Nathaniel's nutmeg : how one man's courage changed the course of history

by Giles Milton

Paper Book, 1999

Status

Available

Call number

974.7101092

Collection

Publication

London : Sceptre, 1999.

Description

In 1616, an English adventurer, Nathaniel Courthope, stepped ashore on a remote island in the East Indies on a secret mission - to persuade the islanders of Run to grant a monopoly to England over their nutmeg, a fabulously valuable spice in Europe. This infuriated the Dutch, who were determined to control the world's nutmeg supply. 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. A beautifully told adventure story and a fascinating depiction of exploration in the seventeenth century, NATHANIEL'S NUTMEG sheds a remarkable light on history.

Media reviews

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
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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.''
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User reviews

LibraryThing member emily_morine
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
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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.
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LibraryThing member ladycato
The title of this is somewhat misleading; it's not simply Nathaniel Courthope's story, but that of various men over a century who fought and died over islands that don't even garner a mention on most contemporary maps.

The tiny island of Run is in the Indonesian archipelago. Five hundred years ago,
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that small cluster of volcanic islands was the only place in the world where one could find clover and nutmeg. And everyone wanted it - the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English, though the last two were the greatest foes. In this fascinating story, Milton describes the incredible effort it took to make it to Run and its neighboring islands. Thousands of lives were lost just in the journey. Shipwrecks, dysentery, piracy. 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. When the Dutch finally gained control and brutally subjugated the native population of the islands, the English still persisted in their claim for spices. War ensued. Brutality was undeniable on both sides, but Nathaniel Courthope's valiant stand on the island of Run made the English claim seem justified. The end result of this conflict: a simple trade of the wealthy island of Run for a scarcely-settled island in America named Manhattan.

This book was enlightening. I have nutmeg in my kitchen cupboard and took it for granted. It costs what, $3? I've read about the Spice Wars, but knew nothing about the specifics or the sacrifices involved. It made me feel sad at times. People really should know about these things. As much as I enjoyed Nathaniel's Nutmeg, it was a very slow read and took almost a week for me to get through. I am glad I read it, though. Many thanks to the person who reviewed it on 50bookchallenge in 2008 and brought it to my attention.
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LibraryThing member nakmeister
This is a non-fiction popular history about the spice race between the Dutch and the English. These two nations were fiercely competing in the 1600's to control the spice trade. The book centres eventually around the tiny Nutmeg growing island of Run, and the story of Nathaniel Courthope, an
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Englishman and employee of the East India Company who's bravery and patriotism will have far reaching effects.

This book, surprising in a history book, has a clever twist at the end that I really didn't see coming. The epilogue is quite interesting too.

This book sat on my shelf for ages, and eventually I got around to reading it and I am glad I did. It reads like a novel and has lots of stories of interesting events and colourful characters in it. The only downside is that it's a sleepy backwater of history far removed from today, but fascinating nonetheless.
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LibraryThing member wyvernfriend
A story of the race for nutmegs and how several people changed the way things work by their behaviour. Nathaniel is a pivotal character in his attempt to hold a spice island and the tragedy of how he wasn't backed up.

Interesting but really I didn't find it incredibly engaging. I'm not sure why it
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didn't really work for me and maybe it is the author's style. It might make a very good film.
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LibraryThing member Greatrakes
I loved this book, although a history of the spice wars in South East Asia it reads like a novel. It isn't at all the story Nathaniel Courthope, who appears only toward the end, and any claim he may have to having changed East Asia seems slight to me.

Although full of historical detail, Milton
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still makes Goodies of the British and Baddies of the Dutch, although from what I can see none come out of this with much credit.

Milton has a talent for both showing the full horror of the life of sailors, explorers and pirates and for making you want abandon your safe but dull life and set off for the Spice Islands.
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LibraryThing member mbmackay
The story of the the first Europeans to reach and trade with the "spice islands" of what is now eastern Indonesian. This should be a gift to a writer of popular history - the fabulous prices paid for nutmeg and cloves, the way the sea route broke the stranglehold of the Arab traders - but if there
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is scope for THE popular history - this book isn't it. Milton manages to choke a good story. He even has a cute new angle - that Holland traded Manhattan for a tiny spice island - but still can't bring it all together into an interesting narrative. What a shame. Read April 2010.
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LibraryThing member isabelx
Shipwrecks, piracy, torture and murders abound in this story of the bloody struggle between the English and Dutch East India companies for control of the lucrative spice trade in the early 17th century.
LibraryThing member scubasue59
A great read and a bit of a history lesson too!
LibraryThing member stephenrbown
Not much on Nathaniel himself, but a fascinating look at the Dutch-English rivalry in the spice trade. I found the writing style amusing and sort-of smirking.
LibraryThing member Gold_Gato
This was a book that snuck up and surprised me. Reaching into my collection abstractedly, perchance I hit upon this volume. I had no clue about the race for the Spice Islands or just how important spices were to Europe in the 17th century. This book details the history of spices, their importance,
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their cost, the explorers who dared to find them, and the wars that subsequently developed because of them.

"Have you a great care to receive such nutmegs as be good, for the smallest nutmegs be worth nothing at home."


Book Season = Spring (when the open seas call)
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LibraryThing member seaskys
I read this quite a few years ago, but remember that I really enjoyed it immensly! Since then I've read Vanilla, Spice a history of Temptation, Salt and more of this type of historical background and intrique about things we take for granted. Fascinating and informative
for those with enquiring
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minds!
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LibraryThing member melydia
There's no denying this is a fascinating overview of the often bloody history of the spice trade in the 16th and 17th centuries, focusing largely on Run in the Banda Islands. I don't really agree with the premise, though, that a man who fought and failed to keep Run in the hands of the British had
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anything to do with the eventual acquisition of New Amsterdam. That said, the rest of the book is pretty gripping. There's a lot of "Yay for the English, Boo for the Dutch" going on, to the point where Dutch readers may be less than impressed by the portrayal of their countrymen (the English act in some pretty barbaric ways too, but this is largely brushed off as just how it was back then). As an American without any stakes in the matter, I enjoyed learning about the race to claim exclusive trading rights with these tiny islands so far from home. And as a 21st century woman, I also rather enjoyed my shock that it had to be such a violent affair. Definitely educational.
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LibraryThing member theonearmedcrab
A book with a theme, and many entertaining diversions, is “Nathaniel’s Nutmeg” (1999), about the spice trade and the rivalry between colonial powers – although as a Dutchman I cannot but observe that the book has been written from a very British perspective, not necessarily always
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coinciding with what I learned in school about history (obviously, I am not scholarly enough to judge which history version is correct).
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LibraryThing member Lukerik
This really is excellent. It's a proper history of the East India Company that's been packaged as the story of Nathaniel's Nutmeg. That whole connection with changing the course of history is pretty tenuous. The great 'what if?' moment for me was the negotiations between the English and Dutch
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companies to form a vast international corporation.
The torture scenes are also very well done.
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LibraryThing member Fips
In a similar vein to Dava Sobel's Longitude, Nathaniel's Nutmeg revolves around the story of one of history's largely invisible protagonists. Whilst this isn't history on the same scale, it sits very nicely with something E. P. Thompson said, about rescuing characters "from the enormous
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condescension of posterity." The major characters in this book will be unknown to most people, as will most of the events, but their importance for the modern world will be clear to everyman.

The book's title is, however, a complete misnomer. The subject matter is very ambitious, dealing with the spice trade and the age of navigation, including forays in the Americas, attempts to find passages to the Indies via the Arctic Ocean, and all of the misadventures, wars, successes and political intrigues of the English and Dutch East India companies. Ultimately, Milton's premise with the book is to tie the exploits of the English East India Company officer Nathaniel Courthope in with the fate of New Amsterdam/New York, but by trying to cover this from all angles, the book is left feeling rather thin and superficial. In the end, the titular Nathaniel makes only a relatively brief appearance near the end of the book, all the space that was left to deal with the book's allegedly main focus. Finally, with such a broad range, the book throws up many interesting questions about the companies, their officers, the spice trade etc., most of which remain unfortunately unanswered, despite its near 400 pages.

Despite these setbacks, the book does have its strengths. It is clearly very well researched, and despite the relative paucity of sources available to fill in the gaps, the author avoids the obvious temptation to speculate wildly. As a piece of decidedly 'popular' history, the book is structured like a page-turner, with hints and references dropped to tease the reader into the coming chapters, focussing on a history driven by characters and concrete events, which makes it an easy book for reading on the go or with other distractions. And although the subject matter is really too broad for a book of this size, Milton does at least concentrate solely on the Dutch and English adventures, paying relatively little attention to Portuguese and Spanish goings on at the same time.

Nathaniel's Nutmeg is a pleasant and interesting diversion, particularly for people whose interest would not normally be piqued the idea by a history book. It is clear that a good deal of research has gone into the book, and the breadth of the subject matter makes this no light task. Yet the impression left is one akin to scoffing fast food empty calories; in order to tie Couthorpe to New York, the author has chosen too broad a subject matter for so short a book, leaving the text too shallow and unfocused. A different title, a less ambitious aim, or a more vigilant editor, and this book could have been an all the more satisfying read.
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LibraryThing member stampfle
I call it 'Connecticut Nutmegger' because like the nutmeggers, who were peddlers from Connecticut who would sell small carved nobs of wood shaped to look like nutmeg to unsuspecting customers, Milton tries to sell us his book as a special look at an interesting piece of 'history.'

Here is a story
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that should be fascinating. (One of my favorite books is "Salt: A World History"). Milton's inept handling of the writing makes it a long and boring read. It seems to be one sea voyage following another. Milton likes to end every paragraph with quotations from the original reference, in the difficult language and grammatical construction of the time; complete with the strange spelling. This slows the reading down considerably. It took me several tries to understand that by 'Pooloway' and 'Poolaroone' he was talking about Pulau (Indonesian for Island) Ai and Pulau Run.

While we don't learn anything about how native populations responded to the European conquerers or what the natives thought of them, we do get a true feeling for the evil and sadism of these colonists, both British and Dutch.

Why the book is called "Nathaniel's Nutmeg" is a bit of a mystery, except that a British factor spent several years on Run Island fighting the Dutch. He seemed to have very little to do with the discovery, cultivation, or promotion of the spice, but Milton chooses him as the hero of this story. We don't even meet Nathaniel Courthope until half way through the book and he is a rather pitiful hero, who admittedly steals from his own company. It is true hyperbole to try to convince the reader that Nathaniel is a 'spice trader who changed the course of history."

All in all, with good editing this book could have been written in 200 pages. It is a hodge podge of information about European sea voyages to the South Pacific looking for spices and why economically they mattered so much. Milton covers the venality of the VOC (Dutch East Indies Company) and British East India Company extremely well. But he never proves his case that Courthope was someone who changed the course of history.

Still with all this fascinating data at hand, Milton forces the reader to suffer through his poor writing style. A style, which detracts from the immensely interesting story of the 17th century spice trade.

I have added an extra star to my review; because, had I not read this book, I would never have known of the little island of Run.
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LibraryThing member rakerman
I quite liked this tale of the search for routes to and control of the spice islands, including the rather unexpected northern voyages that were part of this search.
LibraryThing member MiaCulpa
The "Random person/place/thing/event which changed the history of the world" subgenre has become crowded of late, with many an otherwise obscure person/place/thing/event lauded as the key in changing history.

This example, "Nathaniel's Nutmeg", is well written and keeps one turning the pages but I
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feel Milton is pushing it slightly to say Nathaniel changed the course of history; yes, he was able to keep the Dutch from taking the Spice Island of Tidore for long enough so the Dutch ended up swapping it for what is now New York, but he never seems to be a major figure.

I've enjoyed Milton's other books more but there's no shame in that.
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LibraryThing member sylviaxxx
This book touched me deeply, and I now find myself seeing the humble nutmeg in a new light, along with a rich desire to visit the Spice Islands and experience more about naval life in the tall ships.
LibraryThing member edwardsgt
Fascinating and detailed research into the 16-17th century spice trade, in which Britain vied with the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish to control the lucrative trade. The disputes between Britain and the Netherlands were particularly bitter and brutal, resulting in several Anglo-Dutch wars. Spoiler
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alert, Britain had the last laugh over the Dutch, exchanging the tiny Spice Islands Run for New Amsterdam, otherwise known as Manhattan!
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Awards

Booklist Editor's Choice: Adult Books (Social Sciences — 1999)

Language

Original publication date

1999

Physical description

xi, 388 p.; 21 cm

ISBN

9780340696767

Barcode

91100000176851

DDC/MDS

974.7101092
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