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<\/p>\nTernate, Spice Islands of the Moluccas, present day Indonesia. \u00a0I am here in the place that started the Western exploration of the world.<\/p>\n
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The Spice Islands<\/em><\/p>\n It was the goal of Columbus in 1492 to get here \u2013 which of course he never did with the American continents getting in the way. \u00a0Vasco da Gama decided to try the other way around Africa \u2013 which he did, reaching the southwest coast of India in 1498.<\/p>\n By 1512, Vasco\u2019s fellow Portuguese made it all the way \u2013 to the fabled Spice Islands, the only source on earth for\u00a0nutmeg<\/a>,\u00a0mace<\/a>, and\u00a0cloves<\/a>. \u00a0Since the Middle Ages, they were esteemed by Europeans for their medicinal and culinary properties.<\/p>\n As such, they were fantastically expensive, especially because the Arabs had a monopoly on the overland trade routes. \u00a0Breaking the monopoly with sea routes meant unbelievable profits. \u00a0So the Portuguese cashed in. \u00a0A pocketful of nutmeg seed pods could buy you a home. \u00a0Imagine what an entire shipload was worth.<\/p>\n Ferdinand Magellan convinced Portugal\u2019s rival, Spain, led by Charles V, that he could break the Portuguese spice monopoly by sailing west \u2013 for by now (1518) everyone knew there was an ocean on the other side of the Americas, but no one had crossed it. \u00a0Magellan did it, but was killed in the Philippines in 1521 before he got here.<\/p>\n So the Portuguese got to keep the Spice Islands, where they built their first fort \u2013 called Kastela \u2013 here on Ternate in 1522. \u00a0The Spanish found there were almost unimaginable amounts of gold and silver for the taking in their new colonies along the west coast of South America and forgot about the Pacific Ocean.<\/p>\n Fifty years later, history was about to shift. \u00a0The Spice Islands were ruled by a Moslem Sultan from his capital, which was here, thus known as the\u00a0Sultanate of Ternate<\/a>. \u00a0Tired of being manipulated by the Portuguese, Sultan Hairun in 1570 stopped taking their orders, whereupon the Portuguese soldiers in Fort Kastela killed him.<\/p>\n This sparked a rebellion among the Ternatese, led by Hairun\u2019s successor Sultan Baab Ullah who forced the Portuguese to surrender, pack up, and leave by the end of 1575. \u00a0You can see this in a monument amidst the ruins of Kastela:<\/p>\n By now, England had gotten over the mess that Henry VIII made (he died in 1547), which \u00a0his daughter Bloody Mary made worse (she died in 1558), with Mary\u2019s half-sister Elizabeth well on her way to launching the glory of the Elizabethan Age.<\/p>\n And out of nowhere came a plain commoner, the son of a peasant farmer in Devon, who helped her create it. \u00a0His name was Francis Drake (1540-1596). \u00a0He turned out to have a genius for commanding men at sea \u2013 and to use his talent against Elizabeth\u2019s principal enemy, Phillip II of Spain.<\/p>\n Sir Francis Drake<\/em><\/p>\n Recall that Phillip\u2019s Spain was rich because of the fabulous treasure pouring out of the west coast of South America \u2013 which had to be transported across the Atlantic. \u00a0That meant it had to first be taken on muleback across the Isthmus of Panama to be loaded onto Spanish galleons at the port of Nombre de Dios. \u00a0Drake took advantage of this critical point of vulnerability, and returned to England in 1573 with tons of Spanish gold.<\/p>\n (Historical aside: \u00a0It\u2019s hilarious that Spanish historians smear Drake as a \u201cpirate\u201d \u2013 as if the Spanish gold wasn\u2019t stolen from Indians and mined via Indian slave labor.)<\/p>\n This earned him an audience with Elizabeth, to whom he proposed going to the source \u2013 an expedition to South America\u2019s west coast to directly deprive Spain of the gold that enabled Phillip to be such a danger to England. \u00a0She agreed.<\/p>\n With the Queen\u2019s support, Drake easily acquired investors to fund what was to become one of history\u2019s most epic, consequential, and remunerative sea voyages: \u00a0The circumnavigation of the world by Drake\u2019s The Golden Hind.<\/p>\n Note that after capturing boatloads of Spanish treasure \u2013 one galleon alone, the Nuestra Se\u00f1ora de la Concepci\u00f3n, held six tons of gold \u2013 Drake sailed all the way to Oregon searching for the non-existent Northwest Passage. \u00a0In June of 1579 he landed at what is now a US National Historic Landmark,\u00a0Drakes Bay<\/a>\u00a0at Point Reyes just north of the Golden Gate.<\/p>\n The white cliffs of the bay reminded Drake of the White Cliffs of Dover, thus he claimed for England all the land \u201cfrom sea to sea\u201d (from the Pacific to the Atlantic, most of the US today) as Nova Albion (Albion<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 \u201cwhite\u201d \u2013 is the original name for Britain). \u00a0Drake\u2019s is thus the original European land claim for what is the US, for the only European to precede him was Juan Cabrillo in 1542 who landed at San Diego and islands like Catalina but made no claims for Spain.<\/p>\n Drake then captained the Golden Hind across the Pacific to land here at Ternate in early November, 1579. \u00a0Proclaiming himself no friend of the Portuguese, he was welcomed by Sultan Baab Ullah. \u00a0There is a famous engraving of his meeting with the Sultan:<\/p>\n The legend is that the Sultan was shocked to learn Drake had no interest in his cloves, for which he had a world monopoly that had made him fantastically rich, because the Hind was too full of Spanish gold and silver to load them aboard.<\/p>\n Yet Drake, in his book on the voyage with notes by the ship\u2019s chaplain Francis Fletcher \u2013\u00a0The World Encompassed\u00a0\u2013 records that the Sultan gifted him with at least a ton of cloves for British protection against the Portuguese. \u00a0Drake\u2019s crew members were deliriously happy as Drake gave them each a hefty portion worth a fortune.<\/p>\n On September 26, 1580, Drake and the Hind sailed into Plymouth Harbor. \u00a0On April 1, 1581, at the Deptford Wharf on the Thames in London, Queen Elizabeth herself boarded the Hind to bestow a knighthood on its heroic captain, forever to be known to history as Sir Francis Drake.<\/p>\n Please consider reading\u00a0\u201cWhy the Knighting of Sir Francis Drake Should Be Commemorated\u201d<\/a>\u00a0for its historical significance.<\/p>\n He had earned it. \u00a0In addition to completing the first circumnavigation of the Earth as captain and leader (Magellan\u2019s was completed by his remaining crew), the Royal share of Drake\u2019s treasure doubled Elizabeth\u2019s income for the year, paid off all her government\u2019s foreign debt, and enabled her to begin financing the Queen\u2019s Navy for the war with Spain she knew was to come.<\/p>\n And come it did, with Phillip II amassing a gigantic invasion force, the Spanish Armada. \u00a0With blessing of Pope Sixtus V, Phillip\u2019s goal was to overthrow Elizabeth, England\u2019s Protestant Queen, and force the English people to be Catholic once again. \u00a0Elizabeth placed Drake in co-command of the fleet, for which he designed a new form of warship, the \u201crace ship,\u201d much lower, faster, and more maneuverable than Spain\u2019s lumbering galleons.<\/p>\n By April 1587, Phillip\u2019s Armada was ready to depart for the Channel from Cadiz. \u00a0But then Drake and his race ships conducted a series of raids on Cadiz known as\u00a0\u201cSingeing the King\u2019s Beard,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0destroying over 100 Spanish ships and setting Phillips\u2019 invasion back for a year.<\/p>\n The full invasion came in August 1588, with Drake\u2019s race ships and the rest of the Queen\u2019s Navy decimating the Armada in the\u00a0Battle of Gravelines<\/a>\u00a0on August 9. In it, and the Armada\u2019s retreat with storms forcing it north, half of its ships were lost with 20,000 (out of 30,000) soldiers and seamen dead. \u00a0Many of the survivors rescued on Ireland\u2019s coast settled there, with their descendants becoming the Black Irish due to their darker skin.<\/p>\n These two exploits of Drake placed England on its path to becoming a world superpower with an empire upon which the sun never set. \u00a0And it started here in Ternate, at the historical intersection between an English commoner and a Sultan.<\/p>\n It is with some irony that Ternate was to play another epic role in history some 280 years after Drake\u2019s visit. \u00a0By this time, Ternate and all of what is now Indonesia was a colony of the Netherlands known as the Dutch East Indies.<\/p>\n It happened in this home:<\/p>\n It was here in early 1858 that\u00a0Alfred Russell Wallace<\/a>\u00a0wrote his famous\u00a0\u201cTernate Essay\u201d<\/a>\u00a0on evolution and natural selection that he then sent to Charles Darwin.<\/p>\n For twenty years, Darwin had developed his theories on evolution but was afraid of publishing them. \u00a0The Ternate Essay revealed that Wallace was close to replicating his concepts. \u00a0This prompted Darwin to have Wallace\u2019s letter together with one of his own read jointly at a meeting of the Linnaean Society in London in June 1858. \u00a0It further spurred Darwin to publish his iconic work,\u00a0On The Origin of Species,\u00a0the following year (1859).<\/p>\n Thus, if it had not been for what happened in this home on Ternate, the most influential book of modern times might never have been.<\/p>\n I\u2019m here not only for my penchant to experience history first-hand where it took place, but to plan an exploration of the most extraordinary and interesting places in Indonesia for next March. \u00a0Ternate sure is one of them.<\/p>\n The scent of cloves and nutmeg is still everywhere like in Drake\u2019s time, as are the trees that grow them. \u00a0The Sultan\u2019s Palace is still here, although rebuilt 100 years ago:<\/p>\n For me, however, what I found most intriguing is not simply the history but the people here today. \u00a0Yes, they are Moslem. \u00a0Yes, women wear headscarves (but no face-hiding burqas!). \u00a0Yes, they observe Ramadan.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s an abundance of Christian churches, Indonesian-made Bintang lager and Guinness beer are popular and available, and most of all, everyone is amazingly friendly. \u00a0Everywhere I go, I am greeted with smiles, a cheerful \u201cHello, Mister!,\u201d an offer to shake hands, and a request that a picture be taken of us together with their cell phone. \u00a0Everybody has a call phone.<\/p>\n How can you not love a place so unreservedly friendly, and has ice cold Guinness to boot? \u00a0Oh, yes, and it\u2019s also really beautiful.<\/p>\n Islam has many flavors. \u00a0The one you find here is one we can easily get along with. \u00a0Perhaps that\u2019s the final consequence of the meeting between Drake and the Sultan.<\/p>\n 6 Things Everyone Should Know Before Moving to Spain<\/a><\/p>\n Everything You Need to Know for a Perfect Trip to Mexico City<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Sir](\"http:\/\/www.escapeartist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/jpeg-1-8.jpg\")
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