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Coffee 101: Coffee History
The History of Coffee (Part 2)
In 1723 a French naval officer named Chevalier Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu had an overwhelming ambition to plant the sprouts of this magnificent tree in the soil of the Caribbean. Unfortunately, De Clieu's romantic ideals did not come across very well toward the the authorities in Paris (whom he needed to get the trees from) so... he stole a cutting from the kings coffee tree. Little did de Clieu know, this was only the beginning of a major adventure fraught with hurling seas and seemingly endless peril at all corners of the journey.
De Clieu kept the young seeds in a glass case on deck. First, one of his fellow travelers tried to rip up his trees, a man who, de Clieu writes, was "basely jealous of the joy I was about to taste through being of service to my country, and being unable to get this coffee plant away from me, tore off a branch." Some historians theorize that the coffee thief was a Dutch spy bent on sabotaging the French coffee industry.
Later, the ship barely eluded pirates, and nearly sunk in a major storm. Water grew scarce, and all but one of the precious little seedlings died. De Clieu, although nearly dying of thirst, was so desperately looking forward to coffee in the New World that he shared half of his daily water ration with his struggling seedlings, "upon which," he writes, "my happiest hopes were founded. It needed such succor the more in that it was extremely backward, being no larger than the slip of a pink."
Miraculously, De Clieu reached Martinique and the last surviving seed flourished.Fifty years later there were 18,680 coffee trees in Martinique, and coffee cultivation was established in Haiti, Mexico, and most of the islands of the Caribbean.Shoots from these trees were sent to the island of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, then called the Isle of Bourbon. There, a combination of spontaneous mutation and human selection produced var. bourbon, a new variant or cultivar of coffea arabica with a somewhat different growth pattern and smaller beans. The famed Santos coffees of Brazil and the Oaxaca coffees of Mexico are said to be offspring of the Bourbon tree, which had traveled from Ethiopia to Mocha, from Mocha to Java, from Java to a hothouse in Holland, from Holland to Paris, from Paris to Réunion, and eventually back, halfway around the world, to Brazil and Mexico. Trees of the bourbon variety continue to produce some of Latin America's finest coffees.
The first reference to coffee being drunk in North America is from 1668 and, soon after, coffee houses were established in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and other towns. The Boston Tea Party Of 1773 was planned in a coffee house, the Green Dragon. Both the New York Stock Exchange and the Bank of New York started in coffeehouses, in what is today the financial district known as Wall Street.
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