the rhetoric of the Anglo-Dutch wars. The decisive practical legacy, though, is that it helped convince the English to abandon the Spice Islands and concentrate on India (see FW-ST-07) — a "defeat" that reshaped world history. The clove monopoly itself was eventually broken by the same horticultural smuggling that undid the nutmeg monopoly; cloves were transplanted out of the Moluccas, and by the nineteenth century the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba, off East Africa, had become the world's dominant clove producers — on the labor of enslaved people, opening yet another chapter of spice-and-slavery (a strong cross-link candidate within this section).
Food culture legacy
Cloves are now everywhere — in garam masala and Chinese five-spice, in mulled wine and baked ham, in the great spice blends of three continents — their global ubiquity the inverse of the scarcity the VOC killed to maintain. In Indonesia, cloves found a distinctive second life in kretek, the clove cigarettes that consume a large share of the country's clove crop to this day. The Zanzibar clove economy reshaped East African cuisine and trade.
Reference notes
Editorial precision required: keep the 1623 Amboina massacre (Anglo-Dutch) clearly distinct from the broader violence against Moluccan islanders; do not let the well-documented European deaths overshadow the larger, less-recorded local toll. Cross-link to Spices of the World (clove), Spice Blends & Spice Pastes of the World (garam masala, five-spice), FW-ST-04 (VOC), FW-ST-05 (Banda), FW-ST-07 (the English retreat to India). Related cuisines: Indonesian, Zanzibari / Swahili coast, Chinese. Content advisory: organized economic destruction; targeted executions.
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