These questions bring us to the limits of a certain way of telling stories about the past. The empirical, documentary methods of historical scholarship—the methods that allowed me to construct a timeline of what happened in the Bandas in 1621—depend critically on language, literacy, and writing. The evidence for those methods comes primarily from written records. In the stories they tell, entities that lack language figure only as backdrops against which human dramas are enacted. Nutmegs, cloves, and volcanoes may figure in these stories, but they cannot themselves be actors in the stories
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