The island can be smelled before it can be seen. From
more than ten miles out to sea a fragrance hangs in the air, and long before
the bowler-hat mountain hoves into view you know you are nearing land.
So it was on 23 December 1616. The Swan’s caption, Nathaniel
Courthope, needed neither compass nor astrolabe to know that they had arrived.
Reaching for his journal he made a note of the date and alongside scribbled the
position of his vessel. He had at least reached Run, one of the smallest and
richest of all the islands in the East Indies.
Courthrope summoned his crew on deck for a briefing. The
stalwart English mariners had been kept in the dark about their destination for
it was a mission of the utmost secrecy. They were unaware that King James I
himself had ordered this operation, one of such extraordinary importance that
failure would bring dire and irrevocable consequences. Nor did they know of the
notorious dangers of landing at Run, a volcanic atoll whose harbor was ringed
by a sunken reef. Many a vessel had been dashed to splinters on the razor-sharp
coral and the shoreline was littered with rusting cannon and broken timbers.
Courthope cared little for such dangers. He was far more
worried about the reception he would receive from the native islanders,
head-hunters and cannibals, who were feared and mistrusted throughout the East
Indies. ‘At your arrival at Run,’ he had been told, ‘show yourself courteous
and affable, for they are a peevish, perverse, diffident and perfidious people
and apt to take disgust upon small occasions.’
As his men rowed towards land, Courthope descended into
his cabin and brushed down his finest doublet, little imagining the momentous
events that were to follow. For his discussions with Run’s native chieftains –
conducted in sign language and broken English – would change the course of
history on the other side of the globe.
The forgotten island of Run lies in the back waters of
the East Indies, a remote and fractured speck of rock that is separated from
its nearest land mass, Australia, by more than six hundred miles of ocean. It
is these days a place of such insignificance that it fails even to make it onto
the map: The Times Atlas of the World neglects to record its existence and
the cartographers of Macmillan’s Atlas of South East Asia have reduced it to a
mere footnote. For all they cared, Run could have slumped beneath the tropical
water of the Indies.
It was not always this. Turn to the copper-plate maps of
the seventeenth century and Run is writ large across the page, its size out of
all proportions to its geography. In those days, Run was the most talked about
island in the world, a place of such fabulous wealth that Eldorado’s gilded
riches seemed tawdry by comparison. But Run’s bounty was not derived from gold –
nature had bestowed a gift far more precious upon her cliffs. A forest of
willowy trees fringed the island’s mountainous backbone; trees of exquisite
fragrance. Tall and foliaged like a laurel, they were adorned with bell-shaped
flowers and bore a fleshy, lemon-yellow fruit. To the botanist, they were
called Myristica fragrans. To the plain-speaking
merchants of England they were known simply as nutmeg.
Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, written by Giles Milton, historical adventure
story follows desperate battles of the spice war between English and Dutch
merchant adventurers as they compete for control over world supply of nutmeg in
the early 17th century. It was lucrative
and widely believed to have powerful medical properties. Tons of pirates and
cannons, treachery and endurance, blood
and gore.
Giles Milton is a non-fiction writer who specializes in
the history of exploration, particularly of lesser known adventurers of the
16th and 17th centuries and dynamics of the indigenous as first merchants came
to these newly colonized lands. His books, extensively researched, source from
unpublished materials such as diaries and journals, private letters, and those intended for archival
documentation.
Also find him here. Rios is widely known for crafting Magical Realism into his storytelling.
A Small Story About the Sky
The fire was so fierce,
So red, so gray, so yellow
That, along with the land,
It burned part of the sky
Which stayed black in that corner
For years,
As if it were night there
Even in the daytime,
A piece of the sky burnt
And which then
Could not be counted on
Even by the birds.
It was a regular fire—
Terrible—we forget this
About fire—terrible
And full of pride.
It intended to be
Big, no regular fire.
Like so many of us,
It intended to be more
And this time was.
It was not better or worse
Than any other fire
Growing up.
But this time, it was a fire
At just the right time
And in just the right place—
If you think like a fire—
A place it could do something big.
Its flames reached out
With ten thousand pincers,
As if the fire
Were made of beetles and scorpions
Clawing themselves to get up,
Pinching the air itself
And climbing,
So many sharp animals
On each other’s backs
Then into the air itself,
Ten thousand snaps and pinches
At least,
So that if the sky
Was made of something,
It could not get away this time.
Finally the fire
Caught the sky,
Which acted like a slow rabbit
Which had made a miscalculation.
It didn’t believe this could happen
And so it ran left,
Right into the thin toothpicks of flames,
Too fast to pull back,
The sky with all its arms,
Hands, fingers, fingernails,
All of it
Disappeared.
Goodbye.
The sky stayed black
For several years after.
I wanted to tell you
This small story
About the sky.
It’s a good one
And explains why the sky
Comes so slowly in the morning,
Still unsure of what’s here.
But the story is not mine.
It was written by fire,
That same small fire
That wanted to come home
To tell,
And it did,
A small piece of blue in its mouth.
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