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Fort Belgica
(and Fort Nassau)
Banda Neira, Banda Islands, Moluccas, Indonesia
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Built: 1672-1673
Used by: Netherlands, Great Britain
Conflict in which it participated:
Napoleonic Madness
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The Age of Discovery can be credited for the worldwide dissemination of starforts through the 16th and 17th centuries...but what begat the Age of Discovery? Well lots of things of course, but one of the biggies was...spices.
The spice trade was both ancient and vastly lucrative. Arab traders dominated the overland routes that brought spices from the mystic east to Europe, and one of the driving forces behind the European urge to sail forth and explore at the end of the 15th century was an interest in fetching their own darned spices from the source. |
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One of those sought-after spices was nutmeg. This tasty spice made it to Constantinople in the 6th century AD, and it wasn't until the 13th century that Arab traders pinpointed nutmeg's one and only source: The Banda Islands, just a smidge north of what is now Australia. Their first order of business upon this discovery was to make absolutely certain that those accursed Europeans didn't find out about it.
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 A drawing of Fort Nassau and the weird, yurtlike thing that was the first version of Fort Belgica, sometime before 1673, because that's when the author, Caspar Schmalkalden, died. Looks like Fort Nassau was in danger of sliding right into the sea, doesn't it? |
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Portuguese explorer extraordinaire Afonso de Albuquerque (1453-1515), in addition to having the distinction of two q's in his last name, also secured some of Portugal's most important colonies: Goa in India (home of the Fortaleza de Aguada) and Ormuz in the Red Sea (home to the Fort of Our Lady of the Conception). In 1511 Albuquerque lived up to his many titles ( The Terrible; The Great; The Lion of the Seas; The Portuguese Mars; The Caesar of the East; Mrs. Albuquerque's Little Boy Afonso) by conquering Malacca, a south seas hub of Asian trade. A three-ship detachment was sent to find the Banda Islands, Source of All Nutmeg, which discovery was made in 1512. The Portuguese stayed for a month, buying and cramming their ships full o' nutmeg, whereupon they sailed home and assumedly made eleventy bazillion dollars. |
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The Portuguese hadn't been prepared to build forts and dominate the Banda Islands in 1512, but they returned in 1529 with that very purpose in mind. Led by a Captain Garcia, the Portuguese managed to construct the foundations for a little fort on Banda Neira Island, but the Orang Kaya, governing body of the Bandanese, wisely turned against the European interlopers and chased them back to their ships.
Dutch commercial interests arrived on Banda Neira in 1599, at which time they signed some contracts with the locals, and were permitted to set up a small trading post. The Bandanese balked at the assertion that they should sell their precious spices exclusively to the Dutch, however, and it was determined that more extreme measures were necessary to ensure that the nutmeg tap wouldn't stop flowing.
In 1602, twelve Dutch voorcompagnieën banded together to form the Dutch East India Company (VOC). This commercial entity was a force unto itself, with the power to build forts, negotiate treaties and declare and wage war. By this time it had been determined that the Banda Islands were the world's only source of nutmeg, and the VOC simply couldn't stand the thought of not monopolizing such a resource. Negotiations got underway, but the Bandanese simply wouldn't buckle to Dutch demands, and a series of unfortunate incidents occurred in which persons on both sides were regrettably killed.
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The concept of high ground, in a military context, couldn't have been an unfamiliar one to the soldiers of the VOC...but nothing illustrates the shamefully altitude-challenged state of Fort Nassau better than the fact that, as soon as they could, the Dutch started fortifying the mountain that was directly behind Fort Nassau.
Wouldn't that hilltop have been the location to fortify in the first place? Perhaps, due to the fact that they were being actively attacked while building Fort Nassau, the Dutch were just doing what they could, where they could...also, the chance of an artillery-armed foe claiming that high ground and pitching shells into Fort Nassau with impunity probably wasn't of immediate concern.
As forehead-slappingly obvious as the imperative to seize the high ground seems in hindsight, there have been plenty of examples of similarly inexplicable oversights...generally having something to do with commanders commanding that a fort be built at (points imperiously at) this spot on a map, having never set foot anywhere near that spot, and having no idea what the ground looks like. Perhaps the VOC's commanders had ordered that a fort be built atop those Portuguese foundations, and that's where those foundations were. The Dutch at this point were gleefully taking over numerous Portuguese colonies, and probably had a healthy respect for the Portuguese ability to choose the right spot for a starfort. However, it's all speculation, and I'll stop now. You're welcome.
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 Forts Beligca and Nassau as they stand, virtually on top of each other! |
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The Dutch started working on the fort that would eventually become Fort Belgica in 1611, to serve as overwatch for Fort Nassau, but also to intimidate the Orang Karan as well as the English who had established a base on Run island, just about ten miles to the west of Banda Neira. The English East India Company (EIC) sprang into being in 1600, and had much the same mission and powers as the VOC, and the two "companies" would bump heads on many an occasion.
Despite the presence of two Dutch forts now on Banda Neira, the Bandanese simply weren't cooperating in the manner that the Dutch felt appropriate. The VOC decided that this whole enterprise would run much more smoothly if they just replaced all of the island's inhabitants with persons who were more amenable to Dutch requirements. On February 21, 1621, a fleet of 19 ships carrying 1,655 Dutch troops and 286 Japanese mercenaries landed at Fort Nassau.
Those Bandanese that were not interested in submitting to Dutch domination had by this juncture secured some semblance of modern weaponry and assembled fortifications, but they were no match for a determined European army, and before the end of the year around 90% of the population of Banda Neira had been killed, enslaved, starved to death or driven off the island.
Moo haa haaa, victoriously bellowed the VOC, our brilliant plan is a success! Slaves from the Dutch East Indies (mostly what is today Indonesia), India and China were shipped in to replace the Bandanese, and the few remaining original islanders were forced to teach the newcomers the ins and outs of nutmeg production. |
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And thus everyone was happy. For nearly 200 years thereafter, the replaced islanders and their Dutch masters coexisted in a respectful harmony, producing endless shipfuls of precious nutmeg, the sale of which helped fund great advances in the arts, sciences and humanities back in Europe. Actually, the only truthful parts of that last sentence are, that it lasted almost 200 years, and that -lots of nutmeg was churned out.
The British were ever attempting to nip at the edges of the Netherlands' spice empire, but the 1667 Treaty of Breda eased those commercial tensions for a bit, with the shuffling of some Indonesian possessions betwixt the two powers. England was, however, always looking for an excuse and opportunity to nab some of that spice business.
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Just such an opportunistic excuse finally came along in the early 19th century. As France did its world-eroding thing that began with Revolution in 1789 and concluded with Napoleon (1769-1821) being nailed down on St. Helena for the last time in 1815, lots of things fell apart in Europe. With the VOC being dissolved in 1799 and the Dutch being pretty comprehensively occupied with defending themselves at home, the Royal Navy captured all of what were known as the Spice Islands over a seven-month period in 1810.
When the Royal Navy arrived off Banda Neira on August 9, 1810, the island was defended by around 1500 troops, Dutch and "native militia," manning ten batteries of guns in addition to our two starforts.
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Banda Neira receives a visit from the Royal Navy on the morning of August 9, 1810. Excitingly, Forts Nassau and Belgica are clearly visible, if curiously inactive. |
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The starfort was designed to be impregnable from the attentions of artillery-armed, European armies. This was notionally accomplished by a heavily-armed garrison with complete range of vision in mutually-supporting bastions, secure behind stout masonry walls. What happened when none of those advantages were employed? Exactly what happened at Fort Belgica on August 9, 1810.
A British landing party made it ashore in a somewhat depleted state, having been ravaged by shore batteries. Around 200 men were led up to the fort, in agreeably poor weather, by a friendly local. Unable to see much of anything or make their guns work in the heavy rain, Fort Belgica's defenders managed to allow the British to scale the outer walls with ladders, and had astoundingly left the gate into the inner section open, so that their commanding officer, who lived outside of the fort, could meander in at his own best speed and start making some good defensive decisions...such as, close the damn door!
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 Fort Belgica, captured by dronemaster Alexandre Girardeau. |
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Needless to say, the British had the wit to take advantage of the wide-open gate and secured Fort Belgica by 5:30am. Perhaps fittingly, Fort Belgica's commandant was one of the eleven defenders killed in this battle: The British suffered only a few wounded. Along with the fort, they captured thirty men and fifty cannon. When the Dutch governor on Banda Neira didn't immediately surrender the island, the British used their new guns in their new starfort to threaten the city with destruction, at which point the governor wisely gave in. |
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The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 restored the Spice Islands to Dutch control, but the British had sneakily secured thousands of nutmeg tree seedlings during their time on Banda Neira, which they transplanted at some of their other colonies on Sumatra and Malaysia. By the end of the 19th century, they had huge nutmeg plantations in Zanzibar and on the island of Granada (whose national flag features a stylized, split-open nutmeg fruit!), and everything that had made the exploitation of Banda Neira so much fun for the Dutch was pretty much ruined. Fort Belgica was used as a prison for some indeterminate amount of time, because what else are you gonna do with a cool starfort when it's not needed to defend your spices any more? Dutch rule was finally ended with the coming of the Japanese in the Second World War (1939-1945). Indonesia declared its independence immediately after the Japanese surrender in August of 1945, but a trait common amongst nations with colonies leading up to World War II was, failing to grasp that their glory days were over after the war. The Dutch attempted to reassert control over Indonesia, sparking off the Indonesian National Revolution (1945-1949). Eventually international pressure forced the Netherlands to come to terms with the new, postwar reality, and they finally recognized Indonesian independence in December of 1949. Today Fort Nassau is reportedly in a state of relative ruin, but Fort Belgica is ready and able to support your footsteps upon your visit! It is apparently rather difficult to get to, but if you do get there, admission is free, but there's a donation box, and you'd be a churlish person indeed to not donate something. Thanks so much to starfort appreciator Jasper de Gelder of the Netherlands, who alerted us to Fort Belgica!
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