Banda Island Massacre

The Dutch waged a bloody war, including massacring and enslaving the inhabitants of the island of Banda in Indonesia to control nutmeg production in the East Indies in 1621. Nutmeg was valued because of a false belief that it would ward off the plague. The Dutch reduced the native population of the Banda Islands from 15,000 to 1000. This is the reason the present inhabitants of the Banda Islands are not Indonesian-looking.