Giles Milton

Where there was no wind and your ship just hung around in the heat as you used up your precious foodstuffs on board and your water.

Scurvy was a perennial problem, a hideous disease caused, of course, by lack of citrus fruit, lack of vitamin C. Your teeth fell out.

Your skin got purple blotches.

You got incredibly weak and then you died.

The other thing was amoebic dysentery or, as I said, the bloody flux I mentioned earlier.

This was caused often by contaminated water.

There's accounts of them drinking water on the ships.

They'd have to clench their teeth to sieve out all the flora and fauna that was sprouting in the water barrels.

You know, quite disgusting.

And then, of course, there were storms.

There was attacks by the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

And in the early voyages, only one in three ships made it home again.

And about 80% of the men on board would die.

So you're taking a massive risk when you travel on one of these voyages.

And it gives some idea of the value of the spices and the money they hope to make, you know, when they got home again, that they were prepared to take the risk.

Keeping the men entertained and keeping boredom at bay was a very difficult thing to do.

In fact, the captain of the ship on which Nathaniel Courtauld sailed, William Keeling, he's one of my favourite characters in this entire story, actually, because he performed...

Hamlet.

He got all his men dressed up in costumes and everything and performed Hamlet on the mangrove shores of West Africa when they were caught in the doldrums.

Yeah, and he thought, well, this will keep them entertained.