Nathaniel's Nutmeg: How One Man's Courage Changed the Course of History

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Known to the Romans also known to the Portuguese [1511]as they had fetched it from the spice Islands [Banda Islands] at huge prophit ,it was called Noz moscada. The Timesdescribed Milton as being able ‘to take an event from history and make it come alive’, while The New York Timessaid that Milton’s ‘prodigious research yields an entertaining, richly informative look at the past. Milton's works of narrative history rely on personal testimonies, diaries, journals and letters to make sense of key moments in history, recounted through the eyes of those who were there. It gets worse. The book's subtitle is "How One Man's Courage Changed the Course of History". There is no doubting Courthope's courage. You don't hole up on an island against a superior fleet, with no natural water sources (he and his men had to drink their supplies with clenched teeth to keep the fauna out) and nothing to eat but sago without a good deal of the right stuff. But his courage did not change the course of history - it simply delayed it a bit.

Nutmeg (The Diary of Samuel Pepys) Nutmeg (The Diary of Samuel Pepys)

In 1614 he was accused of purloining company resources and other offences by one dying man named, Edward Langley. [3] This was the period of the Spice Wars; when the British, the Portuguese and the Dutch engaged in frantic searches for a safer route to the Spice Islands (in what is now Indonesia) and a protracted conflict with the locals and each other over control of the world’s spice supply. The Spaniards for a time also sought a role in the spice trade, but their search for a westward route to the islands led them to the New World where they became distracted by the rape of a continent. Nathaniel Courthope: Oxford Biography Index entry". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press . Retrieved 12 August 2010.Milton, Giles (1999). Nathaniel's Nutmeg (reissue, illustrateded.). Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140292602. OCLC 44871451. Have you heard of the Island of Run? Neither had I. In fact this most insignificant island of the Banda archipelago – 1.9 miles by .65 miles – often doesn’t even make it onto modern maps of the region. Nevertheless, for much of the 16 th and 17 th centuries this tiny atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean captivated the popular imagination and inspired the imperial avarice of the four great powers of that period. Despite numerous letters from the Company's directors allowing Courthope to leave his post, and even awarding him repeatedly for his efforts, he never gave in. Even after the fleet of Sir Thomas Dale sent from England to Run had been defeated by the Dutch governor of the archipelago, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the decision never changed. Nutmeg in more than trace quantities is a medicinial herb that is still used today. It has a more than mild sophoric effect, is slightly anti-histimine, and is a euphoric.

GILES MILTON About — GILES MILTON

In Medieval and Renaissance banquets, exotic spices, including mace and nutmeg, along with the popular cinnamon, were added in large amounts to various dishes. Fashionable French gourmets would bring their own nutmeg graters to add their nutmeg to appropriately improve on a wealthy host's dinner. Such affectations generally disappeared in the 18th century ... Both the Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company were para-state organizations; with charters from their Kings which encouraged the greed and bloodlust of corruptible men to engage in plunder, in piracy, in genocide, in colonization, in ethnic cleansing, in torture and in the construction of monopolies held by violence. This is the story of pre-enlightenment mischief sanctioned by absolute rulers for the enrichment of a few. Giles Milton was born in 1966. He was educated at Latymer Upper School and the University of Bristol, where he read English. His nonfiction books include Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Big Chief Elizabeth, Samurai William, The Riddle and the Knight, White Gold, Paradise Lost, Wolfram, Russian Roulette, Fascinating Footnotes from History. He is also the author of three novels, The Perfect Corpse, According to Arnoldand Edward Trencom's Nose.As you'll have gathered, this is about the spice trade, about which we have some hazy notion ("ah yes, the spice trade") but which repays a closer look. One penn'orth of nutmeg in the East Indies went for 50 shillings in London - that's a 60,000 per cent mark-up, I think - so imagine the incentive for greed, treachery, freebooting and murder. The stories are terrific, and Milton has trawled through the records (primary research - maximum respect) to intoxicating effect. The East India Company used to be a turn-off at school but if they'd told us just how gloves-off this capitalism could be the kids' attention would have been guaranteed. In the preface to the American edition of Fascinating Footnoteshe has written: 'Much of my working life is spent in the archives, delving through letters and personal papers. The huge collection housed in Britain’s National Archives is incompletely catalogued (the National Archives in Washington DC is somewhat better) and you can never be entirely sure what you will find in any given box of documents. Days can pass without unearthing anything of interest: I liken it to those metal-detecting treasure-hunters of North Carolina who scour the Outer Banks in the hope of turning up a Jacobean shilling or signet ring.Persistence often pays rich dividends and this book - an idiosyncratic collection of unknown historical chapters - is the result of my own metaphorical metal detecting. Amidst the flotsam and jetsam, I’ve found (I hope) some glittering gems.' Read about William Hawkins's dealings with the psychotic and unpredictable Moghul Emperor Jehangir (endless piss-ups, gladiatorial competitions between people and lions); Captain William Keeling making his crew put on Hamlet (in Africa, in 1607, possibly the first amateur production); and the Massacre of Amboyna, where the Dutch tortured and then murdered the English inhabitants on trumped-up charges. On 13 November 1609, Courthope was hired by the East India Company to go to the Spice Islands. He left England with great fanfare and by 1616 was a factor at Sukadana in Borneo. [2]

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Ratnikas, Algirdas J. "Timeline Indonesia". Timelines.ws. Archived from the original on 10 July 2010 . Retrieved 12 August 2010.East Indies: July 1614." Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies, China and Japan, Volume 2, 1513-1616. Ed. W Noel Sainsbury. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1864. 301-313. British History Online Retrieved 11 July 2019. [ dead link] Nathaniel’s Nutmeg” by Giles Milton is a re-telling of this lost chapter in history. Through meticulous research and extensive quotations taken directly from the journals and logs of the travelers, this book tells the story of the spice wars at their climax. It is a book about greed, betrayal, violence and torture. It is a book about death and disappointment. In some places it was hard to read; not because the prose is cumbersome (the book flows well) but simply because it is difficult to imagine that people would do such unspeakable things to each other simply for a few pounds of nutmeg or mace.