Nathaniel's nutmeg (10 page)

The voyage had proved a human and financial disaster.
Of the 198 men who rounded the Cape, only 25 returned
alive. Worse still, two of the three ships had been lost and
the one that did manage to limp into port was carrying not
spices but scurvy. Lancaster had proved — if proof was
needed - that the spice trade involved risks that London's
merchants could ill afford. It was not until they learned that
the Dutch had entered the spice race, and achieved a
remarkable success, that they would consider financing a
new expedition to the islands of the East Indies.

The Dutch expedition had been planned in the utmost
secrecy. For more than three years the inhabitants of
Amsterdam's Warmoestraat, a genteel neighbourhood close
to the city's main square, had watched an unusual amount
of activity at the house of Reynier Pauw. This merchant,
just twenty-eight years of age, had already made his fortune
as head of an international lumber business. Now, it
seemed, he had set his sights on a new and more ambitious
project, for two of the regular visitors at his home, Jan Carel
and Hendrik Hudde, were among the city's wealthiest
merchants. There was a third man who joined them at their
meetings — a bearded hunchback whose tight-fitting skull­cap emphasised his bulbous forehead. His name was Petrus
Plancius, a gifted though dogmatic theologian who had
studied in England before travelling to Amsterdam to
preach his fanatical branch of Calvinism. But it was not

theology that brought him to Pauw's house: Plancius had
come to show his maps of the Indies - maps that were said
to be the most accurate in existence.

Men of religion do not, as a rule, make great men of
science. Plancius was the exception and even when he
preached from the pulpit his mind would frequently
wander away from thoughts of God towards his fascination
with geography. 'I have been told,' wrote one critic, 'that

you frequently climb into the pulpit without having
properly prepared your sermon. You switch then to subjects
which have nothing to do with religion. You talk as a
geographer about the Indies and the New World, or you
discuss the stars.' This interest in geography strayed
increasingly into his religious work. Commissioned to
draw a map of Biblical sites for a new edition of the Bible,
Plancius deftly crafted a map not of the Holy Land but of
the entire world, including the Spice Islands. Soon he was
concentrating more and more time on map-drawing until,
in 1592, he published his important world map grandly
entitled, 'A geographical and hydrographical map of the
whole world, showing all countries, towns, places and seas
under their respective degrees of longitude and latitude;
capes, promontories, headlands, ports, shoals, sand banks
and cliffs are drawn in the most accurate manner.'

Plancius drew on the work of two Dutch cartographers
when he came to produce his maps. These men, Abraham
Ortelius and Gerardus Mercator, had in turn derived their
inspiration from the Roman geographer Claudius
Ptolemy who had gone to immense lengths to determine
the precise position of all known places. Ortelius's
fascination with the science of cartography resulted in his
magnificent
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,
whilst Gerardus
Mercator had been struggling throughout the 1560s to
draw his pioneering world map on the projection that
now bears his name. The finished work was similar in
detail to that of Ortelius but differed in its novel
projection, for although he drew all the lines meeting at
right angles he pulled the parallels of latitude farther apart
as they reached the poles. This, of course, distorted the
distances to a huge degree, to the point that Greenland
became the size of North America, but it also meant that
the position of places relative to one another remained
correct. His discovery gave Dutch cartographers a virtual
monopoly on map-making for more than a century and
enabled them to furnish their explorers with practical and
up-to-date information when they set sail on their voyages
to the East Indies.

Even with access to these maps, the Dutch merchants
planning their first expedition remained cautious. They
were aware that it took a huge sum of money to equip a
fleet which, given the record of the English, was almost
certain to suffer substantial losses on the long route to and
from the East. But in the winter of 1592, Plancius arrived
at Pauw's house with a new and unknown face whose
weather-beaten features suggested that he had been abroad
for some considerable time. The name of this stranger was
Jan Huyghen van Linschoten and he had indeed been on
a long voyage — nine years in the Indies — and had
returned with reams of information about the spice ports
of the East.

Linschoten was the antithesis of Fitch and, had the two
men met in the souks of Malacca, they would have found
little in common. The Dutchman's tales are a colourful mix
of fact and fantasy and his book is filled with 'luxurious and
unchaste women', rampaging elephants and giant rats 'as
big as young pigges'. Most extraordinary of all is his tale of
the monstrous fish of Goa which are 'in bigness as great as
a middle sized dog, with a snout like a hog, small eyes, no
eares, but two holes where his eares should bee'. As he tried
to sketch this extraordinary creature, 'it ranne along the hall
upon the floore and in every place snorting like a hog.'

Unlike Fitch, Linschoten was not travelling in order to
research the cost and availability of spices; rather, his aim
was to collect weird and wonderful fables from the East and
he would quiz every merchant and mariner he met and
transcribe their marvels into his bulging diary.

It was not until he returned to Holland and began to tell
people of his travels that their true worth was realised.
Unwittingly, Linschoten had compiled an immense
encyclopaedia of knowledge about the islands of the East
Indies. He knew exactly what the native merchants wished
to exchange for their spices, had discovered that pieces-of-
eight were the coins most sought after by traders, and had
inadvertently researched all the most suitable ports for
revictualling on the long journey to the East. The resulting
book, the
Itinerario,
stretched to five weighty volumes, one
of which included descriptions of the produce of every
island in the Indies as well as a list of languages of most use
to foreign traders. There were lengthy accounts of the
nutmeg and clove trees along with a section on the healing
and curative properties of these spices: 'nutmegs fortify the
brain and sharpen the memory,' he wrote. 'They warm the
stomach and expel winds. They give a clean breath, force
the urine, stop diarrhoea, and cure upset stomachs.'

Linschoten's account and Plancius's maps convinced the
three merchants that the time was now right to send an
expedition to the East. Yet still they hesitated, deciding to
await the return of a spy they had sent to Lisbon, a
headstrong man named Cornelis Houtman whose unstable
temperament was to cause so much trouble in the future.
Exactly what Houtman discovered in Lisbon is not known,
but it convinced the merchants that there was no time to
be lost in entering the spice race and, 'after many
discussions, it was finally resolved that, in the Name of
God, a beginning should be made with the navigation and
other affairs.' Six more merchants were summoned to help
finance the project, four ships were built, and cannon were
borrowed from various towns. Embarrassingly, not enough
firearms could be found and an agent had to be despatched
to England to buy some extra weaponry.