Nathaniel's nutmeg (4 page)

More than five years was to pass before a search ship
from England finally discovered what had happened to the
Bona Esperanza
and
Confidentia.
Sailing into the bay where Willoughby had chosen to winter, the would-be rescuers
stumbled across the ghostly and rotting hulks of the two
ships — ships which had ended their days as charnel houses.
The crew's final grim months remain a mystery, for
Willoughby, racked by hunger, stopped recording daily
entries in his ship's log. All that is certain is that he and his
crew survived much of the winter, for the rescue party
found wills dated January 1554, a full four months after the
vessels had entered the bay.

The final, macabre twist in the tale was recorded by
Giovanni Michiel, the Venetian ambassador to Moscow.
The search party, he wrote, 'has returned safe, bringing with
them the two vessels of the first voyage, having found them
on the Muscovite coast with the men on board all frozen.
And they [the rescuers] narrate strange things about the
mode in which they were frozen, pen still in hand, and the
paper before them, others at tables, platter in hand and
spoon in mouth; others opening a locker, and others in
various postures, like statues, as if they had been adjusted
and placed in those attitudes.'

While Willoughby and his men froze to death, Richard
Chancellor had fared rather better. Relying on the wit that
had so enamoured him to his adoptive father, he quickly
foresaw the danger of Arctic pack-ice. Dropping anchor in
the White Sea close to present-day Archangel, he
abandoned ship and trudged his way overland to Moscow.
At first he was disappointed in what he found. The city, he
thought, was 'very rude' and the houses 'all of timber'. Even
the imperial palace was disappointing - 'rather low' and
with 'small windows' it was 'much like the old buildings of
England'. But Chancellor soon changed his tune when
confronted with the barbaric splendour of Ivan the
Terrible's court. Ivan greeted him in 'a long garment of beaten golde, with an imperial crowne upon his head and
staffe of cristall and golde in his right hand'. The emperor's
conduct was as majestic as it was awe-inspiring: at a courtly
banquet he 'sent to every man a great sliver of bread, and
the bearer called the party so sent to by his name aloud, and
said, Ivan Vasilivich, Emperor of Russia and great Duke of
Moscova doth reward thee with bread.' Even the wine
goblets caught Chancellor's eye — weighing the golden
beakers in his hand he declared they were 'very massie' and
better than anything he had seen in England.

The time spent in Moscow was one of endless pleasure
for Chancellor's crew. Many had expected their journey to
end in disaster or death but instead they were living it up
in the bejewelled pavilion of the Emperor of Russia.
Chancellor was no less impressed: 'I have seen the King's
majesties of England and the French King's pavilion,' he
wrote, 'but none are like this.'

After lengthy negotiations, Ivan sent the English
commander back to England with a letter conferring
trading privileges upon a group of merchants in London. In
doing so he had unwittingly laid the foundations of the
Muscovy Company, a precursor to the East India Company.

Of the three ships that set sail for the Spice Islands not
one achieved its goal of locating the elusive North-East
Passage. The men who sailed north to escape the tropical
diseases of the Indian Ocean little thought they would
perish in the sub-zero waters of the Arctic. It would take
another four hundred years, and a nuclear-powered
submarine, before the northern route to the Pacific would
finally be conquered.

While London's merchants anxiously awaited news of their
historic first voyage to the Spice Islands, many people in

the country were left wondering what all the fuss was
about. Nutmeg, after all, made for an unpromising luxury.
Dry, wrinkled and not much bigger than a garden pea it
scarcely had the same appeal as a golden ducat or finely
hewn sapphire.

The doubters were soon to learn that it was of
potentially far greater value. London's leading doctors of
physic made increasingly extravagant claims as to the
efficacy of nutmeg, holding it to cure everything from the
plague to the 'blody flux', both of which were regular
visitors to the capital, sweeping through its insanitary
back streets with devastating effect. One leading authority
pronounced that his sweet-smelling pomander, which
contained a large quantity of the spice, could even stave off
the dreaded 'sweating syckness' that accompanied the
'pestiferous time of the pestilence'. Since this sickness – the plague — was said to kill in just two hours the pomander
had to be made with all possible haste. After all, the old
patter ran: 'mery at dinner, dead at supper.'

It was not just life-threatening illnesses that nutmeg was
said to cure. A growing interest in the medicinal value of
plants had led to an explosion in the number of dietary
books and herbals, all of which claimed that nutmeg and
other spices were beneficial in combating a host of minor
ailments. For chesty coughs, doctors recommended mulled
wine suffused with nutmeg. Cloves were said to cure
earache, pepper stifled colds, while those embarrassed by
trapped wind were recommended to take an extraordinary
pot-pourri of fifteen spices including cardamom, cinnamon
and nutmeg - a recipe that would have been out of reach
of all but the flatulent rich. Spices were even held to revive
those who had shuffled off this mortal coil. Ten grams of
saffron taken with sweet wine was enough (it was claimed)
to bring back the dead. There were not known to be any
side-effects.

One of the more popular books was Andrew Borde's
Dyetary of Helth,
a guide to good living which earned the
author even more fame than his seminal
Treatyse upon
Beardes.
'Nutmeges,' he wrote in his
Dyetary,
'be good for
them which have cold in their head and doth comforte the
syght and the brain.' His home-produced nutmeg cocktail
was said to be extremely efficacious; not only did it cleanse
'the mouthe of the stomacke and the spleen', it was also
'good against the blody flux', a virulent and dangerous
strain of dysentery.

Borde's
Dyetary
is a curious mixture of herbal and lore.
To any gentleman wishing to live a long life he suggests
wearing a red petticoat and avoiding 'snaily rooms', while
those able to 'rise with mirth' every morning were assured
of good health. His suggestion that nutmeg dampens sexual
desire had signally failed to work on him, for this celibate
former monk died in disgrace. 'Under the colour of
virginitie and of wearing a shirt of hair [he kept] three
whores at once in his chamber
...
to serve not only himself
but also help the virgin priests about in the country.' Borde
of all people should have kept taking the nutmeg but as he
wearily admitted, 'it is hard to get out of the flesh what is
bred in the bone.'

Other authorities, turning Borde's misfortune to good
effect, began to claim that far from dampening sexual
desire, nutmeg was actually a powerful aphrodisiac. The
licentious Charles Sackville, sixth Earl of Dorset, jested that
Julius Caesar's libido was so low that even if Cleopatra had
used 'nutmeg, mace and ginger' upon her Roman swinger'
she would have failed to stir his loins. Such ingredients
could scarcely have failed to work on his lordship, for he
knew to his cost that a spoonful of nutmeg before bedtime
could cause no end of sweet but troublesome dreams:

Dreaming last night on Mrs Farley,

My p----- k was up this morning early,

And I was fain without my gown
To rise in th'cold

to get him down
Hard shift, alas, but yet a sure,

Although it be no pleasing cure.

Sackville's love of nutmeg was to prove his downfall. His
neighbour, Samuel Pepys, recorded how he was imprisoned
for indecent exposure 'after running up and down all night
almost naked through the street'.

Beneath all the quackery about nutmeg there lurked
a grain of truth, particularly in the claims that it was a
powerful preservative. Perishables had traditionally been
conserved by salting, drying or smoking, none of which
suppressed the foul taste of rank meat. A sprinkling of
nutmeg over the viands not only disguised the stench, it
also helped stay the natural process of rotting by
dramatically slowing the rate of oxidation.

The use of spices as preservatives and flavourings was, in
fact, nothing new. The ancient Egyptians had imported
cumin, cinnamon and cassia to embalm the bodies of their
pharaohs whilst the apothecaries of the Old Testament
crushed spices into holy unguents for their temples. The
Romans were more practical in their use of such luxuries,
using nutmeg and aniseed to preserve meat and flavour
wine, adding cumin to their pastries and using fennel as a
flavouring for the city's famed vinegar sauces.