Ternate

Cloves grew naturally on Ternate, Tidore and a handful of neighbouring islands and nowhere else on earth, and that made this small volcanic island a centre of world trade long before Europeans knew where it was. By the 15th century the Sultanate of Ternate, converted to Islam and ruled from the shore below Gamalama, controlled a maritime network that reached across Maluku to Sulawesi and the coasts of New Guinea, in constant rivalry with the neighbouring sultanate of Tidore.

The Portuguese arrived in 1512 and built a fort at Kastela, holding a trading position for sixty years until the killing of Sultan Hairun turned the islanders against them; his son Baabullah drove them out in 1575, and Ternate reached the height of its power under his rule. The Dutch East India Company built Fort Oranje in 1607, and for a few years Ternate was the administrative seat of the Dutch in the Indies before the capital moved to Batavia. Company policy then concentrated clove growing on Ambon and cut down the trees here, which impoverished the sultanate and turned it into a Dutch dependency.

The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace rented a house here from 1858 to 1861, and the essay on natural selection that he sent to Charles Darwin, written during an attack of fever, is known as the Ternate essay, though his own journal suggests he was on neighbouring Gilolo when the idea came to him. After Indonesian independence the city became the main town of North Maluku and, when the province was created in 1999, its capital in practice until 2010, when the seat of government moved across the strait to Sofifi. Sectarian violence in 1999 and 2000 and repeated eruptions of Gamalama have shaped the decades since.

The sultanate is still the heart of local identity. The Sultan of Ternate holds no governmental power but retains ceremonial authority, and the kedaton, the palace above the city, remains a working court with its own officers, regalia and calendar. The Legu Gam festival, built around the sultan's birthday, fills the palace grounds and the streets with processions, music and traditional games, and draws people back from across North Maluku.

Ternate's culture is Maluku's, shaped by long contact with the wider Malay world. The cakalele war dance, performed in red cloth with a sword and a shield of painted wood, appears at official welcomes and festivals; the soya-soya dance recalls the fighting under Baabullah. Kora-kora, the long paddled war canoes that once carried Ternate's fleets, are built for races. Bambu gila, a performance in which a heavy bamboo pole appears to take on a life of its own against a group of men, is a well-known local spectacle.

Almost everyone is Muslim, and the old court mosque with its tiered roof shows how Islam arrived here through Javanese and Malay networks rather than directly from the Arab world; the memory of the violence of 1999–2000 has made religious peace a matter people speak about carefully. Ternate Malay, a distinct local variety, is the language of the street alongside Indonesian, and several Papuan-related languages are spoken on the island and nearby. Visitors are greeted openly, and the formality of asking after family before business is normal.

About 211,000 people live in the city, which takes in the whole island and a few smaller ones, making it the largest urban centre in North Maluku even though the provincial capital moved to Sofifi. Nearly all of them live on the flat ring of land between the sea and the volcano, in neighbourhoods that climb the lower slopes until the gardens begin.

The economy is built on trade, administration and the sea. Ternate is the transit point for everything moving into North Maluku: goods land at the port or the airport and go on by boat to Halmahera, Morotai and the smaller islands, and people come the other way for hospitals, universities and markets. Fishing, above all for tuna and skipjack, employs a great many families, and cloves, nutmeg and copra still come down from the slopes. The nickel boom on Halmahera and Obi has added money, workers and pressure on housing and flights.

Days start early and slow to a stop in the heat of the afternoon. The markets are busiest before eight, the angkot run all day with the windows down, and in the evening the whole city seems to move to the reclaimed seafront to eat, walk and watch the light go off Tidore. Living beneath an active volcano is routine: ashfall closes the airport and dusts the roofs every few years, evacuation routes are marked, and people speak of Gamalama with a mixture of wariness and affection.

Ternate's signature is gohu ikan, raw tuna or skipjack cut into cubes and tossed with lime juice, salt, bird's-eye chilli and lemon basil, then finished with coconut oil heated with shallots and poured over at the table. It is often called Ternate's sashimi, though the citrus and basil make it something else entirely, and it is eaten as a snack as much as a meal.

Fish otherwise arrives grilled over coconut husks, with sambal dabu-dabu or colo-colo — raw chopped chilli, shallot, tomato and lime — spooned over it. Papeda, the sticky sago porridge, is still eaten with ikan kuah kuning, fish in a turmeric and lime broth, and sago also appears as hard baked slabs called sagu lempeng, dipped in coffee or eaten with fish. Cassava, plantain and taro fill out the plate more often than rice in older households, and nasi jaha, rice cooked with coconut milk in a bamboo tube, is made for celebrations.

The spice trade left its mark on what people drink. Air guraka, hot ginger with palm sugar and kenari nuts, is the evening drink of the street stalls, and cloves and nutmeg season cakes and sweets. Halua kenari, kenari nuts set in caramelised sugar, is the standard gift to take away, along with nutmeg syrup and ground cloves from the market. Fruit is abundant and cheap — durian, rambutan, langsat and mangosteen in their seasons.