If not for the East India Company, the people of India and Singapore today (where the majority of the people are not descended from White Europeans like Australians or Americans) would not be speaking English as a lingua franca. With such a long history during the years of the colonization, everything was decided in the negotiation rooms in London and The Hague and who knows where else.

Milton spins a fascinating tale of swashbuckling adventure, courage and cruelty, as nations and entrepreneurs fought for a piece of the nutmeg action. It seems to have been chosen for rhyming effect instead of any substantial role played by Nathaniel Courthope.

I’d never read a book on this era before, and had never heard about the key individuals in this story. I was fascinated by the "early modern" character of the world portrayed; the Age of Exploration brought a glut of new information about the world outside Europe, but people - even highly-educated people - had no way of separating the true stories from what, in retrospect, we know to be absurd. Yet 370 years ago, Run's harvest of nutmeg (a pound of which yielded a 3,200 percent profit by the time it arrived in England) turned it into the most lucrative of the Spice Islands, precipitating a battle between the all-powerful Dutch East India Company and the British Crown. I'm not sure how you were supposed to "take" the wine/saffron combo once you were no longer living, but presumably few people were wealthy enough to find out. his men is staggering, for their course, more than three hundred miles inside the Arctic Circle, must have taken them in a giant arc through a dangerous sea littered with melting pack-ice.

And he does it with accounts of Africans and Asians all over the place too - he takes something that an English sailor said about them and just accepts it as an accurate account. Banten is Bantam, Aceh is Achin, Mollucas is Molucos, Ambon is Amboyna, and he also misspelled Indonesian first vice president name, Hatta became Hatti. We get a vivid picture of the hardships and dangers but the wider picture which Milton tries to paint is lost in speculation. The one-way trip of something like 15,000 miles in the tiny, leaky boats of that era was, well not safe.

So future expeditions, hugely expensive and incredibly risky, were launched on the basis of global symmetry and the knowledge that unicorns are bred in China, along with some ancient texts by Pliny the Elder, claiming that there were open waters at the North Pole. Interestingly enough, nutmegs grew only on a few small remote islands that form part of today's Indonesia. Written like fiction, it follows the start of the spice trade between Europe and the east Indian islands (Indonesia), the ultimate birth of the East India trading company and the many many battled fought over control over this area between the English, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. Towerson), whose second husband is murdered in the Massacre of Amboyne but the author fails to tell us what happened to her, if anything. Compelling, fascinating and filled with excerpts from primary sources, meaning letters and journals of the merchants and sailors and ships captains who experienced it all, I will never again use nutmeg, cloves, and peppercorns without thinking of the battles fought and blood shed in the 17th Century over these commodities.

Particular focus is given to the increasingly bitter and deadly rivalries of the 17th Century English and Dutch spice merchants as they vie for control of the remote archipelagos of Indonesia along with their precious crops of cloves and nutmegs. Lots of interesting, sometimes incredible, true tales of adventure and discovery, but put together in a dry fashion and which, to me, lacked continuity. Well, I felt it was a flaw to title the book Nathaniel's Nutmeg and tell so much about others and so little about Nathaniel. What it does not do is come together as a memorable whole, though I don't think the author was quite aiming for that either. This book is actually most interesting in its history of naval exploration, including Henry Hudson's exploration of North America in his attempts to find a Northwest Passage.The book deals with the competition between England and Holland for possession of the spice- producing islands of South-East Asia throughout the 17th century. But - and here's the spicy bit - they did so in exchange for a small North American colony by the name of 'New Amsterdam'.