Ternate is an island and town in the Maluku Islands (Moluccas) of eastern Indonesia, located off the west coast of the larger island of Halmahera. In the precolonial era, Ternate was the dominant political and economic power over most of the "Spice Islands" of Maluku. Today, Ternate is the provincial capital and largest town in North Maluku province.

The island

Ternate is dominated by the volcanic Mount Gamalama (1715 m). The volcano erupts regularly, covering the island with volcanic dust. The largest recent eruption of Gamalama was in September 1980, when 30,000 of the islands 56,000 residents were forced to temporarily flee to nearby Tidore.

History

Up until the Dutch completed the colonization of Maluku in the nineteenth century, the sultans of Ternate ruled an extensive empire that at time stretched across the archipelago, from Sulawesi to Papua. It frequently engaged in fierce competition for control of its periphery with the nearby sultanate of Tidore.

In part as a result of its trade-dependent culture, Ternate was one of the earlier places in the region to convert to Islam, probably in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. When the Portuguese arrived in the early sixteenth century, Sultan Abu Lais of Ternate allied himself with them, but relations were strained from the start, They were expelled in 1575, due to Ternaten anger with zealous Christian missionaries, and Portuguese meddling with the Ternaten throne. At the time, European power in the region was very weak; after the expulsion of the Portuguese, Ternate was able to substantially increase its military reach across the region.

The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace wrote his "Ternate essay" "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type" (http://www.wku.edu/%7Esmithch/wallace/S043.htm) while on the island in 1858.

References

• Andaya, Leonard Y (1993). The world of Maluku: eastern Indonesia in the early modern period. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0824814908
• Hanna, Willard Anderson and Des Alwi (1990). Turbulent times past in Ternate and Tidore. Banda Naira: Yayasan Warisan dan Budaya.