Giles Milton

You break open the flesh and inside you have this withered little nut, which is a nutmeg, which is entirely surrounded by a very beautiful, bright red, lacy sort of thing, which is mace, which is very similar in taste and flavour, in fact.

They come from exactly the same fruit, yeah.

The nut is covered in this stuff, yeah, in the mace.

Can you eat it or not?

Nutmeg obviously used in cooking, mace is used in cooking as well.

And of course, the flesh of the fruit in the Bandar Islands is made into sort of jams and marmalades and chutneys and things like that.

So every bit of the fruit can be used.

And it should be said that these six islands in the Bandar Islands, they are entirely, or they were entirely covered in forests and groves of nutmeg trees.

And the smell...

The scent of these trees is quite extraordinary.

So when you're on a boat approaching these islands, hanging in the air is this almost kind of extraordinary perfume.

That pungent smell of nutmeg hangs in the air.

So they're magical places.

But as we will hear, they were also extremely dangerous places.

So yeah, it was about less than one English penny would get you 10 pounds of nutmeg.

So a kind of sack full of nutmeg.

That would sell for something like two pounds and 10 shillings when you brought it back on the three-year voyage back to England.

The markup is absolutely staggering, whopping.

I mean, what Bondi corporation wouldn't want a markup of 60,000%?

This is why, you know, to bring back even a small amount