Nathaniel's Nutmeg

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I guess May is “the month of reading slump” since this book feels really long to me, although the subject is supposed to intrigue me. After lengthy negotiations, Ivan sent the English commander back to England with a letter conferring trading privileges upon a group of merchants in London. Other authorities, turning Borde's misfortune to good effect, began to claim that far from dampening sexual desire, nutmeg was actually a powerful aphrodisiac. Against incredible odds, the last of the merchants sent to establish a toehold in the island group, he rallied his men and the natives daily and held Run against the Dutch, under the most brutal conditions, for four long years. I now have a better knowledge and understanding of the race for domination of the Spice Islands, the development of the East India Company and the subsequent British Empire.

Don't be misled by the title, although Nathaniel Courthope has a very significant role to play in this history, he is only in the story for a very short period. Nathaniel’s Nutmeg is about the battle for trade supremacy in the East Indies between the Dutch and English in the late 16th, early 17th century. This book has the wrong name, it should simply be a history of the Banda Islands in the 17th century.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. Knowledgeable, insatiably curious and entertaining, Milton locates history's most fascinating—and most overlooked—stories and brings them to life in his books. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

England's maiden expedition to the Spice Islands had come to grief in the ice-bound waters of the Arctic.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. The subsequent peace deal between the two nations gave Holland Run and the British Manhattan; New York was born. The focus is on the English merchants and sailors of the East India Company but by necessity a lot also on their rival the Dutch East India Company.