Indonesia: Ternate

"The isles of Ternate and Tidore," wrote John Milton, "whence merchants bring their spicy drugs." (Paradise Lost, 1667). The first two ships to circle the world stopped at Ternate, a tiny island in present day Indonesia which for centuries, was the only known source of cloves. Magellan's flagship, Victoria, stopped at Ternate in 1521, shortly after he was killed in the Philippines, under captain Juan Sebastian Elcano. Elcano filled Victoria with cloves and nutmeg in the Spice Islands and sailed home to fame and fortune in Seville, where I visited last year. Sir Francis Drake's ship Golden Hind, renamed from the Pelican after it was filled with stolen Spanish gold, stopped at Ternate on the second circumnavigation in 1579, and added spices to his cargo even more valuable than gold. Both ships stopped here because the tiny volcanic islands of Ternate and Tidore, off the larger island of Halmahera (then called Gilolo) were the only known source of cloves, the most valuable spice in the world. Conquered and exploited successively by Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and Japanese invaders, the locals lived under the yoke of foreign rule until 1949, when Maluku, or the Spice Islands, became a province of independent Indonesia. Most of today's cloves come from other countries now, and the remaining trees on Ternate and Tidore supply the kratek cigarette market in Jakarta, where tobacco and cloves produce an aromatic, unhealthy habit enjoyed by millions of Indonesians. Ternate's other claim to fame, and the primary reason I visited there in April, is the location of a small Dutch bungalow where Alfred Russel Wallace co-discovered the theory of natural selection in 1858. After eight years in the Malay Archipelago collecting beetles, butterflies, and bird skins for wealthy Europeans, Wallace had an epiphany during a malaria delirium, wrote down a 10-page summary of evolution, and mailed it to Charles Darwin in England. After publishing the "Ternate Essay" with a brief excerpt of his own work, Darwin completed and published "The Origin of Species," and changed the world almost as much as Magellan and Drake.