Spice Trade

Lyrics

Little stone. 
Little wooden egg.
Hard and veined and sleeping.
Myristica fragrans.
Just a seed from a tree.

You only grew in one place on this earth.
The Banda Islands. A secret kept by the wind.
They said your dust could stop the Plague in London.
They said your scent was the smell of paradise.
And in Amsterdam, in 1602, they drew up the papers.
The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie.
All for you.

Oh, little nutmeg.
You launched a thousand ships.
Your dust was weighed against silver.
You were the currency of fevers and of kings.
The flavor of empire, the cost of the world.
All that faith, all that violence, held in a seed.

Then came the Fluyt ships, sails fat with purpose.
Then came Jan Pieterszoon Coen.
He wrote it down in a letter, Sixteen Twenty-One.
"We cannot carry on trade without war, nor war without trade."
And the sweet scent on the island air mixed with smoke.
Mixed with something metallic.
Fifteen thousand souls silenced for a monopoly on a single flavor.

Oh, little nutmeg.
You launched a thousand ships.
Your dust was weighed against silver.
You were the currency of fevers and of kings.
The flavor of empire, the cost of the world.
All that faith, all that violence, held in a seed.

From a smoking island, across the whole blue ocean.
To a brick warehouse in a cold city.
And for your last lonely source, on Run Island...
They traded a harbor in 1667.
A long, thin island called Manhattan.
They traded a future city for a handful of seeds.
Can you believe it?

And here you are.
In my kitchen. In my hand.
The wars are over. The ships are all ghosts.
But the scent...
...is exactly the same.
What are you worth now?
Little stone.