Nathaniel's Nutmeg

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His suggestion that nutmeg dampens sexual desire had signally failed to work on him, for this celibate former monk died in disgrace. Nathaniel's Nutmeg tells the story of the Anglo-Dutch battle for the spice islands in Indonesia - a conflict that raged on and off for centuries. Drawn from original letters, journals and personal diaries, Nathaniel's Nutmeg sheds light on an extraordinary and little-episode in world history. Geographers agreed that this was indeed good news; the chilly northern land mass must surely be a second Cape of Good Hope. Those merchants had vociferously defended their decision, presenting logical and compelling arguments to support their theories.

Very importantly, this book gave me a interest to read more books about this time period and explore it in greater depth. Nutmeges,' he wrote in his Dyetary, `be good for them which have cold in their head and doth comforte the syght and the brain. Starving sailors would land on islands and gorge on scared cows, only to be slaughtered by mobs of horrified villagers who believed the cows held the spirits of deceased ancestors. After riding out the gale, Sir Hugh re-established contact with the Confidentia and both headed towards the coastline. Giles Milton weaves a thrilling tale and is especially gifted at finding the best direct quotes from period letters and documents.At the centre of the story lies Nathaniel Courthope, a trusty lieutenant of the East India Company, who took and held the tiny nutmeg-producing island of Run in the face of overwhelming Dutch opposition for more than five years, before being treacherously murdered in 1620. A true story (more or less), it nonetheless reads like an old-fashioned swashbuckler, complete with bravery, treachery, derring-do, clandestine dealings, betrayals, base incompetence, and much adventure on the high seas. Their hulls were splintered and twisted, their sails in tatters and their crew apparently long since dead.

Whereas stories of the exact same kind of plotting and scheming on the part of the British are met either with excuses on Milton's part, or with outright approval.Before you get to him, you read about generation after generation of Europeans travelling to places they had no right to be, where they either succumbed to unmentionable diseases or coshed each other over the head or both. The sources are mostly secondary, since the story is compiled from original hand-written journals of English explorers, Ambon (in today’s Maluku province, Indonesia) library collections, and five thousand pages of Jacobean script. and gently swaying palm trees, Willoughby and his men had met with freezing fog, impenetrable ice, and the realisation that London's merchants had made a terrible mistake when they chose the route over the North Pole.

This was a fascinating book about the Spice race, that time in history when the great powers of Europe were looking for the fastest ways to the East and the competition to control the spice trade was at its height. Nathaniel's Nutmeg] deftly and arrestingly captures the sorry history of the European lust for nutmeg and its devastating impact on the Spice Islands. This book details the history of spices, their importance, their cost, the explorers who dared to find them, and the wars that subsequently developed because of them.

Against incredible odds, the last of the merchants sent to establish a toehold in the island group, he rallied his men and the natives daily and held Run against the Dutch, under the most brutal conditions, for four long years. It carries a perspective of adventure and bravery that is thoroughly imperial and racist, and does not even acknowledge the question of why these powers thought they could take over these far-off lands in the first place.

I was fascinated by the "early modern" character of the world portrayed; the Age of Exploration brought a glut of new information about the world outside Europe, but people - even highly-educated people - had no way of separating the true stories from what, in retrospect, we know to be absurd. Throughout the book, there are several historical events that are worth noted, as it is absent from most major historical books today. Apart from successfully killing the smell and taste of rotten meat, nutmeg was also known for curing just about anything from the plague to impotence. The island that became Maluka was fought over in the early 17th century by the British and the Dutch, because of the nutmeg there.His forthcoming book (UK: May 2024, US: Sept 2024) is THE STALIN AFFAIR: The Allies' Secret Mission to Wartime Russia. In retrospect, it's amazing that an unproved assumption about geological symmetry would have trumped, even for the most intelligent people of the time, the proven fact that if you get water cold enough it will freeze, thereby trapping your ships in the frozen Arctic wastes. Towerson), whose second husband is murdered in the Massacre of Amboyne but the author fails to tell us what happened to her, if anything. A brilliant adventure story of unthinkable hardship and savagery, the navigation of uncharted waters, and the exploitation of new worlds, Nathaniel's Nutmeg is a remarkable chapter in the history of the colonial powers.