The Dutch East India Company had sought a monopoly of the Banda spice trade since 1609, when a Bandanese ambush killed a company admiral and much of his party. In 1621 Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen arrived with a large force, occupied Lonthor, and in the campaign that followed the islands' population was killed, starved on the slopes to which it had fled, deported or driven overseas; forty-four leading orang kaya were tortured and executed by Japanese mercenaries in company service after a summary process. Contemporary reports describe roughly a thousand people remaining on islands that had held on the order of fifteen thousand. The company then divided the nutmeg groves into perken worked by imported enslaved labour under Dutch planters, an arrangement that lasted until the nineteenth century. A body of scholarship, including work published as 'Genocide in the Spice Islands', argues the destruction meets the definition of genocide; the Dutch government has not made any formal determination on the events of 1621.
The Dutch East India Company under Jan Pieterszoon Coen destroyed the population of the Banda Islands to secure a monopoly of nutmeg and mace, and repopulated the islands with company planters and enslaved labourers
Contemporary VOC and English accounts and modern reconstructions put the Bandanese at roughly 13,000-15,000 across Banda Neira, Lonthor and the smaller islands. After Coen's campaign of 1621 about 1,000 remained on the islands; roughly 1,700 were taken as slaves to Batavia and the rest were killed, starved or fled to Kei, Seram and elsewhere.
No count exists. Company correspondence records the execution of forty-four orang kaya and describes people killed in the fighting, starved on the cliffs of Lonthor where they had taken refuge, drowned, and dying in transit to Batavia; historians infer that the great majority of a population of some fifteen thousand died, but the only figures are the estimated population before and the roughly one thousand counted afterwards.
The torture and beheading of the orang kaya, the driving of the population into the interior where many starved, the burning of villages and the enslavement of survivors on the confiscated nutmeg plantations are documented in the Dutch East India Company's own reports and Coen's correspondence.
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