Making a Massacre on Ambon Island
A Dutch conspiracy trial at Amboyna in the Indonesian archipelago gave birth to a sadly enduring English word: massacre.
Dunblane, Manchester Arena, Sandy Hook: the place names evoke grief and horror, a cry of anguish pinned to a map, each the site of a massacre. Such atrocities might seem as old as time, but the word itself is not. Massacre worked its way into the English language in the late 16th century and came ultimately to signify a specific type of death, one characterised by cruelty, intimacy and treachery. How that happened – why we think of massacres in the way that we do today – is the story of yet another place, Amboyna, an island in the Indonesian archipelago, and of an incident that happened there in 1623.
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