Nathaniel's nutmeg

by Giles Milton

  At first all went well; the ships arrived safely at the Canary Islands before setting off with the wind in their sails for Cape Verde and the equator. Here, they had the good fortune to capture a Portuguese caravel laden with sixty tons of wine, a thousand jars of oil and numerous barrels of capers. Despite this unexpected revictualling men began to die. Two expired on the Edward Bonaventure before she had even crossed the equator whilst others soon 'tooke their sicknesse in those hote climates, for they be so wonderful unwholesome'. Worse, the weather was on the turn. No sooner had the ships entered the southern hemisphere than 'we had nothing but tornadoes, with such thunder, lightening and raine that we could not keep our men drie three houres together which was an occasion of the infection among them.' With provisions running low, the ships followed the trade winds to Brazil before turning in the direction of the Cape of Good Hope.

  The crew had by now been at sea for more than three months without eating any fresh fruit. Stuck in the doldrums and with nothing but 'salt victuals' and biscuits on board, they began to fall sick. Failure of strength and persistent breathlessness were the first signs that the body was beginning to weaken and many could no longer climb the rigging. Next, their skin turned sallow, their gums tender and their breath rank and offensive. 'The disease that hath consumed our men hath bene the skurvie,' wrote Edmund Barker, one of the on-board chroniclers of the expedition. 'Our soldiers, which have not been used to the sea, have best held out, but our mariners dropt away; which (in my judgement) proceedeth of their evil way of living at home.'

  Most of Lancaster's men were soon suffering from these early signs of the sickness and it was not long before the scurvy took on a more dramatic form. Their teeth dropped out and purple blotches sprouted all over their bodies. Eating salted meat did nothing to assuage their condition;

  indeed, it only seemed to make matters worse. As their muscles swelled and their joints stiffened, thin streams of blood began to trickle from their eyes and noses. By the time the ships staggered towards the Cape of Good Hope many were also suffering from acute diarrhoea, as well as from lung and kidney troubles.

  The usual port of call for ships rounding the Cape was Table Bay, a sheltered watering place first discovered by the Portuguese in 1503. Here the English ships dropped anchor and sent an advance party ashore where they were met by 'certaine blacke savages, very brutish, which would not stay'. This first meeting between Lancaster's Elizabethan hosed and doubleted seamen and the natives of southern Africa must have made for a strange sight. Never had the English crew seen such a primitive and barbarous people and they watched the savages with a mixture of awe and disgust. 'They wear only a short cloake of sheepe or seale skinnes to their middle, the hairie side inward, and a kind of rat's skinne about their privities.' So wrote Patrick Copland, the priest on a later voyage who was unamused by the titillating behaviour of their womenfolk. 'They would lift up their rat skinnes and shew their privities.' Mealtimes were an occasion for even greater disgust. One Englishman watched in horror as a band of natives ravenously munched through a pile of stinking fish entrails that had lain for more than two weeks in the tropical heat. As the 'savages' smacked their lips and sucked their fingers he concluded that 'the world doth not yield a more heathenish people and more beastly', adding that their meals smelt so foul 'that no Christian could abide to come within a myle of it'. The jewellery worn by the women was equally offensive: 'Their neckes were adorned with greasie tripes which sometimes they would pull off and eat raw.

  When we threw away their beasts' entrails, they would eat them half raw, the blood lothsomely slavering.'

  For three weeks Lancaster's crew were disappointed in their search for fresh fruit. They managed to shoot geese and cranes with their muskets, and gathered mussels on the foreshore, but found it difficult to acquire food in sufficient quantities to feed all their company. But eventually they had some luck. After capturing a native and explaining in sign language their need for meat and fruit, he set off up country and returned eight days later with forty bullocks and oxen, as well as several dozen sheep. The men could not believe how cheap these animals were. One knife bought a bullock, two secured an ox, and a broken blade was all that was needed to buy a sheep. While the crew bartered on the foreshore, a small party set off around the bay in a small pinnace and returned with a huge number of seals and penguins. Lancaster even managed to shoot an antelope.

  Despite all the fresh meat many of the men remained desperately sick. A health check revealed that less than two hundred men were 'sound and whole' and fifty were too ill to work. A decision was taken: the Penelope and Edward Bonaventure would continue eastwards while the Merchant Royal 'was sent home for England with diverse weake men'. The expedition was now down to two ships, both of which were dangerously undermanned.

  It was only a matter of days before the expedition met with disaster. No sooner had the two remaining vessels rounded the Cape of Good Hope than a tremendous storm sank the Penelope with the loss of all hands:

  We encountered with a mighty storme and extreme gusts of wind, wherein we lost our General's companie [the Penelope] and could never heare of him nor his ship any more, though we did our best endeavour to seeke him ... Foure dayes after this uncomfortable separation, in the morning, toward ten of the clocke, we had a terrible clap of thunder, which slew foure of our men outright, their necks being wrung in sonder without speaking any word, and of 94 men there was not one untouched; whereof some were striken blind, others were bruised in their legs and arms, and others in their brests, so that they voided blood two dayes after; others were drawne out at length, as though they had been racked. But (God be thanked) they all recovered, saving only the foure which were slaine outright. Also with the same thunder our main mast was torn very greviously from the head to the deck, and some of the spikes, that were ten inches into the timber, were melted with the extreme heate thereof.

  Lancaster's vessel, the Edward Bonaventure, was now alone, a dangerous situation for a ship about to enter uncharted waters. Worse still the ship's master, William Mace, was killed by natives while making a sortie for water on the shores of Mozambique. Luckily help was at hand. When a Portuguese merchant-ship sent a message to Lancaster by way of a negro in a canoe, 'we took the negro along with us, because we understood he had been in the East Indies and knew somewhat of the countrie.'This became a regular practice among the English captains and the only sure way of finding the remote and isolated Spice Islands. Unfortunately, this particular 'negro' proved a disaster. Allowing the ship to be blown hopelessly off course, he missed the Laccadive Islands in the Arabian Sea where Lancaster had intended to revictual and decided to head to the Nicobar Islands instead. 'But in our course we were very much deceived by the currents,' and these islands also eluded the ship so that by the time she reached Penang off the coast of Malaysia the crew were once again in a desperate condition. Only thirty-three men were left alive, and eleven of these were so sick that they were unable to man the ship. After cruising the coastline for a few days, Lancaster spotted a large Portuguese ship sailing from Goa. To attack her was a great gamble but Lancaster was prepared to take the risk. Ordering the men to prime their cannon, he 'shot at her many shot, and at last shooting her maine-yard through, she came to anker and yielded'. The captain and crew escaped in little rowing boats leaving the English to ransack the vessel. She was loaded with a hotchpotch of cargo, including sixteen brass cannon, three hundred butts of Canary wine and a good supply of raisin wine 'which is verie strong', as well as red caps, worsted stockings and sweetmeats. As soon as these had been transferred onto the Edward Bonaventure Lancaster set sail in order to escape the danger of reprisals.

  Sailing north-west towards Ceylon — and lost in the vastness of the Indian Ocean — the crew now decided that they had had more than enough adventure. With their captain languishing in his cabin, 'very sick, more like to die than to live', they refused to obey his orders and decided to head for England. Lancaster was reluctantly forced to agre
e. Short of food and plagued with cockroaches, they safely rounded the Cape of Good Hope and, with the wind in their favour, headed straight to the island of St Helena where a group of men rowed ashore. Ever since the failure of Edward Fenton's mad scheme to proclaim himself king the island had been deserted. Ships occasionally stopped at the island to stock up on the 'excellent good greene figs, oranges, and lemons very faire', and the crew of one passing vessel had seen fit to construct a makeshift chapel on the island; but for the greater part of the year the island was uninhabited. It was with considerable surprise, therefore, and not a little fear, that Lancaster's men heard a ghostly chant emerging from the chapel. Kicking open the door, 'we found an Englishman, a tailor, who had been there 14 months.' His name was John Segar and he had been cast ashore the previous year by the captain of the Merchant Royal who, realising he was at death's door, reasoned that he stood a greater chance of survival on land than aboard the ship. But although the months on the island had cured his body, the loneliness, boredom and heat had begun to addle his mind. 'We found him to be as fresh in colour and in as good plight of body to our seeming as he might be,' wrote one witness, 'but crazed in mind and half out of his wits, as afterwards we perceived; for whether he were put in fright of us, not knowing at first what we were, whether friends or foe, or of sudden joy when he understood we were his olde consorts and countrymen, he became idle-headed, and for eight days space neither night nor day took any naturall rest, and so at length died for lacke of sleep.'

  The journey home should have been almost over but as the crew set sail for home the wind dropped once again and they spent six weeks drifting helplessly in the mid- Atlantic. At last the breeze stiffened and Lancaster, who had by now recovered, suggested they let the winds carry them to the West Indies where they could obtain much-needed provisions. A chance encounter with a French ship enabled them to replenish their supplies of wine and bread but it was to be their last stroke of good fortune. A sudden storm arose which grew so fierce that 'it carried not only our sailes away, but also made much water in our shippe, so that wee had six foote water in holde'. The ship limped towards the outpost island of Mona and, relieved to have reached land, all but five of the crew rowed ashore. It was the last they would ever see of the Edward Bonaventure: at around midnight the ship's carpenter cut the moorings and, with a skeleton crew and a good measure of self-confidence, sailed off into the night leaving Lancaster and his men stranded.

  Almost a month passed before a French ship was spotted on the horizon. Hastily lighting a bonfire to attract her attention the crew were eventually picked up and offered the passage home. By the time Lancaster and the pitiful remnants of his crew arrived back in England they had been away for three years, six weeks, and two days.

  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

  Expeditions set off to the Spice Islands with primitive instruments. Most navigational equipment was only useful in bright sunshine, and a common practice was to hire (or capture) a local 'pilot'. 'We took a negro along with us,' wrote James Lancaster, 'because we understood he had been in the East Indies.'

  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 trave
lling 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.'