Nathaniel’s Nutmeg

In the early seventeenth century, nutmeg grew commercially only in the Banda Islands, making the small archipelago a focus of violent competition between local communities, the Dutch East India Company and English merchants. Giles Milton centres the story on Nathaniel Courthope, who reached the island of Run in 1616 and accepted its inhabitants’ alliance with England. With a small force and limited supplies, he attempted to resist Dutch efforts to enforce a regional monopoly.

Courthope’s prolonged defence reveals the human cost of a commercial war often described only through European companies and treaties. The book follows siege, betrayal and coercion across the islands, including the destruction inflicted on the Bandanese population. It then traces Run’s place in the later Treaty of Breda, in which English claims to the island were abandoned while the Dutch accepted English possession of New Netherland, linking the nutmeg trade to the colonial future of Manhattan.