Nathaniel's nutmeg (27 page)

The last words Verhoef heard were those of his subordinate, Jan de Bruin, who cried in panic, 'Admiral, we are betrayed!' Defenceless and unarmed, there was nothing the men could do. All forty-two Dutchmen who entered the grove were butchered and their heads severed from their bodies. The Bandanese then attacked the soldiers on the beach before inciting a general uprising. The Dutch now found themselves in a perilous position. An emergency council was summoned and elected a new leader, Simon Hoen, who hurried back to the half-built castle and urged his men to work even harder to complete the construction. Hoen did not waste any time in taking his revenge; the blood-flag was hoisted from his flagship and the Dutch made a formal declaration of war against Neira Island and began to 'execute and practise all revenge possible'. Villages were burned, vessels destroyed and natives butchered.

On 10 August 1609, a peace treaty was at last signed on board Hoen s flagship. This pact, agreed by only a handful of orang-kaya, stated that henceforth Neira Island was to be placed under Dutch dominion and 'to be kept by us forever' — the first territorial acquisition by the Dutch in the East Indies — while the rest of the islands were to suffer similar losses to their freedom. Furthermore, the headman was forced to 'sweare that they would thereafter have trade with none other nation whatsoever it were but sell all their nuts and mace to the Hollanders only'. Hoen sent a letter to Captain Keeling informing him of this fact and commanding him to sail from the Banda Isles within five days and never to return — the beginning of 'the warres betwixt the English and Dutch'.

Keeling, having suffered so many indignities at the hands of the Dutch, now felt he was in a position to act defiantly. He sent a reply stating that there was no question of him leaving the Banda Islands since he had just managed to procure a large batch of spices which would take a full twenty-five days to load on board. He also informed Hoen that he intended to leave a permanent English factory on Ai Island.

Keeling's bluff worked. He was well aware that 'oftentimes rash men threaten to kill which they durst not for life perform': so it was on this occasion. He loaded his spices in peace and, happy to bid farewell to the Banda Islands, set sail for England. At last, after months of hardship, he had time to perform some Shakespeare again.

In the summer of
1558, almost five years after Sir Hugh Willoughby's fateful expedition to the Arctic, a piece of disconcerting news filtered into London. It was rumoured that a resourceful young explorer from Brussels called Oliver Brunei had travelled a considerable distance along the northern shores of Russia and claimed he was on the verge of discovering the North-East Passage. Confident of success, he was now planning to board a Russian ship and continue sailing until he reached the Spice Islands — a route that would slash two thousand miles and more than a year's sailing time off the long journey east.

This news was a cause of great anxiety to London's merchants for Brunei's sympathies lay with the Dutch and any discovery would be to their benefit. It was imperative that Brunei's exploration should be stopped in its tracks and, to this end, the merchants of the newly formed Muscovy Company promptly denounced him to the Russians as a spy and the unfortunate Brunei spent the next twelve years in prison.

Lesser men might have found their enthusiasm for foreign travel dampened by this experience. Not Brunei: no sooner had he been released from jail than he set off eastwards again, this time in the employ of the Strogonov family. Exploring the ice-shattered coastline of Arctic

Russia, he compiled endless notes and charts and eventually returned to Holland to find a string of geographers waiting to meet him, including the distinguished Gerardus Mercator. Mercator was overjoyed to discover that Brunei brought the news he had been waiting so long to hear; for years a constant trickle of hearsay and rumour had reached both Amsterdam and London suggesting that there was indeed a navigable North-East Passage that led to the Spice Islands. Many of these stories were decades old, and even more were complete fiction, but each new finding saw geographers redrawing their charts of the Arctic, much of which remained a vast white blank known only as Terra Incognita.

What was particularly interesting about Brunei's findings was that he claimed to have reached the fabled River Ob which, it was believed, wound a golden route in the direction of the Indies. 'It is,' wrote one trader, 'a common received speech of the Russes that are great travellers, that beyond the Ob to the south-east there is a warm sea, which they express in these words in the Russe tongue:"Za Oby reca moriaTempla;" that is to say,"beyond the River Ob is a warm sea." '

No one could be sure whether or not this was true and even Brunei had not managed to sail down the River Ob, but a persistent stream of rumours suggested that the Ob did indeed lead to the tropics. Certainly the dependable merchants of the newly formed Muscovy Company believed the stories and often added their own tales to the increasing dossier of evidence. Chief merchant Francis Cherry told his London bosses that he had eaten a sturgeon from the Ob; others, more tantalisingly, declared that they had seen 'great vessels, laden with rich and precious merchandise, brought down that great river by black or swart people'.

This caused great excitement among London's spice merchants; the more so when they learned that the people living on the shores of the Ob appeared to be of Chinese descent for 'whenever they make mention of the people named Carrah Colmak (this country is Cathay) they fetch deep sighs and, holding up their hands look to heaven signifying, as it were, and declaring the notable glory and magnificence of that nation.'

Despite all the evidence, the English were wary about furnishing a new expedition in search of the northern route to the 'spiceries'. A handful of bold adventurers continued to try their hand at sailing into the Arctic and an expedition despatched in 1580 managed to sail a considerable distance across the Kara Sea before finding its path blocked by pack-ice. But the mission was not a complete failure for the crew returned to England with a strange horn, some six feet long and decorated with a spiral twirl. Ignorant of the existence of the narwhal — that strange member of the whale family that has a single tusk protruding from its head — the rough English mariners confidently declared that this odd piece of flotsam had once belonged to a unicorn, a highly significant find, for 'knowing that unicorns are bred in the lands of Cathay, China and other Oriental Regions, [the sailors] fell into consideration that the same head was brought thither by the course of the sea, and that there must of necessity be a passage out of the said Oriental Ocean into our Septentrionall seas.'

The English were urged on in their Arctic endeavours by Samuel Purchas who called upon all intrepid and adventurous men to set sail in search of a passage, reminding them that their journey towards the 'spiceries' would shorten with every step they took towards the Pole, 'where that vast line at the Circumference itself becomes no line anymore, but a Point, but Nothing, but Vanitie'. Purchas's poetry failed to stir his English compatriots but his enthusiasm was echoed in Holland by the more practically minded Mercator who gave repeated assurances that Arctic exploration was not as dangerous as was commonly supposed. 'The voyage to Cathay by the east is doubtless very easy and short,' he wrote dismissively, 'and I have oftentimes marvelled that being so happily begun it hath been left off, and the course changed to the West, after more than half of the voyage was discovered.'

Advice of a more concrete sort came from Petrus Plancius, the man who would help to despatch the first Dutch expedition to the Indies in 1595 and who was as keen as ever on sending a fleet over the top of the North Pole. Arguing that fresh water froze more easily than salt, he maintained that the coastline of Russia was continually choked with ice because of all the water pouring into the sea from freshwater rivers such as the Ob. His advice to the Dutch explorers was to sail further north, away from the land, where they would find a sea completely free from ice.

In the wake of such demonstrable logic three fleets set sail in succession. The first, which left the Texel in 1594, was so confident of success that it carried letters in Arabic to be handed to the eastern potentates on arrival in the Spice Islands. Splitting into two groups, the first squadron was commanded by an accomplished mariner called William Barents who was destined to go down in history as one of the greatest of all polar explorers. But even his navigational skills were useless in the frozen wastes of the Arctic and it was not long before his ship reached a 'great store of ice, as much as they could descry out of the top, that lay like a plain field of ice'. He sailed more than fifteen hundred miles in search of a passage through this ice but was eventually forced to admit defeat.

Cornelis Nay, commander of the second group, was more fortunate. Sailing through the Strait of Vaygach to the south of Novaya Zemlya, he had a trouble-free passage into the Kara Sea and would have continued eastward if summer had not come to an abrupt end. He returned to Holland and boldly pronounced that he had discovered the North-East Passage, informing the Dutch merchants that it was 'ready-made and certaine'. Nay was feted as a hero. Northern Russia was renamed New Holland, the Kara Sea became the New North Sea, and the Strait of Vaygach was rechristened Strait Nassau.

There was no time to lose for other nations, particularly the English, were certain to hear such momentous news. The following summer a second fleet was sent with the full expectation of it reaching the Spice Islands by Christmas. It was not to be. Strait Nassau was choked with ice and the New North Sea was frozen solid. Morale plummeted when two men, caught stealing pelts from natives, were disciplined in accordance with the rules of the ship. This involved being keel-hauled three times in a row — a brutal enough punishment in the warm waters of the Indies but even more dangerous when performed in the glacial Arctic. The first man had his head ripped off as he was pulled under the vessel. The second survived only to be cast ashore where he froze to death. A small mutiny followed, resulting in the hanging of five men, and by the time the expedition arrived back in Holland, the crew had lost their enthusiasm for their Arctic adventure.

The States of Holland and Zeeland decided to abandon the project, arguing that they had already spent a fortune on an increasingly futile venture. But the merchants of

Amsterdam were undeterred by the repeated failures and promptly equipped a third fleet of two ships which set sail in the spring of 1596 under the overall command of William Barents, with Jacob van Heemskerck as captain. Trapped in ice somewhere to the north of Novaya Zemlya, the two men were convinced that their experience of Arctic climes would enable them to survive the winter. Building a temporary shelter out of logs and driftwood — a shelter so well constructed that it was still standing three centuries later when visited by Englishman Charles Gardiner — they hibernated for eight months. Good humour helped them win their battle for survival. In January they feasted on flour after crowning their ship's constable King of Novaya Zemlya whilst in February they shot a polar bear 'that gave us a hundred pounds of fat'. In June the ice at last began to thaw revealing that the ship had been crushed beyond repair. Two small craft were hastily built by the remaining survivors who were encouraged in their endeavours by the jocular Barents. Although desperately sick he kept everyone in good spirits: 'Our lives depend on it, boys,' he jested. 'If we cannot get the boats ready we shall have to die here as burghers of Novaya Zemlya.'

A few days later he expired, leaving Heemskerck to guide the little boats through the ice. Nearly two months passed before the survivors spied a Dutch ship close to the Kola Peninsula, which came to the rescue. When Heemskerck and his men eventually reached Holland and had an audience with their Amsterdam financiers they betrayed a considerable cynicism about any northern route to the Spice Islands. To reinforce the message that the North Pole was no place to go looking for spices, they pitched up at the meeting dressed in full Arctic clothing, including 'fur caps made of white foxes'.

With the failure of this third expedition, enthusiasm for the northern project waned. Although a prize of 25,000 guilders awaited anyone who did break through the ice, more than a decade was to pass before any ship, Dutch or English, ventured further east than the White Sea port of Archangel. The Reverend Purchas was distraught: 'That which I most grieve at,' he wrote, 'is the detention of further discovery of the Pole and beyond.' He believed that it was the duty of rich merchants to finance polar exploration, for 'they might get the world and give us the world better if Charitie were their Needle, Grace their Compasse, Heaven their Haven, and if they would take the height by observing the Sun of Righteousness in the

Scripture-astrolabe, and sounding their depth by a Leading Faith, and not by a leaden bottomless Covetousness.'

In 1608, word reached Purchas that an English explorer by the name of Henry Hudson had made two journeys northwards, setting sail with the intention of crossing the pole and continuing on to the 'islands of spicerie'. Although he had failed in both these aims he had covered considerable distances, touching land at Novaya Zemlya, Spitzbergen and even the eastern coastline of Greenland. But what really excited Purchas was that Hudson had travelled further north than any mariner before him; sailing, indeed, to within less than ten degrees of the Pole.