Capture of Banda Neira

9 August 1810, Banda Neira, Spice Islands (Moluccas)

British victory; the Banda Islands surrendered

In 1810 Britain set out to take the Dutch Spice Islands, by then ruled from Napoleon's Kingdom of Holland. Amboyna fell in February. The Banda Islands, the centre of the nutmeg trade, were the most strongly held: Fort Belgica and Fort Nassau, ten batteries, and some 700 regular troops and 800 militia. Captain Christopher Cole planned to land about 400 sailors, marines and Madras infantry at night from Caroline, Piémontaise and Barracouta and take the forts by surprise. A battery opened fire on the boats in the dark, a squall scattered them, and they grounded on a reef opposite a battery of ten 18-pounders. Cole got fewer than 200 men ashore in a sandy cove before dawn. They took the battery from behind with pikes, without firing a shot, then scaled the outer walls of Fort Belgica in heavy rain that kept the defenders' muskets from firing. Their ladders were too short for the inner walls, but the gate was opened to let in the commandant, and they rushed it. When the Dutch batteries fired on his ships, Cole turned Belgica's guns on the town, and the governor surrendered. Cole was knighted, and the East India Company sent nutmeg and clove seedlings from the islands to its own colonies.