document effectively ceded the islands of Run and Ai to England in perpetuity. "And whereas King James by the grace of God is King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, is also by the mercy of God King of Pooloway (Ai Island) and Poolarun (Run Island)." For the next five years, Courthope and his band of starving followers were besieged by a Dutch force one hundred times greater. The Dutch eventually captured Run, destroyed the plantations, and killed Courthope. According to Milton, the English, smarting over their loss of Run, "responded" 48 years later (in 1664) by attacking and annexing New Netherland, which they renamed New York. At the Treaty of Breda in 1667, ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the Dutch did not press their claims on New Netherland and largely agreed to maintain the colonial status quo. In Milton's narrative, this was in return for the English relinquishing their territorial claim to the island of Run. The Riddle and the Knight Milton's debut non-fiction title, The Riddle and the Knight, is a work of historical detection. It follows the trail of Sir John Mandeville, a medieval knight who claimed to have undertaken a thirty-four-year voyage through scores of little known lands, including Persia, Arabia, Ethiopia, India, Sumatra and China. Mandeville subsequently wrote a book about his odyssey: it is widely known as The Travels.The Riddle and the Knight investigates Sir John Mandeville's purported voyage and the shadowy personal biography of the knight himself. It contends that the widely held assertion – that Mandeville's real identity was John de Bourgogne – is based on a flawed testimony of the chronicler John d'Outremeuse. The book asserts that Mandeville's autobiographical portrait – in which he claims to be a knight living in St Albans – is probably correct. It also contends that Mandeville was forced to flee his native England when his overlord, Humphrey de Bohun, led a troubled rebellion against King Edward II.The Riddle and the Knight concludes that the greater part of Mandeville's voyage is fabricated or compiled from earlier sources, notably Odoric of Pordenone, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and Vincent de Beauvais. In spite of Mandeville's extensive borrowings from other works, Milton offers a reappraisal of Mandeville's place in the history of exploration. Mandeville's Travels captured the imagination of the medieval world and was a source of inspiration to Christopher Columbus as well as notable figures from the