Milton, Giles 1966-

PERSONAL:

Born 1966.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19 Union Square W., New York, NY 10003.

CAREER:

Freelance journalist and author.

WRITINGS:

The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, Allison & Busby (London, England), 1996, published as The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, the World's Greatest Traveler, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2001.

Nathaniel's Nutmeg; or, The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1999.

Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2000.

Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan, Hodder & Stoughton (London, England), 2002, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2003.

White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million White Slaves, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to magazines and newspapers, especially in the area of travel articles.

SIDELIGHTS:

Giles Milton is a freelance journalist who often contributes travel articles to newspapers in England and other countries. His books are about travel and adventure, as well, but here he journeys back in time to write popular histories on little-known topics and people from the past. In some of these works, he picks out a particular person from history to illustrate a larger issue. For example, his Nathaniel's Nutmeg; or, The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History centers on English captain Nathaniel Courthope's perilous adventures in the Pacific to illustrate the spice wars between the British and Dutch fleets; White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million White Slaves draws on the autobiography of Pellow to draw attention to an oftenforgotten period of history when Europeans were being enslaved by Sultan Moulay Ismail of Morocco. Sometimes criticized for emphasizing adventure and gore over hard research, and for having an overly Anglophilic perspective, Milton has also been been praised for writing interesting, illuminating chapters of history.

His first book, The Riddle of the Knight: In Search of John Mandeville, is one that is on shaky historical ground. Many historians, in fact, believe that there was no such person as John Mandeville, a man who is the supposed author of a book chronicling his travels through the Middle East and Asia during the fourteenth century, a voyage that rivals that of Marco Polo. Others have speculated that there was, indeed, a Mandeville, but that he exaggerated his travels immensely and took his descriptions of Asia from other writers. Nicholas Howe, writing in the New Republic, stated that "his existence as a fourteenth-century Englishman seems far more likely to be brilliantly realized fiction than soberly attested fact." Milton himself traveled to the Middle East to research his subject, apparently finding some evidence Mandeville was real, but not being able to confirm his Asian travels either. In the end, Milton concludes that the Travels Mandeville wrote is a valuable work anyway, whether or not he actually made the whole journey. Howe noted flaws in the work for lapses in facts and failure to cite sources, adding: "The real reason to regret Milton's tiresome quest to prove Mandeville's existence is that it gets in the way of what might have been a lively and perceptive travel book of its own." New York Times Book Review writer Geoffrey Moorhouse also noted Milton's failure to recognize that Mandeville may have been fictitious, but nevertheless added: "The result is an engaging hodgepodge of a book, even if it takes us no closer to Mandeville than we were before." A Kirkus Reviews contributor duly noted, too, that "Milton has invented a unique form of travel-writing, investigating the world as it existed in the yearnings and imagination of long-ago Europeans."

The title character of Milton's next book, Nathaniel's Nutmeg, was most definitely real, and the book received higher praise from critics. Here, the author tells how Captain Nathaniel Courthope held the tiny island of Run in the South Pacific for two years. Run was valuable because it had nutmeg farms, a crop that was worth as much as gold in Europe at the time. The Dutch had control of most of the nutmeg islands at the time (people thought the crop could not be grown elsewhere), but when Courthoupe died, the Dutch seized it. The reason for the title Milton chose is that afterwards, during negotiations, the English formally gave Run to the Dutch but received the island of Manhattan in exchange, which turned out to be far more valuable. Several critics enjoyed the way Milton brings his story to life. For example, in Time International, reviewer Helen Gibson wrote: "Using original diaries, journals, letters and obscure Dutch chronicles, Milton spins a fascinating tale of swashbuckling adventure, courage and cruelty, as nations and entrepreneurs fought for a piece of the nutmeg action." While Journeys writer Roy Ellen pointed out that Nathaniel's Nutmeg has a distinct "Anglocentric bias," overemphasizes adventure, and lacks sympathy for other cultures, a Publishers Weekly contributor concluded that the "book tells an absorbing story of perilous voyages, greed and political machinations in the Age of Exploration."

The same complaint about Milton's favoring his English countrymen can be seen in criticism of Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America. Telling the story of the Roanoke and Jamestown colonies, Milton speculates that the famous disappearance of the Roanoke settlers happened because the English colonists moved their settlement several miles away, only to be put to death twenty years later by Chief Powhatan. A Publishers Weekly critic felt that "Milton argues persuasively" for this theory. Milton then explores the story of Jamestown, Captain John Smith, and Pocahontas. In a scathing review of Big Chief Elizabeth for the New Republic, critic Alan Taylor lambasted Milton for painting the Indians as savages who attacked colonists without provocation and for using "highly partisan and often incomplete sources." He added that "Milton's superficial understanding of Indian culture proves especially distorting in his recounting of the fabled story of Pocahontas rescuing Captain John Smith from an execution ordered by her father Powhatan in 1607." Taylor explained that scholars now believe that Smith was not being executed but that he was subjected to an Algonquian ritual in which he was forced to recognize Powhatan as his chief. Other reviewers were less critical, however, believing, as New York Times critic Janet Maslin did, that the work is "an entertaining, richly informative look at the past."

Readers who have encountered the novel Shogun by James Clavell will find much familiar in Milton's next book, Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan. The central figure here, William Adams, is the same man who was the basis of Clavell's hero. Adams was an English seaman who survived a dangerous journey to Japan in the hopes of establishing trade for his country, as the Dutch had. Here, he came into the good graces of the warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu, because of his ability to learn the language and culture so well and assimilate into it. Milton helped Ieyasu learn about Europeans, and Ieyasu came to respect Adams so much that he was made a samurai. "Milton does a masterful job of conveying the wonder with which each culture beholds the other," commented a Kirkus Reviews contributor, while New York Times Book Review critic Susan Chira described it as "a vivid, scrupulously researched biography."

More recently, Milton completed White Gold, the story of one man's kidnapping by Barbary corsairs and enslavement at the hands of the cruel Moroccan sultan Moulay Ismail. Milton based his book on Thomas Pellow's own accounts, supplementing it with other research materials. Some critics, however, felt that the author took too much of what Pellow wrote at face value, as well as inflating the figures for white enslavement in northern Africa. Milton "accepts the wildly exaggerated figure of one million European slaves in North Africa," wrote Frank McLynn in the New Statesman, "when the most careful scholarship has established that British captives in the Barbary states in the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cannot have exceeded 20,000." Pellow's exploits seem similarly doubtful in some aspects. Given Sultan Ismail's penchant for executing people at the drop of a hat, for example, it is unlikely that Pellow ever would have defied him the way he does on several occasions in Pellow's account, noted McLynn, who also criticized the author for sensationalizing the tale. On the other hand, Philip Hensher wrote in a Spectator review that, "as Milton points out, there are quite a number of other accounts which give the same picture of the sultan's excesses, and perhaps Pellow deserves to be given some credit." Whether or not Pellow was a totally reliable witness, critics lauded Milton for reminding readers of a part of slave history that many overlook. In Geographical, for example, Mick Herron called White Gold "an interesting light cast on a dark corner of history," and Library Journal contributor Robert C. Jones similarly concluded that the work "is a thorough and well-researched presentation of a lesser-known chapter in the history of slavery."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 15, 1999, Danise Hoover, review of Nathaniel's Nutmeg; or, The True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History, p. 1649; November 15, 2000, Margaret Flanagan, review of Big Chief Elizabeth: The Adventures and Fate of the First English Colonists in America, p. 607; October 15, 2001, Margaret Flanagan, review of The Riddle and the Knight: In Search of Sir John Mandeville, the World's Greatest Traveler, p. 376; December 15, 2002, Kristine Huntley, review of Samurai William: The Englishman Who Opened Japan, p. 730; May 15, 2005, Jay Freeman, review of White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million White Slaves, p. 1620.

Bookseller, April 9, 2004, Benedicte Page, "Slave to the Sultan: Giles Milton Tells the Story of Thomas Pellow—One of the Million White Slaves in North Africa Whose History Has Been All but Forgotten," review of White Gold, p. 24.

Forbes, July 26, 1999, Adam Bresnick, "The Spice Boys," review of Nathaniel's Nutmeg, p. 281.

Geographical, January, 1999, Ciara Shannon, review of Nathaniel's Nutmeg, p. 68; August, 2004, Mick Herron, review of White Gold, p. 96.

Journeys, June-December, 2000, Roy Ellen, review of Nathaniel's Nutmeg, p. 198.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2001, review of The Riddle and the Knight, p. 1469; November 1, 2002, review of Samurai William, p. 1595.

Kliatt, January, 2002, Janet Julian, review of Big Chief Elizabeth, p. 31.

Library Journal, May 15, 1999, David Keymer, review of Nathaniel's Nutmeg, p. 108; October 1, 2000, John R. Burch, Jr., review of Big Chief Elizabeth, p. 122; December, 2002, Steven I. Levine, review of Samurai William, p. 150; July 1, 2005, Robert C. Jones, review of White Gold, p. 97.

New Republic, June 25, 2001, Alan Taylor, "The Virginians," review of Big Chief Elizabeth, p. 36; April 22, 2002, Nicholas Howe, "Paths of Story," review of The Riddle and the Knight, p. 43.

New Statesman, September 18, 2000, Anne Somerset, "Well-hung Tongue," review of Big Chief Elizabeth, p. 54; June 14, 2004, Frank McLynn, "The Sultan's Slave," review of White Gold, p. 51.

New York Times, November 23, 2000, Janet Maslin, "Colonists' Travails in Earliest Virginia," review of Big Chief Elizabeth, pp. B16, E18.

New York Times Book Review, December 2, 2001, Geoffrey Moorhouse, "Travelers from Antique Lands: Two Books Focus on Two Journeys in the Twelfth and Fourteenth Centuries," review of The Riddle and the Knight, p. 26; April 27, 2003, Susan Chira, "Shogun's Pet," review of Samurai William, p. 18.

Observer (London, England), June 27, 2004, Dan Neill, "When Morocco Ruled the Waves," review of White Gold.

Publishers Weekly, April 5, 1999, review of Nathaniel's Nutmeg, p. 232; October 16, 2000, review of Big Chief Elizabeth, p. 58; October 8, 2001, review of The Riddle and the Knight, p. 53; January 6, 2003, review of Samurai William, p. 52; May 2, 2005, review of White Gold, p. 187.

Spectator, June 22, 2002, Sara Wheeler, "Go East Young Man," review of Samurai William, p. 50; June 12, 2004, Philip Hensher, "Pirates of Penzance and Reykjavik," review of White Gold, p. 42.

Time International, April 12, 1999, Helen Gibson, "Spice World—the Book: Since Its Discovery, the Scent of Nutmeg Has Held a Heady Attraction for Epicures and Traders Alike," review of Nathaniel's Nutmeg, p. 65.