I wished there were more about the Breda Treaty, where the Dutch traded with the English the island of Manhattan (yes, that one in New York) with Rhun Island. Manhattan did not appear on the map until an Englishman by the name of Henry Hudson who worked for the Dutch East India Company came across the island.

Chancellor was no less impressed: `I have seen the King's majesties of England and the French King's pavilion,' he wrote, `but none are like this. His adoptive father, Henry Sidney, so eulogised his young charge when presented to the Company that the merchant adventurers thought they had a new Magellan in their midst. However the book lacks focus, it is like a kaleidoscope or a set of pick-up-sticks that have been tossed in the air. I’d never read a book on this era before, and had never heard about the key individuals in this story. On 14 August 1553, he `descried land', apparently uninhabited, at 72 degrees latitude but failed to reach it due to the quantity of ice in the water.One of the most sought-after spice at that time was nutmeg, a native plant of Banda Islands, East Indies (now known as Indonesia).

Milton has organized innumerable first-person accounts, by tradesmen and ship captains and others not given to long descriptives, into this tapestry. The sources are mostly secondary, since the story is compiled from original hand-written journals of English explorers, Ambon (in today’s Maluku province, Indonesia) library collections, and five thousand pages of Jacobean script. Thus the book acts, inadvertently, as a cautionary tale about colonialism - which is perhaps no bad thing.For five years, Courthope and his half-starved band of thirty men were besieged by a force one hundred times greater. It shows a lot of how we have changed in the past 400 years in our civilisation and the author could make it sounds “recent”. In retrospect, it's amazing that an unproved assumption about geological symmetry would have trumped, even for the most intelligent people of the time, the proven fact that if you get water cold enough it will freeze, thereby trapping your ships in the frozen Arctic wastes. It kind of all blends together - Milton recounts the tale of ship after ship that tried to grab this island or that island, but then the Dutch beat them, or destroyed their fort, or threatened the islanders with death for trading with the English, and then everyone got scurvy and died. ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1616, an English adventurer, Nathaniel Courthope, stepped ashore on a remote island in the East Indies on a most secret and dangerous mission.

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. Nathaniel’s Nutmeg by Giles Milton is a historical account which neatly chronicles the race of all the major powers in Western Europe to corner the spice market. Of the three ships that set sail for the Spice Islands not one achieved its goal of locating the elusive North-East Passage. Previous books include D-Day: The Soldiers' Story and Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which was a Sunday Times best-seller. Consider the humble jar of nutmeg pushed to the back of your kitchen cupboard, among all the other spices that you hardly ever use.

I had no clue about the race for the Spice Islands or just how important spices were to Europe in the 17th century.