Nutmeg was once one of the most coveted spices on earth, grown on a single cluster of Indonesian islands, and the hunger for it helped redraw the map of the world — it’s the reason New Amsterdam became New York, swapped away by the Dutch to close out England’s last claim on a nutmeg island they already held

For most of the seventeenth century, every nutmeg on earth came from a handful of volcanic islands you could sail past in an afternoon. And the scramble to control it is the reason New Amsterdam is now called New York. Portuguese ships reached the islands in 1512, as Britannica’s entry on the Banda Islands records, and the Dutch pushed them out early in the following century. The Dutch, meanwhile, had controlled Run since 1621, even though England had never formally renounced its claim to the island. Banda still grows nutmeg and mace, on a much smaller scale, for a market where the spice costs a few dollars a jar.