Free Nathaniel's nutmeg by Giles Milton

the king's palace was hit; at another, a group of newly captured prisoners were tortured. 'And after we had revenged ourselves to the approval of our ship's officers,' wrote the same crew member, 'we prepared to set sail.' The ships proceeded to the nearby port of Sidayu where they were surprised by a group of Javanese natives who boarded the Amsterdam and hacked twelve men to death, including the skipper, before finding themselves under attack. The Dutch 'then chased the natives back to the shore in our own rowing boats and executed the Javanese who had killed our colleagues'. Few paused to question why everyone was acting with such brutality. The voice of conscience is never loud in the journals of sixteenth- century mariners but one crew member did wonder why his fellow tradesmen had suddenly become such bloodthirsty cut-throats. 'There was nothing missing and everything was perfect except what was wrong with ourselves,' he wrote.
    Events were to prove that the killing had scarcely begun. As the Dutch ships passed Madura, a low-lying island off the Javanese coast, the local prince (not yet privy to the events in Bantam) decided to put on a display of friendship, welcoming the Hollanders with a little flotilla of native prahus. The oarsmen rowed slowly and ceremoniously towards the Dutch vessels and at the centre of their display was a magnificent barge decorated with an elevated bridge on which stood the local prince, smiling broadly.
    The Dutch grew agitated as more and more natives rowed out to the ships. Some whispered that it was an ambush; others were convinced there was treachery afoot and argued for a pre-emptive strike. Houtman agreed and, relying on the time-honoured principal that the best defence is attack, his ship 'opened fire and killed all on the big boat'. It was the signal for a general massacre. Within minutes, dozens of cannon were being fired into the flotilla, sinking boats and slaughtering the welcome party. No sooner had the floating parade been blasted out of the water than the Dutchmen lowered their rowing boats and concluded the day's business with hand-to-hand fighting. By the end of the battle, all but twenty natives were dead, among them the prince whose body was relieved of its jewels before being returned to a watery grave. 'I watched the attack not without pleasure,' admitted one Dutch sailor, 'but also with shame.'
    The ships and crew were by now in a pitiful condition. Rival factions were at each other's throats while the various commanders — of whom Houtman was in the ascendant — were scarcely on speaking terms. Hundreds of men had died and those who were still alive were suffering from tropical diseases picked up at Bantam. Worse still, the ships themselves were in a sorry state of disrepair. Bearded with marine growth and encrusted with barnacles, they looked as if they had been raised from the depths of the ocean. Many were honeycombed with teredos (shipworms) which bored through the Dutch oak and allowed water to filter through the holes. On deck the tropical sun had so dried the timbers that the gaps between the planks were more than half an inch wide.
    Then there was the question of spices. Despite many months at sea, Houtman had so far failed to buy any spices apart from the tiny quantity acquired when his ships first arrived in Sumatra. Having rejected trade with the merchants of Bantam, the Dutch were fast running out of suitable marketplaces.
    A plan of action had to be made and a decision taken. Houtman argued that they should sail east to the Banda Islands where they were assured of a cargo of nutmeg at a reasonable price. But the captain of the Mauritius, Jan Meulenaer, disagreed. He said that the ships were virtually unseaworthy and that to make such a long voyage would be risking almost certain death. In the event, death came to Meulenaer rather sooner than he expected. Just hours after a particularly ferocious argument with Houtman he collapsed on deck and expired.