Nathaniel's nutmeg

'This is a little nutmeg of a book, spicily packaged
and guaranteed to provide savoury reading.'
Christopher Hudson,
The Standard

'A magnificent piece of popular history. It is an
English story, but its heroism is universal. This is a
book to read, reread, then read again to your
children. If you do not have any children, get some.'
Nicholas Fearn,
Independent on Sunday

'Milton leaves one both yearning for a time when
the world seemed full of infinite adventure and
appalled by what greed did to such a paradise.'
New York Times Book Review

'This fascinating and eccentric history is a
remarkable blend of epic fairy tale and true history.'
Publishing News

'An exciting tale of defiant heroism.'
Geographical Magazine

Giles Milton was born in Buckinghamshire in 1966
and studied at the University of Bristol. A writer
and journalist, in 1995 he wrote the acclaimed
The
Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John
Mandeville.
He has contributed articles for most of
the British national newspapers as well as many
foreign publications and specialises in the history of
travel and exploration.

In the course of his researches, he has travelled
extensively in Europe and the Middle East.

For Madeleine and Heloise

Copyright © Giles Milton 1999

First published in 1999 by Hodder & Stoughton
A division of Hodder Headline
A Sceptre paperback

Giles Milton lives in London with his wife and two
daughters

The right of Giles Milton to be identified as the
Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without
a similar condition being imposed on
the subsequent purchaser.

British Library C.I.P.
A C1P catalogue record for this title is available
from the British Library

ISBN 0 340 69676 1

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

Hodder and Stoughton
A division of Hodder Headline
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH

Acknowledgements

The hand-written journals of the gentlemen adventurers who
form the
dramatis personae
of this book are almost unreadable to
the untrained eye. I owe a debt of gratitude to the handful of
Victorian scholars - long deceased - who transcribed these
voluminous writings. George Birdwood, Sir William Foster and
Henry Stevens made this book possible, as did W. Noel Sainsbury
and his indefatigable daughter Ethel who together edited and
indexed more than five thousand pages of Jacobean script - all
done without the aid of computers.

Thank you to Des Alwi on Neira Island for his hospitality,
enthusiasm and the use of his twin-engined power boat; to
Monsignor Andreas Sol of St Francis Xavier Cathedral in Ambon
(Amboyna) for allowing me free access to his extensive library;
and to James Lapian at the BBC's Indonesian Service.

In London, I am grateful to Magolein van der Valk for
rendering obscure Dutch chronicles into fluent English; to the
staff of the London Library and the British Library s Oriental and
India Office Collections; and to Frank Barrett, Wendy Driver,
Maggie Noach and Roland Philipps.

I am particularly indebted to Paul Whyles and Simon
Heptinstall, both of whom read numerous versions of the
manuscript and suggested much-needed changes.

Prologue

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 it was on 23 December 1616. The
Swan's
captain,
Nathaniel Courthope, needed neither compass nor
astrolabe to know that they had arrived. Reaching for his
journal he made a note of the date and alongside scribbled
the position of his vessel. He had at last reached Run, one
of the smallest and richest of all the islands in the East
Indies.

Courthope summoned his crew on deck for a briefing.
The stalwart English mariners had been kept in the dark
about their destination for it was a mission of the utmost
secrecy. They were unaware that King James I himself
had ordered this operation, one of such extraordinary
importance that failure would bring dire and irrevocable
consequences. Nor did they know of the notorious dangers
of landing at Run, a volcanic atoll whose harbour was
ringed by a sunken reef. Many a vessel had been dashed to
splinters on the razor-sharp coral and the shoreline was
littered with rusting cannon and broken timbers.

Courthope cared little for such dangers. He was far
more worried about the reception he would receive from
the native islanders, head-hunters and cannibals, who were feared and mistrusted throughout the East Indies. 'At your
arrival at Run,' he had been told, 'show yourself courteous
and affable, for they are a peevish, perverse, diffident and
perfidious people and apt to take disgust upon small
occasions.'

As his men rowed towards land, Courthope descended
into his cabin and brushed down his finest doublet, little
imagining the momentous events that were to follow. For
his discussions with Run's native chieftains — conducted in
sign language and broken English — would change, the
course of history on the other side of the globe.

The forgotten island of Run lies in the backwaters of the
East Indies, a remote and fractured speck of rock that is
separated from its nearest land mass, Australia, by more than
six hundred miles of ocean. It is these days a place of such
insignificance that it fails even to make it onto the map:
The
Times Atlas of the World
neglects to record its existence and
the cartographers of Macmillan s
Atlas of South East Asia
have
reduced it to a mere footnote. For all they cared, Run could
have slumped beneath the tropical waters of the Indies.

It was not always thus. Turn to the copper-plate maps of
the seventeenth century and Run is writ large across the
page, its size out of all proportion to its geography. In those
days, Run was the most talked about island in the world, a
place of such fabulous wealth that Eldorado's gilded riches
seemed tawdry by comparison. But Run's bounty was not
derived from gold - nature had bestowed a gift far more
precious upon her cliffs. A forest of willowy trees fringed
the island's mountainous backbone; trees of exquisite
fragrance. Tall and foliaged like a laurel, they were adorned
with bell-shaped flowers and bore a fleshy, lemon-yellow
fruit. To the botanist, they were called
Myristica fragrans.
To
the plain-speaking merchants of England they were known
simply as nutmeg.