Nathaniel's Nutmeg

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one who could fledge out the history with greater depth, build a stronger thesis (Milton's thesis that a mid-level merchant altered history isn't that strong), and make the characters more human. His forthcoming book (UK: May 2024, US: Sept 2024) is THE STALIN AFFAIR: The Allies' Secret Mission to Wartime Russia.

A two-mile strip of land in the Banda sea, the island was rich with nutmeg and offered the English a chance to break the global Dutch monopoly. In fact, the title is slightly misleading as Nathaniel Courthope after whom the book is named, is featured in only a short but important part of it, the tenacious defense of Run Island. In essence the book is about the voyages of discovery and trade which set out to profit from the huge demand for spices in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries.But that it a problem endemic to historical accounts in which several narratives are advancing simultaneously on several different fronts. Nathaniel's Nutmeg tells the story of the Anglo-Dutch battle for the spice islands in Indonesia - a conflict that raged on and off for centuries.

Nutmeges,' he wrote in his Dyetary, `be good for them which have cold in their head and doth comforte the syght and the brain. You know the man by report, I by experience; you by words, I by deeds; you by speech and company, but I by the daily trial of his life. Their hulls were splintered and twisted, their sails in tatters and their crew apparently long since dead. the added benefit of avoiding conflict with the Portuguese who had been sailing the eastern route for almost a century and had established fortified bastions in every port.He fails to give much personality to his characters or build any significant story lines in the book.

Nathaniel's Nutmeg] deftly and arrestingly captures the sorry history of the European lust for nutmeg and its devastating impact on the Spice Islands. Earl of Dorset, jested that Julius Caesar's libido was so low that even if Cleopatra had used `nutmeg, mace and ginger' upon her `Roman swinger' she would have failed to stir his loins. Before you get to him, you read about generation after generation of Europeans travelling to places they had no right to be, where they either succumbed to unmentionable diseases or coshed each other over the head or both. Throughout the book, there are several historical events that are worth noted, as it is absent from most major historical books today.

Would you believe that nutmeg formed the basis for one of the most bitter international conflicts of the 17th century, and was also intimately connected to the rise to global pre-eminence of New York City?