NATHANIEL’S NUTMEG

Or, The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History

By Giles Milton

Illustrated

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

388 pages

 

”The island can be smelled before it can be seen. From more than 10 miles out to sea a fragrance hangs in the air, and long before the bowler-hat mountain hoves into view you know you are nearing land.” So begins Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, in a style that signals history written as a ripping good yarn as clearly as a skull and crossbones run up the mainmast. And a very fine yarn it is, too: the story of the century-long struggle to control the spice trade to Europe from the East Indies; a tale of courage, treachery, endurance, cowardice, greed and derring-do.

Giles Milton, the author of an earlier book on the British explorer John Mandeville, rivals Evan Connell in his ability to tell a good story. He is a tireless researcher and an expert at explaining the sort of things that have baffled Americans since grammar school. For instance, why a spice that now languishes in the back of the average kitchen cabinet until Thanksgiving once sent men sailing halfway around the world in boats no longer than a city bus. Nutmeg, it seems, was worth more than its weight in gold in 16th- and 17th-century Europe for two reasons, one real and the other illusory; it was, in those prerefrigeration days, an excellent meat preservative, and English doctors were convinced it could cure everything from dysentery to the plague to impotence. The markup on a shipload of nutmeg could run as high as 60,000 percent—enough to make rich men out of a captain and his backers. Even a sackful, filched by an enterprising sailor, could set a man up for life with a nice house and a servant.

Only adding to the value of this miracle spice was its rarity. Nutmeg then grew only in the Banda islands, a nearly inaccessible archipelago that is now part of Indonesia. This was an era when the mightiest ships of the day were dependent upon the winds and vulnerable to storms, doldrums and uncharted reefs, even sea worms that could gnaw through their timbers on a long voyage. The vessels bounced over to the South Seas through a pinball course that took them to the Canary Islands, over to Brazil, back to Cape Town, then up along Madagascar, Aden, India, Sumatra. Round trips could take three years, and the men on board suffered incessantly from scurvy, dysentery and cholera, not to mention Japanese pirates, treacherous Oriental monarchs and, above all, other European nations. Britain, Portugal and Spain projected their constant, big-power jostling halfway around the world, through endless raids, ambushes and acts of out-and-out piracy. The cost was dreadful. Of the first 12 ships sent out by the British East India Company, from 1596 to 1606, four were lost. Many later voyages fared even worse—particularly expeditions sent into the Arctic wastes searching for a route to the East via the North Pole.

Despite early forays by Portuguese and Spanish mariners, the spice race soon boiled down to a rivalry between the Dutch and the English, through the auspices of their respective legendary East India companies. Xenophobia, hardship and greed made the decades-long contest an increasingly deadly one. Milton paints a harrowing picture of Bantam, ”that stinking stew” of a Javanese port, which sounds like the very embodiment of Hobbes’s state of nature. In a city beset by typhus, fire, open sewage and general lawlessness, sailors and merchants alternately waylaid each other and made common cause against the local inhabitants.

One of the most notorious adventurers was a Dutch commander called Jan Coen, a ruthless, sardonic, thoroughly frightening individual who brought the struggle to a murderous crescendo early in the 17th century. Coen and his Dutch crew went on a methodically murderous rampage, razing the old port of Jakarta, enslaving most of the population of the Bandas and even chopping down all the nutmeg trees on Run, the one island England could still lay claim to.

Here Milton brings his narrative to a horrific climax, detailing the torture and execution of several innocent British merchants, and recounting the heroic stand of the eponymous Nathaniel Courthope, a British captain, on tiny Run. Still, down the stretch, Milton stumbles slightly over one of his main premises, which is just how much this long-ago battle on the other side of the globe had to do with the world we know today.

He credits Courthope with establishing the British claim to Run and thus making it possible, nearly 50 years later, for the British to trade those rights for another island they had recently seized from the Dutch. ”Manhattan had been a small trading center with a population of less than 1,000,” Milton writes. Now, the island would enter ”a new and ever more prosperous period in its history —a period that would see it rise and rise until the name New York was fabled around the globe.”

This is a nice try, but one is left feeling that Milton is trying too hard to find a hero for an often sordid tale. After all, Courthope was finally ambushed and killed by the Dutch, and Run was, well, overrun. The British acquisition of Manhattan was due as much to other factors, not least of which was the propensity of the island’s already self-absorbed residents to steal chunks of timber and stone from its main fort for use in building their own homes. As for Manhattan’s rise and rise, that would seem to have a little to do with the inhabitants who remained when the British sailed out through the Verrazano Narrows in 1783, leaving the place in rubble.

But this overreaching detracts only slightly from what is a rousing historical romp. Milton leaves one both yearning for a time when the world seemed full of infinite adventure and appalled by what greed did to such a paradise. It is particularly sobering to read of the tendency of the Europeans to slaughter anyone they came across. A Dutch sailor’s reaction to another orgy of bloodletting visited upon the Bantam Javanese for asking too high a price for their nutmeg sums it up splendidly: ”There was nothing missing and everything was perfect except what was wrong with ourselves.”