Nathaniel's Nutmeg

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the nutmeg but as he wearily admitted, `it is hard to get out of the flesh what is bred in the bone. England's maiden expedition to the Spice Islands had come to grief in the ice-bound waters of the Arctic.

Reading about a lesser known chapter of history—especially a story as seemingly buried as this one was interesting. Throughout most of the book Milton does an admirable job using plenty of primary documents, but when it comes to Courthope, Milton shrugs off academic rigors and paints a picture of a selfless savior.Although Nathaniel plays only a small role in this book, it is his heroism in trying to secure the tiny island of Run for the British, that the author has chosen to put him in the title. Combining the forces of paper agreement, guns, ships, and forts, both the English and the Dutch tricked and forced the hands of the natives to sell them monopoly rights for the nutmeg. Their ships, it was decided, would head due north; a route that would shave more than two thousand miles off the long voyage to the Spice Islands.

Milton’s use of irony was adroitly placed, often he shows sympathy with the poor natives who are paid small amount of fee for their nutmeg which could be resold very expensively in Europe. and gently swaying palm trees, Willoughby and his men had met with freezing fog, impenetrable ice, and the realisation that London's merchants had made a terrible mistake when they chose the route over the North Pole. A highly-colored chronicle of the European race for control of the spice islands (the small south-east Asian archipelago that produced the entire world supply of nutmeg and cloves during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), Nathaniel's Nutmeg introduces the reader to a rollicking cast of brigands, merchants and adventurers, all of whom are out for a piece of the spice pie. The crew's final grim months remain a mystery, for Willoughby, racked by hunger, stopped recording daily entries in his ship's log.Ignorant of the existence of the narwhal - that strange member of the whale family that has a single tusk protruding from its head - the rough English mariners confidently declared that this odd piece of flotsam had once belonged to a unicorn, a highly significant find, for 'knowing that unicorns are bred in the lands of Cathay, China and other Oriental Regions, [the sailors:] fell into consideration that the same head was brought thither by the course of the sea, and that there must of necessity be a passage out of the said Oriental Ocean into our Septentrionall seas. Before you get to him, you read about generation after generation of Europeans travelling to places they had no right to be, where they either succumbed to unmentionable diseases or coshed each other over the head or both.