Giles Milton

Such was the value of this spice.

And this is where the story really revolves around this, because nutmeg in the 1600s only grew on six islands in the world.

And these islands, known as the Banda Islands or the Banda Archipelago, are impossibly remote.

They are literally in the middle of nowhere.

To sort of paint a picture, they're 1,200 miles east of Java, if people can place that on a map.

They're 600 miles west of Australia.

Yeah, that's the nearest place, Papua New Guinea.

But even today, they're extremely hard to get to.

But in the 1600s, you know, when you're sailing in a wooden ship halfway across the world, they were not only difficult to get to, but extremely dangerous to get to because you're contending...

not only with the elements, with the storms, with monsoons, with reefs, with sunken reefs, but you're also contending with the Portuguese, the Spanish and, of course, the Dutch, none of whom want you to find these islands and kind of break the monopoly that they're trying to carve out on this space.

They do.

And they're very, very fussy trees.

So they require a particular type of volcanic soil.

They require a particular microclimate, which is why they were confined to these islands.

And it was extremely difficult, actually, to try and transplant these plants.

Just to paint a little picture of the tree, because most people won't have seen one.

They're very, very beautiful.

They look rather like a lemon tree.

And in fact, the nutmeg fruit is this beautiful lemony golden fruit that hangs off the tree.

And it's inside that fruit.