Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed The Course Of History (2015) - Plot & Excerpts
I'm marginally ill today - mild fever, slight achiness, low energy - and because of that, I'm disappointed that I've already finished Giles Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg: or, the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History. Because this, my friends, is my version of the perfect home-sick-from-work book. 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. A highly-colored chronicle of the European race for control of the spice islands (the small south-east Asian archipelago that produced the entire world supply of nutmeg and cloves during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), Nathaniel's Nutmeg introduces the reader to a rollicking cast of brigands, merchants and adventurers, all of whom are out for a piece of the spice pie. Milton paints a portrait of a Europe obsessed with nutmeg and other spices - not merely as luxurious additions to a meal, but as (they thought) a cure for everything from the common cold to the Bubonic plague. Some London apothecaries even claimed that enough saffron, taken with sweet wine, could raise the dead. (I'm not sure how you were supposed to "take" the wine/saffron combo once you were no longer living, but presumably few people were wealthy enough to find out.) Spice prices in London and other European centers was sky-high, and fortunes could be made by those with enough knowledge and capital to fit out an expedition, and enough bravery or foolhardiness to risk their lives sailing around the world in order to buy nutmeg and other spices at their source. 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. The wealth of nations was allocated to missions that now seem outlandish: seventeenth-century geographers, for example, were convinced that the North-East Passage (a supposed navigable sea route from Europe over the North Pole and into the Pacific) must exist, because surely God made the world symmetrical up-and-down:In an age when men still looked for perfect symmetry on their maps, the northern cape of Norway showed an exact topographical correspondence to the southern cape of Africa. Geographers agreed that this was indeed good news; the chilly northern land mass must surely be a second Cape of Good Hope.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. In another amazing development, more "evidence" for the existence of a North-East Passage came with the return of a failed Arctic expedition:[T:]he crew returned to England with a strange horn, some six feet long and decorated with a spiral twirl. Ignorant of the existence of the narwhal - that strange member of the whale family that has a single tusk protruding from its head - the rough English mariners confidently declared that this odd piece of flotsam had once belonged to a unicorn, a highly significant find, for 'knowing that unicorns are bred in the lands of Cathay, China and other Oriental Regions, [the sailors:] fell into consideration that the same head was brought thither by the course of the sea, and that there must of necessity be a passage out of the said Oriental Ocean into our Septentrionall seas.'So future expeditions, hugely expensive and incredibly risky, were launched on the basis of global symmetry and the knowledge that unicorns are bred in China, along with some ancient texts by Pliny the Elder, claiming that there were open waters at the North Pole. Which is a pretty astounding testament to the power of magical thinking, and makes you wonder which modern assumptions will seem similarly absurd to future generations.Milton's narrative gets even more exciting once the expeditions actually set off. In addition to stand-offs among the Portuguese, English and Dutch, and the inherent dangers of the voyage (most expeditions lost at least a third of their men to scurvy, dystentry and tropical diseases), there were legion clashes among the grandiose and idiosyncratic personalities involved in these explorations. Henry Hudson, for example, was commissioned to find the North-East Passage: he was given explicit instructions and signed an agreement saying that he would sail up the coast of Norway and then attempt to turn east. Unbeknownst to his backers, however, he never intended to follow this route at all, but immediately headed west to explore the possibility of a North-WEST Passage. There was such a thin membrane of allegiance in many of these stories: Sir Frances Drake, who defeated the Spanish Armada for England and then led an early, successful expedition to the Spice Islands, turned down the next job offer he got from the British East India Company: he had decided to pursue a career of straight-up piracy instead. Even in later years, each voyage sent by the East India Company was out for its own profit, and a second British ship would often commandeer the goods won by a first British ship, rather than working together for the overall profit of the Company. Milton did a good job depicting the chaotic, winner-take-all quality of the times, and made it all seem as fun to read as a nineteenth-century adventure story.Which is actually a little bit disturbing.Because, if you think about it, the reason an old-fashioned swashbuckler is fun to read is that the narrative makes certain pirates into the "good guys," and other pirates into the "bad guys." Obviously, in real life NO pirates are good guys, but Milton, despite writing non-fiction, does exactly this same thing. Consistently, throughout his narrative, he paints the British as the good guys and the Dutch as their treacherous adversaries, even when the two sides are acting more or less equally reprehensibly. Every instance of an unprovoked attack or secret conspiracy on the part of the Dutch is treated with an attitude of condemnation, yet not of surprise. Miton seems to be asking the reader "Well, what else would you expect? Gruesome, isn't it?" 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. Milton calls Nathaniel Courthope's practice of running spies under cover of darkness "ingenious," but classifies the actions of a Dutch spy who betrays Courthope as underhanded treachery. In one instance, the British captain William Keeling (a funny duck by all accounts - he organized early productions of Shakespeare plays among his sailors while crossing the Atlantic) has been trying to overcome his Dutch rivals on the islands of Ai and Neira, and has been sending spies among the natives. Many might assume that Keeling was therefore in on the native uprising that ended up slaughtering 48 Dutchmen, but Milton goes to great lengths to suggest that he wasn't:After the passing of almost four centuries it is hard to piece together exactly what happened next. The Dutch records suggest that William Keeling helped instigate the ensuing massacre, but this accusation contradicts his own diaries. Although he had certainly struck a number of secret deals with the natives, there is nothing to suggest he was actively inciting them to violence. Indeed, he was busy buying nutmeg at Ai Island, a day's sailing journey from Neira, when rumors of a plot began to circulate.It could just be me, but if I were conspiring with the natives to overthrow my Dutch adversaries, that's the kind of information I might elect to exclude from my journals. You know, so as to avoid HANDING THEM EVIDENCE in the event of my capture. Of course I don't know anything about the circumstances here; it could be that Keeling really didn't know anything about the uprising. Yet Milton seems willing to impugn Dutch captains and bureaucrats on flimsier, more circumstantial evidence than we can read between the lines here against Keeling. And when he is forced to relate distasteful behavior on the part of the British (such as the men in Henry Hudson's expedition who made a sport of shooting American Indians with muskets from the deck of their ship) he seems extremely grieved by it, whereas similar behavior by the Dutch can pass without comment. So, Nathaniel's Nutmeg was not the most balanced, bias-free history I've ever read. There was a definite jingoistic/nationalistic bent that bothered me more as the book went on, and inspired some eye-rolling toward the end. I would still recommend it, though, to those in the mood for the true(ish) version of the old-fashioned sea yarn.
Have you heard of the Island of Run? Neither had I. In fact this most insignificant island of the Banda archipelago – 1.9 miles by .65 miles – often doesn’t even make it onto modern maps of the region. Nevertheless, for much of the 16th and 17th centuries this tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean captivated the popular imagination and inspired the imperial avarice of the four great powers of that period.This was the period of the Spice Wars; when the British, the Portuguese and the Dutch engaged in frantic searches for a safer route to the Spice Islands (in what is now Indonesia) and a protracted conflict with the locals and each other over control of the world’s spice supply. The Spaniards for a time also sought a role in the spice trade, but their search for a westward route to the islands led them to the New World where they became distracted by the rape of a continent.Over all the Spice Islands, Run was the most coveted – covered as it was from one end to the other with Nutmeg trees; trees that would grow nowhere else. At that time Nutmeg was thought to cure the plague; and was the most valuable commodity in the world.“Nathaniel’s Nutmeg” by Giles Milton is a re-telling of this lost chapter in history. Through meticulous research and extensive quotations taken directly from the journals and logs of the travelers, this book tells the story of the spice wars at their climax. It is a book about greed, betrayal, violence and torture. It is a book about death and disappointment. In some places it was hard to read; not because the prose is cumbersome (the book flows well) but simply because it is difficult to imagine that people would do such unspeakable things to each other simply for a few pounds of nutmeg or mace.There are many lessons I took from this book. They are not the lessons you will probably hear. You will probably hear that because the protagonists of the conflict (at least one chapter of it) were the Dutch East India Company against the English East India Company, it is an example of how unregulated business is capable of great evil. You will probably hear how the story demonstrates that the true goal of trade is economic colonization.I glean from this amazing story the opposite lessons.Both the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company were para-state organizations; with charters from their Kings which encouraged the greed and bloodlust of corruptible men to engage in plunder, in piracy, in genocide, in colonization, in ethnic cleansing, in torture and in the construction of monopolies held by violence. This is the story of pre-enlightenment mischief sanctioned by absolute rulers for the enrichment of a few.What we saw running amok in the shadowy corners of the world was two imperial powers vying for conquest. What I see in this story is a warning of what can happen with unsupervised authority – when power requires no consent and legitimacy is not derived from natural laws; laws that were rediscovered during the enlightenment and have been steadfastly and progressively protected using institutions built by and for us as individuals at the service of our reason.The story ends with a moral; a somewhat ironic one. The British defeat at the hands of the Dutch was resolved by Run going to the Dutch and Manhattan (which had been colonized by the Dutch West India Company) going to the British; setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to the establishment of the greatest city the world has ever known. The prize for which so many died is now worthless, while the consolation prize, a piece of land nobody cared for, is now the richest place on earth – built not by violence at the service of looters but by the power of unbridled innovation and uncoerced (read free) trade.Read this book for a fascinating piece of history you’ve probably never known about. And read it to remind yourself of the value of the enlightenment – when the individual man was placed at the center of society – lest we lose it all and return again to dark times.
What do You think about Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed The Course Of History (2015)?
The book is about the 16th and 17th century race to the spice islands between the European powers, primarily England and Holland, but also Spain and Portugual. The first part of this book is engrossing, thrilling, and shocking as Milton describes the early attempts to find routes from Europe to the sources of spices like nutmeg (which was supposedly a cure for the black plague), cloves, and cinnamon. Most of these spices were exclusively grown on tiny islands that make up part of modern-day Indonesia (the "Spice Islands"). Small fleets of ships would go east or west in search of spices lacking many important skills -- like how to determine longitude, how to prevent scurvy -- and having basically no idea where they were going. The tales of these often horrible voyages was quite interesting, if bleak. Crews of hundreds of men would leave the docks in Europe, and just 10 or 20% would return. The book also tells of attempts to reach the East Indies via a northern route, either going around Canada or above Russia. The middle of the book is confusing and tiring, as the author details the often trivial struggles over the islands and the business details of the companies financing the trips.The end gets a little better, as it focuses on the ultimate battles between the Dutch and English for the Banda Islands.
—Ethicurean Reads
There was a time when people killed and died for nutmeg. Imagine that! Stinking nutmeg! Not even oregano or at least cinnamon. I must say on my list of things I would be willing to die for nutmeg is somewhere at the bottom, right before marmite. Nonetheless, The Dutch and the English and the Portuguese would fight relentlessly over the access to nutmeg. 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. In the beginning of the 17th century nutmeg was in. Maybe one day people will laugh at the lenghts we go now to get access and control over the oil resources.Interestingly enough, nutmegs grew only on a few small remote islands that form part of today's Indonesia. For about two hundred years no one had the brilliant idea of taking some seeds and planting them somewhere else, it seems. Instead, the English and the Dutch fought like maniacs over Banda islands that had very little except for nutmeg. Of course, Giles Milton sympathises with the poor natives who got paid very little for their nutmeg which fetched astronomical prices in Europe. But I'd like to believe that the natives were thinking they were conning the Europeans selling them all that useless nutmeg and getting things like knives and clothes in return. They probably thought: "What in the hell are you doing with all that nutmeg, you crazy white man?".Long story short, thanks to nutmeg New York is called New York and not New Amsterdam and we are not all speaking Dutch. If you want to know what that has to do with the price of the fish, read the book. You will also learn that the English are good and the Dutch are bad (it is not quite clear why, but apparently the English were more gentlemanly when doing the pirate stuff). Another thing, Nathaniel doesn't appear until towards the end of the book and doesn't do all that much before dying but he makes for a nice title.This is a book for people who want to know how people found places before the Google Maps and how weird it was when information would travel from one place to another for two years, rather than 0.2 sec. Good God, people used to be patient back then.
—Kinga
I do not normally read non-fiction, but my dad shoved this book into my hands after a recent visit and said "Read it" in hushed tones, as if this book contains all the hidden truths I could possibly need.Written like fiction, it follows the start of the spice trade between Europe and the east Indian islands (Indonesia), the ultimate birth of the East India trading company and the many many battled fought over control over this area between the English, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese.It took me a while to get into the story, but, once I got past the archaic and sometimes clumsy language, it was a fun read that prompted me to want to know even more about the islands.I would suggest this book to anyone interested not only in marine history, but also in Pirate lore.
—Vanessa
