Several hundred years from now, when vehicles are powered by free renewable resources such as hydrogen and sunlight, our posterity will ask a similar question: “Why on earth would our ancestors go to war in the Middle East just to secure access to oil resources? Milton has a terrific eye for the kind of detail that can bring the past vividly to life - The Spectator You may also be interested in. Brutality was undeniable on both sides, but Nathaniel Courthope's valiant stand on the island of Run made the English claim seem justified.

I was fascinated by the "early modern" character of the world portrayed; the Age of Exploration brought a glut of new information about the world outside Europe, but people - even highly-educated people - had no way of separating the true stories from what, in retrospect, we know to be absurd. But - and here's the spicy bit - they did so in exchange for a small North American colony by the name of 'New Amsterdam'. Yet Milton seems willing to impugn Dutch captains and bureaucrats on flimsier, more circumstantial evidence than we can read between the lines here against Keeling.Combining the forces of paper agreement, guns, ships, and forts, both the English and the Dutch tricked and forced the hands of the natives to sell them monopoly rights for the nutmeg.

There was a definite jingoistic/nationalistic bent that bothered me more as the book went on, and inspired some eye-rolling toward the end. And the boat journey from Neira to Rhun is not treacherous (I've been there using a rickety inter-island transport) since in the ocean, everything depends on the season and tides. And he does it with accounts of Africans and Asians all over the place too - he takes something that an English sailor said about them and just accepts it as an accurate account.He sounded the sea floor, pored over charts and scratched his head before concluding that `the land lay not as the globe made mention. Five hundred years ago, that small cluster of volcanic islands was the only place in the world where one could find clover and nutmeg. Such a man would have been a risk for the short hop across the English Channel; to despatch him to the uttermost ends of the earth was to court disaster.