Nathaniel's Nutmeg

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Their ships, it was decided, would head due north; a route that would shave more than two thousand miles off the long voyage to the Spice Islands. For five years Courthope and his band of thirty men were besieged by a force one hundred times greater - and his heroism set in motion the events that led to the founding of the greatest city on earth. Brutality was undeniable on both sides, but Nathaniel Courthope's valiant stand on the island of Run made the English claim seem justified. I wouldn’t find it surprising, given an expat looking for information about a country would naturally gravitate towards books written by fellow foreigners about the said country. his men is staggering, for their course, more than three hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle, must have taken them in a giant arc through a dangerous sea littered with melting pack-ice.

He tells everything from an English point of view, because those were the sources he was using, but we can't always rely on these accounts to be an honest accounting of events. 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.In essence the book is about the voyages of discovery and trade which set out to profit from the huge demand for spices in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. Compelling, fascinating and filled with excerpts from primary sources, meaning letters and journals of the merchants and sailors and ships captains who experienced it all, I will never again use nutmeg, cloves, and peppercorns without thinking of the battles fought and blood shed in the 17th Century over these commodities. On 14 August 1553, he `descried land', apparently uninhabited, at 72 degrees latitude but failed to reach it due to the quantity of ice in the water.

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. And though I did have to mark the map pages and keep referring back to them, there could have been no alternative other than a companion atlas (certainly at additional cost). The one-way trip of something like 15,000 miles in the tiny, leaky boats of that era was, well not safe. It offers a fascinating glimpse into the spice race of late 1500s and early 1600s, and how relatively few sailors seeking riches and glory set the course of history around the world.This book is more truly a history of colonialism in the Banda Islands, the destructive effects of Dutch and English attempts to take control of various islands (trade here was synonymous with substituting colonial governance for independent rule), the enslavement and murder of the indigenous population, and the many and repeated failures of the English to secure a toehold in the East Indies in the 17th century. I can say this book is like a collection of letters or journals compiled into the form of a book with a few explanations here and there. It shows a lot of how we have changed in the past 400 years in our civilisation and the author could make it sounds “recent”. The treaty worked well on both sides: The Dutch was able to secure their worldwide monopoly on nutmeg. 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.

You might wonder how this could be so as most likely you've never heard of it, but I won't spoil the book for you.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.

I miss, however, more references to sources other than the British ones: I mean local, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, who were the active countries in the region at the time of this developments.The historic 1553 voyage was the brainchild of a newly founded organisation known as the Mystery, Company and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Unknown Lands. When describing the English diplomacy with the natives, he used positive-sounding adjectives such as “apt” and “ingenious”, while when describing the Dutch and Portuguese’ attempts in dealing with the natives, he used negative-sounding adjectives such as “guileful” and “ruthless”.