How greed put the East Indies on the map

How greed put the East Indies on the map

Nathaniel's Nutmeg, or The True and Incredible Adventures of the
Spice Trader Who Changed The Course of History
By Giles Milton
Published by Penguin, USA
400 pages
US$24

JAKARTA (JP): The proper title of this book should perhaps be
"Plunder, Greed and Gluttony, Engines of Empire". It is the
story, entertainingly, even colorfully told, of the 16th century
and 17th century European hunger for spices that changed the face
of history and took humankind off on a new trajectory.

The spices, principally cloves and nutmeg, were, as we all
know, to be found in the East Indies in what is now Indonesia.
Once European navigators had located their sources, fierce
competition ensued between Portuguese, Dutch and English sailors
to take them back to markets where profits beyond the dreams of
avarice could be achieved; a staggering 3,200 percent for nutmeg
in London, for example.

It is a tale of armed commerce in which piracy was a
commonplace (after all, England's Queen Elizabeth I lovingly
called Francis Drake "mine own pyrate"). It is a story of how
European merchants arrived in the East with a fierce drive in
their bellies to establish trading supremacy by any and all
means.

It focuses fascinatingly to some degree on an Indonesian
island so tiny that it figures on very few modern maps. The
island in question is Run in the Banda archipelago, where nutmeg
trees grew in great profusion. Today Run is little more than a
seldom-visited, windblown and surf-surged speck, but 400 years or
so ago it was a magnet for these adventurers from Western Europe.

Among them was one Nathaniel Courthope, an English sailor who
pitted his wits against the best of the Dutch to secure cargoes
of nutmeg for the London market. Milton tells Courthope's story
and that of other merchants like the painstaking Ralph Fitch, who
spent eight years in Malacca studying the spice trade, in rich
detail. Courthope is one of those figures in history who has
fallen into oblivion, and the author has done a remarkable job of
rescuing him from it.

There were more than enough rogues, scoundrels, misfits and
generally colorful characters ready to chance their arm and head
for the East. But, unlike Courthope, not all were entirely suited
to the demands of navigation -- it was long before the Englishman
Joseph Harrison solved the mystery of accurate measurement of
longitude -- or of captaining a crew. One fantasist described by
Milton announced one day to his crew as their ship headed into
the South Atlantic that he intended to make himself king of St.
Helena. He was only dissuaded by a near-mutinous gathering of the
men.

For others the perils that lay athwart their journey were just
too many and numbers of ships foundered on alien shores for lack
of proper charts. One of the greatest enemies of these European
crews was not the rocky coastline or the hidden shoals and reefs,
but scurvy. An unrelieved diet of ship's biscuits and salted meat
was no good for anyone; it being a century and a half before the
great English navigator Captain James Cook discovered the value
of vitamin C to his men, many died from malnutrition. In some
cases ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope would put in and shoot
seals and penguins from the huge local colonies, but that meat
proved only a temporary expedient.

Of course when they got to the East Indies, if they ever did,
crews would find plentiful supplies of fish and then fresh fruit
ashore. First they had to overcome the sometimes rightful
suspicions of local populations. For the Dutch in particular,
having established a reputation for bluntness and insensitivity,
it was not always an easy proposition.

Interaction with local populations is part of the narrative,
and it is certainly interesting to learn that the Sultan of Aceh,
having been appraised within weeks of the English victory over
the Spanish Armada, was able to send congratulations to Queen
Elizabeth. Not everybody was so comfortable with the new
arrivals. One native crew was preyed upon by an armed English
merchantman; "indignant at the blatant act of piracy (they) set
upon the Englishmen and suffered terrible injuries before leaping
overboard", as Milton has it.

The truly intriguing information in the book is that Run was
traded by the English for a Dutch-owned island on the other side
of the world, and that island became one of the richest pieces of
real estate in history, Manhattan.

For anyone seeking a readable account of the beginnings of
empire, Giles Milton has provided it in this rich source book.

The literature on adventurers to the East in the 16th and 17th
centuries was also recently added to by Yale University Press'
reprinting of The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet, a collection of
writings by one Georgius Everardus Rumphius. The lonely German
eccentric arrived in the Indonesian archipelago with trading
notions on his mind, but settled in Ambon and became an early and
avid collector of marine specimens.

Fascinated by the profuse marine life in and around Ambon's
waters, the German began a taxonomy that preceded the work of the
great Swede Linnaeus. What is truly extraordinary about it all is
that he went blind at an early age and following an earthquake
lived out a solitary life, having lost his wife and daughter.

Two very different stories. Nathaniel's Nutmeg is one to whet
the appetite of those who want an understanding of raw history
and of the ruthless mentality that shaped European colonialism in
this region. Rumphius' tale provides a different picture.

-- David Jardine