Giles Milton
speaker
1,435 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 5d ago
Giles Milton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Now, obviously, this was complete nonsense, but everyone believed it at the time.
And that was the important bit because it meant that everyone wanted these spices, which meant that the prices remained extraordinarily high.
Yeah, I mean, there's a wonderful account in my book, actually, of Pepys going down to the docks on a late one night and sort of doing this backhanded deal in the darkness where he shoves a few gold coins into the hands of some sea dog.
And in exchange, he's given a small sackload of nutmeg.
So, yeah, this was, you know, almost black market industry was going on in London at the time.
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.
Showing 1061–1080 of 1,435 · page 54 of 72
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