David Jays
NATHANIEL’S NUTMEG by Giles Milton (Hodder & Stoughton)
Nutmeg has an old-fashioned smell, piquant and musty, settling on custards, milk puddings and possets of ale. To the Elizabethans, however, it conjured a brave new world, a fragrant kernel of promise from the Spice Islands in the East Indies. As medicinal as culinary, nutmeg was thought to sweeten the breath and finesse freckles, and during the terror of plague a tickle-scented pomander might ward against contagion. Combining novelty, luxury, fashion and self- preservation, the nuts tweaked imaginations and were unimaginably valuable.
Spice cargoes breathed clouds of fortune – Giles Milton reports that 10lb of nutmeg, bought for a penny in the East Indies, would reap 50 shillings in London. The slavering economies of Holland and England scrapped unmercifully to carve speedier routes to the Spice Islands and seize control of trade.
This is a chronicle of rapacity and rough justice, and you sense Milton’s relief when, 200 pages in, he finally turns up a hero. Nathaniel Courthope, a conscientious English trader, defended Run, the tiniest of the Banda Islands, which groaned with nutmeg trees. Nutmegs and little else – no fresh fruit and veg, nor even water, just a palm tree whose trunk could be boiled down for porridge.
Courthope and his unhappy few resisted Dutch siege for five years, until in 1620 he was shopped by a duplicitous Hollander and shot on reconnaissance to a neighbouring island. Courthope was stubborn as much as heroic, and more staunch than successful. The book’s subtitle, How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History, refers to a 1667 treaty in which the English finally ceded all claim to Run in return for the then unpromising isle of Manhattan. Hindsight favours the English.
Milton’s tone is oddly Victorian – the English tend to be pluckier and more trustworthy than the Dutch, who cower in their cabins or commit bloodthirsty treachery.
The Dutch might tell a different story: in The Embarrassment of Riches, Simon Schama confirms that they viewed the English as peevish, unscrupulous ruffians. What the islanders themselves thought is anybody’s guess, and certainly not Milton’s. He merely records the traders’ scorn of ”a peevish, perverse, diffident and perfidious people”.
Other than a savoury description of torture, Milton’s pedestrian narrative is seldom piqued by either the disease-cramped peril of the voyages (two-thirds of the sailors on the first ships failed to return) or the wondrous novelty of the unknown. The Indies promised sights passing strange: giant men in Patagonia, hog-snorting fish in Goa, unicorns, a room hung with rotting human heads.
And the nutmeg itself, perfuming the air, the vivid scarlet skein of mace which surrounds the nuts bursting out on tree after tree. To a contemporary Portuguese scholar this was ”the most beautiful sight in the world”. To the pioneers of venture capitalism, it was merely lolly on a stick.