NATHANIEL’S
NUTMEG
OR, THE TRUE AND INCREDIBLE ADVENTURES OF THE SPICE TRADER WHO
CHANGED THE COURSE OF HISTORY
By
Giles Milton
Illustrated. 388 pp. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.
By
KEVIN BAKER
Kevin
Baker is the author of the historical novel "Dreamland"
and was the chief historical researcher on Harold Evans’
"The American Century."
"The
island can be smelled before it can be seen. From more than ten
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 Giles Milton in 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 mind-boggling
courage, treachery, endurance, cowardice, greed, and derring-do.
Milton,
the author of an earlier book on the British explorer John Mandeville,
rivals Evan Connell in his ability to keep the wonder in history.
He is a tireless researcher, a first-rate storyteller, 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 deemed invaluable in 16th- and 17th-century Europe
for two reasons—one real and the other an even more important
illusion. English doctors or "physicks" were convinced
it could cure everything from dysentery to the plague to impotence.
One can only imagine what the physicks would have done with laetrile,
but nutmeg was also, in those pre-refrigeration days, both an
excellent meat preservative. The mark-up on a shipload of this
miracle spice 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.
Unfortunately
for Europeans, nutmeg then grew only in the Banda islands, a nearly
inaccessible archipelago that is now part of Indonesia. This was,
after all, an era when the mightiest ships of the day were dependent
upon the winds, and pathetically vulnerable to storms, doldrums,
uncharted reefs; even sea worms that could gnaw right through
their timbers on a long enough voyage. They 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. Roundtrips 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 their fellow Europeans. Of the first three
fleets sent out by the British East India Company, four of the
twelve ships and eight hundred of the twelve hundred men involved
were lost. Later voyages fared even worse—particularly those
expeditions sent into the Arctic wastes on the wishful insistence
that there had to be a quicker, easier route through 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’
state of nature. Along streets beset by typhus, fire, nonexistent
sewerage, and general lawlessness, European sailors and merchants
alternately waylaid each other and made common cause against the
local inhabitants.
Despite
many individual acts of daring, the British East India Company
had a penchant for hiring imbecilic commanders. The Dutch had
Jan Coen, a ruthless, sardonic, thoroughly frightening individual
who brought the struggle to a murderous crescendo early in the
seventeenth century. Coen and his Dutch went on a methodically
murderous rampage, razing the old port of Jakarta to the ground,
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 a claim to.
Here
Milton brings his narrative to a pulsing climax, detailing the
horrific torture and execution of several innocent British merchants,
and recounting the heroic stand of the eponymous British Captain
Nathaniel Courthope on tiny Run. His descriptions of Courthope’s
resistance are particularly riveting, but he does stumble slightly
down the stretch over one of his main premises, which is just
how much all this had to do with the world we know today.
Desperately
short of food and water, lacking any seaworthy ships, and bereft
of help from home, Courthope held out for three long years, and
Milton lauds his "patriotism, duty, and an unswerving belief
that what he was doing was right." He credits Courthope with
fully establishing the British claim to Run and—by so doing—making
it possible, nearly fifty years later, for the British to trade
those rights for an island they had recently seized from the Dutch
on the other side of the world.
"...Manhattan
had been a small trading centre...," claims Milton. "Now,
the island was set to 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 several other factors—not least of which was the propensity
of the island’s already solipsistic residents to steal chunks
of timber and stone from its only fort for use in building their
own homes. As for Manhattan’s "rise and rise,"
that would seem to have at least a little to do with those of
us who have been here since the British sailed out through the
Verrazano Narrows in 1783, leaving the place a burnt out ruin.
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 new, and full of infinite adventure—and
appalled by what human greed led us to do to such a paradise.
It is particularly sobering to read of the knee-jerk tendency
of the Europeans to slaughter any other people they came across.
A Dutch sailor’s reaction to a 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," he wrote, "except what
was wrong with ourselves."
©
Copyright The
New York Times
