Giles Milton

would set you up for life, you're going to be extremely rich.

I have to say it didn't really preserve meat either.

In fact, it didn't do very much.

In fact, it was basically good for mulled wine and bechamel sauce, you know, but they didn't realise that at the time.

And so, but Willie, you've made a very important point because the whole point of these voyages is if you could sail to the Bander Islands and then make it back home alive again, you've cut out five middlemen, all of whom double or treble the price of the thing on the way.

So you stand to make a huge amount of money.

This is all about money, finance and business.

But most of all, it's about a monopoly because if you control everything,

Those six bander islands, you control the global supply of nutmeg and that makes you a big cheese in this story.

Yes, so both the English and the Dutch, they set up what are known as factories, but are not really factories at all.

They're like fortified warehouses, which are their headquarters.

And they're in Bantam at the time, which is a port just down the coast from Jakarta.

And as you say, rivalries are intense there.

They're both after the same thing.

And from the very word go, I think the Dutch are far more powerful.

They have more ships.

They have far more capital behind them.

Many more men.

And they're much more aggressive in pursuit of the spices that are so yearned for in Europe.

And so from this base Bantam in Java, they begin to set sail east, further east to the Moluccas or what are known as the Spice Islands.