The century after Magellan

When Ferdinand Magellan came across the Mariana islands in 1521 he was heading west in order to reach the Spice Islands (which are part of Indonesia). Alas, the intrepid Portuguese explorer didn’t get to complete his itinerary. After leaving the Marianas, Magellan got embroiled in some intrigue in Cebu (Philippines), tried to muscle some of the locals, and got himself mortally skewered as a result. What remained of his fleet and what remained of his men then continued to the Spice Islands.

So what’s up with this spice stuff?

That question is addressed by a book, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg (Penguin, 388 pp., $16.00) by Giles Milton. This is a profoundly well-written book, wide in scope, and generous in depth.

Published in 1999, it takes a look at the heyday of the nutmeg frontier when things really heated up in the first half of the 1600s.

The Portuguese made early inroads into the Spice Islands. By the early 1600s, however, the English and Dutch were gaining momentum in the maritime realm. Portugal and Spain no longer had the action to themselves. Nutmeg, incidentally, was sold as a remedy in Europe to fight the plague.

The Dutch and English found themselves locked in a brutal rivalry in the Spice Islands, to include an island called Run. Run is smaller than Saipan but it held a mother lode of nutmeg.

Getting from Europe to those islands, and then back again, was a risky endeavor. About a decade into the spice race one tally for the English went like so: Of the 12 ships and about 1,200 men they sent to the islands, one-third of the ships didn’t survive the voyage, and about 800 of the men perished from disease alone.

The line between merchant ships, fighting ships, and pirate ships was often a blurry one. National rivalries were vicious. The captains, sailing under commissions from their monarchs or officials, would often be given license to plunder or sink ships that were flying other colors.

Not everybody, however, played for their home team. Magellan, for example, was Portuguese but he sailed for the Spanish. Henry Hudson, for whom Hudson River in the U.S. is named, was English but he sailed for the Dutch.

If you’re wondering why Hudson would be part of a Spice Islands story, it’s because he had been dispatched from Europe to find a shortcut to the west Pacific. He wound up in current-day New York.

That shortcut gig went from false hope to false hope. Sailing from Europe to the islands involved either going around Africa or going around South America. Various expeditions, all futile, were mounted to explore northern routes as shortcuts.

Anyway, back in the islands, procuring nutmeg and other spices involved setting up bases for trading, warehousing, provisioning, and such. Hey, some things never change: Logistics has often been the difference between failure and success in just about every large endeavor. This endeavor was probably no exception.

The warehouse and trading bases were run by guys called “factors,” and the structures themselves were called “factories.”

One such factor was young Nathaniel Courthope. He signed a seven-year contract and in 1610 set sail from London for the islands. En route, he and some others wound up in irons in the Middle East. Courthope survived the ordeal and eventually made it to the islands. After various adventures he wound up being appointed the captain of a voyage to Run.

Courthope arrived at Run in 1616, by which point the Dutch squeeze on England’s spice action was reaching critical mass. Run was in the process of becoming England’s last stand in that area.

Run, which had no source of fresh water, was essentially under Dutch siege for 1,540 days, and Courthope’s men died one by one of disease. The Dutch, with a well-armed presence, finally succeeded in slaying Courthope himself.

Thus ended this episode in tropical history, an episode that had no shortage of danger, plunder, and brutality.

We started with Magellan so we might as well end with him, too. You may have heard of the Strait of Magellan. If so, you might have noticed that it’s at the southern tip of South America. Magellan’s route from Spain to the Mariana Islands involved crossing the Atlantic, going to the southern tip of South America, then working west across the Pacific. Magellan took a shortcut through some waters that stand in the southern tip of South America, hence the “Strait of Magellan.”