Greed, Trickery, and Deception: The Untold Story of the Coffee Bean – Part 2

This is a guest post by Raza Imam. Learn more about how you can guest post for Daily Shot Of Coffee here.

In the last installment of this series, we learned how French and Dutch traders were able to steal coffee from jealously guarded Arab plantations. In doing so, they literally planted the seeds of successful plantations across the globe; from the tropical regions of Indonesia to the fertile soils of the New World. While historians go back and forth over who actually brought coffee to the New World first, the colonial impact on the history coffee drinking, and even the world is indisputable.

The year after the Dutch gave the gifted the coffee tree to the French King Lois XIV, they Dutch shipped the tree to their territories in South America. Not long after that, a French naval officer decided he’d bring it to the New World as well. With great effort, he managed to get a hold of the precious coffee plant from the royal French garden. Setting his sights on the island of St. Martinique, he began a journey that likely shook his faith in humanity, with passengers repeatedly trying to destroy the seedlings and tear off the leaves! In addition to being long and painful, the ship was plagued by sea storms and pirate attacks. Things were so bad that the officer had to share his limited supply of water with the plant to keep it from dying because they had run out of water on the ship. When he finally landed on St. Martinique, he managed to transplant the tree in a garden, which he was forced to keep under armed guard until the first harvest! Fifty years later, he saw the fruits of his hellish journey; 19 million coffee trees, paving the way for an unstoppable coffee business in the West Indies, and South and Central America.

Where ever the colonialists went, they were sure to bring coffee. Even Catholic missionaries were influential in the spread of coffee. Given their inherent affinity for botany, many Christian monks studied and nurtured the coffee plant in their gardens.

France, Europe’s dominant supplier of coffee at the time spread the plant from Martinique to modern day Haiti, leading to its rapid spread all throughout the French Antilles. Coffee production spread to other New World colonies as well. The Spanish brought it to Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, and Columbia. They even spread it as far west as the Philippines. Not to be outdone, the Portuguese introduced coffee to their colony, Brazil, paving the way for it to later become the largest coffee producer in the world. By 1730, the British introduced it to Jamaica, where the world renowned Blue Mountain beans are still grown.

By the early 1800′s, competition to sell coffee became extremely intense…as if it wasn’t already. The Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra, both Dutch colonies, were the main exporters of coffee to Europe. India and Ceylon tried to compete against the Dutch, but the British colonies didn’t make a dent against the Dutch empire. But as fate would have it, the Dutch coffee plantations were eventually hit with a disease that swept through the coffee fields of Asia, destroying the crop and giving Brazil the chance to take the reigns as the world’s largest coffee producer; a status the country still holds today.

The collapse of the mighty Dutch coffee empire wasn’t caused by a mighty army or a labor revolt. After hundreds of years of greed and deception, it’s amazing to think that the fall of an empire was due to a puny plant disease.

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Photo by Patrn.

Category: Coffee Information