»Pirates of the Malaccas

Reading Giles Milton's account of the bloody Spice Wars, Nathaniel's Nutmeg. His loose collection of anecdotes prevents the book from being a strong history, but some of the anecdotes relate very exciting incidents from the struggle amongst the feckless Dutch, cunning Portuguese, and desperate British.

During this time of intrepid, daring, and stupid exploration, the Dutch innvoated map-making technology. Today,
this online mapping tool produces interactive maps (with nearby transit stops marked!) for almost any address in the European Union.

James Lancaster, who inadevertently created the trading triangle between England, Gujarat, and the Spice Islands when he pillaged Portuguese carracks in the Indian Ocean, ran into weather on his return to England:

Even Lancaster felt the end was near. Descending into his cabin, he penned a letter to the Company in London, a letter whose unfailing spirit would become legendary among the sailors of the East India Company. 'I cannot tell where you should looke for me,' he wrote, 'because I live at the devotion of the winds and seas.' And then, sending the letter over to the Hector, he hade her head for England leaving his own ship to her fate. The Hector's captain refused and shadowed the Red Dragon until the storm finally abated. And so, side by side, the ships sailed first to St Helena and then into the English Channel.

When the adventurer Wm. Hawkins arrived in Gujarat to arrange English trading rights, he found strong pro-Portuguese sentiment, backed by Shah Jehangir's official pact with Portugal.

Hawkins was annoyed but placed his trust in tact and diplomacy. He sent a polite but firm letter to the Portuguese command reminding him that their two countries were at peace and asking that 'he release my men and goods, for that we were Englishmen.' The commander was in no mood to be lenient and sent Hawkins a return letter 'vilely abusing His Majesty [King James I] terming him King of Fishermen, and of an island of no import'. Worse still, he described Hawkins as 'a fart for his commision'.

Were the book more well-written (it's not, as the dust jacket claims, a "modern-day Robert Louis Stevenson"), then the story of the lone Englishman, eponymous Nathaniel Courthope, who held off the formidable Dutch for four years, might be more exciting. As two-thirds of the pages lead up to the res, and the connexion between Nathaniel and the treaties is never clearly drawn, the book reads like a second-rate high-school essay. And it lacks commas (which perhaps Adam Gopnik could spare from his best-selling "From Paris to the Moon," which I haven't read; the first sentence put me off horribly).